Lazor Wulfis all set to premiere on Adult Swim with back-to-back quarter-hour episodes this Sunday, April 7that Midnight ET/PT. The series, pitched as being about “finding the inner strength to buy your own cereal, not dying, and the art of the scam,” is colorful and full of unique characters but rather aimless and ultimately kind of pointless. I’m all for Adult Swim series experimenting with animation styles (seeTigtoneandThe Shivering Truth), anthropomorphic animal absurdities (seeSquidbilliesand their inky ilk), and late-night, bizarro takes likeToo Many Cooks, butLazor Wulfjust didn’t have enough comedy, absurdity, or charismatic chemistry to keep me interested.
Created byHenry Bonsuand executive-produced by Bonsu,Daniel Weidenfeld(China, IL),Carl Jones(The Boondocks), andVince Staples, with joyous animation from Bento Box Entertainment,Lazor Wulffollows a wolf who carries a laser on his back (as you might have guessed) and the adventures he and his pack of carefree friends face while hanging out at their neighborhood joints like The Clurb and Esther’s Diner. The main cast of voice actors include musical artistsVince StaplesandDRAM, WWE SuperstarBig E, along withQuinta Brunson,Judnick Mayard,Andre Pascoe,Reginald VelJohnson, andJ.D. Witherspoon.
Check out theLazor Wulftrailer before getting into the particulars of my review below:
Introducing an all-new wolf pack. Lazor Wulf premieres Sunday, April 7th on adult swim. Lazor Wulf is about finding the inner strength to buy your own cereal, not dying, and the art of the scam.
On the surface,Lazor Wulfseems like it has all the makings of another great Adult Swim series: crazy characters brought to life by colorful visuals and earnest voice actors, all engaging in a series of non sequiturs meant to serve up laughs thanks to randomness alone. Unfortunately, with the exception of Stupid Horse–a try-hard character who’s belittled by his “friends” in the wolf pack–none of the leads really have a strong sense of personality to distinguish them from one another. Lazur Wulf has a laser while Cannon Wulf has, you guessed it again, a cannon, and King Yeti sports some sick bike tricks. That’s about it. Without a strong sense of character, I don’t particularly care what antics they get up to, whether they make sense or not. The whole thing is like a fever dream that a character inNeo Yokiomight have, and one which no one wants to hear about.
Even over the course of the relatively short 11-minute runtime for these episodes, the characters can’t seem to settle on one idea or another. What starts as a night spent eating as many mozzarella sticks as possible soon turns into a race to rebuild a defunct diner (which was still perfectly funct, apparently) while also hosting a future-death party for the title character. There’s a fine line between too little and too much randomness, andLazor Wulfgoes off the deep end in this regard.
I did laugh a few times, for what it’s worth, but I can count them on one hand: One is when Lazor Wulf tries some new food and spits it out, another is when King Yeti’s dad bids goodbye to him (in hilarious fashion), and the last was from one of the random bouts of yelling from God, who’s envisioned as a disembodied floating head in the clouds in this telling.
Maybe I’m just too old for Adult Swim’s brand, which has kept pretty consistent over the years even as its original audience aged out to make way for the younger folk to come on in. Maybe I’m just wrong aboutLazor Wulf(like I was regardingRick and Mortyback in the day, so very, very wrong) and it’ll find an audience. Or maybe I was just too sober while watching these episodes, an oversight I really need to remedy while reviewing Adult Swim shows in the future. Be sure to let me know your thoughts once you check it out this weekend, sober or not.
Lazor Wulfpremieres with back to back episodes on Sunday, April 7that Midnight and 12:15am ET/PT on Adult Swim.
