I know I’ve kind of missed the boat here, since the Steven Universe crossover is old news and most people have gone back to just ignoring this show, but I promised in a tumblr post weeks ago that I’d watch the entire series and post a detailed, honest review, and a tumblr post about a cartoon may as well be a blood contract, right?

So, just for you, I’ve finally made it through about nine solid hours of “Uncle Grandpa,” and like a giant dork, I sat there taking notes in a text file.

Below the cut is a long, excessively detailed break-down of everything, but if you want the TL;DR version: the show has its surprise positives and lower-average overall entertainment quality, with about one dozen problematic moments throughout its first 54 episodes, varying widely in severity. Some criticisms are quite valid, while others carry a startlingly ableist taint.

QUESTIONABLE CONTENT:

The following is a detailed list of potentially problematic moments across Uncle Grandpa’s first 54 episodes. Please don’t complain that I’m nit-picking; that’s the goal. I’ve jotted down every single joke I found that I could conceivably imagine anybody finding problematic, major or minor, and your feelings are going to vary wildly from mine the next person’s. It’s okay to still enjoy something problematic - everything is, and everyone does - but it shouldn’t just be swept under the rug when there’s always dialog to be had and improvements to make.

ep1: Uncle Grandpa is going through a wardrobe looking for outfits to give a little boy. He tosses aside a series of wacky outfits for different reasons. When he discards a blue tutu, the reason he gives is “too confusing.”

ep2: Uncle Grandpa, Pizza Steve and Mr. Gus are looking for their tiger friend, who has the personality of a teenage girl. By following her trail, they end up going to a series of salons, getting their nails done, buying jewelry and so forth, until they’re all in dresses and spray tans. This lasts a few seconds with Uncle Grandpa saying “I wonder where she went looking so beautiful!” before they’re back to normal.

ep5: Pizza Steve is fleeing from retail security guards when he gets covered in a heap of clothes. He pops out dressed like a woman for a moment, and it fools the guards into thinking he’s just a shopper. The joke here might just be that, as a slice of pizza, no disguise should have worked.

ep6: uncle grandpa tries to help a kid do something “legendary” enough to earn a nickname, and comes up with doing rigorous yard work. It’s kind of unfortunate that this is also the first black child in the show, but it at least feels accidental? The same kid ends up battling a dragon to save Uncle Grandpa by transforming into a He-man-like barbarian hero, which can go either way.

ep8: Uncle Grandpa tries to prove he can be left unattended, so he creates his own babysitter, which is just a duplicate of himself in a cliche babysitter outfit, which means a blonde ponytail and pink sweater. No attention otherwise called to this as a joke; all the humor comes from Babysitter Grandpa ironically encouraging UG to break rules.

ep 33: Uncle Grandpa goes on vacation to a tropical island and meets your typical stock pseudo-Hawaiian “island natives,” who believe in a prophecy that someone resembling Uncle Grandpa will stop their volcano from erupting. When he acts like an asshole (uncharacteristically for the series, too) they finally throw him into it.

season 2, episode 8: the “Aunt Grandma” episode, features a title card with Uncle Grandpa posing in a “sexy” way. The actual Aunt Grandma in the episode is Uncle Grandpa’s new arch-nemesis, and unfortunately hits on all the tired cliche’s of a female counterpart; she’s young, curvy, and lacks a sense of silliness. The episode culminates in a physical brawl between the two in which both end up with torn clothes (moreso Uncle Grandpa, however). She pretends to be defeated and admit his superiority before stealing his mustache, claiming to be him, and flying out the window with an umbrella.

Season 2, episode 13: we “spy” on Pizza Steve for a split second and see him trying on makeup in his mirror, the joke presumably being that he’s being weird.

Season 2, episode 18: some “hot” girls at the beach talk “ditzy,” somehow don’t understand how soda bottles work, and fawn over Mr. Gus for opening them. This is, however, implied to be only the way Pizza Steve remembers the scenario.

Season 3, episode 1: this whole episode is about teenage girl wanting “duck lips” so she can take more popular selfies. Uncle Grandpa keeps making them bigger and bigger for her as she gains more devoted fans until an Anatid-based disaster convinces her to be herself. Whole thing just felt awkward to me, since it clashes with the way he’s helped male children in other episodes.

