Disneys Barbaren-Dave

Though it may (wrongly) seem that Disney has an unassailable position in the field of animated television series, the transformation in style that Disney’s animated TV shows have undergone over the past decade indicates that the company is aware of the competition from Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, which have been poaching viewers from Disney in large numbers. Even before the studio found the ideal balance of traditionally designed characters and their relationships and the boisterousness and free spiritedness picked up from the competition in Phineas & Ferb (Disney’s biggest hit of the new millennium), it came up with the exceptionally distinctive Dave the Barbarian while in the process of opening itself up to new trends. As in the case of Gargoyles, which was created in response to Warner’s Batman and in some ways surpassed it, this crazy series from Doug Langdale with its Dadaist logic can boldly measure up to cult classics such as 2 Stupid Dogs, Cow and Chicken, Grim & Evil, SpongeBob SquarePants and Catscratch, as well as newer titles like Adventure Time and The Amazing World of Gumball. As a nonsensical paraphrase of overwrought fantasy (sword and sorcery), its foundations lie in the consistent inversion of standard genre elements and their subordination to the Dadaist logic of completely free association (it is thus in no way surprising that the ancient evil with the desire to enslave the world has a combover and is a deity not of blood, war or pestilence, but of excessive punctuation). Within this structure, each individual episode has a deranged premise that provides more absurdist peripeteias, as well as subversive reflections on the workings of classic genres and narratives – in this respect, the best episode of the series is that in which The Dark Lord Chuckles the Silly Pig enslaves the show’s narrator and thus also seizes control over the direction of the narrative. (19.04.2014)