HBO's 'The Prince' Animated TV Series: A Review

HBO’s new animated series ‘The Prince’ ruthlessly cuts the very deserving target of the British royal family down to size.

No doubt delicate viewers will find it repugnant, but the flawed show is funny enough to overcome what some may deem offensive.

HBO’s new aggressively irreverent animated series The Prince, which debuted on HBO Max on July 29th, sets its comedy sights on the target rich environment of the British royal family and relentlessly fires a ferocious fusillade of mockery at the monarchy.

The series, which is made up of twelve, 13-minute episodes and features such notable actors as Orlando Bloom, Allen Cumming and Sophie Turner, was first scheduled to premiere in the spring but HBO pushed that back out of sensitivity regarding Prince Philip’s death in April.

After having watched The Prince, which savagely lampoons all of the royals, I don’t think that deferential gesture will ease any hurt feelings among the Windsors.

The Prince’s caricatures of the royals are relentless and vicious. For instance, the Queen is a cruel, foul-mouthed, farting crime boss, and Prince Philip, a decrepit near cadaver.

Prince Charles is a spineless, big-eared, mealey-mouthed coward who berates his bride Camilla, a horse-faced mute, to get in the good graces of his mother.

Prince William and his wine-hound wife Princess Kate, are absolutely miserable and headed to divorce, are indifferent parents, and are incapable of doing even the most intimate of things without servants.

Speaking of servants, all of the royals are absolutely brutal towards ‘the help’. This is best portrayed by the devoted butler Owen (Allen Cumming), a sad-sack widower, and the two gay butlers, all of whom must delicately navigate the ever-shifting minefield of the monarchy or else find themselves fired…or worse.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are two of the more hysterical royal portrayals on the show, maybe because the caricatures of them seem more realistic due to their being such cartoonish people in real life.  

On The Prince the two of them are living in Melrose Place in Hollywood, and are subtly cross-eyed, which for some reason made me chuckle.

Meghan is a talentless actress and social climber leading the clueless Harry around by the nose, while Harry (voiced by an utterly brilliant Orlando Bloom) is such a dolt he cannot remember the name, or gender, of his baby, is astonished by the magic of refrigerators, and is so dumb as to be virtually unemployable.

That doesn’t stop him from trying though, as he reveals to Meghan that as a little-boy he dreamt of being a massage therapist, to which Meghan replies that as a little girl she too had a dream…of being a princess. A dead-eyed Harry then declares, “you kinda fucked that up”. Yes she did.

Meghan’s acting failures lead her and Harry to the Hollywood gutter of reality tv and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and then she brings reality tv to the royals, which culminates in a fistfight between the Queen and Lisa Rinna over a perceived slight to Ms. Rinna’s husband Harry Hamlin.

Then there’s Meghan and Harry’s HGTV show “Royally Screwed”, where they try and fix up houses on a budget for regular people. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

Considering the roasting Harry and Meghan receive on The Prince it’s no surprise that the show is on HBO as opposed to Netflix, as Harry and Meghan have a deal with Netflix rumored to be worth $100 million, and no doubt flex their royal muscles to squash the series and “protect their brand” if given the chance.

The main protagonist of The Prince though is Prince George, the 8-year-old heir to the throne and son of Prince William and Princess Kate, who is portrayed as an effeminate and obliviously and obnoxiously entitled child.

Prince George is basically Stewie Griffin from Family Guy but just a few years older, which should come as no surprise since the creator of The Prince is Gary Janetti, a writer for Family Guy.

And that is the biggest problem with The Prince, that it’s derivative of Family Guy.

The Prince follows the Family Guy formula with children acting like adults, adults acting like children, an extended musical number, and when mixed with Machiavellian palace intrigue, it all feels like ‘Family Guy Goes to Buckingham Palace’.

That’s not to say that the show isn’t funny, just that it isn’t original.

Some have been offended that The Prince is targeting a real-life 8-year-old, Prince George, with its comedy, and I suppose there’s some legitimacy to that. William and Kate are certainly displeased with the show, but to be honest, and maybe this is the Irish in me, I’ve a very hard time accepting a British royal, regardless of age, as a victim in any circumstance. It’s like with the Oscar winning movie The King’s Speech where we’re supposed to feel bad for the King George VI because he’s some stuttering, muttering jackass. No thank you.

Overall, The Prince is a mindless, quick watch. The episodes are short (13 minutes), don’t ask for much mental effort, and occasionally make you laugh…there are worse things in life. While I found it certainly could’ve been better, I also found it to be funny often enough.  

