Rik O'Shae

It's very typical white middle upper class London centric. Voices that don't match the characters, and overly fluffy. It's background TV.

Nostalgia fuel. It's great to see a game lovingly recreate dragon ball like this. It feels underbaked though, fighting the same enemy a billion times over was a questionable design choice. Just a little more time and this could have been perfect

I am a bit confused about why this is getting so much hate. The show is as close to the original series in it's presentation as it can be. Some of the people and characters can be grating but among them are some characters that we found ourselves routing for. We really enjoyed it and while some bits may be scripted I feel that's no more or less true for anything else on TV. We're enjoying it at the very least.

Too rushed, the series sprints it of the gate and glosses over any real character building to get straight to the warring factions. It feels like several seasons worth of plot points have been pushed into one. Small details like a vampire stating that they are called bloods only to then have a wholly removed character elsewhere miraculously know that is what they are called. Within what feels like a couple of weeks the vampires have completely given up on their previous humanity and embraced their new identity with no thought for the lives they left behind. Whole clans have sprung up out of nowhere, seemingly everyone has become infected overnight. It's just a shame, I'm still watching it but there is a jarring difference between the way this is laid out and the pacing you see in more established TV shows like GOT etc

I really enjoyed the original of this film as a child, and as a boy that's saying something because it's aimed at young girls but the humour and variety of characters made it fun. This version was not fun, everything fell flat, a bit like when somebody tells you a joke but messes up the punchline. Flipper who was previously a spritely, goofy form of comedy relief is now just a fish who could equally have been absent from the movie. Sebastian is ok but doesn't carry the same grumpy slightly annoyed voice of wisdom, the words are there but the character isn't. Flounder is supposed to be the gateway to the human World, providing limited but comical insight. Here he does a good rap but the voice doens't match the image and we rocket through any scenes that he / she's in. Ariel is fine... just plods along. In the cartoon Ariel is this curious rebellious young teenager trying to find herself, here that sense of rebellion is gone, there are a few polite smiles but little emotion. Overall not great.

Initially this series seemed great. It had a big World, lots of characters, and it came across as Game of Thronesesque. I think the first warning sign is the lengthy prologue in the first episode that explains the lore behind the series. In story telling there is normally a rule of show, don't tell, in that the Characters back story, emotions, motivations should be obvious from their actions on the screen. In this they tend to verbalise a lot of their thoughts and feelings with lots of flashbacks and monologues explaining their motivations. I think this is born out of the fact that there are too many characters being thrown in too soon. There isn't the time to show us who they are so we are taken on a whistle stop tour of everything about them and the end result is pretty bland. On more than one occasion a character would get into a fight, win the fight and then the people that they just fought would suddenly agree to work for them, with no real reason to do so? Just, oh you won, so you're the boss now, onto the next scene. The other criticism I have is the casting. Sweet lord there is a jarring disparity between acting ability in this show. It's one of the few where the show runners are dwarfed by the acting of the tertiary characters. I found myself aching for the main story arc to get out of the way so we could go back to the band of misfits that were actually worth watching. Even that got tiresome as their crew ballooned from three characters to six in the space of an episode. It's background TV, it's not bad but it's not going to set your World alight and a lot of it is drivvle. If you want to watch something like Game of Thrones, just go watch Game of Thrones.