Monsters at Work Season 1 Episode 1: Welcome to Monsters, Incorporated--TV Show Review
I didn't realize this, but it turns out there's a Disney Plus TV show that's a sequel to Monsters, Inc. and Monsters University. It came out in 2021, but I'm just finding out about it now. (I stumbled upon it while searching for the Monsters, Inc. movies on Disney Plus). Wikipedia article HERE.
So, after having just rewatched Monsters, Inc. and Monsters University, I checked out the first episode of this TV show with my kids.
I don't plan on continuing with the series, so here are my thoughts on just the first episode.
If you want a TV show that will reward your attention to the previous 2 movies, then this is it. There's lots of references to events and characters from both Monsters, Inc. and Monsters University.
Considering that the original Monsters, Inc. came out all the way back in 2001, my initial thought was that this was a bit of a gamble to assume that people still remembered the original movie so well. But, of course, they're not assuming you remember it from 2001. They're assuming that you just streamed it again last night. That's the beauty of a streaming service, I suppose. When everything is at your fingertips, nothing gets old, and it doesn't matter when the original movie came out.
The other problem with so many references to the previous 2 movies is that the episode is in danger of becoming nothing but Member Berries. And this episode is definitely in danger of doing that. But then, it's just the establishing episode of a series. Presumably the subsequent episodes probably break into fresh territory.
Speaking of breaking into fresh territory: after checking in with our old friends from the movies (Sully and Mike Wazowski) we then follow the adventures of a brand new monster: Tylor Tuskmon. I guess the showrunners must have decided that the character arcs for Sully and Mike Wazowski were already completed, and they needed to bring in a fresh character. Either that, or maybe John Goodman and Billy Crystal were too expensive to base the whole series off of?
Either way, hopefully the rest of the show does a good job of balancing the old established characters with the new ones.
The first episode showed some of the whimsy that made the previous two movies so enjoyable, but it also was setting itself up as an animated office sit-com. And I don't have a lot of interest in sitting through 2 seasons of that. (Well, maybe if the jokes in the first episode had been a lot better, I might have considered it. But I wasn't grabbed by the first episode. It wasn't terrible, but it didn't grab me either.) Certainly my kids were not at all interested in an office sit-com, so they didn't ask to see any more episodes once we finished watching the first episode together.
And so, I think we'll leave it there. Probably neither me nor my kids will be continuing with the rest of this series.
(This past week I also watched Captain Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but those reviews won't post until the next few days, so we'll have to count them in 2026's round-up.)
I've decided that for this next year, my goal is to cultivate the habit of being a reader, and any time spent watching screens (be it movies, TV or Youtube) is time that I'm losing out on reading.
...and I actually did stick to this the first half of the year. Aside from movies I had to watch because of work (i.e. movies that I had to show to a class of students when I was working as a substitute teacher), I didn't watch any movies for the first half of 2025.
But, by the second half of 2025, I started getting the urge to watch more movies again.
At the moment I'm writing this, I still have that urge. So maybe expect to see more movie reviews on this blog in 2026?
Also, as with every year, I watched a lot of Youtube videos. At one point I decided it would be worthwhile to keep track of what I was watching, and started posting all those videos to my blog...
I was substitute teaching again today, and the instructions the teacher left was to play an episode of MacGyver. (Usually the instructions are to put on a movie, but this time it was a TV show.)
Some of the students had never heard of MacGyver. (Of course they hadn't. This show was way before their time.) Other students recognized the name MacGyver from Simpsons references.
As for myself, I actually had never seen an episode of MacGyver before. I definitely knew about it. Several of my friends from the church youth group were fans, and I remember some discussion about it. But I had never seen it myself. Mostly because my parents exercised tight regulation on my tv viewing when I was young.
In fact, I didn't even realize until I looked it up just now, but MacGyver was actually a 1980s TV show. I always thought it was from the 1990s, I guess because I remember my friends talking about it in the 1990s. But it turns out it started in 1985, and ran until 1992 (W).
Anyway, the episode that the students (and me) were assigned to watch for today was Season 2 Episode 21: "D.O.A.: MacGyver". And because this was the lesson plan for 4 of the classes I was covering today, I ended up watching it 4 times.
If you know anything about MacGyver, you know that his schtick is that he's an action hero who fights crime using science. This is why teachers generally approved of the show. (I mentioned before that many of my church youth group friends were fans of the show, and I also remember the youth pastor himself talking approvingly of the show.)
It struck me upon watching my first ever episode that this was a pretty clever idea by someone. Basically the show seems to play like any other 1980s action tv show, but the episode included a couple brief references to fixing things with some sort of science or mechanics. It's a very small part of the episode, but it's just enough to get the show recommended by teachers and youth pastors. And then the rest of it plays out like a normal action show. Clever marketing.
