With Fanboy & Chum Chum acheiving meme status
maybe we should take some time to consider why the show was originally so “meh”.
I don’t find it particularly good, or even particularly bad, just a big huge ”meh”.
In my opinion, the blame for that can be put on producers who were desperate to catch lightning in a bottle twice by replicating the success of Sponge Bob. The only problem was, as these things often go; they failed to remember what was it about Sponge Bob that struck a chord with audiences.
To put it in as simple and short of a tangent as possible, we loved Sponge Bob because in spite of the abstract craziness of the character, he was largely grounded in being a good person. He was optimistic, kind to his friends and neighbors, and hard working. What’s more valuable is how given the insanity of the character and Patrick along with him, there were always other characters who were normies, basically, regular people who could give earnest reactions to the craziness. Squidward was the extreme of it but other characters like Sandy, and Mr. Krabs provided that kind of normal adult perspective that made the lunacy of Sponge Bob so much funnier.
Fanboy & Chum Chum doesn’t have any of that.
It’s like they took the madcap silliness of Sponge Bob and made that the entire show, only they made it so much worse? How? By making the protagonists not just annoying and stupid, but bad people who never seem to face reprocussions for their actions.
To me, that’s the worst kind of character writing; an irredeemably bad person who does bad things unprovoked and gets away with it. It’s what I’ve always hated about someone like Woody Woodpecker.
Anyway, back to what I was saying, Fanboy and Chum Chum are just kind of infuriating as characters because there are no normal people in their world to ring them in. I guess you could maybe say the one convenience store clerk and the magic kid were supposed to be the normies but no, no they weren’t. Everyone, and I do mean everyone in this show was either goofy, insane, a bad person, or any combination of the three. The biggest crime of that though is that no one really seems to have any sort of depth or different character traits outside of what they show on the surface. If you see them in one episode, they’re more than likely going to act the exact same way in any other.
And don’t @ me saying it was like that in Sponge Bob because it wasn’t. Even a semi-background character we don’t see that often like Larry the Lobster has bits and pieces of his character and personality trickled down to us that make each of his appearances feel unique and memorable.
To conclude, Fanboy & Chum Chum wasn’t the start of Nickelodeon’s inherent desperation to snag a second Sponge Bob. That honor goes to The Mighty B. But while it wasn’t the start, Fanboy & Chum Chum was a transparent sign of their intentions and that they, as a company were fastly losing touch with their audience.
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