Surviving Winter Break Boredom with Animation

I’m trying to stay modern because sadly I lack the page space to go into why you should consume “Infinity Train” and “OK KO Let’s Be Heroes” nor examine their contemporaries.

As the winter break quickly approaches, we have been greeted by two scrumptious sacrifices. “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off “and (stick with me here) “Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix” are both incredibly new takes from long-running Beloved franchises.

I will begin with the most recognizable proper noun I’ve used so far, “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off”, the long-awaited “Scott Pilgrim” cartoon that came out on Nov. 17. I like to think of it as the New Game Plus of the original Scott Pilgrim movie: You don’t need to have watched the original movie to get a lot out of the Animated Series but as any new game plus should, it adds a lot to the experience, even if you watch them both, back-to-back.

With enough absurdist comedy to be considered an entry in the Scott Pilgrim franchise, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off presents us with the most healthy way of dealing with your past we have seen in the franchise, to date. Although it is not my favorite entry in the franchise, at least for me, this is now how the complete story definitively ends.

Now that I have finished the easy part… on to Captain Laserhawk.

A Blood Dragon Remix is a dystopian alternate past that takes place in the world where every single Ubisoft game really happened! As you may already know, Raymond is a major character but so is the pig from “Beyond Good and Evil” and so is a frog who follows the Creed from “Assassin’s Creed” and so is DedSec from watchdog.

All of these different worlds never made to combine all are forced together, and it somehow works so well.

This is a show where you can hard cut from Sam Fisher from “Splinter Cell” proving that legs only slow you down straight to Rayman drinking orange juice, and it works miraculously. The content warnings for this are gore, partial nudity and drug use. Unlike Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, you don’t need any of the background details. I adore it yet have never played a single Ubisoft game; if you do play Ubisoft games you’ll probably get more out of this.

I’ve been told that if you play Assassin’s Creed the show has a whole extra twist and I don’t doubt that the same exists for almost every other Ubisoft game. This is an impossible world held together solely By Love Of The Source material.

Those are my two modern animated pics for this winter holiday season, but odds are you will (sadly) run through their combined 14 episodes pretty quickly. You can always check out animation’s impressive backlog. As long as you can find some place cozy, animation will have a place for you this winter.