Let's Watch This: An Episode of "Sidekick"

NOTE: Please do not take any of the little nitpicks in this review (or any of my other reviews, for that matter) seriously. I write these reviews in the hopes of making people laugh. Those nitpicks are really just dumb little observations that I'm attempting to make jokes out of, not complaints that add to whether or not I like something.

NOTE #2: No disrespect is meant towards anyone who worked on the show I am reviewing today. I'm sure they are all very nice and talented people.

NOTE #3: If you like this show, that is great. Go ahead and like it. I'm not judging you.

Another cartoon from the folks at Nelvana, Sidekick was the creation of Todd Kauffman and Joey So, premiering on YTV in Canada on September 3rd, 2010. Three seasons and a total of 52 episodes (each one consisting of two segments) were produced.

The show stars twelve-year-old boy Eric Needles (voiced by Miklos Perlus), the kid sidekick of superhero Maxum Man (Ron Pardo), who has mysteriously gone missing. Along with his friends Trevor (Christian Potenza), Vana (Stephanie Annie Mills) and Kitty (Denise Oliver), he goes to a school called the Academy For Aspiring Sidekicks, where the kids of his town Splitsboro learn how to be superhero sidekicks. That's an interesting idea for a show.

The characters in Sidekick first appeared in shorts that aired as part of an anthology series created by Nelvana called Funpak. Funpak showed various animated shorts that could potentially be pilots for new cartoon shows on YTV - viewers could go online and vote for which ones they thought were the best. I don't think any of the other shorts went on to become full shows (if I'm wrong, somebody please fill me in). I guess this was the one viewers just really, really liked. Or maybe this was just the least bad of the shorts, I don't know.

I have never watched a single episode of Sidekick. Here in the United States, the show aired on Cartoon Network for a while, and then on Qubo for a few years. I have no idea if it's good or bad. But that's what we're going to find out today! We'll be watching the twentieth episode, which consists of the segments "Match Dot Com" and "Stupor-ize Me". Fortunately, you can find most of the episodes on YouTube, so let's dive in.

It's Valentine's Day in Splitsboro... and before anybody asks me why I didn't post this review of a Valentine's Day-themed episode on the actual Valentine's Day as opposed to a WEEK AFTER VALENTINE'S DAY, I wrote this review on the day AFTER Valentine's Day (I didn't know this was a Valentine's Day episode going in, I picked an episode of the show to review at random). And at the Academy For Aspiring Sidekicks, the students celebrate Valentine's Day by having some guy dress like Cupid and shoot arrows out of a BB gun. But like all schools, they also have a Valentine's Dance that night, and Kitty really, really, really wants to go with Eric. I guess one of her main character traits is that she has the hots for Eric?

Unfortunately, Eric doesn't go for girls with extremely long necks.

Alas and alack, Eric doesn't want to go with Kitty... he wants to go with Vana. Upon hearing this, Kitty runs off crying, and Eric doesn't ask if she's okay or even acknowledge it. What a tool!

Eric asks Vana to the dance, but she tells him she's already got a date and she wouldn't have gone to the dance with him anyway. Then a giant Care Bear shows up, causing Eric's skull to pop out of his head (which was probably meant to be funny but is more disturbing than anything) and he runs out of the room screaming - he's terrified of mascots.

"Are you a Care Bear?"

"I'm an Intensive Care Bear. I left my crowbar at home, though..."

After that, the headmaster, Professor Pamplemoose (Patrick McKenna)... an odd name seeing as there's nothing moose-like about him... tells him that his freakout is going on his permanent record.

Later, at the mansion where Eric and Maxum Man live...

Brought to you by the letter "M".

Eric complains about his problems to his Indian-accented sentient computer, Maxum Brain (Tony Daniels). He's sure that he can find a date for the dance using Maxum Brain's "super-database". First, he has to set up a dating profile... and we are treated to a glimpse at Eric's nose hairs. Because I really needed to see that.

Get a nose hair trimmer, Eric.

After entering three hundred character traits of his, the "super-database" helps Eric find his perfect match. And it does! In just three seconds! Wow.

