Bunnicula (2016)

Bunnicula
You be better off reading the books.
Genre: Adventure Black comedy Dark fantasy Running Time: 11 minutes Country: United States Release Date: February 6, 2016 – December 30, 2018 Network(s): Cartoon Network (2016) Boomerang (2017-18) Created by: Jessica Borutski Maxwell Atoms (season 1) Distributed by: Warner Bros. Television Distribution Starring: Chris Kattan Sean Astin Brian Kimmet Kari Wahlgren Seasons: 3 Episodes: 104

Bunnicula is an American animated black comedy that aired from 2016 to 2018, on Cartoon Network and Boomerang. It is loosely based on the "Bunnicula" books by James and Deborah Howe. Three seasons with 104 episodes aired. Currently, reruns of the show air on Boomerang.

Plot

After moving to New Orleans with her father and pets, Chester & Harold, Mina Monroe is given a key by her late Aunt Margot. She then unlocks a door that contains a part Dracula bunny, Bunnicula, who drains vegetables rather than blood to get his strength. Unaware of this, Mina adopts him. Most episodes follow Chester and Harold joining Bunnicula on their supernatural adventures.

Qualities That Can't Fly

1. Extremely poor gasp from the source material: Unlike the original book, which had charm and warmth, all of that is replaced with very unfunny humor with little to no depth. The style and calmer tone of the previous adaptions are all of a sudden lost, the new characters don't fit, older characters have been flanderized, and more unnecessary changes.
2. Many characters are bland, unlikable, cliché, and overall just boringly atrocious. Not helping is that they were very flanderized from the original personalities.
   • Chester is a cat who is often exasperated by everyone around him, and a noticeable Butt-Monkey, basically being Squidward. In the books, he was simply a tabby whose wild suspicions of phenomena exasperated Harold a bit.
   • Harold is the cliché dimwitted dog who often (albeit accidentally) mistreats Chester. He is also the worst of the flanderization, as in the original book he had noticeable intelligence and had to deal with Chester and Bunnicula.
   • Mina is the teenage ego girl.
   • Mina's father is the overused idiotic father that is impressionable.
   • Bunnicula himself is a very bland protagonist, who has little to no personality other than "vampire bunny who sucks carrots". He also has the strange tendency to shapeshift, dismember himself, and do other weird things even though he did no such thing in the books, and these abilites are probably only there just to show off the ideolgy that Bunnicula doesn't come off as a random bunny with vampire fangs.
   • Some characters like Howie (Harold's nephew), Ann Monroe (the mother figure), and the Monroe brothers Pete and Toby are removed from the series, replacing the Monroe bros. with Mina, a single child for Mr. Monroe.
3. Although the animation for the first season was passable, the remaining seasons which were animated in flash are pretty unconvincing and have many errors including some stiff character movements.
4. Despite the fact Maxwell Atoms is included, he doesn't manage to save the show, as he doesn't give some of the cleverness, charm, and likability it could have had with his previous work.
5. Terrible pacing with scenes that often either go on for long, seem like forever, or are slow to the point you'll get bored, for example, in one episode, there's a padding-out scene with the characters yelling "NOOO! plays whilst the screen for some reason keeps zooming in and out. The scene also lasts for 8 seconds.
6. The humor isn't that good as it mainly relies on bad gross-out humor, especially in the infamous episode "The Fruit Fly".
7. Pretty grating and awful voice acting for Bunnicula, who speaks in confusing high-pitched gibberish, and Harold, who has this way to dumb "idiotic" accent that only makes him sound ear-grating.
8. A lot of content in the show is disturbing, grotesque, and downright creepy for a Warner Bros Animation standards, as shown by its overuse of gross-out that often goes way too far. Some examples to name a few are:
   • At the end of the intro, a bunch of monsters surround Bunnicula and the others, and then to get out, Bunnicula does something disturbing like puffing up or sticking out his red eyes (though, turning into a realistic bunny or having three Bunniculas aren't as bad as the two specified).
   • In "Mumkey Business", in the first episode, Chester catches a "big" cockroach, then Harold shows him a grossly giant cockroach.
   • In "The Juicy Problem", Bunnicula, who was turning into a clean freak after drinking vegetable juice, puts dirty mop water in Chester's mouth in slow motion, with him choking in the next scene.
   • In "The Fruit Fly" (probably where it has the most of this), Bunnicula, who is turning into a fly, disturbingly vomits on the food to digest it, which only is disgusting and awful to look at it.
9. As to be expected, there are a lot of bad (and rarely mediocre) episodes.
   • "Mumkey Business" (which started the show on a poor note)
   • "Walking Fish"
   • "Garlicked"
   • "Son of Bunnicula"
   • "Chester's Shop of Horrors"
   • "Bride of Bunnicula"
   • "Adopt A Vampire"
   • "Lucky Vampire Foot"
   • "Sunday Bunnday"
   • "Beware Apartment 13ǃ"
   • "Collar Me Crazy"
   • "Calendar Boys"
   • "Family Portrait"
   • "The Juicy Problem"
   • "Uninvited" (which ended season 1 on a bad note)
   • "Three Heads Are Better Than One" (which began season 2 on an also bad note)
   • "Pranks For Memories"
   • "Revenge of the Return of the Curse of the Weredude"
   • "The Eyes Have It"
   • "Mark of the Mandrake"
   • "Cat Burgled"
   • "Goat Story"
   • "Bunnicumoji"
   • "Scott Free"
   • "Bunn on a Plane"
   • "Cat-aclysm"
   • "Bunn Vs."
   • "Lafitte's Lucky Locket"
   • "How The West Was Bunn"
   • "Yellow Bellied Sound Sucker"
   • "The Fruit Fly" (probably the worst episode of the entire series)
   • "Queen Wicked, the Wicked Queen"
   • "Iron Bunn" (which ended season 2 on a weak note)
   • "Mastering the Genie" (which began season 3 on a bad note)
   • "Termites!"
   • "Purr-gatory"
   • "Any Witch Way"
   • "Wag the Dog"
   • "Poppet Master"
   • "A Vampire at the Vet"
   • "Oh Brother!" (which ended the show as a whole on an atrocious note)

