What About Mimi?

What About Mimi?
This show is forgotten indeed.
Genre: Comedy Slapstick Running Time: 22 minutes Country: Canada Release Date: October 4, 2000 - August 14, 2002 Network(s): Teletoon Created by: Chris Bartleman Blair Peters Distributed by: WildBrain Starring: Chiara Zanni Kori Cook Rhys Huber Carly McKillip Tony Sampson Andrew Francis Keith Miller Sam Vincent Ellen Kennedy Colin Murdock Peter Kelamis Saffron Henderson Garry Chalk Dale Wilson Noel Callahan Tabitha St. Germain Seasons: 3 Episodes: 39

What About Mimi? is a Canadian animated children’s television series. The show was produced by Junior-EM.TV (Germany), Decode Entertainment and Studio B Productions (then DHX Media, now WildBrain). The show was first premiered on Teletoon (now Cartoon Network Canada) on October 4, 2000, with the final episode's airing on August 14, 2002, leading up to three seasons and 39 episodes overall.

Plot

The show focuses on Mimi Mortin, a clever, redheaded girl in the sixth grade who lives in the Canadian town of Starfish Bay with two friends, Elaine and Russell and her family, but rivaled with Sincerity.

Why Mimi's Never Got a Plan (Bad Qualities)

1. A lot of the characters are either bland, generic, stereotypical, or just flat out unlikeable at best.
   • Miriam "Mimi" Mortin herself is an incredibly unlikeable and unsympathetic protagonist. She is a Mary Sue and essentially believes that the world revolves around her and that everything must be done her way, and also doesn't really seem to mind her own business and always jumps to conclusions.
     • She is also quite paranoid, as whenever she sees something she doesn't like she will start daydreaming about it. These daydreams also serve as filler as you could easily cut these daydream segments out and it wouldn't even make a difference. Her catchphrase "Mimi's got a plan!" is annoying as well.
   • Brock Wickersham is just a generic dimwitted bully whose personality doesn't go beyond being a generic dimwitted bully who just pulls pranks on others. The same can be said for his friends, who serve as nothing but generic goons for him.
     • "In Deep Sea Mimi", He is very sexist towards girls like he won't save Mimi, Elaine, Sincerity and Hailey from the storm, and calling them "a whipy and a loser".
   • Budrick "Buddy" Wickersham, Brock's younger brother, is also a generic bully but is revealed to be a genius; Buddy also doesn't want people to know about this fact, especially his older brother Brock, explaining it would embarrass him in front of his family.
   • Much like Leo and Clementine from Caillou, Elaine Pituskin and Russell Van Eden are just generic friends of Mimi who always follow the latter around like pigeons, with Elaine having no personality other than being an animal and nature-loving vegan and Russell having no personality other than being the clumsy video guy who loves sports and aspires to be a film director that is commonly treated as a Butt-Monkey throughout the show.
   • Sincerity Travers, Mimi's rival, is just a generic, snobbish, and preppy "mean popular girl" who bullies Mimi and her friends and is obsessed with popularity. Her only motives for doing anything also being for popularity.
   • Hayley Kinaschuk is Sincerity's best friend and "lackey", although she's kind and many times disagrees with Sincerity. She is also good friends with Mimi, Elaine, and Russell.
   • Herbert Finkle is just a stereotypical nerd who is in charge of Starfish Bay Schools' school newspaper and also serves as Brock and Buddy's punching bag.
   • Lodeman is a student at Mimi's school who tends to make awful noises and act distracted most of the time.
   • Ms. Victoria Grindstone is just a generic teacher who at first hated her job, but ironically in a later episode is shown to like it for some reason.
   • Mr. Petri is another generic teacher who teaches science and blames Brock for everything bad, even over stuff he never did. This is because of the latter's state of bullying and pulling pranks at his classroom.
   • Ms. Murchison and Mr. Pianoforte are the generic librarian and music teacher respectively who hate each other for no explained reason.
   • The rest of Mimi's family are also just a whole batch of generic tropes:
     • Mimi's father, Marvin (Marv for short) is just a bumbling and idiotic hippie, and he pretty much serves as the 2000 equivalent of Hugh Test from Johnny Test.
     • Mimi's older and younger brothers, Jason and Brad (short for Bradley) are really deadpan, while the former is commonly treated like a loser.
     • Mimi's mom, Saffron, is just a vegan obsessed airhead who always feeds her own kids vegetables and nothing else.
2. The animation, while not bad, given that it was provided by Studio B Productions, can noticeably be quite choppy at times and suffer from some animations errors as well.
3. The voice acting, while passable, can be annoying, especially with Mimi's catchphrase, "Mimi's got a plan!", which gets annoying over time and can be enough to get on your last nerves.
4. Most of the humor isn't funny as most of it is just fart and burp jokes (particularly from Russell), and gross-out. It's also one of the only types of humor that the show uses. Anything else doesn't even bother trying to be funny.
5. The episodes are quite repetitive as they usually just involve some sort of plot about either the school or neighborhood with Mimi making a random assumption without context about something or someone and trying to fix it in an overly-complicated manner, which would usually only make things worse, and much like Norman Price from Fireman Sam, anytime she would supposedly learn a lesson, she immediately forgets it in the next. So, what's the point?
6. The pacing is not the best and doesn't really feel fast enough, making it boring. Even worse is that all of the episodes are 22 minutes long with no segments, even though all of the episode's plots feel like they could be done in about 11 minutes (with some exceptions). In the third and final season, however, they did finally split the episodes into segments.
7. The theme song, while not bad, has some misleading lyrics, such as "changing the world", even though Mimi cannot change the world, let alone her attitude. It also mentions "saving the day", even though most of the time Mimi ends up making things worse as stated above, such as in the episodes "A Star Isn't Born", "The King of Uncool", and "The Play's The Thing".
8. A lot of the episodes either have mediocre endings or just end on cliffhangers.
9. The show tends to overuse stock cartoon sound effects, which is not only lazy but obviously generic.
10. Generic and stereotypical character designs, such as Brock and his younger brother.

"Mimi's Got a Plan!" Qualities

1. The animation isn't bad and is actually decent, given that it was provided by Studio B Productions, which is now defunct as of 2010.
2. The voice acting, while annoying at times, is actually quite passable, given that the voice director Terry Klassen also worked on Ed, Edd n Eddy.
3. Some characters can be more tolerable than others.
4. Some may still find some sort of enjoyment in this show despite its flaws.
5. The theme song isn't bad in spite of its somewhat misleading lyrics.
6. Brad (short for Bradley) is the only likable character in this show.

Reception

It currently has a 6/10 on IMDb.

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