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12. oz Mouse is a 2000s American surreal humor and psychological thriller animated television series created by Matt Maiellaro for Cartoon Network's late-night programming block Adult Swim. The third season aired in 2020, and it’s considered by many to be the best season of the show and a major improvement.
12 oz. Mouse (season 3) | ||||||||||||||||||
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A show that went from intentionally bad to actually being unintentionally good. What a pleasant surprise Adult Swim has given us.
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Good Qualities
- The show became good when the Invictus special aired in 2018, which was a great way to revive the show.
- This season has massively improved with its writing, having more unique stories.
- The season introduced new great characters, like:
- Aria (often considered to be the best character in the series)
- Professor Wilx
- Buzby
- Human Eye (only seen in "Invictus")
- Francis the Reporter
- Kiki
- The Kid
- The returning characters have become more likeable and have redeemed themselves:
- Mouse Fitzgerald has become a better protagonist as he always helps his friends, became funnier, and is sympathetic due to his dramatic and sad backstory.
- Mouse's friends, Skillet, Golden Joe, Peanut Cop, New Guy, Man-Woman, Spider, and Green-Sweatered Woman have become less annoying, funnier, and helped out their friends in tough situations.
- Mouse's likeable friends, Eye and Roostre, have become even more likeable thanks to their kindness and helpfulness being useful in many situations.
- Olof Mörck and Elize Ryd were great guest stars in the last 3 episodes of the season, and their animated counterparts are well-written.
- The music is still good, and it's epic.
- The season uses a theme song by Amaruthe in "Invictus", which is pretty awesome.
- The animation is still good and has greatly improved since it became less lazy, the art style became cleaner, and it still remains faithful to its original book.
- The voice acting has massively improved and is now good, especially from the creator of the show, Matt Maiellaro himself as Mouse, and Mary Spender as Aria.
- The show still isn't overly gory and uses its responsibility, unlike some other Adult Swim shows.
- The dialogue has greatly improved as well, being more clever and sometimes even funny.
- The stupidity and weirdness of the show has improved to being good.
- The character designs of the new characters are great, especially Aria's.
- This is the best season of the entire show, being an improvement over the first two, which is also hilarious considering the show's crew was trying to make this show intentionally bad from start to finish.
- The production order finale, "Final Beginning", was a decent way to end the show. The broadcast order finale, "Francis, Cheap & Out of Control", was also pretty decent.
The Only Bad Qualities
NOTE: Do not take these bad qualities seriously. Since the show used to be intentionally bad, these were likely intentional.
- The returning characters, while looking cleaner in the new art style, still have their old character designs and look a little lazy and ugly.
- Similar to "The Tale of the Not-So-Nice Dragon" from The Backyardigans (the series finale of said show in production order), The final episode in production order, "Final Beginning", while still decent unlike "The Tale of the Not-So-Nice Dragon", ended the show on a cliffhanger.
Reception
While the series as a whole gained a cult following, this season received more generally positive reception from critics, audiences and fans of the show, and agreeing that this was a major improvement over the first 2 seasons. They also found it funny that the show's staff tried to make the whole show intentionally bad, but after the unintentional success of the Invictus special, they knew that the show was unintentionally going towards the right steps of improving.