Season 3, episode 2: Mr. Gus appears to get hit on the head and act “stupid,” though we later find out this is really his cousin Nathan. Nathan talks with “hillbilly” dialect, shoves things in his nose and the other antics. The final punchline is that he’s a cartoon writer.

SUMMARY: we’ve got about eleven things in 56 episodes that can be read as gendered, racial or ableist humor, though you might find some of them trivial and they all read as sheer ignorance. Most are cribbing from “classic” cartoon humor, but people grow sick of that humor with pretty good reason. This stuff is all worth criticism and I’d like to see a little better effort in the future.

That said, I’m surprised by the low frequency of this content compared to most other children’s comedies, especially more “classics” like Animaniacs, Spongebob and previous CN originals, many of which are still recent enough that you can’t call “products of their time” (and that’s always a cop-out anyway. If it’s shitty now, it was shitty then, guys) Uncle Grandpa’s bad moments mostly stick out so much because it’s up against Steven Universe, Adventure Time, Gravity Falls and so many others with an amazing track record.

NOW LET’S TALK POSITIVES.

Let’s agree first and foremost that positive points don’t “negate” or “make up” for negative moments in a television show. Shitty jokes get made and can’t get un-made. Other shows can have little to no negatives to sour things. It’s just not really a “give and take” system. That still doesn’t mean it’s not worth talking about the good qualities of something; some people can hate a series on some merits, and love it some others.

BODY POSITIVITY: screenshots have circulated around of “fat” and “ugly” Uncle Grandpa characters to ostensibly demonstrate that the show is “full” of body shaming, but unless I missed some throwaway moment, I never saw anything that constituted a “fat joke.” Most characters are drawn to look “goofy” in Uncle Grandpa, but their appearance is virtually never the butt of the joke. The very first episode of the series, “Belly Brothers,” is also about Uncle Grandpa trying to convince an overweight child that having a large belly is “awesome.” This utilizes jokey things, like rolling their bodies over some monsters to defeat them, but it’s all presented like cool/fun “powers” to have. In the end, the kid, who was previously embarrassed by his fat, doesn’t want to wear a shirt anymore. It doesn’t go over well with his mom, but Uncle Grandpa thinks it’s just fine.

DIVERSITY: with the exceptions already listed, most minority characters defy stereotypes, are much more common than they are in other cartoons of this nature and included as casually and naturally as any white characters. Mr. Gus is performed by and coded as a black man and is the most intelligent, literate and well informed of the five main characters, despite also being the “muscle.” It’s still too bad he’s a green lizard and the title character is a white male like literally everything else on the network. People kind of forget that this is even true of Steven Universe. It’s getting more and more jarring.

GENDER REPRESENTATION: one reason Aunt Grandma sticks out like a sore thumb is that it’s not really so common for this show to make every human woman conventionally attractive. For every “hot” female character seen in this cartoon, and I can only remember maybe a couple, far more are drawn just as cartoonish and goofy as its average male characters, in a wide variety of ways, without being the butt of jokes for it. Their personalities are similarly varied, and they have yet to be notably stereotyped in their hobbies, interests or career choices.

SURPRISINGLY LOW ABLEISM? (Subjective) this is going to be hard to believe, and it took me a while to even think of it, but despite everything else about how this show is set up, how its characters come across and the “cousin Nathan” episode, there is VERY LITTLE comedy derived from any character’s lack of “intelligence.” Uncle Grandpa himself is not like Patrick Starr, Homer Simpson, Billy or Cheese or a hundred million other “dumb” cartoon characters. He doesn’t accidentally hammer boards to his head, they don’t make him illiterate for a cheap laugh, he doesn’t stare blanky and say “duhhhhh!” when presented with a simplistic problem.

Uncle Grandpa is simply *different.* He has a perpetual, child-like wonderment and he approaches everything in life with ridiculous, surreal goofiness. Take this lightbulb joke, for instance, He knows what has to be done, he is not ignorant of the basic concept of changing a lightbulb. He simply can’t do anything without it being wacky and circuitous, which is how the whole short goes (yes, this is a whole short about him changing a lightbulb. It’s cute.).

