3 out of 5

Created by: Dave Cooper, Johnny Ryan

covers season 1

So close.

The Pig Goat Banana Mantis! trailer that Johnny posted on his site in 2012 just about made me poop my pants; the mash-up of Johnny’s Nickelodeon randomness with Cooper’s sickly art style was like my fever dream update of Ren & Stimpy.  The premiere of the show (switching Mantis! for Cricket) – with an amazingly rocking theme song that seemed to exactly capture the prayed for inanity – caught me off guard by going for a full half hour but also knocked my socks off with the quality: visually Cooper’s designs had been woven into every detail, the world a lot bigger than the promo could ever have hinted at, and our oddball characters – roommates, siblings, whatevers – were fully realized by their voice actors and the non-stop script from Johnny and David Sacks.  This was a very high bar.  While the writing crew remained pretty small for the season, we still wander off the path blazed by episode one into slightly more generic boisterous kid humor, which is just loud and gross at times, and struggling to connect its four characters’ pieces of the plot puzzle.  The core vibe established by our creators keeps things from ever really getting boring, and the strong presence of their characters enforces a pleasant feeling of things not happening in a vacuum, even though one story might not reference another, making PGBC like the bat-shittier cousin of Adventure Time, flaunting randomness in that series’ face and trading a candy obsession for a pickle one.  Note: I prefer this.  But it is a show that exists almost exclusively off of its oddness, and it’s hard to strike the right balance of dumb bluster and dumb intelligence consistently.

A 3 out of 5 rating may not seem “close,” but it’s that each episode has a few moments that tickle the same heights as the trailer, and the season opener, making it an addiction: thirsting after a few minutes more because a perfect scene might just be around the corner.