Smiling Friends - did u smile

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did u smile

  • yes

    Votes: 1,793 93.3%
  • no

    Votes: 218 11.3%

  • Total voters
    1,922
Sorry I still can't help but think something happened behind the scenes. I get wanting to go out on top and not become like Rick and Morty... but every IP has a population of cringe idiots in its fandom and that shouldn't keep you from producing your show as you normally would. I don't work in the industry so I don't know but is it really that hard to ignore Reddtors?

I saw zero signs this was going downhill or dropping in quality.
Regular Show had a similar premise and set up, were 22 minute episodes and still got fairly consistent 8 seasons.
Big fan of that. I remember seeing the promos before it premiered. It was a different time...
 
Sorry I still can't help but think something happened behind the scenes. I get wanting to go out on top and not become like Rick and Morty... but every IP has a population of cringe idiots in its fandom and that shouldn't keep you from producing your show as you normally would. I don't work in the industry so I don't know but is it really that hard to ignore Reddtors?
I'm partial to the theories that the show either got cancelled because Zach and Michael genuinely didn't have enough content to fill season 4, let alone 5; Or that Zach and Michael had caught wind of potential changes coming to Adult Swim after the Paramount merger, and decided to can the show so it didn't get fucked over during that mess.
 
I'm partial to the theories that the show either got cancelled because Zach and Michael genuinely didn't have enough content to fill season 4, let alone 5; Or that Zach and Michael had caught wind of potential changes coming to Adult Swim after the Paramount merger, and decided to can the show so it didn't get fucked over during that mess.
I was going to say, this doesn't scream too much of them being completely burnt out especially as they got seasons 4&5 greenlit. It seems to me that behind the scene changes due to the merger that was in the process happening right as they were in discussions for getting the new seasons greenlit that made the future burnout go from bearable to unbearable in their eyes and they just decided to call it at that.
 
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Big if true
 
Michael Cusack literally made a female-led show years ago, in the same off-beat style he's famous for, but that didn't take off since it wasn't as "marketable" as Smiling Friends.
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Final season of that was only last year, which I didn't find out until months later, thanks to the lack of shit given by anybody.
 
i'd say it ended on a fairly good note. maybe too soon, another season could have done it, but i probably only say this because i'm from an era of 4 season shows being the norm. it'll always be a shame that budget restrictions reduced each season to just around 8-10 11 minute episodes but budgets gotta do that to things now. quality was really squeezed out of each of em.
 
Smiling Friends conspiracy vid cause the fag above me didn't ARCHIVE FUCKING EVERYTHING.
PreserveTube
1000023766.jpghe got the lain OST track list wrong it's Dimension not direction lmao
 
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With all the shows that have gone on forever and started sucking (The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, etc.) , I'm glad Smiling Friends gets to end while it's still good
South Park's decline was wild, not even a season. My other half loves it, said the show is dead.
The funny / confusing thing about South Park to me, is that the one of the creators said something along the lines of "I just want to go back to episodes of the kids messing around [with episodes] like 'Awesome-o'. Why not just do it then? It's literally their own show and Comedy Central practically shuts down for a week if any episode isn't finished on time or they piss off Matt and Trey.

They explained that middle-era South Park worked off of how buzz-journalism heavy 2009-2014 was, and that the show pivoted so hard into a 5-year-long Trump-Garrison bit because he was the only thing in the news. But then some of the best episodes in that era are still the original one-offs. 'Crippled Summer' and '1%' for instance.

One of my friends has zero remote interest in South Park just off of what he hears. But then they smirk or laugh a little when I tell them the premise of episodes like 'Crippled Summer' or 'Go God Go XII'. These are episodes they can just do at will, but they don't. I'd like to believe just maybe they realized by year 3 of 'orange man bad' is when they went "oh shit, did we get swept into making the same episode for 3 seasons?", but if they didn't pivot then something is stopping them. Do they think there wouldn't be an audience since they've been catering to the TDS hornets' nest for so long? Or has 10 years of doing some of the most facile episodes fried originality out of their brain?

South Park could do a 23 minute episode with no dialogue or music that's just Stan shooting up a mall and the creators still wouldn't lose their show. Maybe they'll be "off the air" for 2 days before cancelled subscriptions made the network immediately change their mind. Matt and Trey must have forgotten this.
 
