Master Raindrop (2008)
Water... Earth... Fire... Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony....
....And then everything changed when this became a thing...
Let me introduce you to the half-arsed, rip-off glory of a show Master Raindrop. First aired on Channel 7 on Australian Television in 2008 this cartoon was created by Australian, New Zealand and Singaporean companies. As stated on IMDB by Mike Crippin it is about:
No names of the heroes not anything really. I mean, I would give you a synopsis but it’s really hard to narrow a description down to something that barely exists anymore. You see, I wanted to review this cartoon for ages. I wanted it to be the first cartoon I reviewed. So, I gathered I would have to do some research and not just go on from what I remembered as a kid because I’m not some biased piece of shit. But, it seems like Flying Bark Productions wanted this gone for good. The only thing that I was able to find on this cartoon was a YouTube clip of the opening sequence (I will link under this), episodes but in different languages and an English episode on Vimeo. Everything else is just scrapped. The Wikipedia page isn’t that long and basically spells out the fact that this is a rip-off of other shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Xiaolin Showdown.
So I suppose I wasted some of your time, I guess you hoped for a full blown review on this pile of baloney, but it’s kind of impossible. Unless someone actually has any footage or any other information about this show there isn’t much to say. Which is another thing that baffles me; it feels like nobody else remembers this cartoon or knew it exist and I feel like there are a lot of people out there who don’t understand what it’s like to have bad cartoons when living in Australia.
I’m not saying all cartoons and animation in Australia are bad, there are some really amazing ones that are super rad (DogStar, The New Adventures of Figaro Pho, Animalia, etc). But there are even more flops where people just file it off as something and expect audiences to watch it no matter what. So, as an example of this, let’s bring something that was more recent into the mix.
Buzz Bumble (2014) This was a show created in 2014 by the well-known Australian production company Blue Rocket (The grand production company that bought us Pixel Pinkie!). It follows the story of Buzz Bumble, a stunt bee, doing tricks in a stage-show alongside other various bugs.
Maybe I’m being a bit harsh here. But can we stop and look for a second at the animation and overall design of this? I mean, the environments are still and empty besides the backdrop, the characters are bland and flat and the lip syncing it just awful. As well as the plot to each episodes are very cliched and have been done before.
All in all, I want to do a mini series on cartoons that I grew up around, that aren’t as well known, but some people may look at them and be like “Oh shit I remember that.” They won’t all be solely based around Australian animation, which I feel bad for already crapping over because like I said before there are some amazing gems in the Aussie animation business, check them out ^.
Welp, it’s getting late so I’m going to sign off before I start ranting and rambling and hating myself a bit more. Ha!
