The Bots Master S1E1: "Adios ZZ"
This review was commissioned by @krinsbez
Another western children's cartoon from the nineties, but this time from France rather than North America. It came out in 1993, which is around the same era that most of the other western toons that I've looked at so far were released. I've never heard of this show, so aside from it ostensibly having something to do with robots I've got no clue what to expect.
One of the things that I didn't expect was for this to be another 3D gimmick cartoon, where you're expected to wear the glasses. Okay, will prepare ahead of time for the headache I'm going to be nursing after this. The OP is hard to watch due to the fad visuals that I'm not equipped for, but auditorily it's at least very different from what I've come to expect. It's leaning hard into a gangsta rap sound that I don't think would be *quite* mainstream American youth culture for another few years at least, so maybe France was ahead of the curve. The song introduces a corporate villain who looks a little too much like Lex Luthor for my approval, a team of goofy rapping robots called the Boyz Squad (groan...), and a child inventor named Zulander who seems to have created the squad and is using them for anti-corporate asymetric warfare. He is the titular "bots master."
Huh. Okay, that last detail makes me quite a bit more curious than I was before. Robots are nothing unusual in this era of children's cartoon. Kid supergenius inventors are also nothing unusual. And yet, I don't think I can readily think of a show, book, or comic that revolves around those two elements in the most obvious conjunction WITHOUT trying to subvert it. Robots were (and still are) always rebelling against their creators. It's pretty much a coin flip as to which side is the good guy or the bad guy - it's either the innocent robots rebelling against a cruel creator or a well-meaning inventor trying to control their evil creation - but that creator-created antagonism is ubiquitous. When it comes to heroic rather than villainous robots, they often have human child companions (a la Transformers), who may be technological geniuses in their own right, but at most they just either help repair the robots that someone else created. Here, it appears that we have a creator and his creations, the latter acting in their intended roles, as the protagonist group.
There's some interesting philosophical ground to tread here. The show might not be intending to tread it. It might not KNOW that it's treading it. But it will have done so regardless, and I'm interested to see how well it manages this.
My only other comment about this intro is that it reveals their catchphrase to be "It's laser time." Or maybe "blazer time." One or the other. Either way, it's bad and I hate it.
Let's get into the pilot!
We open, as many such shows do, with a newscast. In this case, seemingly an expose sort of thing, going into the famous MegaFact synthetics corporation's main production facility, where they churn out Auto-Activated Androbots (referred to colloquially as 3A's). The 3A's have become ubiquitous throughout global industry and civil maintenance in a short period of time, and this one company (I thought it was called MegaFact at first, but now they're saying a different name that I couldn't quite catch. Maybe MegaFact is just the name of the big factory complex that they own) has been at the forefront of it. The centrepiece of this expose is a rare interview with the normally highly ellusive and secretive chairman of the corporation, Sir Lewis Leon Para...
...
...his name is Paradigm.
Pronounced differently ("dim" rather than "dime") but still, that is his name.
We have another bald Lex Luthor lookalike supervillain named Paradigm.
For fucking serious? Serious?
If he starts splicing sea anemones with DNA from Attila the Hunn, I'm out of here.
Or...actually, no, that joke should be the other way around. This came out a year before the Street Sharks pilot did. Which...okay, to be fair, that should have just been my initial assumption. If one cartoon shamelessly, lazily rips off of another cartoon without even making a token effort to hide it, and one of the two cartoons in question is Street Sharks, well, you shouldn't need to know anything more than that to understand which title goes where.
Anyway.
We start alternating between the newscast, and young Ziv Zulander watching it on TV with a grim expression. Zulander looks a little older than I thought from the intro; more like he's supposed to be in his early-mid teens or so. As he watches, he takes down a voice recording to be hopefully recovered in the event of his death. Zulander claims to be the true original inventor of 3A technology (damn...it's *really* recent tech, then, given that he doesn't seem older than 15 at most), and that the corp that stole his technology is planning to use it for world domination, so he's going to stop them or die trying.
That shirt of his looks oddly military. Wonder if the artist was drawing on some other kids' cartoons of a slightly different genre for the character design here.
Zulander explains that the company is about to refit most or all of the 3A's with a new microchip that will remove all of their ethical subroutines and override all other ownership protocols with exclusive loyalty to the corporation's upper management. That's...definitely a SatAm villain plot.
