I’m actually pretty sure I… like this one?  We have a new hotness in the Siler household, the latest of any number of new hotnesses, and this time he’s plucked a thing called SLUGTERRA out of the Netflix queue to mildly obsess over for a few weeks.  SLUGTERRA is interesting; it’s the first show he’s ever really liked that I thought “Oh, this show is designed to sell kids a bunch of dumb shit,” except since we watch it on Netflix we don’t see any commercials and so– ha!– we evade Disney X D’s(*) capitalist clutches.  That said, before I realized the show was designed to sell kids shit, I’ll freely admit that I thought Man, this would make a fun turn-based video game.

So there’s that.

Anyway!  The premise.  It’s weird.  The show is set… underground, I think?  Maybe under the real world?  And there are people, but also trolls (they’re blue!) and whatever the mole dude is:

They’re called “slugslingers.” They shoot at bad guys with guns.

The ammunition for their guns is slugs.  These dudes:

When the slugs get shot out of guns, they twirl a little bit and then they can spin a web, or set themselves on fire, or freeze stuff, or turn into spinning blades, or any bit of nonsense you can imagine, and sometimes they punch each other out of the way, and sometimes they just explode, which seems kinda lazy, and they’ve only got one of each kind of slug that they have and so once they’re shot I guess they just wander back to their owners for some reason.  There’s probably something complicated behind it because this show has a Goddamn wiki but my kid is four so he’s not too into the details.  Oh, and also they ride around on mechanical animals.  There was this one episode where a dude was riding a robo-snake.  I approve of robo-snakes.

The sound design, believe it or not, is the coolest thing about the show.  The little slugs make cool noises when they’re being fired at each other.  I like the sounds they make.

There are bad guys.  This is Dr. Blakk.  Yeah.  Blakk.

Ooh, scary.  This is Dr. Blakk’s henchman.  His name is– I am not making this up– El Diablos Nacho.

He’s actually scarier-looking than Dr. Blakk, but his name is Nacho and there’s a grammar error in the first two words of his name and plus there’s no Spanish in this world anyway so why the hell is his name El Diablos Nacho and I refuse to worry about it.

(See the little red canisters on his shirt?  And the blue ones on the good guys up above? They have to slam the slugs into those before shooting them, then put the canisters into the gun, then fire the shot.  It’s very 1800s.  I want to know how the hell this ecosystem evolved, and who realized you could shoot these things.)

It’s a fun show.  I like the characters, and the setting is pleasantly weird, and like I said the sound design is stellar.  I just can’t get behind calling a dude El Diablos Nacho, though.

(*) Why is that space in there?  Because if you take Disney X D’s name and you write it without a space, WordPress turns it into Disney XD, which isn’t a word, and wait, is that why it’s called Disney X D?  How do you say that?  And how do you turn off the substitution in WordPress?  OMG OLD.