Talking Friends

This article was copied (instead of imported) from the now-deleted Terrible TV Shows Wiki.

Talking Friends
It may be Talking Tom's first attempt at being a cartoon show, but that's not to say it was a great attempt either...
Genre: Animated sitcom Running Time: 2-3 minutes Country: United States Slovenia Release Date: June 8 - August 31, 2012 Network(s): YouTube Distributed by: Karactaz Productions Disney Outfit7 Starring: Michael Tauzin Michael D. Cohen Keith Ferguson Candi Milo Susannah Hillard Seasons: 1 Episodes: 10 Next show: Talking Tom & Friends

Talking Friends is a CGI-animated web series that aired throughout mid-2012. the series is based on the Talking Tom apps. It was made by Disney, who collaborated with the Slovenian game company Outfit7 to make this series. It only lasted 10 episodes, making it a short-lived cartoon.

Plot

The Talking Tom characters go on different numerous adventures each episode.

Unfriendly Qualities

1. The CGI animation is extremely mediocre, even for 2012 standards, with lots of animation errors, clipping objects, and bland graphics.
2. The stories are average, lazy, and poorly written.
3. The concept of all the characters from the Talking Tom apps being in one TV show wasn't executed that well, despite being a decent idea on paper.
   • Though, Talking Tom & Friends would revisit this concept, and it's executed much better there.
4. Some episodes have quite a lot of errors.
   • In the episode "Foolf", one of Pierre's lines is randomly high pitched.
5. The background and settings are bland to look at, due to the fact that all the characters aside from Angela all live in caravans in a barren wasteland/remote desert near a big city named Nowheresville, which is not a very fitting setting for Talking Tom and his friends.
6. The lip syncing for when the characters talk can look off at times.
7. Generic theme song. In fact, it shouldn't even be considered a theme song since it’s only three seconds long, and the instruments just spaz you out and do whatever they want. Also, it doesn't have any lyrics, but it just spouts random gibberish at the end.
8. Whilst the voice acting isn't exactly bad, some of the voices for the characters either don't match them or just sound rather bland, particularly on Tom and Ben.
9. Unlike the songs in Talking Tom & Friends, many of the songs here for each episode are annoying and generic.
10. As decent as the character designs can be, some of them are kind of creepy, such as for Angela and Ginger.
11. Certain characters are unlikeable and annoying:
    • Pierre in particular is an annoying character who is crazy obsessed with playing video games and whoever he is playing games, he just calls everyone noobs all the time, which gets really annoying.
    • Ginger is just a generic troublemaker who is completely one-dimensional as he never learns from his mistakes, he is like a cat version of Norman Price from Fireman Sam without any of the charm and not that much character development either. Luckily though, he became a little bit more likable in later episodes of the series.
12. Most of the episodes often feel repetitive and have more or less the same plot ideas as the last with the only difference being the conflict. For example, there is always has this running gag where Ben makes an invention and everyone starts using it and liking it, but in the end, it either gets completely destroyed, or that it just disappears after it’s only episode, which is tiresome and unoriginal. The only episodes that don't use it were "Rock the Catsbah", "Shake that Tail", and "Angry Parrots".
13. Somewhat false advertising: The trailers have hinted that the hand is one of the characters, but in the series, it only appears in the intro.
    • Not to mention, Angela wasn't mentioned in the trailer.

Friendly Qualities

1. The character designs are cute and actually faithful to the character designs from the apps, even if they come off as creepy to some.
2. Some episodes are structured pretty good and have clever concepts.
3. The idea to make Gina a stuffed animal was rather clever.
4. Despite not being 100% faithful to the original apps, some stuff in the show are at least faithful to the original apps:
   • The interiors of Tom and Ben's caravans at least resemble their houses from the Talking Tom 2 and Talking Ben apps respectively.
   • Some episodes have Tom and Ben do news shows in their news set, which is a nice nod to the Talking Tom & Ben News app.
5. There are a few good episodes in the show like "Rock the Catsbah", "Foolf", "Newserator", "Shake that Tail", and "Tom After Tom", which ended the show on a high note.
6. Aside from the repetitive and annoying songs, the soundtrack for most of the episodes is decent.
7. Some of the voice acting does work on some characters, like Angela.
8. Tom, Ben, and Angela are likeable characters.
9. Despite the bland setting to where the characters live, most of the backgrounds are nice to look at, mainly the view of downtown Nowheresville in "Newserator".
10. To be fair, this was Outfit7's first ever show, so some of its flaws can be excused.
11. The CGI animation, while mediocre, looks decent at times.
12. The 2014 retooling is a massive improvement.

Trivia

• Disney made another series based off an app called Where's My Water? based on the same name of the app. While the episodes are still shorter (most of them are 2 minutes long) they have more episodes.
• The teaser for this show is Disney's first ever video on YouTube and the fifth episode, “Rock the Catsbah”, was Disney's most popular video on YouTube between 2012 and 2019.
• There's a restaurant based on Talking Friends located in Malaysia.
• This is the first and only time Talking Tom has appeared in a Disney cartoon. It's also the first time Tom has appeared in a cartoon itself.

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