On the news, Sir Paradigm comes out to meet the interviewer riding in a hoverchair thingy. For all that he's allegedly secretive and rarely seen, the guy seems extremely confident in front of a camera, and delivers a classic corporate-philanthropist-showman persona. It only helps him so much, though, because at the end of the day he still looks like this:
When the interviewer asks him if the rumours are true about him planning to run for president of the nascent united Earth government, he just sort of humblebrag-deflects and returns the subject to this next line of microchips they're upgrading their existing 3A lines with. He goes on about how the upgrade is going to be free across the board, made at billions of dollars of cost to the company, just as a show of commitment to customer satisfaction.
Yeah, definitely not suspicious at all.
...
I'm starting to wonder if "the most elusive man in the world" is just part of his branding. Like, if he makes public appearances and statements all the time, but sinks millions of dollars into promoting the meme that he is, in some never-specified way, elusive and mysterious.
@krinsbez, is this character the entire reason you wanted me to look at this pilot? Somebody casting bald-of-evil Elon Musk as a cartoon villain over a decade before anyone had heard of Elon Musk? Well, if so, I hope you're satisfied.
...
Also, am I hearing this wrong, or is the new microchip that they're planning to put in all the robots called the "krang chip?" Like, pronounced the same way as Kraang, from Ninja Turtles? Maybe I was right to check the dates before making assumptions about the Dr. Paradigms after all.
Okay, well.
As Paradigm boasts and Zulander warns, we cut to a couple of Paradigm's underlings watching the broadcast from their own sanctum. There's a lady with intimidatingly large and aggressively presented tiddies named Lady Frenzy, and a Scooby Doo animatronic monster named Dr. Hiss.
Their voices both sound exactly the way they look like they would.
As they cackle to themselves about how soon the world will be theirs thanks to the brilliance of their visionary leader Paradigm, the view zooms out to show the environment they're in, and...I have so many fucking questions right now.
Like, forget the WTF juxtaposition of the near-future corporate highrise office with the random ancient-looking columns jammed into the middle. That's pretty normal for Illuminati-ish villain lairs in cartoons, at least from this time period. No, what I'm trying to figure out is what the layout of this room is supposed to facilitate, and what Frenzy and Hiss are doing in it. Do they host a TV show together? It really, really looks like they're hosting a TV talk show. What the hell kind of show do a whispery femme fatal tiddymonster and a blind alien's attempt at putting together an old man costume host?
They don't seem to be filming (or whatever the hell else this room is for) at the moment, though, so why are the two of them just standing there side by side behind the anchor desk? Is there really not a more comfortable place they could be watching their boss' interview from? Like, a place with chairs in it, maybe? The way that they're standing at that desk and quickly answering the phone when it rings makes it seem almost like they're doing secretarial work, but...a titled noblewoman and what appears to be one of the company's lead scientists doing that?
What is supposed to have been happening for the several minutes leading up to the beginning of this scene, that would have these two people standing in this location?
Well. I guess we'll have to puzzle that out later. For now, Lady Frenzy gets a phone call that informs her that Zulander has learned about their plan and is moving to screw it up for them somehow. She and Hiss leap out from behind their...whatever that piece of furniture they're standing behind is supposed to be for...and start running off to lock down the sensitive stuff and mobilize the minions.
Return to Zulander now, continuing his audio memoir. Originally, he created his first set of 3A's - nicknamed the Boyz Brigade - as a lonely child desperate for companionship. Wait, his initial batch were fully sentient, and they came BEFORE the mindless labor drones? Wacky. Anyway, he designed them to help kids who can't read good and want to do other things better as well be perfect friends for himself, with personalities akin to those of children his own age at the time and interests adjacent to his own. Now, though, he has no choice but to do the same thing the bad guy is doing, and modify these peaceful constructs for violence.
As he finishes that thought, one of said constructs comes bouncing into the room, wanting to play.
I get the impression he's aged at least a couple of years since he made them, but they're still emotionally the same children that he wanted for friends at the time.
As I predicted, this is already opening some ethical bait cans that I'm not sure if the show knows that it's opening. But, well, we will see.
Insectoid robot friend Swang interrupts Zulander's recording to warn him of a squad of corporate police-bots inbound on their address. Well, Swang makes a bunch of dubstep noises at him, and Zulander interprets that as a warning about incoming policebots. I guess he's been taking ranks in Binary Chatter instead of giving himself more personal augmentations; a dangerous path for an AdMech to tread, but we already know this guy is a rebel by nature. Or maybe it's just a Star Wars type thing, where everyone except the audience somehow knows how to interpret R2D2's blips and bloops. Either or. Zulander stops his recording and hurries out of the house with Swang bouncing along right behind him.
