The Nutshack

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The Nutshack
"IT'S THE NUTSHACK!" Yes, we get it...
Genre: Animated Sitcom Running Time: 20–28 minutes Country: Philippines United States Release Date: April 25, 2007 – May 31, 2011 Network(s): Myx TV Created by: Ramon Lopez Jesse Hernandez Distributed by: Koch Entertainment Starring: Rex Navarrete Ramon Lopez Jesse Hernandez Rhia Abarquez Jamar Logan Victor Bognot Joshua Padilla Seasons: 2 Episodes: 16

The Nutshack is a Filipino-American adult animated sitcom created and produced by Ramon Lopez and co-created by Jesse Hernandez. It was the only Filipino-American television series to be animated. It aired on Myx TV in the United States and Myx in the Philippines.

Plot

Two cousins, Philip "Phil" Matibag and Jackson "Jack" Colero, from completely different areas, San Francisco and the Philippines, respectively, are forced to live together by their overly controlling uncle, Richard "Tito Dick" Cabeza.

Why It Should Be Kicked in The Nuts(h)ack

1. Misleading title: The title has nothing to do with the show's premise at all.
   • China was also never bombed in the episode "Bomb China"; the episode is instead about George W. Bush turning everyone into white people.
2. Phil Matibag, the protagonist of the show, is a very cocky, annoying, and immature character who often acts like a huge jerk to everyone, including Jack, his cousin, and doesn't care about breaking any laws.
3. Abysmal voice acting.
   • Most of the characters have exaggerated accents to poke fun at their ethnicities, making it very mean-spirited and racist.
   • Phil always sounds like he has a constant cold, making it a bit hard to make out what he's saying.
   • Jack's voice sounds like a poor impression of Patrick Star with a Filipino accent.
   • The half-cyborg tarsier, Horat, has a ridiculously high-pitched voice that makes him sound like a chipmunk.
     • What doesn't help is that we only have subtitles for Horat. It's hard to follow what most of the other characters are saying.
   • Rainbow Scout's valley girl-like speech mannerisms make fun of actual gay men.
   • Manu has a thick Hawaiian accent combined with a shrill high-pitched voice that makes it particularly hard to understand what he's saying.
4. The character designs are incredibly bad and range from mediocre to horrendous. They look like they've been steamrolled, especially in the intro.
   1. Phil Matibag is a notable example of bad character design.
5. The background music often drowns out the dialogue.
6. The show has loads of unfortunate implications and bad morals; two examples include the episode "Got Surgery?", which encourages people to get body modification surgeries to feel accepted, and "Blackapino", which tells viewers that the only way for people to find you interesting is if you "act black".
7. Aside from Chita, most of the characters are terrible and/or are poorly-written.
8. Most of the characters are pretty unpleasant people; even the characters that could be seen as "nice" have their moments of being just as bad as everyone else!
9. The writing is incredibly lazy; The majority of it is filled with dirty jokes along with roundabouts of insults.
10. Some episodes don't even begin with a proper exposition or end with a proper resolution.
11. Overuse of shock humor to where it can hardly be called humor; each episode is filled to the brim with jokes ranging from toilet humor to jokes about drugs, homosexuality, racism, and sexual themes.
    • Horat's habit of throwing feces at everyone and humping a body pillow in numerous episodes.
    • Phil masturbating on the toilet with a porn magazine, alongside his genitalia making a rooster sound in "Pilot".
    • The entire "Monkey Love" short in "Road Trippin".
    • Cherry Pie getting her breasts enlarged, then ruined at the end in "Got Surgery?".
    • Phil urinating all over the city, Snoop Dogg and 2Pac are portrayed as ducks pooping everywhere, with a Dr. Phil caricature continuing to eat his salad covered in bird poop in "Duck Karma".
    • Sanjee sticking a shish kabob in his butt, feeding it to Tito Dick, as well as El Pinyot Loco's head getting jammed into Rainbow Scout's rectum in "Blind Dick".
    • Dwayne and Sanjee are being forced into gay sex by a caricature of the late Bob Saget in "420".
    • Phil spraying semen and Jack giving Dwayne explosive diarrhea in "TT Boy and Kid Utot".
    • Dick eating a sandwich out of a hole in Jack's right buttock and later bodily waste in "Bomb China" saga.
12. The main criticism about this show is the horrendous animation that looks incredibly horrible for 2007 standards. It doesn't look like the type of animation they would air on TV and instead looks like a poorly-made Internet Flash animation, and while it did improve a bit in season 2, it still looks horrible.
13. Poor pacing; In "Duck Karma", Phil and Jack eat breakfast three times in a row.
14. Overly relies on heavily racist stereotypes in a way that would cause discomfort rather than laughter, so much to the point that not even the most racist of Golden Age-era classic cartoons of the 1920s-1960s would go this far:
    • It is offensive to Filipinos despite, ironically, being a Filipino-American show and the creators being Filipino themselves.
    • Sanjee is a generic "Indian convenience store owner," much like Apu from The Simpsons, but worse because there is no charm to him whatsoever, because he also makes a bunch of disgusting bestiality and rape jokes.
    • Ning Ping from "Bomb China" and "Battle of the Bay" is a communist Chinese dictator who is very racist against Filipinos, all because a Filipina woman refused to date him.
    • "Blackapino" is the ultimate punch in the gut when it comes to stereotypes of African American gangsters. The scene where Jack gets gunned down by Ed and Angel after getting mistaken for an actual gangster adds insult to injury to said stereotype given that most gangsters die by getting shot, even if both Ed and Angel regretted their actions.
15. Aside from the racial stereotypes, it also portrays the LGBTQ+ community as sexual deviants to the point of being tasteless.
    • In "Road Trippin'", Phil and Horat get sexually pursued against their wills by a large group of homosexual men in the shower.
    • In "Pimp My Jeepney", when Ed, Angel, and Jack were making fun of Phil after getting a drag makeover by Cherry Pie, Phil angrily stomps away and yells "I'm not an object!" as he flips them off.
    • When Phil was urinating all over the city, a seemingly queer man drinks Phil's urine after stating promiscuously that he was glad it was "raining".
    • Cherry Pie, a transgender woman, serves as an offensive depiction of actual transgender people; She is portrayed as a sex-crazed "virgin" who makes everyone around her very uncomfortable.
      • It doesn't help that everyone constantly misgendered Cherry Pie for still retaining her Adam's apple, and often jokes about her genitals.
    • Rainbow Scout is a buff gay man with an extremely stereotypical voice, talking nonstop about how much he enjoys anal sex.
16. Another most infamous thing about the show is the annoying and uncreative theme song. Most of the theme song is nothing more than "It's The Nutshack!" and aside from a few lyrics, the theme song has said line repeated 16 times! (20 times if you listen closely).
    • To add salt to the wound, the full version repeats the phrase 28 times!
17. Plot-hole: Cherry Pie is said to be a virgin. However, aside from her appetite for sexual activity, her biography states that she raped an officer out of anger.
18. Some scenes make no sense at all, even by animated sitcom standards, and try way too hard to be funny.
    • It also shoehorns unnecessary pop culture references at random moments, as if it's trying to be Family Guy, or South Park.
    • The jokes are not only excessively vulgar, but their poor writing makes it come off as if a group of edgy middle-schoolers wrote them.
19. There was a scene in Slasher with Phil kissing Jack in the lips, which is outright incest, considering Phil and Jack are cousins.
20. Product placements such as Xbox consoles including Halo 3.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Chita is much nicer than the rest of the characters. The scenes where she scolds Phil and/or throws stuff at him for being a jerk are pretty funny, too.
   • In fact, every scene in which Phil gets his comeuppance for his rudeness whether it's from Chita or Tito Dick is hilarious.
   • Dwayne, Phil, and Jack's landlord are admittedly pretty funny at times.
2. Some scenes, such as Phil getting injured while snowboarding in Road Trippin and Tito Dick and Ed staring each other down repeatedly saying "What?" in El Bombadero, were funnier than the majority of the show's jokes.
3. The opening theme song, while awful, is catchy. Its "so bad it's good" nature easily turned it into a meme.
   • The idea of Angel having the ability to resurrect deceased individuals was interesting, though the execution was utterly laughable.
   • Aside from the usual gross-out scenes, Fatherland had a decent concept with Phil traveling to the Philippines to get to know his biological father,
4. The storyboards for the show looked much better before they were animated, styled in detail, and are in an attractive-looking-looking style slightly different from the show itself.
5. Chita's voice acting, while not great, is much better than most of the others.
6. The end credits theme is better than the theme song.
7. The end of Got Surgery, while disturbing, does show a good lesson on why people should not rely on body modification as everyone's surgery backfires on them.
8. The series finale, Battle of the Bay was a pretty decent way to end the show.
9. The show's concept seemed interesting but was wasted on bad animation, nonsensical stories, voice acting, and overuse of shock humor.

