Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re exploring something a little outside our usual fare, as we munch through the first season of the Bigtop Burger animated series. From what I understand, this series is a frantic, irreverent comedy created by Ian Worthington, produced in Blender and featuring the voices of a variety of Youtube talents. The series follows the adventures of the titular burger truck and its clown-painted employees, though I imagine not much actual burger-vending will take place.
The series appears to fall into the same post-Invader Zim space as Vivziepop’s productions, with an emphasis on frenetic action and verbal sparring. I’ll admit, I was too old for this particular wave of online media; I was watching Invader Zim when it first came out, while my formative online video consumption was decidedly pre-Youtube, centered more on the stick figures and Salad Fingers of the old Newgrounds era. Nonetheless, I’m always curious to check out more of the internet’s diverse artistic microcultures, and imagine there’ll be much to poke at in this season’s blistering eleven minute runtime. Let’s get to it!
Season One
We open on the highway, as the Bigtop Burger van charges towards wherever it may be going. A choice that already points towards the distinct opportunities provided by different eras’ artistic tools – an episode taking place in a moving vehicle would be an absurd proposition for amateurs working in traditional animation, but tools like Blender make it far easier to convey things like vehicular motion or movement into depth
I appreciate how the linework is still intentionally rough, doing its best to mask the underlying sharp angles of 3D-animated objects. There was a long period where you couldn’t really evoke the wobbling roughness of indie comic art through 3D animation, but both professional teams and individual enthusiasts have been getting better at emulating the appeal of hand-drawn art in CG (or finding entirely original aesthetics built on CG assumptions, like Spiderverse and its descendants)
Our OP embraces the voluminous, depth-evoking capabilities of CG animation, panning forward past our leads as they’re each introduced in turn
Our first character introduced is Penny. Seems like they’re somewhat leaning into the incidental messiness of amateur VA work, making natural jokes out of stutters in the line read
The pacing is quick and intentionally choppy, which seems like a common style for web shorts, which are attempting to stack as many micro-gags into as few seconds as possible
“He-hey Tim, wh-what’s what’s whatsup?” Yeah, Penny’s voice actress seems like an old hand at this sort of faux-naturalistic stumbling tempo. There is definitely an inherent comedy in hearing what sounds like someone mumbling over voice chat applied to full character animation
Alongside Tim, our other leads are Billie and the apparent leader Steve
Some solid reaction faces from Penny. This show’s aesthetic actually seems more indebted to Klasky Csupo or Ed, Edd, & Eddy than Zim, embracing humorously grotesque exaggerated features
Steve has ripped the stove out so he can “prepare some treats for (his) daughter’s bake sale.” Seems he’ll be the source of our surreal one-liners
“Steve, man, the stove’s not even plugged into anything.” So Penny is the starry-eyed newbie, Steve the absurdist, Billie the cynic, and Tim the straight man
“Merry Christmas to you, my boy!” Seems like this is mostly the Steve show, as he makes various nonsensical riffs on ostensible burger salesmanship
Some fine banter between the poor employees, as they discuss the non-existence of an alleged “brunch rush”
Meanwhile, Steve has parked the van off the highway in order to chase a deer. I do like the visual gag of the van just being awkwardly set twenty feet down the highway incline. I tend to like surreal beats the most when they’re just hanging out in the background unacknowledged, something Keiichi Arawi excels at
Huh, I wonder if this sequence was actually inspired by Nichijou’s famous deer-on-principal battle
“You lost the moment you entered these woods.” Steve, on the other hand, just feels too manic and obvious in his silliness for my tastes. This progression is comedically functional, but I’ve seen too many variations on this “declaring war on a random animal” concept to be excited by this one
Yeah, Steve’s seemingly got the Ed role of just making nonsense statements, which is a pretty thin tentpole for a sitcom. Even shows like Tim and Eric are generally riffing on familiar yet inherently ridiculous source material – travel and legal ads, infomercials, local TV, etcetera
I like the character designs, though. There’s a funny contrast between stuff like the characters’ incredibly detailed ears and little muppet hands
Our next customer unfortunately has some serious echo on his microphone
“Tim, we’re still doing burgers, right?” Also appreciate the cast’s general indifference or even hostility to their premise. Seems to fall in line with this production’s general blurring of the lines between its internal reality and its self-conscious skit-based nature, which I suppose is a natural reflection of Youtube’s somewhat parasocial dynamic, wherein the identities of these characters as popular online figures never quite fades beneath their ostensible in-universe performances
“Despite it all.” These quick cuts to random cut-in imagery and sound cues seem to be a common thread in Youtube comedy. They sorta feel like a consequence of Youtube’s expectation of brief, repeated videos – the natural result of a medium where you don’t necessarily watch something beginning to end, where you might pause or rewatch blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gags, or transpose such gags into new formats, rather than the traditional expectation of watching a narrative straight through
Tim’s main joke seems to be “Australian accents make for funny comedy straight men,” and I’m inclined to agree
Our next skit introduces us to an apparent burger truck rival, Cesare of Zomburger
“Our burgers make yours look like beef wellington.” Not really impressed by Cesare’s loud, erratic noises, but the entire food truck joining in on mocking how bad their own burgers are is a good gag
The stuttering, run-on nature of these lines sorta calls to mind Rick & Morty’s interdimensional cable episodes, which generally involved Justin Roiland getting drunk in a room and just riffing on nonsense. I wonder if the planning for these segments involved the voice actors just sort of bouncing off each other, and seizing on whatever sounded best for the eventual animation
“They’re just riffing over there, huh.” Tim actually admits it
Charmingly preposterous sound effects for Steve getting shot across the highway with a cannon. They’re frequently playing on the inherent “weightlessness” of CG animation – how every model here is actually floating in space, and is in no way actively attached to the ground
Cesare’s strangled “oh my god” as his truck explodes is also very nice
Ooh, I like this extended sequence of the team cleaning up and washing off their clown makeup. Just a quiet human moment, the sort of thing that makes characters feel sympathetic and real
I similarly appreciate these off-duty shots of the various characters throughout the credits. Pure absurdism doesn’t do that much for me, but absurdism laced with grounded humanism is the good stuff, that special Arawi sauce
“My cat is scratching the rug, don’t do that!” And I suppose for a small online production like this, these peeks behind the VA curtain offer a similar humanizing appeal
And Done
Well that was a charming little production! The jokes were honestly pretty hit or miss for me – some of them felt exceedingly familiar, and others were just sorta underdeveloped, leaning too heavily on randomness for its own sake for my taste. But the voice acting was solid on the whole, and definitely made effective use of the stops and stumbles of actual people intentionally muddling through nonsensical situations. The camaraderie of Steve’s employees was endearing, lots of unique faces to enjoy, and you could really get the sense of a young animator just sorta throwing things against the wall in terms of Blender’s capabilities. Not really my scene, but a likable indie work on the whole!
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