His perfect match? Mandy Struction, and with a name that sounds like "Destruction" you just KNOW she's gonna turn out to be a villain. So he calls up her house and asks her mother if she'd like to go to the dance.

At the dance...

Villainous girls go for guys who are much, much smaller than them. Just ask Natasha Fatale.

Eric and Mandy discover that they have so much in common. They both hate dancing, they both say "lame" all the time (well, Eric gets CALLED "lame" all the time), and they both wear custom-made shoes. Then we get a disgusting close-up of Eric's feet. Geez, and I thought the nose hairs were gross...

If I had to look at it, so do you. Sorry.

So, just a reminder... this show is about a school where kids learn how to be superheroes' sidekicks... and we're at a school dance. A school dance that has nothing to do with superhero-ing. Whee.

They then meet up with Kitty, who tries very, very hard to hide how crushed she is that Eric went out with some other girl instead of her. "Hi, pretty new girl who seems to have appeared out of thin air to ruin my life!" she says cheerfully. "I'm SO HAPPY Eric brought you with him! Heh heh... I'm here with someone too, you know. Uh, Alan Amazing! KNOW WHY THEY CALL HIM THAT?! BECAUSE HE IS AMAZING!"

Okay, I'm starting to like Kitty a lot more than Eric. I think this is another one of those shows where I think the female lead would be a much better protagonist.

Plus, if she were the main character, you'd have a superhero show where the protagonist
is both a young girl AND Asian! It'd be very progressive!

Trevor is suspicious that Mandy is a robot. I guess the implication is that Eric is such a loser that even his best friend has his doubts that he'd be able to find anyone to go with him to the dance. Or maybe he watched that SpongeBob episode where SpongeBob and Squidward thought Mr. Krabs was a robot before going to the dance or something?

After Professor Pamplemoose shows up again, Eric tells Mandy that he just so happens to keep permanent records of every sidekick's likes, dislikes, toenail sharpness, vulnerabilities... and that makes Mandy very, very intrigued, as does Eric's mentioning that he keeps them all in this rickety old desk in Room 218, top left drawer. Hmmm, I wonder if she's up to something...

"Did I mention that I'm not a villain?"

Not too far away, Vana and Kitty are spying on Eric and Mandy, enraged that HIS date is cooler than THEIRS. Kitty says that she's seen Mandy before, but WHERE? They need a hair sample to analyze. Problem is, they're not particularly stealthy... always a good quality for a sidekick to a SUPERHERO, right? What the heck is the school teaching these kids?

I actually do think this gag is pretty funny.

We get a montage of Eric and Mandy doing fun things like graffitiing the walls and putting tiny sharks in the punch bowl... Eric is supposed to be a SUPERHERO's sidekick, right? Then Mandy says she has to go, uh, call her parents, and once she leaves Vana and Kitty tell Eric that there's something weird about Mandy. Aside from, y'know, that she came to the dance with him. Eric is all "You're just miffed that you wouldn't go to the dance with me!", which falls flat when one remembers that Kitty did make it pretty clear that she wanted to go to the dance with him and he was too thick-headed to pick up on it.

Then Eric gets a call from Maxum Brain, who tells him that Mandy Struction is a villain. Wow, what an unexpected twist! And here's something else you didn't see coming - David Zaslav is a lousy CEO. Yes, I'm upset about Coyote vs. ACME too...

Is it just me, or does Kitty kind of look like Dora the Explorer?

Kitty gasps. "The Struction family runs the Splitsboro Crime Syndicate! THE MASS DESTRUCTIONS!" she informs us. "They leveled TEN BANKS in TWO DAYS with their SEISMO SHOES!" Seismo Shoes, Vana explains, are shoes with the ability to cause earthquakes. Because Eric is an idiot, he doesn't believe that Mandy is evil. Then a red light starts flashing and everyone hears an announcement that a classroom's security has been breached by an intruder "who at first seemed really cool but then turned out to be evil". Eric is promptly on the receiving end of dirty looks from his peers.

Then he gets a pig thrown at him... for some reason. I don't get what the joke here is.