He’s not very experienced with the world of normal, adult life, but his unconventional way of thinking is consistently an advantage, and when he seems to misunderstand something - like interpreting an internet troll as a literal troll, or a children’s coloring page as a treasure map - he turns out to be completely right. Other characters repeatedly learn, sometimes harshly, that they’ve severely underestimated or misjudged him by assuming he isn’t as “smart” as they are just because he doesn’t think the way they do.

SO HOW IS IT OVERALL?

I have to say I really like what Uncle Grandpa aims to be. The concept of a reality-warping, almost omnipotent character who acts as that weird old visiting relative to everyone on Earth is creative, funny and a bottomless well of story hooks. With his ability to travel time and space, the seemingly limitless interior of his RV, frequent run-ins with strange monsters and a series of human companions, it’s basically like Doctor Who if everything British was sucked out and replaced with vibes of Cow and Chicken or Spongebob. If you ask me, that’s a pretty big improvement over Steven Moffat. The grungy art style and stark colors can be hard on your eyes, but has a 90’s feel some people might really enjoy.

Unfortunately, Uncle Grandpa’s execution kind of falls short on what it promises. I say this as an adult, but I also say this as an adult who thought several episodes of Spongebob were divine masterpieces of comedy. Uncle Grandpa has all the elements in place for hilarity, but there were ultimately only a few moments that really made me laugh. When it’s funny, it’s really funny, but many great opportunities are missed.

For one example, there’s a scene where Uncle Grandpa and Pizza Steve are stranded and starving. Pizza Steve looks at Uncle Grandpa and hallucinates a roast turkey, a common cartoon gag. Uncle Grandpa looks at Pizza Steve and hallucinates a normal, non-anthropomorphic slice of pizza. I get that that’s the joke in itself, but wouldn’t it have been so much funnier if he’d seen something not remotely anything like pizza? It seems like the writers were thinking that way too, because Uncle Grandpa ends up screaming “PANCAKES!!!” as he attacks his friend, but again, this would still be even funnier if his delusion had turned Pizza Steve into, say, a cheeseburger or a pie. This kind of situation came up a lot, where the potential for a joke really hit me in the face, but just didn’t pan out.

Now, on the other hand, Uncle Grandpa doesn’t really aim for that setup/punchline/setup/punchline dialog-driven comedy we’re all so used to, and that’s kind of refreshing. Instead, the majority of humor it aims for is entirely visual; Uncle Grandpa’s strange transformations and distortions of reality are almost constant, and while they’re pretty hit or miss for me, it’s nice to see a cartoon oriented on something a little different from the predictable, sitcom-style comedy of so many others.

This visual humor is something young children are definitely more prone to finding funny than adults, mostly because it’s simply NEWER to them than it will be as they get older. Perhaps more significantly, it’s also a style of humor easily understood on the same level by very different people.

I read input from a lot of this show’s fans as I put this together. I looked through the fan wiki, Deviantart tags, IMDB comments, and of course its tumblr tag. What I found almost immediately was that an exceptionally high number of its visible teen to adult fans describe themselves as autistic. While this is a broad umbrella manifesting in many different ways, to different degrees and in different combinations, many people across the spectrum simply don’t find the same things funny in the same ways as allistic people, and that can be a problem when so much television comedy hinges on the appeal of mainstream sarcasm, social cues and dialog twists. It’s not that some autistic people fail to “get” these jokes, but that they simply don’t work for every type of mindset. They simply cannot be funny to everybody.

Criticisms that “Uncle Grandpa” has been problematic are fair, but everywhere I’ve looked, the MOST common criticism leveled at this show is simply that it’s “stupid,” and that’s frankly pretty shitty. I’ve lost count of how many comments and reviews are just all different variations on the same exact statement, which one comment I ran across on Gamefaqs finally puts bluntly and honestly:

People will dress up this same assessment in all sorts of vocabulary, but it always means the same thing: that if you find this show funny, you’re either a child who “doesn’t know better” or an adult who would know better if something wasn’t “wrong” with you. Even otherwise fairly progressively-minded people seem to fall into this trap of judging the show on an abstract idea of “intelligence level,” and they really, really need to knock that shit off, because no matter how nicely you’re wording it, you’re still just repeating assholes like these people. (Warning: almost all comments painful to read)

There are plenty of valid, rational concerns you can raise about this show. “Appealing to dumb people” is not one of them, and actually really gross.

SINGLE BEST THING IN THIS SHOW: