nlangella1
I remember watching some episodes from this show on MTV over my friend's house during the summer of 2002. The warning content they show is extremely disturbing. Even as an adult, I still find it disturbing. Just thinking about the infants screaming, while the moms cry out for their babies is spine curling. Just thinking about the sounds of infants crying, and mothers screaming for their babies reminds me of the Biblical historical event when King Herod I decides to massacre all of the infant boys under 2 years of age. After that dreadful content, they sing the disturbing kid's show theme, which was obviously a parody to kid shows such as the Seaseme Street. The kid's show theme is also disturbing. It sounds like the creepy carnival music that you hear in horror films and in real life I've seen some pretty disturbing shows, but nothing like this. This has to be the most disturbing, controversial, and evil show I have ever seen. Only an audience who are white trash, or have no morals whatsoever, could watch this piece of garbage. Above all, this show is satanic! It is evil in many ways! How do these creators sleep at night, knowing they've made a show that puts a smile on Judas Iscariot's face while he's burning in hell? They really had no problem having kids star in this show, explaining where babies come, dressing up like Hitler, swearing, giving the middle finger, and showing how rude they can be to their elders? They really have no problem poisoning these kid's minds? I would not recommend this show to anybody. This show demonstrates how sinful Sodom and Gomorrah were.
maz underscore
I'm torn about this show. While MOST parts of it I found to be HILARIOUS, other parts of it I found to be stupid and simply shock for shock sake. The off the wall parody of some of the cartoons are brilliant as indeed are a lot of the scenes with the children. However, I don't think it's clever getting little children to say rude things. It's not that I think "oh poor children, they're being exploited" - it's just that it's really not clever!! It's something that ANYONE could do, therefore making it as simple and pointless as making a paper airplane. In order to make this show better they would have to stick to the natural responses from children, which I think can be funnier than the scripted at time. By far the funniest part of Wonder Showzen is Clarence, the blue puppet who wonders around the streets talking to and annoying strangers. It's really funny and it's mostly improvised. Seeing him in a long scene about the importance of patience test the patience of an EXTREMELY patient man, was by far the funniest scene in my opinion. You should watch this show though because all in all it's very funny, even if it is stupid at times.
liquidcelluloid-1
Network: MTV2; Genre: Parody, Satire, Comedy; Content Rating: TV-MA (for strong language, adult content, animated blood and violence, scatological humor and - what the hell - crazy puppet sex); Available: Uncensored DVD, MTV; Perspective: Contemporary (star range: 1 - 4);Seasons Reviewed: 2 seasons Tucked a way on satellite-only MTV2 and trading in a Tom Green-style post-modern anti-comedy, "Wonder Showzen" is truly the hip show watched only by those in the know. So, I know exactly what I'm supposed to say about it. I know I'm supposed to point to all the reality shows, mindless sitcoms and procedural crime dramas on TV and call "Wonder Showzen" a brilliant work of originality. A piece of absurdist art. That there is nothing else on TV like it.Usually, with TV we are just happy if we see a show with some guts or that just doesn't embarrass us with stupidity. But "Wonder Showzen" is bad in a different way, a way that we aren't used to on TV. "Showzen" passes all these rudimentary tests and then fails spectacularly on the next level - I think it just doesn't achieve the lofty goal it sets for itself.The creators of this surrealistic nightmare of a puppet show, Vernon Chatman and John Lee (of the Brooklyn band PFFR), like its fans, would probably tell you that it is a satirical parody of the kid shows of yesteryear. Immersed deeply in a perfect recreation of every kid show we suffered through as children, the show's only saving grace is that everything it does is with an unblinking straight face. But what about kid shows is it satirizing? "Showzen" seems furious that children's shows exist and are pumping young minds with lies sanitizing the horrible state of the world. "Showzen" is going to correct the record.The kids show that is "Showzen" is hosted by Chauncey (Chatworth), a puppet rag of an indecipherable species (Chauncey as a stoned hippie gets my biggest laugh). A cast of other puppets (including Mother Nature having a sex change and piles of crap with eyeballs) and real kids (the subject of some heavily edited voice-overs