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one of the creators said something along the lines of "I just want to go back to episodes of the kids messing around [with episodes] like 'Awesome-o'.
I remember reading this too, and my thought process is, they either wanted to and Comedy Central offered a fuck ton of money to say "no no our ENTIRE FUCKING NETWORK is based around Orange Man Bad, you have to be on board too". Or, they only said they wanted to make those episodes again because that was the popular agreement among people that were ACTUAL fans of the show.

I'd like to believe just maybe they realized by year 3 of 'orange man bad' is when they went "oh shit, did we get swept into making the same episode for 3 seasons?"
I don't think they really give a fuck anymore. I mean all of the Paramount specials were just fucking awful.
 
Rick and morty going from extreme heights to extreme lows wasn't something that just happened out of nowhere, it was a perfect storm of incompetent checked out showrunners and replacing good veteran writers with completely horrible rookies with egos the size of planets.
Yeah I don't think a bunch of immature kids yelling about sauce in McDonald's or Redditors posting walls of text about how only "intellectuals" like the show is what caused Rick and Morty to drop in quality.

I liked the first couple seasons of R&M but lost interest because it stopped being what I wanted it to be: SpongeBob for adults that's also little more serious than Family Guy. I didn't mind that R&M had some ongoing storylines, character development, or recurring plot points but I remember thinking it was getting too deep/serious and it became a chore to watch.

I think that's partly why it fell off, too. There wasn't necessarily an immediate quality drop, it just strayed too far from itself. This happened with Adventure Time too IMO (which I also remember watching the premiere of).
 
Yeah I don't think a bunch of immature kids yelling about sauce in McDonald's or Redditors posting walls of text about how only "intellectuals" like the show is what caused Rick and Morty to drop in quality.

I liked the first couple seasons of R&M but lost interest because it stopped being what I wanted it to be: SpongeBob for adults that's also little more serious than Family Guy. I didn't mind that R&M had some ongoing storylines, character development, or recurring plot points but I remember thinking it was getting too deep/serious and it became a chore to watch.

I think that's partly why it fell off, too. There wasn't necessarily an immediate quality drop, it just strayed too far from itself. This happened with Adventure Time too IMO (which I also remember watching the premiere of).
I think I might be the only person to have a "phase" of liking Rick and Morty. I thought it was shit from the beginning. I hate the characters, the design, the animation, and it didn't help that I became so jaded with Adult Swim that it made me spit on it just for that reason.
I almost didn't even give Smiling Friends a chance.
I read Zach Hadel was getting a show and I was like "Oh! :biggrin: "
Then I read on Adult Swim and I was like "oh. (:_("
But it was certainly the best thing that Adult Swim has had on in a decade or more.
Alenal, I can't be too upset it ended when it did. The more time spent on Adult Swim the higher the chance it was going to be garbage.
 
I feel this is partially true. Sam Hyde doesn't feel out of the realm of possibilities for voice overs they might of had in mind. Likely happened, but it wasn't "the" catalyst, rather more fuel for the fire of "fuck this, I'm out".
They already had Ben Avery on Smiling Friends. His comedy is also pretty "anti-mainstream" for lack of a better word like Sam's. He's also already within the circle of Sam Hyde's comedian associates.

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The funny / confusing thing about South Park to me, is that the one of the creators said something along the lines of "I just want to go back to episodes of the kids messing around [with episodes] like 'Awesome-o'. Why not just do it then? It's literally their own show and Comedy Central practically shuts down for a week if any episode isn't finished on time or they piss off Matt and Trey.

They explained that middle-era South Park worked off of how buzz-journalism heavy 2009-2014 was, and that the show pivoted so hard into a 5-year-long Trump-Garrison bit because he was the only thing in the news. But then some of the best episodes in that era are still the original one-offs. 'Crippled Summer' and '1%' for instance.
A lot of the old "political" episodes of South Park were funny enough to still be good, even if you didn't "get" the commentary. For example, I had no example that the "Day After Tomorrow" episode was about Hurricane Katrina when I first watched it. I just thought it was a funny episode of South Park. If they did that episode today, the boys would have been barely in it, and it would have been Randy arguing with Donald Trump or something.
 
A lot of the old "political" episodes of South Park were funny enough to still be good, even if you didn't "get" the commentary. For example, I had no example that the "Day After Tomorrow" episode was about Hurricane Katrina when I first watched it. I just thought it was a funny episode of South Park. If they did that episode today, the boys would have been barely in it, and it would have been Randy arguing with Donald Trump or something.
The best politics-adjacent episode was The Snake, where they shat on Hilary Clinton's inauthentic campaign appearances and fake accents. It was about the hardest they ever hit any Democrat.
 
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