The best way to judge if The Prince is worth watching is to answer the question, do you like Family Guy? If Family Guy is a bridge too far for you, then The Prince is not a journey worthy of taking. But if you like exceedingly irreverent comedic shots taken at all things royal, then The Prince may very well be your cup of tea.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Disney's New Content Warning and the Woke Slippery Slope

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

As the insatiable woke beast runs rampant across our culture, the category of things deemed offensive becomes ever more bloated, meaning an increasing number of classics are now in danger.

If you are anything like me you have been losing copious amounts of sleep worrying that Disney’s content warning for racism that runs before some of their classic animated films like Lady and the Tramp, Peter Pan, Dumbo, Jungle Book and The Aristocrats, wasn’t long-winded enough.

Well, thanks to the geniuses at everybody’s favorite frozen anti-Semite’s entertainment mega-corporation, we can all rest easy because they’ve attached a new disclaimer to these allegedly offensive films.

The old content warning was first posted last November and stated, “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”.

Disney’s updated content warning is the polar opposite of the gloriously concise and resolutely mundane original. The new disclaimer reads,

“This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.

Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe.”

I can’t remember who it was, but some jerk once wrote, “brevity is the soul of wit”…well, if brevity is the soul of anything than the Winston Smith wannabe who wrote this atrocious piece of Human Resources porn is as soulless as they are spineless and brainless.

What makes the verbosity of this woke monstrosity all the more hysterical is that the kids who might be trying to watch Disney’s talking animal cartoons either won’t be able to read it at all, and if they can, they sure as hell won’t understand it.

The other thing of note about this disclaimer is that it is absolutely unnecessary as there was no huge groundswell to update the old content warning by making it more wordy and less coherent.

What Disney is actually doing with this new content warning is shamelessly signaling its corporate virtue and trying to appease the woke beast rampaging relentlessly and maniacally across our culture. This beast has an insatiable appetite for outrage and when none appears organically, the woke manufacture some to feed it.

Like an annoying software update, Disney’s updated content warning will no doubt soon need yet another update. The slippery slope of political correctness will force Disney to expand its definition of ”offensive” material and bloat the category of films needing these self-serving content warnings.

Recent history has taught us that the road to woke perdition is never ending. No gesture or change will ever be enough for the p.c. mob. This results in content warnings needing perpetual updates to acknowledge sins of commission, then sins of omission – such as “we are sorry that Dumbo is not centered on characters of color or from the LGBTQ community”, then the sin of too many cis-gendered white characters, or too many white voice actors, and on and on and on…until finally the woke noose tightens enough to suffocate all of entertainment history.

For example, Song of the South(1946) is a controversial Disney classic that depicts a black character, Uncle Remus, as content with life in the cotton fields. Song of the South currently has no content warning or disclaimer…and that’s because Disney has flat out banned it. It isn’t on video, DVD or streaming. It is lost down the memory hole, which is where the woke slippery slope inevitably leads.

The problem for Disney is that through the lens of wokeness all things appear “problematic”, and this means Mickey Mouse may very well have to sacrifice his cash cow core film canon on the altar of political correctness to appease the woke beast. This will be “get woke, go broke” on steroids.

You may think this far-fetched, but if you doubt the woke slope is that slippery, consider the recent chilling example of the word “preference”.

In last week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings Amy Coney Barrett mentioned the term “sexual preference”. In response Senator Mazie Hirono excoriated her for that term claiming it was “offensive” to the LGBTQ community.

That morning “sexual preference” was an entirely acceptable phrase, by lunch it was deemed “homophobic”, and by sundown it was so verboten that Merriam-Webster had literally changed its definition to describe it as “offensive”.

As the speed of history increases, so will the woke over-reaction to it. It starts with content warnings on cartoons and Gone With the Wind…but how much of the entertainment we enjoy today will tomorrow get a content warning and by the end of the week get the Song of the South memory hole treatment? The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy are no doubt already on the endangered species list.

Our civilization used to rely on outrage fatigue to cool the embers of irrational and emotionally driven furies, but among the woke, outrage ossification has set in like intellectual rigor mortis. It is those of us in opposition to the vacuity of political correctness that now suffers from fatigue…and as Patton once said, “fatigue makes cowards of us all”.

My warning of discontent is this…the woke beast slouching toward Bethlehem, via Hollywood, Washington and corporate America, is relentless, consistent, deliberate and insatiable, and in our battle against it we need to screw our courage to the sticking place…because failure is too culturally catastrophic to contemplate.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

We Need a New, Anti-Woke TV Channel To Stave Off Comedy’s Impending EXTINCTION at the Hands of Cancel Culture

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

We Need a New, Anti-Woke TV Channel To Stave Off Comedy’s Impending EXTINCTION at the Hands of Cancel Culture

With political correctness running roughshod over Hollywood, now is the perfect time for a billionaire to invest in a streaming service that prioritizes entertainment over wokeness.

