What About Mimi?

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What About Mimi?
This show is forgotten indeed.
Genre: Animation Running Time: 22 minutes Country: Canada Release Date: 2000 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 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.

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

1. A lot of the characters are either really generic, annoying, stereotypical, bland, or just flat out unlikeable overall.
   • 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. The same can be said for his friends, who serve as nothing but generic goons for him.
   • Much like Leo and Clementine from Caillou, Elaine and Russel are just generic friends of Mimi who always follow the latter around like pigeons, with Elaine having no personality other than being an animal-loving vegan and Russel having no personality other than being the video guy that is commonly treated as a Butt-Monkey throughout the show.
   • Sincerity (Mimi's rival) is just a generic "mean popular girl" who bullies Mimi and her friends and is obsessed with popularity. Her only motives for doing anything also being for popularity.
   • Herbert Finkle is just a stereotypical nerd who serves as Brock's punching bag.
   • The rest of Mimi's family are also just a whole batch of generic tropes.
     • Mimi's father is just bumbling and idiotic, and pretty much serves as the 2000 equivalent of Hugh Test from Johnny Test.
     • Mimi's younger and older brothers are really deadpan, while the latter is commonly treated like a loser.
     • Mimi's mom is just a vegan obsessed airhead.
     • Mimi's teacher 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.
2. The animation, while not bad, given that it was provided by Studio B Productions (now defunct as of 2010), can noticeably be quite choppy at times and suffer from some animations errors as well.
3. Most of the humor isn't really all that funny as most of it is just fart and burp jokes (particularly from Russel), and gross-out, the latter being a type of humor that usually isn't done correctly, with only a couple of exceptions (e.g. The Captain Underpants Movie). It's also one of the only types of humor that the show uses. Anything else doesn't even bother trying to be funny.
4. The episodes are quite repetitive, as they usually just involve some sort of plot about either the school or the 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?
5. 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.
6. 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".
7. A lot of the episodes either have mediocre endings or just end on cliffhangers.
8. The show tends to overuse stock cartoon sound effects, which is not only lazy but obviously generic.

Good Qualities

1. The animation isn't bad and is actually decent, given that it was provided by Studio B Productions (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, Ed, 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.

Reception

It currently has a 6/10 on IMDb.

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