Cut back to megacorp headquarters, where a seemingly endless legion of armed riot control robots are being activated and marched out in formation. In a control room that it makes a hell of a lot more sense for them to be in, Frenzy and Hiss argue about what approach they should take. Frenzy insists that they should put in the extra effort to take Zulander in alive. He was a major asset to them back when he was under their employ, and she thinks she has the combination of menace, money, and mammaries to threaten or tempt him back into service if she can just work on him for a while. Hiss disagrees; either out of ego at wanting to remain their best scientist, or out of honest pragmatism, he thinks their safest bet is to kill Zulander as dead as possible as quickly as possible.
The two bicker and whine at each other until Hiss just overrules her and inputs his own commands into the robots. Frenzy goes to report this recklessness to Paradigm, and Hiss runs after her to make sure she doesn't lie or misrepresent the truth. They bitch at each other all the way to the boss' office; I hope he's done with his interview, because these two don't seem to have the sanity neccessary to turn off the supervillainy in front of the press.
Return to Zulander. He's running down a skyway-sidewalk-tunnel thing that seems to act as a public street. While murmuring to himself about his plan to infiltrate some facility or another to input a thing into another thing to ruin the bad guys' plan. Sure, whatever. Suddenly, he's accosted by a legion of armed riot control synths. Just marching on him in formation, out in the open, pushing civilians out of their way and stuttering in their old school text-to-speech voices about needing to eliminate the target Zulander.
Remind me, the bad guys' plan is world domination via weaponized robots, right?
If they can already send robot armies to kidnap or murder whoever they want, in public, in broad daylight, in a major urban center, without any fear of retribution or even having to pay lip service to appearances...then hasn't their plan already succeeded? They already are in the position that we've been told they're scheming to put themselves in.
Maybe they just control this one city-state or small country for now. Or maybe this region is a full on cyberpunk ancap dystopia, where the government (such as it exists) just lets the corps do whatever the fuck they want as long as it doesn't inconvenience anyone important, whereas most of the world is much saner. I guess? There ARE potentially good answers to this question, but I think the show really ought to have addressed it explicitly while setting things up. It's kind of hard for me to grasp the stakes, otherwise.
...
Also, this show's soundtrack is just plain schizophrenic. The intro song had a (sort of uncomfortable, when one of the robots looked kinda sorta blackface...) gangster rap sound, and giving the robots names like "Swang" leans into that sort of vibe. Now that we have our first action sequence though, it's just techno-metal, like you'd expect from a cyberpunk themed fighty show. It kind of threw me, since my musical expectations were set.
Honestly, I'd prefer if they stuck with the RnB sound. The unusual juxtaposition of that style of music with these sorts of visuals would have been a lot more memorable than just same old same old.
...
Zulander momentarily freezes up when he sees the robot army coming for him, but then gets ahold of himself and has Swang go bouncing around wildly within the enemy ranks. The corporate synths stutter some nonsensical text-to-speech stuff at each other, and start shooting their needlessly overpowered weapons at Swang. None of them scratch him, and they all blow themselves up in a veritable carpet bombing of friendly fire.
What the fuck are those guns loaded with, anti-tank shells? Well, anyway, looks like we've got our imperial stormtrooper analogues to go with Swang's bargain bin R2D2.
They descend a ridiculously high elevator to ground level and start running across the city, only for more corpobots to start closing in on them. However, since they're down on the driving level rather than the walking skyways, Zulander has another asset he can bring to bear. He radios another member of the Boyz Brigade, by the name of Twig.
I like Twig's design. It's a really creative look for a robot, and not at all a hideously ugly mangling of a much more popular character.
Twig smashes his way through another group of corpobots who are trying to set up a cordon outside of the area they're hunting Zulander in, and then charges in to the rescue and...
...oh for fuck's sake.
He transforms.
He actually transforms from car to humanoid.
Okay, yeah, no, this show is absolutely down in the Street Sharks tier.
At Zulander's command, Sub-Optimus Prime tears a monument out of the pavement and throws it at the bad guys menacing his master. And then opens up with his built-in plasma guns at the survivors. He has built-in plasma guns, of course. As Zulander and Swang run on toward their destination with Suboptimus covering their backs, the camera pans up to an external public TV screen. Looks like Paradigm's interview is still going on; I really can't wait for the evil henchmen to come crashing in and ruin his techbro messiah public appearance.
Although, now that we've seen what his minions can just openly do in the streets, I'm not sure what his public image actually IS anyway. I want to say that he's basically the dictator of a small country who enjoys unfairly positive media attention despite abusing his people due to being (as far as anyone knows) a lapdog of the geopolitical powers that be. Think "every third country in the Middle East," essentially. But that might be me putting more thought into this than anyone was ever intended to.