We now live in an age where the Cancel Culture Clan routinely don their white robes of self-righteous totalitarianism and roam the comedy landscape of today and yesteryear searching for any heretics who have violated the ever changing rules of the Church of Wokeness.

It was either Sir Isaac Newton, Huey P. Newton or Fig Newton, I can’t remember which, who once famously said, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”…and so it is with the politically correct panic of our time. 

This is why I believe that anti-wokeness is poised to be a major growth sector in the entertainment industry in the coming years.

My idea to cash in on the current woke hysteria is to start a comedy streaming service dedicated to being resolutely anti-woke.

I call this streaming service…F.U.T.V.

Instead of the fear of offending the delicate sensibilities of the most fragile among us being our guiding principle, F.U.T.V. will make the unorthodox decision to actually treat viewers like adults and let them decide for themselves whether they choose to watch whatever “offensive” comedy has been targeted by the snowflake Savanarolas looking to fuel their bonfire of inanities.

We just need a rich bastard with enough testicular and fiscal fortitude to fund this noble venture. There has to be some billionaire entrepreneur out there who realizes that as the corporate behemoths of Hollywood cave to the incessant bitching of the p.c. mob by casting aside controversial comedians, shows and movies, a gaping void is being opened, and an anti-woke streaming service can profitably fill it.

For instance, in recent years a cavalcade of wildly popular sitcoms such as Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park have all been branded with the scarlet letter of “P” for problematic, due to various woke infractions regarding insensitivity towards race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference and diversity.

“Problematic” is always and every time the first step on the journey down the very slippery slope that inevitably ends with crucifixion by the centurions of corporate cancel culture.

These tv shows are huge money-making properties but in short order they will be available for pennies on the dollar because the weak-kneed buffoons in corporate Hollywood, who are scared to death of the tiny Torquemadas of the Woke Inquisition, will gladly sacrifice their comedy golden gooses on the altar of political correctness in order to appease the angry gods of social justice.

Stand up comedy will fare no better as venues such as Netflix, which have branded themselves the home to comedy, have already begun to cower to the Robespierres of the Woke Revolution and pulled a variety of “racially offensive” comedy shows.

The thing to understand about the woke mob is this… their greatest fear isn’t that someone, somewhere is being offended, it is that someone, somewhere is actually enjoying themselves.

No matter what you do to appease these dour and depraved scolds, it will never be enough, for they are voracious and insatiable in their appetite to destroy anyone and anything that makes them feel uncomfortable.

Netflix has given an inch, and I guarantee you these totalitarian tools will take a mile, and won’t relent until Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Ricky Gervais’ heads are on a platter.

Comedy history too will be raped and pillaged by these woke barbarians as they inevitably push for greats like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks and Billy Connolly to be purged from cultural memory for the crimes of wrong-think and political incorrectness.

The goal of comedy fans everywhere should be to extend a giant middle finger to all these repugnant woke simpletons by supporting comedians doing what comedians are supposed to do…rebelling against the small, closed minds in the culture that are trying to censure, censor and suffocate them.

In conclusion…here is a top six ranking of some of the comedians and their routines that are no doubt on the endangered species list in this toxic age of wokeness. Let’s hope F.U.T.V. can get funding and stave off the incessant waves of woke whiners and bring to a halt comedy’s impending extinction.

6. Bill Burr

Burr stomps on the toes of political correctness and jokes about sexual assault…both hanging offenses in the People’s Republic of Wokestan.

Sexual Assault

PC Culture

5. Richard Pryor

One of the greatest stand up comedians of all-time would have a woke bulls-eye squarely on his back if he were around today. This penitentiary routine would certainly have raised the ire of the social justice Bolsheviks and their demand to “abolish the police”.

Penitentiary

4. George Carlin

It is a tragedy Carlin isn’t around to obliterate the insipid vacuity of the woke brigade. There is no doubt that in 2020 the p.c. police would vastly alter his iconic routine of “words you can never say on television” by expanding it to be more “socially conscious” and applying it to every day life.

“Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”

3. Chris Rock

Speaking of words you’re not allowed to say…the electrifying Chris Rock and his blistering take on racial issues from 1996 sure as hell wouldn’t fly in 2020.

Bring the Pain

2. Louis C.K.

If Louis C.K. hadn’t already been cancelled back in 2017, he certainly would’ve been if he tried these routines in 2020.

The “N” word

Child Molesting

1. Dave Chappelle

I’ll give the last word to Chappelle, who is public enemy number one of the woke because he is so brilliant at eviscerating their vapid, emotionalist drivel. In 2019 his Sticks and Stones wowed audiences but P.C. critics deemed it “regressive”, which must be another term for “honest and funny”…I’ll let you decide.

Chinese

Women Equality

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020