Welcome guys! To the last Summer TV Binge Review of the week. This time we’ll talk about one of the best proposals from Warner Bros. Animation (or at least one of my favorites… maybe I’m biased): ¡Mucha Lucha!
As a Mexican 10-year-old kid this cartoon was meaningful to me, it had one of the most popular traits in our culture: lucha libre. It was awesome to see kids like me on luchas, with their grandiose signature moves and jokes I could relate to. Now that I’m older I admit that it has a lot of clichés, but I honestly can live with that.
First of all, given that almost every episode consisted of two 11-minute episodes, I’m going to divide my 5 thoughts in three parts: a brief review of both episodes, and then, two thoughts on each one (at least most of the times, but I might make exceptions depending on the episode).
Also, you’ll have a bonus! Every week I will add a song as a soundtrack for the review, this week the song was featured on “Weight Gaining”: Besela Ya, from Bacilos featuring Celso Piña. So, without further ado, here are my thoughts on “Back to School” and “Weight Gaining”
1. Recaps
“Back to School” is the introduction of the characters, it sets up the tone of the show and tells us what this show is basically about. The main story is that Rikochet must fight against his obese bully, Potato Potata Jr.
In “Weight Gaining” Rikochet defeats 3 luchadores of his size, but three bigger students challenge him to fight against them, he’s all in, but the Headmistress doesn’t allow him to fight until he gains enough weight to be on their same class.
2. “The only thing to fear is fear itself, oh! And bullies!”
This episode works well as a simple introduction to the main cast, Rikochet is the kind-hearted main character, Flea is the dumb friend, Buena Girl is the nerdy friend, and a lot of other characters are at least introduced by name or trait (i.e. Potato Potata Jr. is one of the bullies). Plain and simple, this is a show for kids, so you don’t need a very deep introduction of every single protagonist.
3. “Honor, family, tradition, and donuts!”
The most important thing is to make a believable world of the lucha libre, therefore you have to create a Mexican town, and set everything taking on the latino culture, their mantra evokes what the Mexican culture sees as good features in people (and donuts, because you know, we do are fat).
Two trivial things I want to mention: I like the existence of the Foremost World-Renowned International School of Lucha, of course there is a school fully dedicated to wrestling hahaha. Also, I laughed so hard because I was thinking, if you ever wonder how I speak, I have almost the exact same accent Señor Hasbeena has.
4. Sin Puños (a.k.a. Without fists)
Now that I´m rewatching the show I noticed something interesting, when they wrestle, you will NOT see real punches, these moments are edited in a way that just before any hit, the camera will move, and the next thing you will see is the character falling, a wrestling hold or even an onomatopoeia. I wonder if this is due to some kind of restriction the FCC required, or if it is an auto-censorship from the studio or something like that. It really doesn’t bothers me, but it’s an interesting detail.
5. “Logic gives The Flea brainpain!”
What I love about ¡Mucha Lucha! is the insanity of it, there’s not much space for logic, and this makes the cartoon great, ludicrous moments full of hilarity, like Rikochet getting so obese he becomes a giant and is NOT allowed to fight against the bullies because he’s now over their weight class. Or The Flea getting smashed time and again like… a flea. (Which by the way, makes me think: Slapstick is very much allowed, but deliberate violence is cut from the fights, how weird is that?). Its weirdness is what makes this show great.
Well that’s it for today, let us know, what do you think of ¡Mucha Lucha! (and any other series from our Summer TV Binge) on the comments below, and see you next Friday.