His interview concludes. Lucky for him, Lady Frenzy arrives just after the cameras stopped rolling, rather than just before. Even luckier for him, Dr. Hiss had the sense to not let himself be seen by normal people, and seems to have grudgingly let her run ahead of him after all.
...come to think of it, right before shitscribble-Optimus saved Zulander, we saw the corpobots demand that he surrender and come peacefully. Which suggests that Frenzy might have successfully twisted Hiss' arm into changing the kill order into a capture order after all. Again, assuming the writers didn't just forget between scenes.
So, the reporters leave, and Paradigm meets alone with his lieutenants. They restate their positions; Frenzy things it's worth their while to take Zulander alive, while Hiss thinks they're better off not taking chances with this kid. Paradigm thinks for a moment, before reluctantly deciding that Hiss has the right of it. If they weren't at such a critical juncture in their plans he'd entertain Frenzy's suggestion, but right now they really need to make sure everything goes smoothly while they're rolling the Kraangs out.
Very confusingly, Paradigm also says that while lethal force is authorized, he also wants them to approach this execution of it with precision and discretion. There's a lot of press hanging out around their facilities right now, and the last thing they need is a PR scandal right when they're trying to get everyone to refit their synths.
...okay, I am now officially lost when it comes to the company's political status.
Hiss thanks him, and goes off to issue the new commands and initiate a full-on security lockdown of their production facilities. Paradigm, meanwhile, grills Frenzy about whether or not she might have a personal motive in wanting to protect Zulander. Like he suspects her of having a crush on him or something. She insists that no, really, she just thinks that his talents would be a shame to waste. Paradigm accepts that answer, but still looks suspicious.
...
I'm not sure if I want him to be correct in his suspicions or not, tbh. On one hand, female villain has a soft spot for the hero is an annoying cliche. On the other...in this story, with these characters, the execution would just be too insane to not want to see. The fact that Zulander is also a minor just makes it that much worse in the most spectacular way concievable.
Well, I guess she also might secretly be his mother or something. That would be less unhinged.
...
Meanwhile, Zulander reaches the outskirts of the factory where they're making the Kraang chips. A couple more of his Boyz are waiting for him here, including the blackface one. Oh god the voice. Oh god, they actually gave him bling.
I thought that shortbus Optimus Prime was bad enough, but now we're getting the racist Bayformers side characters before those even existed. This show continues to be ahead of its time in the most bizarre, idiosyncratic ways...
Blackfacebot and his more racially ambiguous counterpart tell Zulander that they've got the charges all ready, and they can blow up the factory on his orders. Zulander says that he wants to make sure they evacuate it first; not all the people in there are innocent, but many of them probably are. So, they'll have to pull the fire alarm or something first, even if doing so makes this part of the mission considerably riskier for them. That's nice of Zulander, I guess.
First, Zulander sends Swang into the factory to see how many people there are and how easy they might be to evacuate. Before he can make his sweep though, Zulander and the others see more hostiles inbound. It turns out that when Paradigm said he wanted this handled with discretion and finesse to avoid a media circus, Hiss interpreted that to mean "pilot a giant, heavily armed wall-e at the head of another robot army to engage the target right out in the open just literal feet away from our main factory."
I'm not sure if this is Paradigm's stupidity, or Hiss'. I guess we'll find out later whether or not this is what the bossman actually meant.
Well, seeing that the jig is up, Zulander gives the order to detonate the charges. Hiss starts to point out that he'll be killing a lot of innocent workers if he does that, but is cut off midsentence by the explosion.
O...kay. Well, I can't say I was expecting that. On one hand, sure, preventing a corporate world domination scheme justifies some civilian casualties if it can't be helped. On the other though...there wasn't even a moment's hesitation between Hiss showing up and Zulander giving the order, and he doesn't show a single twinge of regret or remorse afterward. Which is kind of hard to square with his behavior a few seconds ago. I'd have actually assumed the writers forgot all about the civilian casualties concerns mid-scene or something...if only they hadn't made a point of having Hiss start to remind Zulander of them during the actual explosion.
Also, for a second, I thought that maybe the explosion was actually of a decoy target that Zulander rigged up to serve as a distraction. The reason being that the factory actually teleported to the other side of their confrontation between shots; Hiss had been approaching from up the street and flanking them against the factory, but then when Zulander blows the factory up the explosion is coming from BEHIND HISS. So...I don't fucking know what's going on here on pretty much any level.
The shockwave from the explosion sends Zulander and his robots (including Swang. Who is back among the others now, despite never having left the factory again as far as I can tell...) flying into the air. Suboptimus grabs them out of the air; apparently he can turn into a plane as well as a car.