Vana, Kitty, Trevor, and Eric run into Mandy sneaking around with their permanent records. She uses her Seismo Shoes to open up a large crack in the floor. Y'know, for how much I've said that the twist is obvious, I will say this is a clever twist on the cliched "school dance" episode for a cartoon about superheroes - a superhero sidekick goes to the dance with somebody who's a supervillain. I just wish they'd made Mandy's name less on-the-nose. Or at least waited until later to reveal what her last name was.

And presumably none of the superhero sidekicks in this school have the ability of flight?
Is it just that none of the sidekicks have superpowers, like Robin?

Fortunately, Eric does something right for once and comes up with a way to defeat Mandy. "I have to know! Am I really just a pawn in some evil game? Or did you really like me?" he asks her. Mandy tells him that he makes her feel something that she's never felt before... and she suggests that he transfer to the Evil Henchmen School so they can be together. Eric declines - he's no good at evil faces.

Your Tasmanian Devil impression needs work, Eric.

And then Kitty shows up in the Care Bear costume. Eric was hoping that, since they have so much in common, Mandy would be afraid of mascots too (she is not). Then Eric remembers that, oh yeah, HE'S afraid of the Care Bear and his body parts fall off.

Pink bears have given Eric the heebie-jeebies ever since he watched Toy Story 3.

While trying to get away from the scary pink cuddly bear, Eric winds up falling off the side of the roof (yeah, they're on the roof now. I probably should've brought that up) and clinging to it. Before he can fall, Kitty saves him while Trevor and Vana... just stand there eating ice cream. Okay, first of all, even if Eric is a tool, Vana and Trevor are crummy friends. Second of all, where did they get the ice cream? Where did Vana even come from? I figured she was in the Care Bear suit with Kitty, but apparently not.

If Kitty isn't standing on Vana's shoulders, how the heck is she fitting in that costume?
She's not that tall... is she using stilts?

Once Eric is safe, Vana calls him out for letting Mandy escape... even though she and Trevor didn't do anything to stop her from escaping either. Eric is actually glad that she got away because he's still gaga for her, angering Kitty. Tell me again why Kitty isn't the main character and Eric is?

Next up, "Stupor-ize Me", which from the sounds of it was inspired by that certain documentary from 2004 about how eating nothing but McDonald's is not good for your health... which is about as obvious as Mandy's being evil, and yet everyone STILL acted like the guy who made it was some sort of hero for "revealing the truth" about McDonald's. Ever wonder why McDonald's don't have playplaces in them anymore? Blame Supersize Me.

The segment starts off with a training video for Maxum Man's enterprise Swell Burger. At Swell Burger, when the assistant manager orders you to repair the thermo-nuclear oven, you do it. And make sure not to spill the nuclear waste that powers it, or you will become a giant and the whole place will blow sky high. I believe this is more or less how the Burger King training video goes, too.

Maxum Man also likes to channel Scrooge McDuck.

After the training video, we see that Eric and Trevor are Swell Burger's new employees. "As fifty-one percent owner of Swell Enterprises, he left orders that before I become a full sidekick, I have to work at Swell Burger," Eric explains. And if HE has to work there, he claims, so does Trevor. It's a best friend rule.

The boys' supervisor, Sammy, comes over and says that he knows they go to the Academy For Aspiring Sidekicks (we'll just call it the AFAS from now on, okay?), which he claims is run by "know-it-alls who wouldn't recognize the perfect student if he hid in their houses and BEGGED THEM". Yep, this guy's got some issues. Eric says that it's pretty cool... except for the pummeling during training. And in the middle of the night when Vana comes over to pummel you. For some reason. I guess she has issues too.

Yep, she's got issues...

One montage later, Eric and Trevor are put to work cleaning the floor. But then they start fighting over the mop, leading to some WHACKY SHENANIGANS, which makes Sammy MAD. He demands to know how they even made it into the academy. According to Trevor, no other school would take him. Not even homeschool. "Yeah. And I just showed up," Eric adds. Sammy is furious - HE got turned down every time he applied to the school but THEY got in? What is this madness?!

