German Animaniacs, Australian Wizards, and Expats of All Sorts
The Weekly Binge, Webfest Berlin edition: 3 Web Series to Watch This Week
This week, part of the Stareable Team was lucky enough to attend the second annual Webfest Berlin, a festival dedicated to presenting, recognizing and advancing short form, episodic, digital content from around the world. We were consistently amazed by the talented creators we met and they renewed our belief that audiences would love this amazing independent content if only they could find it. Even foreign languages couldn’t get in the way of appreciating the quality of these shows (and besides, subtitles are a nice way of feeling like we’re reading more). We’ll soon feature a collection on the site with all of the winners from the festival but in the meantime, these are some of our favorites.
Tubeheads
Over the course of the festival, this show repeatedly drew comparisons to The Muppets but a closer analogy might be to the Animaniacs. Both take what’s ostensibly a medium for children (in Tubehead’s case, puppetry) and make a show that’s in fact very much for adults. Both populate short sketches with an expansive universe, tied together by a love of silliness, zany antics, and well-done callbacks. The episodes draw on a wide range of pop culture references, from Aliens (repeatedly) to Freud to Shark Week. And the creators clearly have an old-fashioned love of sight gags — like US soldiers in Vietnam gearing up to kill “Charlie” before the camera cuts to Charlie Chaplin fleeing through the jungle. Or an addict koala attacking someone for their last eucalyptus coughdrop (it makes sense — just watch the show). Suffice it to say, we made sure to get a photo with the creators (and their puppets) because in a couple years’ time, it’ll seem like a prescient souvenir.
The Wizards of Aus
For a country where this happens, one would think Australians would be more okay with the mysterious or unexplained. But when Jack the Wizard, worn out by the rat (goblin?) race of fighting dragons and saving the princess, hangs it up and moves to the suburbs of Melbourne, he is met with derision and xenophobia. To make matters worse, his rival from the Magical Realm, a demon who relied on their Tom-and-Jerry relationship to fill his schedule and now finds himself a little bored, moves in next door and does his best to goad Jack into picking up his staff. The show does a great job of making the joke about more than Jack’s ignorance, often by creating clever comparisons between the two worlds. Cross-species dating in the Magical Realm is just as painful as speed-dating for humans, but in very different ways. And while the bureaucracy of procuring a recycling bin is a new experience, Jack’s had to deal with incompetent trumpeters misdirecting resources in the defense of the castle. The show even has the seal of approval from the Australian government, which funded the show (rather well, it seems — the special effects are unbelievable) and assigned Guy Pearce for regular guest appearances (presumably that’s how that works?).
Das Apartment
Three young people with very different backgrounds smushed together in a tiny apartment in Berlin. After attending Webfest Berlin, that’s become an aspiration of ours, which perhaps explains our fondness for this show. Das Apartment effectively captures the roadblocks of cross-cultural disagreements, the sexual tension of being young, and the frustrations of living in close shared quarters where yogurt thievery abounds (what is it about fermented dairy that makes people lose their way?). The characters are quickly well-defined, making conversations about bees’ natural polyamory and the ethics involved in stealing their honey without asking seem completely reasonable. And each episode introduces a friend, boss or visitor as a way of exploring Berlin’s unique melting-pot dynamic that seems anything but homogenous (something we can confirm from the nightlife we witnessed).
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