Because it's a SatAm cartoon, the shockwave doesn't do any bodily harm to Zulander and Co as it throws them dozens of feet in the air, but it does destroy Hiss' drone army and mission kills his tank. Without throwing any of them, or even pieces of them, into the air after the good guys in a deadly shrapnel rain. Convenient. I'd have liked it if Zulander at least had to worry about being pelted by the charred bodyparts of minimum wage factory workers, though, as just a small token concession to realism.
Suboptimus flies the other four to...is this Zulander's house? Maybe? It looked like he was living in a high rise apartment or something at the beginning, but I guess that was just a hotel room he was basing out of for the operation. Or else that was his home, and now they're landing at a sympathetic resistance movement's HQ or something. Either way, they're not going to the same place Zulander first left from.
After they land, they dash to a whacky elevator entrance in the ground outside the building that lowers them into a subterranean bunker. The music goes from the action techno-metal, to a version of the RnB intro theme, to...dubstep? Yes, they lower themselves into the underground bunker section of the facility, and the music starts actually wubbing. What the fuck even is this soundtrack?
They're lowered into an underground technopalace full of boyz robots. Like, there are at least three or four of them playing catch in the middle of the main room, and the amputated (but still conscious and watching TV) heads of four others on a shelf, whining at them about blocking their view of the screen.
Moreso than the first few we met, these robots definitely seem like they were created by a gradeschooler to act like other gradeschoolers. Maybe these are the ones who haven't been reprogrammed into soldiers yet. On that same note, when Zulander walks in and we see them interact with him, it really does seem like he has little patience for them. Like their childishness is annoying him, and he starts losing patience with them very quickly upon him entering the room.
Like he isn't happy becoming the lone adult among a bunch of robots who are hardcoded to be like children, but hasn't yet realized that that's what the problem is.
...
See, when I said that this show was going to open some philosophical doors just by virtue of its premise, regardless of execution or intentionality? This is the kind of thing I meant.
...
As Zulander goes over to his computer and starts frantically tinkering with some code, the robots start asking him if he's feeling alright. Which prompts a chef robot with a terrible fake French accent to come in and try to cheer him up with a bowl of raw cookie dough, and then a doctor robot to come and try to take his vitals. The chef robot was in the OP, but I'm almost sure his accent wasn't nearly as horrible then; maybe the VA just couldn't manage to sing like that. Also, I'm really curious what this character sounded like in the French version, and what the show's French creators thought of his American VA. Zulander irritably chases them away and tells them that he's fine, he's just doing something serious, which most of them don't seem able to understand. Which prompts even more robots to stick themselves out of the crowd or come squeezing into the room to make dumb comments about this declaration.
I really hope the show isn't expecting me to remember all the Boyz Brigade robots. Partly because, including the initial heist crew and the speaking roles from this scene, that's at least eleven robot characters, probably more, and that's a lot to expect of an audience. Partly because, well, let's face it; I don't trust these writers to keep track of the personalities of a three or four man team, let alone a thirteen man one.
Eventually, some of the TV-watching robots see a special news update featuring Zulander's own face. That reporter lady who was interviewing Paradigm must have gotten back to the studio pretty dang fast, because she's somehow back in the anchor seat. I guess Zulander's generic-brand-transformer ride might have been longer than the scene cuts made it seem.
Zulander is now wanted for terrorism charges, having just been linked to the bombing of the MegaFact facility downtown.
Hey. This is making me wonder. Why did he go there in person?
Why didn't he just disguise the three robots who did the actual work and have them do it on their own, without anything to implicate himself besides maybe the company's hunch? Blackface and Hardhat planted the charges. Suboptimus was their getaway vehicle. Zulander had literally no reason to be there incriminating himself at all.
I guess maybe he wanted to personally verify that they weren't going to kill anyone. But considering how quickly that concern was totally dropped and forgotten about, and how seamlessly Zulander slipped back into lighthearted cartoon hero snark as they were flying away, I have trouble believing that he actually cared that much.
Yet another newly introduced robot, an obnoxious walking dictionary named DaNerd (sigh...) starts yammering at Zulander while he finishes doing whatever he was doing at the computer. Not working on code like it looked, apparently; instead, he was lowering the aboveground parts of the palace into its underground vault and deploying fake grass overhead.
Zulander explains to the robots (who apparently didn't already know about this?) that this is the bomb shelter system that his grandfather built.
...so. many. questions.
Street Sharks was only barely more WTF than this.
