High Guardian Spice: A Word from Raye Rodriguez
Honestly, I thought I was done talking about this failure, much like everyone else. But strangely, that's sort of the beauty of the show. High Guardian Spice always offers something new to talk and criticize about. Recently, showrunner Raye Rodriguez took to Twitter to defend himself. Let's take a look of what he's got to say:
"High Guardian Spice had a very small budget. We were the first show of a non-union studio. If you're mad at the animation quality, it was the budget. BG art? Budget. Writing?? Budget. We literally started storyboarding the first episode before the first script was finished.
"So when we inevitably ran into problems (all productions do), we didn't have the time or money to slow down and fix them. We had to barrel forward and make due with what we had."
Ah, so it was the budget why there were so many animation errors? It was the budget why there the dialogue was just cringe? Yeah, I'm not buying it. I've seen YouTube animations with a minimal budget and a three minute runtime do so much more than what you and your team did with twelve episodes. Hell, every season of South Park has a minimal budget, and they still have managed to produce many memorable characters and stories for the past two decades.
Also, he's seriously blaming the series' bad writing on the budget? What?!? What the fuck does budget have to do with writing? You don't need a budget to proof read your scripts and ask yourselves if anything there makes sense. And he also admitted that they started storyboarding the first episode before a script was finished. That's already a bad sign. Spider-Man 3 and Jurassic Park 3 ran into this issue during their productions. The big difference is that I can still enjoy those two movies despite their flaws and lackluster stories. Can't say the same about High Guardian Spice. But as the late Billy Mays would have said, "But wait! There's more!" Here's what else Rodriguez had to tweet out:
"People compare HGS to anime because it's on CR [Crunchyroll], but it isn't anime, it's a cartoon made from the same pipeline as any other American cartoon. Our budget was comparable to a CN [Cartoon Network] show, which are usually 11-minutes long, are comedy-centered and have much simpler BGs [backgrounds] and characters."
I've heard that argument too, and honestly that's not a fair comparison. Through the course of my life I've seen so many Cartoon Network shows that look far better than High Guardian Spice. Even the worst shows that Cartoon Network aired looked far better than High Guardian Spice.
"Really the best show to compare HGS to is Onyx Equinox, our sister show and the only other show made at the same studio as HGS. OE had the advantage of learning from its mistakes made on HGS and being union, but it was a lot of the same team and same pipeline."
Yeah, HGS wasn't the only non-anime original production released by Crunchyroll. Last year they released another series called Onyx Equinox, which centered around Mesoamerican culture and mythology. Now I have watched Onyx Equinox in its entirety and I must admit it has its own fair share of issues. But despite its problems the show did keep my interest. I wanted to see where they were going with this. I might have to do a review of that show sometime in the future, but just know that it's not a great show yet it's not awful.
"What we were trying to make was incredibly ambitious for what we were working on and we did the best we could. Maybe in another timeline HGS would have gotten the budget & schedule it needed to reach its full potential."
The best you could? You seriously believe you and your team did their best? I'm gonna borrow a quote from the late, great Sean Connery.
"Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen."
But in all seriousness, what they delivered clearly wasn't their best. If they truly did their best the show wouldn't have so many animation errors and inconsistencies. If they truly did their best the show would have had a linear story for the audience to follow rather than pointless filler episodes. At this point these are just excuses.
"And also in another timeline maybe HGS wouldn't have been roped into the culture wars from its first trailer and marked as BAD years before it came out. But alas, this is the timeline we're in and all I can do is shout about it on Twitter."
Oh, so that's the route you're going with, huh? You're going the Josh Trank route where you bitch about how the public and studio screwed you over instead of accepting responsibility for your own shortcomings. Come on! Act your age and accept this as a failure.
"Instead of piling on the HGS is trash campaign, maybe think about what happened behind the scenes to make it that way, have empathy for the real human beings who did their best working on it & think critically about about who started this hate campaign in the first place."
Really? Hate campaign? Here's a news flash for you, Rodriguez: everyone isn't hating on your show just for the sake of it. Everybody isn't hating the show because it had women/gay/trans characters or writers or creators behind this show. Honestly people could care less. Everybody genuinely hates your show because it really is bad. It was a poorly animated, poorly written piece of American animation full of one-dimensional characters and stereotypes that should not have been on a streaming service meant for anime. Everyone says it's bad because IT IS bad! I tried to give this show a fair viewing. I tried not to be so judgmental. But the more I watched each episode the more I got angry with it.
Ultimately, Raye Rodriguez doesn't accept his own failure but instead blames the studio and the so-called haters. Crunchyroll didn't hire writers. They hired Tumbler-posters. And they used subscription money to fund this garbage. These tweets are essentially Rodriguez adding fuel to the fire. To make things worse for him, Raye Rodriguez has also gone on to block all those who criticized the show. People, don't be like Raye Rodriguez. Hell, don't be like Kate "Kill All Men" Leth. Learn from criticism. Learn from your mistakes. Write better stories and characters.