"Thank You For Not Snitching (The Boondocks)", 10-22-2007

I've finally put my finger on why watching reruns of "The Boondocks" is so difficult.

It became crystal clear watching "Thank You For Not Snitching", an episode that is actually rather clever. (More on the general wit of the episodes later.) The episode opens with two minor characters Ed Wuncler III and Gin Rummy robbing a house in the Woodcrest neighborhood where Granddad, Huey and Riley live.

Wuncler and Rummy are "wiggas" -- whites who appropriate the costuming and idioms of ghetto culture despite the facts that their lives probably don't parallel that of an impoverished black inner-city resident in any way, shape or form. While robbing the house, both carry on a ludicrous conversation about Wuncler's blue-tooth cell phone -- one which mimics the type of conversation that Samuel L. Jackson (who voices Rummy) had with John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction". Despite their incompetence, they manage to pull off successful robberies.

As the police begin to question the local residents, the Woodcrest Neighborhood Watch takes note of the fact that Granddad refuses to cooperate with the police in any way, egged on by Riley. Huey gives an explanation to the viewers that snitching is becoming a cultural taboo in black communities. The police and black communities have a long history of animosity, where blacks are swayed into acting as informants -- Huey/MacGruder gives the number that one out of twelve young urban black men is a police informant, if I heard that right (you can check that number if you want to)-- and are not protected from the wrath of criminals after they cooperate. As a result, rappers have begun to preach the "stop snitching" message -- which is kind of puzzling, according to Huey, as rappers are addicted to bragging and prove to be their own worst self-snitches.

The Woodcrest Watchers -- filled with angry, ancient white suburbanites, milquetoast black attorney Tom Dubois and self-hating black Uncle Ruckus -- began to zero in on Grandpa and the kids as potential criminals. Mrs. Van Hausen, head of the neighborhood watch committee, decides that the Watchers should be armed and begins to rain shotgun fire on Wuncler and Rummy when she catches them mid-heist.

Fleeing, the two incompetents make their way into Granddad's garage, finding out about "Dorothy", Granddad's pimped-out car (which was pimped out by Xhibit in an earlier episode). While Riley watches, agast, as Wuncler and Rummy "borrow" the car, Riley's code of "stop snitching" is put to the ultimate test.

To say more would make this a mere recap. All in all, it was an okay episode where most of the humor is conveyed in attitude rather than the talent to produce memorable lines.

And that's the trouble with "The Boondocks". The cartoon is very much like the comic strip. If you look at the comic strip, you'll find that the characters are drawn in a minimalist style. They rarely change position, and merely make observations. None of the potential of the comic artform is exploited -- for the most part, a written paragraph would have served just as well. (And MacGruder still has trouble writing it.) Hey, even Ernie Busmiller made full use of the comic artform despite a minimalist style, but MacGruder's characters, whether drawn by himself or by his assistants, look rubber stamped.

The cartoon suffers the same ills. I have no doubt that MacGruder loves the cartoon and loves anime. The colors on "The Boondocks" are very subtle, and the use of the anime style follows its own rules of complex anime realism. However, "The Boondocks" only rarely takes advantage of the fact that it is a cartoon, and you can do anything you want in a cartoon. For the most part, episodes of "The Boondocks" could have been acted out by human actors -- there's nothing there that couldn't have been done on a sitcom. Only rarely does "The Boondocks" really shine, such as the nunchaku-staff battle in "...Or Die Trying" or some of the anime-influenced swordplay from earlier episodes.

True, there's the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire -- but really, an episode of "24" could give you the same results. MacGruder has a rich, detailed minimum and simply refuses to make use of it. His observations, while often amusing and on target, are never spectacular, never scintillating. He gets some credit alone just for using the cartoon medium -- I suppose a cartoon can make you predisposed to laugh -- but he never moves into outright laughter.

Everytime he's about to make you chuckle, he retreats into making a statement. Everytime he's about to make a statement, he spoils it by adding something funny. "The Boondocks" goes over like a lead pipe, and while you enjoy what you've seen, you're troubled by what you haven't seen, what you could have seen if someone had flexed their artistic muscles.

"The Boondocks" is like watching a conversational exercise at a school for method actors, where both actors mark the conversation by so much restraint that each actor mumbles his lines to the point where you have to strain just to pick up what's being said. MacGruder uses the pillow where he ought to use the hammer. Satire and commentary should come with a hammer. MacGruder, however, makes it mind-numblingly sedate.