On top of the obvious, Zulander makes this even harder to grock by saying that this should keep them from being found by anyone who goes poking around looking for them. As if the company that he used to work for doesn't know where to find the oversized monstrosity of a house rising from the landscape like a chrome-and-glass melanoma that his family has apparently been living in for three generations. Sure.
The vibrations of the lowering building causes this bird robot to panic and start flying around wildly crashing into things. Zulander grabs it and starts admonishing yet another new character, a recursive robot-building-robot, for not upgrading the damned bird's navigational hardware already.
What bothers me as an audience member about this sequence is that we already have one non-speaking sidekick bot to do the R2D2 thing. We really, really don't need yet another one in the form of this robobird, now.
What should bother everyone in-universe, though, is the fact that this absolute supervillain maniac of a teen genius is creating sentient robots THAT CAN CREATE OTHER SENTIENT ROBOTS and then not even supervising their work very closely.
...
I'm like, 90% sure the world would be safer under Paradigm's iron boot than it is with Zulander being permitted to operate freely.
Let me guess, the next episode is going to start with Zulander tinkering in his workshop while muttering to himself "I'm just so tired of running out of paperclips all the time..."
...
Nerd robot says that he calculates that, given everything Zulander has just filled them in on, there's a 97+ percent chance that if the corporation is unable to locate Zulander, they'll try taking his sister hostage to lure him out. Zulander jumps out of his seat and panics
Lol, did he really not think of that until just now?
Cut back to EvilCorp's main office. Hiss is getting deservedly chewed out for letting Zulander slip through his fingers. He notably ISN'T getting chewed out for breaking cover, though, so I guess what he did actually qualifies as "delicate and covert" in Paradigm's opinion. What the hell would a non-covert intervention be? Nuking the damned city?
Lady Frenzy bemoans how smart their opponent is; when a genius like Zulander goes to ground, he definitely isn't going to leave any hints as to where he is. Hahaha, you sure about that, Frenzy?
Paradigm calms them down, telling them that they can still save this; Zulander might have set their plans back significantly by destroying the chip factory, but they still - and I quote - "have control of the press and the political world."
...
Paradigm, if you have control of the press and the political world, why do you need to turn all the industrial robots into a secret Trojan Horse army?
This problem really doesn't appear to be solving itself as the story goes on. If anything, it's only getting worse.
...
Additionally, Paradigm tells his underlings, he's found a notation in Zulander's old personnel file. He has a ten year old sister named Blitzy who he by all accounts cares a lot about, and she still attends their corporate boarding school.
-____-
What.
Seriously. WHAT.
How long has Ziv been working against the corporation without doing anything about his sister's situation?
Fucking hell, why would she even still be attending that school if her family's ties to the company ended on such adversarial terms, regardless of any shadow war shenanigans? I ASSUME that the Zulander siblings' parents are dead and that an adoptive family or someone has custody of Blitzy, but would legalities have really stopped her one-man-insurgency-with-infinite-resources of a brother?
I had been assuming that the corporation would just abduct her from her home or public school or something, but no, apparently they already had her in their literal custody - en loco parentis - this entire goddamned time without it occurring to Ziv as a potential avenue of attack.
Lady Frenzy cackles evilly at Paradigm's discovery, saying that she knows Ziv will think of his sister first thing before anything else. Hahahaha, you sure about that, Frenzy?
Paradigm says that to pull this gambit off, they will need the cooperation of the local authorities. He asks Hiss if they were able to refit the local police killbots with kraang chips before the factory went up, and Hiss says that they indeed were. Paradigm smiles, and says that this will be Hiss' chance to make up for his failure earlier today.
Okay, so they DON'T need the local police's cooperation to send their private killbot swarms and armed vehicles to engage Zulander in a running firefight across half the city, but they DO need it to relocate a student from their own boarding school?
Am I getting this right?
Seriously?
This would come a lot closer to making sense if they just removed the word "company" from "company boarding school." If she was in someone else's school, guarded by someone else's security. It still wouldn't make sense, but it would come closer to making sense.
Cut to Zulander and his choice boyz beginning their second infiltration of this 24 hour period, this time with much less planning. Get into the school, grab Blitzy, get out again, and hope that the company hasn't already acted. They infiltrate the school by...marching right up to it and destroying the corporate security bots who try to ask them for ID.
-___-
The writers keep having characters talk about covert operations and stealth, but I'm not sure if the writers actually know what those words mean.
