REVIEW: URBAN REGGIE “PILOT”

An animated series about 2 guys who are trying to make it in Hollywood as musicians…no this is not Tenacious D: The Movie

Spoilers Below

Urban Reggie follows the mis-adventures of Reggie and his brother Pepe, as two kids who aspire to be big time musicians in Hollywood, as such they move from a small village in Mexico, to the City of Angels.  The pilot episode is only about 5 minutes and in it we get the guys trying to adapt to their new surroundings and settle in.

The show is created by former The Simpsons character layout artist Erick Tran, and you can definitely see the expertise here as the characters look great, and the animation is clean fluid, and goofy with Pepe cracking me up pretty much every time he appears on screen.  The jokes are funny, well thought out, however I sometimes had trouble keeping track because most of the characters are bilingual and it was difficult to follow along when they speak Spanish, but other than that I thought it was a decent show.

The only thing I am having trouble with is the target audience and again this might be as a result of the short-length of the pilot, but most would think “Hey its a guy from The Simpsons doing a show”, and we’ve seen this a few times before( Futurama, Good Vibes, and Crash Canyon) with usually decent results, and I’ve been fooled before. When it was announced that former Family Guy director Dan Povenmire was going to do a show with Disney, I naturally thought that meant we were getting an adult animated series on Disney. But, with the release of Phineas and Ferb that’s not what we really got, and as such with Urban Reggie the question has to be asked “Who is the target audience?” I think the writers/Erick Tran need to figure that out first, then we gotta show, because the characters are there, the plot is there, but the most important thing for a new animated show is for the audience to be there.

 (8.0 out of 10)