Reception

The Nutshack was universally panned by critics and audiences, considered one of the worst animated series ever made. Many online reviewers like PanPizza and Mr. Enter have voiced their disapproval of the show and the show's theme song, calling it one of the worst shows of the 2000s. It currently holds a 2.3/10 on IMDB, along with a 31% on Google. After the rise of internet memes using its theme song in 2016, the show gained an ironic cult following. The cult following took their exaggerated love so far, they left positive reviews for the show everywhere they could, calling it their favorite "anime", writing lyrics to its theme song within the reviews, and some of the reviewers recently started to call the stereotypes "representation". This may explain why it received a 5.4/10 on the Rating Graph despite being panned by both critics and audiences alike. On November 15, 2016, RebelTaxi uploaded a video retrospective on the series and its negative reception to YouTube, featuring interviews from the creators of the show, gaining 1,000,000 views in 5 years.

Trivia

• The show's theme song spawned a lot of memes, which sometimes make the song overtly verbose or replace every instance of "Nutshack" or every noun with something else. Co-creator Jesse Hernandez and the singer of the theme song Nump, have tweeted and posted on Facebook and Twitter about the memes, appreciating all the support.
• Despite the creators gushing over its "So Bad, It's Good" cult following, Myx TV seems to express regret broadcasting the series as the network has no plans on releasing season 2 on DVD anytime soon.
• Long after the series ended, most videos on the show's official YouTube channel were blocked because of copyright claims by ABS-CBN Corporation.
• The majority of the cast and crew for this show haven't done anything noteworthy since its cancellation, some of them even quit the TV industry altogether.
  • As if that wasn't enough, they are very difficult to find online, with the voice of Jerome showing up to nothing at all.
• Along with the show's theme song, MyxGlobal uploaded every single episode of the show on YouTube in organized playlists.
• According to co-creator, Jesse Hernandez, the show's title was a summarization of the cast living in an area of "nutty" people, hence "Nutshack" also being a slang term used to describe mental hospitals and psych wards, alongside "nut house".
• The Ninjabread Man theme remixed with the show's theme song was used in the Scott The Woz episode "Shovelware Variety Hour".

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