They proceed into the school, and - before running into any other humans at all - happen to find Blitzy roaming around the hallways by herself after dark. Because of course. She tries to violently resist as best a ten year old can when they try to grab her (why didn't Ziv just say hi to her before going for the tackle? It's not like there's any silence left to preserve after firefighting the security...) until she recognizes her brother. She asks him what took him so long to come get her, and then promptly asks him what he's doing with those "bozo bots."
Oh god I hate her already.
Blackfacebot tries to protest that classification. In rhyme. Because of course.
Blitzy explains that she had a feeling he would come for her pretty soon, once she started seeing his face all over the news. She also took the liberty of telling all her classmates to hide in the basement tonight for fear of an event at the school, and apparently they all listened to her. And so did the teachers, I guess. Or else she's just lying so that her brother will stop having to pretend to care about civilians in the area this time, idk.
Just then, the city police announce their presence. The school has been surrounded by a fleet of manned hovercars and an army of robotic infantry. The commanding officer on the scene amplifies his demand for Ziv Zulander and any accomplices of his to drop their weapons and emerge from the building with their hands up, or else they'll send in the armed drones.
Also, speaking to his underling, the officer hands it to the corporation for figuring out that Zulander would be coming to this location soon and passing the intel on to the city government. And here I was thinking the police showed up because somebody destroyed the school security robots lol. Maybe this intel let them arrive faster and in greater force.
Then, we cut to Dr. Hiss in his Wall-E tank. Which he's somehow repaired or replaced in the few hours since his last defeat. And which he's parked a few hundred meters away without anyone noticing. Or maybe just not caring, considering the freedom to operate that the company has already been shown to enjoy. Cackling villainously, he activates the kraang chips in the police robots and has them march on into the school shooting to kill.
Okay, but why though?
They already had the cooperation of the local authorities. Ziv did them the favor of making himself a known terrorist, so the government and police were already totally on their side (even if they weren't under the company's thumb already). Either Zulander resists the police and they use lethal force, or he doesn't and the company now has the much easier task of assassinating him in his jail cell. Why did they need to intervene here at all?
I'd assume that this was Hiss acting alone on his vendetta, but no, Paradigm specifically sent him here with orders to do this specific thing.
So, they're pre-emptively letting the world know that robots with the kraang chip in them are AT THE VERY LEAST dangerously buggy. And for what benefit? If they just wanted to send another robot army at Zulander, they could do that on their own. They already HAD a few of their own robots in place here, after all. Why not just hide a bunch more of them on the grounds? It's not like the police robots are any tougher, smarter, or better armed than the company's own units. In fact, they appear to be the EXACT SAME MODEL OF ROBOT, just with a different paint job. If anything, the police-owned variant seems to be less deadly, since they're armed with just these low-powered laser guns instead of the explosive blasts we saw the private ones shooting earlier.
And, sure enough, Ziv's minions deal with the policebot army with visibly less effort and risk than they did against the company ones earlier.
-___-
Why did Paradigm and Co think that sending the same robots, but with shittier weapons and less control of the battlefield thanks to the police not being onboard, would yeild them better results?
Some flying helicopter-drones attack next. Not clear if these are police or company owned, whatever. Anyway, they lay down suppressive fire and force Team Zulander deeper into the building. Then, Ziv does the dumbest execution of a potentially cool idea I think I've ever seen. He takes off his shoes and throws them high up into the air out a window. He knows that these chopper drones seek their targets by scent, and his shoes obviously smell strongly of him. While they're all targeting the shoes, they stop the suppression for the few seconds Ziv's own minions need to shoot most of them down.
So, good idea: include a detail like some models of robot using senses other than vision to navigate and do their jobs. For kids in this show's target age range, it might be a novel idea that our technology doesn't have to rely on the same senses our own bodies do, and that a machine with different senses (or at least, with different levels of reliance on each sense) might have different advantages and vulnerabilities because of it.
Bad execution: a robotic gunship that identifies its targets by scent? These aren't flying around at just above ground level either, they're up in the air acting pretty much like, well, helicopter gunships. If they were fighting a robot tracker, or contraband-sniffer, or something like that, then having the robot be scent-guided would make sense and targeting that sense would be clever. For an aerial unit that's meant to snipe its targets from above like a bird of prey, though? Yeeeeah, there's a reason that eagles and hawks don't hunt by scent.
Honestly, it would make more sense if the infantry-bots were the ones guided by scent.
Witht he air clear, Suboptimus swoops down and opens a cockpit he apparently has to let them board. Blitzy recognizes Suboptimus, so either Ziv built him earlier than the two she didn't recognize, or she was just being mean to them on purpose, or the writers forgot.
As they fly away, Dr. Hiss makes a last ditch attempt to shoot them down with his own vehicle, but loses the firefight almost instantly. What a shmuck.