to make them say the darndest things) join Chauncey. Lee performs street-interviewer Clarence with a voice so adorable it lets him get away with saying just about anything.Why do I feel like I've seen all this before? Comedy Central has based countless series over the years on taking the template of a children's show and juxtaposing it with something adult, bloody or blasphemous and letting the hilarity ensue. "Showzen" is another drained exercise in the concept that this juxtaposition is just inherently funny. It most recalls Robert Smigel's short-lived children's show parody "TV Funhouse" (as well as Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog) only less focused, not nearly as clever as it thinks it is and not a fraction as funny. This is your chance to see what "Funhouse" would look like running around on a violent cocaine high. Funny. Not Funny.What it lacks in skill, it makes up for with balls. "Funhouse" found laughs in racial and scatological jokes. "Showzen" finds them in race, vulgarity and angry left-wing middle-school-age anti-war, anti-capitalist politics. What is the show really saying about slaves, American imperialism, God, the meat industry? Nothing really. It is just a subversive re-affirmation of what an angry viewer already believes. Which takes me to its biggest crime: how derivative it becomes, repeating the same jabs on the same targets over and over.The show desperately wants to be controversial, but Nazism, plantation slavery, mushroom clouds, the meat industry and "He Haw"? The show's targets aren't just stationary, they are decomposing. As a result, its desire to be a dead-on retro parody and a contemporary social satire crash into each other. It cycles between making sharp jabs, taking back those jabs and straight-up lecturing us. After the DVD comes out, the show lectures us about pirating DVDs. Season 2 goes off, almost entirely, on a rant voicing the liberal fear that Middle America (literally, a puppet shaped like a red state - get it) and "He Haw" watching hillbillies are trying to take over the world.It might sound like I'm contradicting myself. How can the show be unoriginal, gutsy, irrelevant and iconoclastic all at the same time? To understand that is to understand that there is a fundamental disconnect going on between TV and the public - the traditional TV viewers it wants to offend and every other TV show out there pushing the same buttons also trying to offend them. Yes, its true, the "He Haw" crowd that still exists would surely get up in arms over a blasphemously amusing bit called "God's Biggest Boners" or God killing himself with a pistol over loosing a game of rock, paper, scissors. However, when you look at it in the context with the rest of TV – as I am - none of this is that revolutionary. Some time in the last decade all this became TV normality. The difference between them and "Wonder Showzen" is passion. To say that "Showzen" is angry would be the understatement of the year.So, forgive me if I roll my eyes at this show's pre-teen level rebellion against authority. This is normally the type of twisted enterprise that I like, but "Wonder Showzen" is more a dull, crass, mean-spirited, nearly unwatchable and socially irrelevant exercise that delights in torturing its audience for 22 minutes to make unoriginal points. It is like being hurled around in a cyclone of dementia, anarchy, pedophilia and puppet sex."Wonder Showzen" has gotten being awful down to a science, but there will always be an audience for this and if you are going to watch an angry, cheap, mean-spirited, pure ideological spit-wad show, this is the one to watch.* ½ / 4
sallyfifth
Ah, having a boy dressed as Hitler ask people about the Youth today (get it? The Hitler Youth??) seems like the demented dream of Trey Parker or Matt Stone, who, incidentally probably wouldn't have the stones to try it with a real kid in a real place. This is a delicious, delirious take on the kids shows we grew up watching that is so smartly put together that it elicits wonder at every creepy turn. The first half of the show about "Patience" which tried the audience's patience with its slow, boring repetitive nature is actually rewound and played in its entirety backwards once the show's runner realizes that they're losing the audience and then a new episode on "SPEED" (edited for TV) is played in its place. It's just one example out of a hundred real risks the show takes in order to bring the shine out of that old Tom Green commercial surreal. What makes things work so well is how the show plays it straight. It's not a winking, nudging thing. It's a devastating scathing commentary on the life cycle, our world, and our social constructs and the balckhole they all inhabit. It's just so damn funny about the tragedy of it all. Kids will say the darndest things.