Qualities That Can Fly

1. The concept of Mina and her 2 pets interacting with Bunnicula (like in the books) was a good idea, but was executed very poorly.
2. The animation for the first season was decent and by the way, the intro has much better animation, despite the often disturbing gag at the end.
3. Aside from the voices of Bunnicula and Harold, the rest voice acting is passable.
4. The monsters of some episodes are interesting, such as a "Mumkey", a zombie fish, and a "Bearshee".
5. There are some likable characters like Patches the Weredude, Fluffy, Elvira, and even Chester who despise his stereotypical personality. He at least has some character traits.

Reception

Bunnicula received a mixed reception, due to it being an insult to the original books, having clichéd characters, and the atrocious flash animation. Still, though, there were main positives to the show that were put at it, making some reception mixed. The main praise went to the story-building, etc, though that was due to most of Maxwell Adams' contribution to this. As a result of mediocre reviews, the show was canned in 2018, and only reruns of it remained, though it remains mainly a cult classic by some. It currently holds a 7.0/10 on IMDb.

Trivia

• As of 2021, the show is available for streaming on HBO Max in Latin America. A Reddit article rumored in August 2024 that it would be coming to HBO Max in North America and other countries, but that never happened.
• In addition to receiving next to no advertising, the TV series was quickly and quietly dropped off on Boomerang; no new episodes aired for over a year. It also seemed to only ever air on Saturday afternoons at 6:00 PM, which didn't help.
  • A year later, it was announced that the series would be made available on the Boomerang streaming app. Episodes 9-13 were aired unannounced on March 28, 2017.
  • Cartoon Network finally brought back reruns of the show in October 2017 for Halloween... at 11:30 AM, when its target audience was at school; the fact that it was the show's only timeslot didn't help matters either, nor does it help that it would usually be preempted for more reruns of The Amazing World of Gumball (which would end up replacing this show in November anyway).

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