D.O.A.: MacGyver plays like a pretty by the numbers 1980s action TV show. In fact, it's SO by the numbers that they include not 1 but 2 TV tropes commonly used in that era: MacGyver has amnesia and can't remember who he is, and also as MacGyver begins to remember his past, they sprinkle in clips from past episodes. That's right, it's both an Amnesia Episode and a Clip Show Episode.
But as much as I love to poke fun at 1980s TV shows, you do have to admit that it's very watchable. I mean, you do really have to admire what they were doing in action TV shows in the 1980s--they managed to pull off 22 action episodes a year, on a tight budget, and ended up with a lot of action sequences and stunt work that were actually pretty good.
The ending of this particular episode, however, was anticlimatic. I'm not sure how typical that is (as this is so far the only MacGyver episode I've seen.)
Also, I didn't realize it until I went to the IMBD page, but the girl in this episode is played by Nana Visitor, who I, as a huge Star Trek fan, know from Star Trek Deep Space Nine. (I thought she looked recognizable when I was watching the episode, but didn't realize who she was.)
Bonus: Someone made a fan trailer for this episode:
In 2024, I tried to deliberately make time to watch more movies. When I could. It wasn't often that I had the apartment to myself, but when I did, I deliberately made a point of watching a couple movies.
His Girl Fridayis an old classic film, but it actually hold up surprisingly well. I'd recommend it as a fun film to watch.
Charade has tons of famous actors in it, but although it's an old film, I don't think it's particularly regarded as a classic. It's still fun to watch, even if it is completely forgettable.
This was my 3rd time sitting through Lawrence of Arabia. It has some amazing scenes, but the film sure is slow-paced. I mean, to be fair, it's deliberately slow-paced, so it achieves the effect that the film-makers are intending. If you like that sort of thing.
If you like history docu-dramas (and I love them), then Path to War is a fascinating film.
Berkeley in the Sixties has long been one of my favorite documentaries, although I've seen this film many times before, so it was not really a new experience for me. Still, if you haven't seen it yet, it's a recommend.
The 1925 The Phantom of the Opera was interesting as a time-piece. (It looked really impressive for its time.) But I think there's a reason silent films just aren't popular nowadays. Talking films are just way more interesting to watch.
These are really all recommends. They all do a good job of bringing the ancient Greek dramas to life. But my favorite was The Theban Plays by Sophocles the BBC, 1986. It does such a good job of making Sophocles plays really enjoyable for a modern audience. With a small caveat. It appears that this production added to the original words of Sophocles a little bit. That is, they add some sentences to the dialogue to make explicit what in the original play was somewhat ambiguous. But they never leave behind the original play entirely. They're always using the original dialogue as a base, just adding to it here and there. So if you're a purist, you're not going to like it. But I thought the revised dialogue actually worked really well, and that it made Sophocles' plays feel very modern.
And there were a couple movies I watched this year because I had read the books, and I wanted to see how the movies compared. So after reading Swamp Thing, I decided to check out the Swamp Thing movie. And after reading The Last Unicorn, I saw The Last Unicorn movie. Both of these movies are cult classics, and, as is often the way with cult classics, they both have some elements in them that are really interesting, but also have a few rough edges.
In a recent Youtube video, entitled Why we can't focus., Jared Henderson also shares my recent philosophy on movie watching--that is, when it comes to our powers of focus and attention span, social media and phones are the real enemy, and watching whole movies might actually help to lengthen our attention span. (Jared mentions movies at about 11:30). As I mentioned above, this has also been my philosophy the past 2 years, and the reason why I tried to make it a point to watch more movies both this past year and the previous year. All that being said, I don't think I'm going to continue this philosophy into 2025. I've decided that for this next year, my goal is to cultivate the habit of being a reader, and any time spent watching screens (be it movies, TV or Youtube) is time that I'm losing out on reading.
Which is not to say I won't watch any movies in 2025. I'll watch movies for all the usual reasons people watch movies (e.g. someone invites me to see a movie, or there's a movie I really want to see, or I'm just really tired and feel like watching a movie.) But this coming year I won't make it a point to watch movies just for the sake of watching movies--i.e. in 2023 and 2024, when the wife and kids were out, I thought, "I have some time to myself, I'm going to watch a movie." In 2025, if I have a similar situation, my plan is to say, "I have some time to myself, I'm going to get some reading done."
The line between movies and TV got a bit blurred this year. A lot of the movies I watched were actually TV movies. Now, a 2 hour TV movie is actually simple enough to classify (in my book, it counts as a movie). But what about a TV movie that is in two parts and was spread out over two nights, like The '60s? Is that a movie or a show?