The Zulanders return to the base. How they do that without leading anyone back to the location, I wont bother to contrive an explanation. As they sit around in the underground bunker having a late dinner, Ziv explains the situation to his sister and wonders morosely what they can even do now. The enemy has been set back, but they're a lot more powerful, and Ziv isn't sure if continuing to press the offensive is sustainable as they'll eventually triangulate their position.
...
Man, wouldn't it have been funny if a few hours ago the bad guys had just asked one of Blitzy's friends to ask her where her house was? Lol.
Actually, weren't they planning to threaten her life or something to force Ziv to negotiate, or was their plan concerning her - in its entirety - just "lets watch her going about her life and try to get Ziv if he shows up." Wouldn't it have been hilarious if he outsmarted their outsmarting and just didn't do shit? Eh, I guess they might have escalated to actually threatening her if he kept them waiting long enough, fair enough.
...
As Ziv wonders what to do next, Blitzy tells him that he should forget caution; instead, he should escalate, terrorize, and strike fear into the hearts of their enemies. Her words, not mine. Some of the robots timidly ask Ziv if his little sister was always like this, and he replies in the affirmative. Ziv tries to explain to her that with just two kids and a couple dozen robots, they're not going to be able to strike fear into anyone (erm...you sure about that, Ziv? Your synths seem to be head and shoulders more powerful than what the enemy is using, to the point where a small squad of them is seemingly worth an army). And, that's when Ziv's homemade global extinction event waiting to happen hurries over to offer a suggestion.
He tells Blitzy that between her older brother and himself, they have two entities capable of producing sentient, high-powered robots. The Zulander family doom fortress also has ample raw materials in storage, and the surrounding stone and soil happens to be fairly mineral-rich, so if they start building some mining and smelting equipment first they can increase that materials supply even further.
Ziv is slightly unsettled by what's being proposed here, but he agrees to do it, and the other robots are also onboard. Blitzy, of course, is wearing a wide, excited grin. You can practically see the little mushroom clouds in her eyes.
End episode.
In terms of quality, I don't think there's much more that can be said. It definitely has the so-bad-it's-good quality that it needs to entertain, but somehow it doesn't strike QUITE the same perfect balance of absurdity and jank that Street Sharks turned itself into an ironic cult classic with. I guess I can repeat how amused I am by the Elon Musk parallels with the big bad, but again, there's not much I haven't already said there.
Hmm. Well, I can add that I really am morbidly curious about where it ends up going with Lady Frenzy's implied attraction to the clearly underaged protagonist. The sheer insanity of trying to balance those factors, with this pair of characters, handled by THIS writing team...well, it probably ends up being horrible on multiple levels, but it's the kind of horrible I might have trouble looking away from.
The most interesting thing about this pilot is that, with a bit of tinkering, it could have easily been another show's villain backstory episode. Ziv is already at least 40% of the way there, if only because of the writers' goldfish attention spans making him much more callous than they intended him to be. But, if we really want to go for a poignant cartoon villain origin story, I think the BBEG-to-be should be Blitzy.
Say that Ziv reluctantly goes along with her and his robo-protege's "make an entire race of intelligent war machines" plan, telling himself that after the megacorp is defeated he can resocialize the Boyz Legions for peaceful coexistence. Then, a few missions in, Ziv gets killed in action, leaving his ten year old little sister as the new bot master by default. Blitzy lacking her brother's technical skills barely matters, since there's already at least one robot who can handle the replication (especially if he can build additional replicators like himself, forming a "queen" caste for the boyz' proverbial ant supercolony). She ends up repeating a much darker version of Ziv's lonely childhood; she's separated from other children by the constant threat of enemy action rather than shyness, and forced to rely on subservient robot minions for company out of necessity rather than choice. Ziv himself plays the same role for her that their grandfather implicitly did for Ziv, only rather than just grieving him she's out to avenge him, and as a traumatized little kid she has zero sense of proportionality. The aggressive and megalomaniacal tendencies of hers we see in the pilot are probably just a childish phrase she would have grown out of with a normal-ish upbringing, but she's now been deprived of anything close to normalcy, and has no one to reign her in and help her grow up. It takes her several years to defeat the megacorp and revenge herself on its leaders, and by that time she doesn't know how to do much else BESIDES android-assisted terrorism, or have any consciously acknowledged want of human companionship left in her.
Fastforward another decade or two after that, and yeah, Blitzy the evil robot queen could 100% carry a much better SatAm cartoon than this one as its main antagonist.
I think that's about all I have to say about The Bots Master pilot.
