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Remember Me As I Was
“Better Call Saul presents: Slippin’ Jimmy”
As a nohomers.net alumnus, it is my duty to watch and review the strange and unknown of the animation world. This is just one of those strange and unknown shows. When the series was first announced, the fanbase at large seemed to immediately have a silent, unanimous agreement to ignore this series existence. I’ve seen a handful of reviews made since then, but otherwise its been (rightly) ignored. Since I have nothing better to do on a Sunday, I might as well add this to my growing list of “obscure ass cartoons I’ve watched”.
The series is meant to show Jimmy McGills adventures as an elementary school aged kid. Usually paired with his best friend Marco, and usually dealing with a bully named Trent. Each episode is based on a movie (a western style snowball fight, an exorcist parody with a school teacher, Cool hand luke parody in reform camp, ect). Not a terrible series premise I guess, young Jimmy imagining he’s in the films he would’ve watched as a kid, though its not really presented in that way.
What confuses me is just, who is this series actually for? The series is rated TV-MA, but the show itself is really tame. A few things that wouldn’t pass for a children's network (the bus driver suggestively rubbing a stick shift while reading a romance novel is the raunchiest it ever got), but a kid could watch this okay, though they’d probably be as bored as I was when watching it.
The few jokes in it are awkward and wordy. The animation is pretty typical Rick and Morty/Netflix sitcom visuals (series was animated partly by Starburns who does R&M). The backgrounds occasionally look pretty nice, the animation of the characters themselves are fine for what this is, just the designs are ugly and the poses are really stiff. Occasionally dipping into creepy when their heads are put into a weird angle/eyes bulge out. A few weird/unpleasant shots, but for a short web series, it does the job.
For BB/BCS fans, there’s surprisingly not really any references to those shows. Chuck is shown in the silent movie episode, which is about Jimmy getting a record player for him to listen to Debussy, and ends with Jimmy studying law books with him. That was fine, easily the shows best episode, maybe by default just for not having any spoken dialogue. There’s a brief reference in that episode as well to that scene of Jimmy buying bowling balls at the pawn shop, but outside of that, there’s no obvious references/callbacks, for better or worse. Unless you wanna make claims like Trent the bully is the same Trent that waited for Walter/Hank in Confessions, or the girl Jimmy asks out in the bus episode is one of his wives. Of course nothing in this cartoon is canon, but then what does this series actually do as a BCS spinoff outside of naming its two main characters Jimmy and Marco?
The show just isn’t interesting. I would honestly enjoy it more if it went for low hanging fruit. If it did dumb shit like a young Kim and Walt being at his detention camp, or Mike being his babysitter. If the AMC content producers really wanted an animated series in the BB universe, they should’ve done something fun. Give me chibi Better Call Saul SD, balls to the wall random/what if scenarios with the characters I know and love.
This was probably just meant to be a cute side series like the training videos to advertise the show/maybe snag an Emmy nomination, but if you’re going to do that, why not make something more fun and creative, instead of this not quite children's cartoon, that kids will probably never watch because its stuck on AMC’s broken app, and 99% of the BCS fans who saw the trailer of this immediately thought it was shit and vaccum cleaned it out of their minds.
All 6 episodes were written by Ariel Levine (writer of Axe and Grind and Something Unforgivable) and Kathleen Williams-Foshee (script coordinator of BCS Seasons 3-6). They’re passable kids show quality stories, not terrible, but also not really funny or interesting. I was just bored. The episodes are only 9 minutes including credits, so it took less than an hour to watch it all. Compared to my usual Sunday routine of laying in bed thinking about my many life mistakes, I guess this was a little more pleasant.
A very strange series that exists. The idea of this show actually existing and the few memes made of it are kind of funny, but not worth the time/effort put into this that could’ve gone elsewhere.
Eh, maybe on the weekend).