As I state in the video, my original intention was to have this video be a little bit about my thoughts on the Masters of the Universe franchise, but mostly about Masters of the Universe: Revelation. But I ended up talking for so long about my thoughts on the franchise, that it just ended up that this video was all reminiscing about the franchise. The next video, then, will be my review of Masters of the Universe: Revelation
In the video, I mention seeing in toy stores animals that turn into rocks that were released as Master of the Universe toys. For more information about them, see here: https://youtu.be/Va_jgg4MddM?si=tdkEFqcKrHBxEl8h
* The video by Midnight's Edge video about how this series is not an actual sequel to the original series, because they don't own the rights to the original series: https://youtu.be/G9SJ2Yp84Lo?si=uiHsGZ8Yc-3VP072
I'll save my thoughts on that show for when I finish it. But as I am watching it, I've become curious to revisit the original show.
Like everyone of my generation, I have tremendous nostalgia for the original He-man and the Masters of the Universe show. But, like every functioning adult, I also find the show hard to sit through now that I'm all grown up. The last time I tried to revisit this show and watch an episode on Youtube, I found it painful to get through. I tried again today, with the same result.
In addition to my general curiosity to revisit the show, I particularly wanted to revisit this episode, because Roboto (W) is one of the major characters in Masters of the Universe: Revelation part 1, and I wanted to check to see if his origin story in the original cartoon syncs with what was in Masters of the Universe: Revelation. (Spoiler alert: It doesn't sync. But hold that for now. We'll come back to this in a few days when I finish and review Masters of the Universe: Revelation.)
Other than that, this episode is a perfect example of why it's impossible to return to He-man and the Masters of the Universe as an adult.
I think the primary thing that kills these episodes is the slow pacing, and the jerky animation.
That being said, it's not any worse than other animated shows from its day. Most animated shows from the early 1980s are unwatchable.
(...although, it's strange, animated shows from the late 1980s, like Ducktales (W), still largely hold up. And I think that's largely true of all the years that followed as well. So animated cartoons made before the late 1980s don't hold up, but animated cartoons made during or after the late 1980s still hold up. What was it that happened in the late 1980s?)
On the positive side, there are some things to like about the original Masters of the Universe cartoon.
Although the animation isn't very good in the sense that the character movements are jerky, the character designs are actually visually appealling. The characters are all bright and colorful, and they look interesting.
The settings for the original Masters of the Universe were always good as well.
The planet Eternia was a bit like the Land of Oz in that it never ran out of exotic new places to go and strange creatures to meet, and the original show always had interesting landscapes for our heroes to wander across.
[Okay, granted, this particular episode isn't a great example of fantastic landscapes. Other episodes were more interesting. Still, I'm going to give it points for some of the interesting rock formations in the terrain, as well as some of the cool futuristic city designs.]
And then, of course, there's the music.
...actually, let's call the music a mixed bag. I think the original theme music is quite good, but as an adult, I can't help but notice how repetitive the soundtrack is. By the end of one 22 minute episode, you're already sick of that theme!
Despite the limited animation techniques that were used to produce the series, He-Man was notable for breaking the boundaries of censorship that had severely restricted the narrative scope of children's TV programming in the 1970s. For the first time since Ruby-Spears's Thundarr the Barbarian, a cartoon series could feature a muscular superhero who was actually allowed to hit people (although he more typically used wrestling-style moves rather than actually punching enemies), though he still could not use his sword often; more often than not He-Man opted to pick up his opponents and toss them away rather than hit them.
...I never noticed this as a kid, but once you know to look for it, it's super obvious, isn't it? In this episode, He-Man never punches anyone or uses his sword to hit anyone. He uses his sword, but only to hit other objects with, never a person.
I guess you have to give the show credit for all the inventive ways they found to have He-Man fight bad guys, while seldom hitting them.
In similar fashion to other shows at the time, notably G.I. Joe, an attempt to mitigate the negative publicity generated by this controversy was made by including a "life lesson" or "moral of the story" at the end of each episode. This moral was usually directly tied to the action or central theme of that episode.[13][14][15]
...I remember those morals from when I was a kid, but watching this episode now as an adult, it strikes me that they really were shameless about it. They produced a story with almost no edifying content at all, and then still found a way to claim it had a moral because it was about helping your friends.
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Update: I googled "Why did animation get better in the late 1980s?" I didn't find a definitive answer, but I did find several sights confirming that animation did indeed get drastically better after the mid-1980s (so it's not just my subjective opinion). See, for example, this article: The Dark Age of Animation.
From the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the world of animation in the United States experienced a severe quality drought. Television animation was cheaply and quickly produced and loaded with errors. Feature-length animation experienced severe budget cuts, and the number of animated movies being released was drastically reduced. Cartoons that many generations grew up watching were made with “limited animation” - a style that utilized as few frames as possible, which resulted in choppy, simplified character motions.
Etc. Read more at the article.
On the subject of cheap animation, I notice that He-Man's transformation seems to always be the same in every episode. So that's a good few seconds of animating money that they saved every episode.
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Check out He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Complete Original Series [DVD] on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/41tJoHd (This is an associate's link. If you buy anything through that link, I get a commission.)
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