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I finally got to see some of the episodes of Rick and Steve Happiest Gay Couple on youtube.
My questions are:
1. The whole PLASTIC appearance of the show is designed to appear to WHAT in WHOM?
2. Aren't there any number of OTHER WAYS of presenting Rick and Steve that are cheaper and would be more entertaining to a Gay Audience?
Overall, my initial impression of Rick and Steve is that the show seems like an incredibly expensive and overblown way to present a handful of moderately funny jokes.
In my opinion, the biggest insult to Woody Allen's way of making movies is that you can LISTEN to an entire Woody Allen movie with no video and NOT miss a damn thing about the plot/storyline. It seems to me that if you set out to make a MOVIE, and what you end up with can be played on the RADIO without any lost of plot or storyline, THAT makes you a pretty shitty moviemaker.
In my opinion, Rick and Steve can be played on the radio without any real lost of plot or storyline. For example, there is a clip of two lesbian characters in bed telling straight jokes. IN THIS EPISODE, I can't think of any real reason why anyone would need to VIEW the clip. The Clip is just two lego-like characters in a bed, what exactly is there to SEE. The entire clip of the lesbians telling straight jokes could be played on the radio without any lost whatsoever. So, it then becomes a really big joke if someone spent $50,000 per hour (a figure presented at Variety.com) to produce two lego lesbians characters in a video telling a handful of moderately funny jokes.
IN MY OPINION, the over all PLASTIC and SANTIZED look to Rick and Steve gives off a rather funny and unfortunate commentary about WHAT KIND OF GAY makes its way onto MTV's Gay Channel. MTV Logo's idea of ACCETABLE GAY are plastic gays with no genitalia.
According to rumor, Gay People are more likely to be online sooner than the public at large. One would assume from this that more gay people would be internet savvy and internet jaded than the public at large. Frankly, I don't think the whole plastic/playground look of Rick and Steve works.
I think Rick and Steve would work much better (and be cheaper to produce) if the producers went with the auto-rotoscoping of real humans rather than the stop-action/animated presentation they chose.
BTW, the website for Rick and Steve at http://ww.happiestgaycouple.com looks as plastic and as infantile as the video.
There is a "joke" presented in one episode of Rick and Steve in which a HIV+ older man starts putting his medication on a table. The character is shown piling bottles and bottles of different drugs on the table for some kind of new outrageous "Drug Cocktail" that he has to take several times a day to control Aids. I DEFINITELY did NOT think this was funny. I actually wonder WHO GAY would think that such a thing would be funny?
