Review: Victor and Valentino “Fueygo Fest”

OVERVIEW

In order to get some sweet jet skis for him and Valentino, Victor begins promising all the kids in town a really cool party with many special guests and amazing events…but ends up using their party fees to buy the jet skis anyway, leading them to have no money for the actual party. On the promised day, all the kids turn on them and destroy the jet skis, teaching Victor the value of honesty. For this week anyway.

OUR TAKE

The kids in the audience may not fully get this one, but this is a not so subtle reference to the 2017 scam known as the Fyer Festival, which also promised a huge party but ended up wasting a ton of money and turning out to be a massive waste of time for everyone involved. The fact that it can so easily be translated into a short ten minute cartoon about the problems of promising more than you can actually do actually makes the whole real life situation seem about as cartoonish as it is. There are probably a lot of lessons to be learned from that whole fiasco and this seems like only a portion of it, but it’s enough that fits into this format that a kids show would. Also, I might be looking to far into it, but I can’t help but wonder if the ball pit (that also is less than promised) may also be a reference to another failed event, Dash-Con, a convention that was intended for users of Tumblr and comes with its own horror stories, not the least of which being a ball pit which someone allegedly peed in. Thankfully this was avoided in this episode, due to the pit only having two balls, but it seemed to deliberate a reference to not reference.

And obviously it has to be Victor who is the one scamming everyone, as deceiving others in order to get what he wants as easily as possible is exactly his method. Not that he’s necessarily a bad kid, because that would make it difficult to follow his misadventures every week (or in this case every day) but that he usually looks for shortcuts and ways to learn as little as possible and do as little as possible in order to achieve his goals, and so most of the episodes that focus on him primarily where he attempts this are about him learning why taking this route is the incorrect way of going about it. Honestly, even as an adult, I can relate to Victor in wanting to get things done in the easiest way possible, but that makes the constant lesson that he needs to put in the proper amount of time and work hit that much harder when it comes to that. In this particular scenario, it’s that you shouldn’t scam your friends to get jet skis, or else one of them WILL destroy the jet skis with her crazy strong arms, even when it will keep her from getting her refund money. And honestly, I think we can all relate to that.