Next, Eric is put to work at the cash register. Vana and Kitty show up... huzzah, Kitty's back! I still want her to be the main character. Sammy offers them a "new and improved" Swelly Shake, then proceeds to laugh evilly. But don't worry, I'm sure he was just thinking of something funny from earlier and NOT letting everyone know that he's concocted an evil plan involving the shakes.

Meanwhile, Trevor is failing miserably at food-preparing. Why do so many of these Nelvana cartoons have an idiot best friend as one of the leads? Trevor, Entree, Dave... are there just a lot of Patrick Star fans at Nelvana?

At least Trevor isn't really fat, or I'd definitely call him another Patrick knockoff...

Everybody in the restaurant helps themselves to a free Swelly Shake. But what they don't know is that THESE Swelly Shakes suck out their smarts and "Sidekick Essence", which Sammy guzzles down himself. Now the AFAS won't be able to turn him down, and he'll be a superhero sidekick!

He offers Swelly Shakes to a suspicious Eric and Trevor. Eric politely declines because he's lactose intolerant, but Trevor, being the colossal moron that he is, drinks both of them and becomes a grey-skinned idiot (well, he was ALREADY an idiot, but y'know what I mean) as well! Oh, and Sammy now looks like this:

Eeeeeeeeeeeugh...

"You won't get away with this, Sammy!" Eric declares, but Sammy easily clobbers him. Wow, Eric must really suck as a sidekick if he can be defeated that easily. But then Eric realizes that, if Sammy stole all of the other sidekicks' abilities and skills, he must have gotten their bad habits too - like Trevor's love of floor food! And you thought I put in that screencap of Trevor eating food off the floor for no reason, didn't you?

Well, actually, yeah, I did. I had no idea that it would be brought up again.

"Prepare to taste Silly Putty-colored gunk! Which, by the way, is what Chicken McNuggets
are made of!"

While Sammy is distracted by the food on the floor, Eric sticks the suction hose in his mouth and drains him of everyone's abilities and skills. But Eric is sympathetic when he laments that he'll never get him into the sidekick academy and pulls some strings to get him accepted. But then he gets accepted at that Evil Henchman School as well, and he admits that getting into the AFAS was actually his "fallback dream". Oh-kaaaaaaaaaaaaay then...

After Sammy jumps out the window (it makes sense in context), Eric sprays everyone with the shake mix, restoring them to normal... almost. Kitty's now in Trevor's body, Trevor is in Vana's, and Vana is in Kitty's. And Vana-Kitty can't fight the urge to pummel Eric. The end.

What's the Verdict?

Congratulations, Sidekick. You're the first of these mediocre Nelvana cartoons to get a "YOU TRIED" stamp.

I would not call this a good show. The animation is wonky, a lot of jokes fall flat, and the characters aren't very interesting. HOWEVER, there are a couple of jokes I did think were pretty funny, the voice actors all do a good job, and - as I've said before - I actually liked Kitty. Why couldn't the show have focused on her? I think she could've carried the show much better than Eric would. I dunno, maybe this is one of those shows where things get better after the first season, but I don't think I would recommend watching Sidekick. But like I said, it came closer to being good than other Nelvana shows like Ned's Newt and Scaredy Squirrel did.

Incidentally, when I looked the show up on IMDB, I discovered that the writers of these episodes worked on some interesting projects, some of which I've already looked at on this blog. Joey So, for example, worked on a lot of Disney movies, such as Mulan, Tarzan, The Emperor's New Groove, and The Princess and the Frog. Andrew Harrison was a writer for Scaredy Squirrel and Hotel Transylvania: The Series. Richard Clark's resume includes such shows as Martin Mystery, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That, and more recently, Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years. You might have also recognized some of the voice actors... Tony Daniels is one of the many voice actors who's done the voice of Frosted Flakes mascot Tony the Tiger, and was also characters in Transformers: Cyberverse. Christian Potenza and Stephanie Anne Mills are also Chris and Lindsay respectively in the Total Drama shows. Ron Pardo is the mayor in Paw Patrol, Quest and Graer in World of Quest, and took over for Harland Williams as Newton in a few episodes of Ned's Newt. Patrick McKenna lent his voice to Scaredy Squirrel, Spliced, and even JoJo's Circus. Neat, huh?