Game Over - The Complete Collection

Starring:Elizabeth Daily, Rachel Dratch, Artie Lange, Lucy Liu, Patrick Warburton, Marie Matiko, James Sie, Marisa Tomei, John Michael Higgins, Jessica Glassberg, James Arnold Taylor, Jennifer Coolidge, Jan Hooks, Tom Kenny, Common, Danica McKellar
Director: John Rice (VI)
Studio: Anchor Bay
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com
The CGI animated series Game Over is built around an inventive premise--how do video game characters live when they're not in the middle of the action? Viewers that missed its original broadcasts during its 2004 network run can now enjoy the entire series in this double-disc set. Game Over invites you into the hectic lives of the Smashenburn family: accident-prone racecar driver dad Rip (Patrick Warburton, Puddy from Seinfeld); wife and secret agent Raquel (Lucy Liu, who replaced Marisa Tomei), feisty daughter Alice (Saturday Night Live's Rachel Dratch), and youngest son Billy (E.G. Daily from Rugrats), who suffers under his unrequited crush for an exchange student (who, being from Japan, is an anime character, natch). The five episodes find the family adopting a monstrous, cigar-smoking pet (voiced by comic Artie Lange, who first appears in "Meet the Smashenburns"), experiencing popularity at school ("Basic Win-Stincts"), and attempting to bond ("Into the Woods"), each with disastrous results. It's amusing stuff, especially if you're a fan of other brash, pop culture-driven programs like Family Guy, and video game fans will get a kick from seeing characters from several popular games pop up in cameos throughout the series.

Amazon.com

The CGI animated series Game Over is built around an inventive premise--how do video game characters live when they're not in the middle of the action? Viewers that missed its original broadcasts during its 2004 network run can now enjoy the entire series in this double-disc set. Game Over invites you into the hectic lives of the Smashenburn family: accident-prone racecar driver dad Rip (Patrick Warburton, Puddy from Seinfeld); wife and secret agent Raquel (Lucy Liu, who replaced Marisa Tomei), feisty daughter Alice (Saturday Night Live's Rachel Dratch), and youngest son Billy (E.G. Daily from Rugrats), who suffers under his unrequited crush for an exchange student (who, being from Japan, is an anime character, natch). The five episodes find the family adopting a monstrous, cigar-smoking pet (voiced by comic Artie Lange, who first appears in "Meet the Smashenburns"), experiencing popularity at school ("Basic Win-Stincts"), and attempting to bond ("Into the Woods"), each with disastrous results. It's amusing stuff, especially if you're a fan of other brash, pop culture-driven programs like Family Guy, and video game fans will get a kick from seeing characters from several popular games pop up in cameos throughout the series.

The Complete Collection offers a surprisingly solid sampling of extras for a largely unknown series; chief among these is the sixth episode, "Monkey Dearest," which went unaired in America. A trivia game, character bios, and short featurettes on production round out the supplemental features. --Paul Gaita

Description

Ever wonder what happens to your favorite video game characters after the game ends? The far-from-ordinary suburban Smashenburn family lives in an alternate video-game universe comprised of off-beat characters. Within this world of action heroes, monsters, and cartoon characters inspired by popular video games, the Smashenburns find unconventional ways to survive everyday issues.

Customer Reviews:

At home with the video game characters.......2007-03-19

At the end of a long day of video gaming, all those characters have to go somewhere, right? This set of eight shorts, each the length of a TV slot, follows them home.

If "The Incredibles" hadn't already done something similar, only more clever, this would have looked a bit stronger. Still, it stands on its own well enough, and the child characters (teenage Alice and tweenage Billy) are are given better roles. Alice's attitude, in particular, has a lot going for it.

It has its clever moments, though. The CGI polygons are visible fairly often, reminding the viewer of the limits of 2004-era gaming hardware for PCs. The super-powered anime exchange student is good, too, as Billy's first crush. He's overawed when she flies him around, leaving a multi-colored trail behind her. When she has to go back to Japan (the country), he's heart-broken.
Dad: You'll meet other girls.
Billy, inconsolable: Will they shoot rainbows out of their butts?

It's funny, entertaining, and thoroughly forgettable. So, if you have an evening you don't plan to remember, give it a shot.

//wiredweird

Defeated By Bad Writing.......2006-10-02

This premise could have been good, but it was brought down by lousy scripting. The animation was of a high level, like "Reboot," & the voice work was stellar. Patty Jausoro was a producer on this and is great with animation... as well as other things.

Extremely entertaining!.......2006-06-26

We just rented this video and found it to be one of the best written shows we've seen in a long time. It's a shame it's not still running. As parents of teenagers, we found the humor quite funny yet it was pretty clean. You can safely watch it with a "tween" / teen. The NR rating was a bit daunting so we pre-screened some of it first and found it tamer than most PG/PG13 shows.

Meh. Nothing Special..........2005-08-31

Could of been a lot worse I guess, but I'm not shedding any tears over the show's quick cancellation. The problems with the show is that it tries that formula of mixing quirky family humor for the grown ups with cheap gags for the kiddies but it becomes just one big mess. Also, the children are pretty horrible characters, there's nothing to empathize with especially since they look SO modelled over market research. (Perhaps a comment of the shallow nature of the current video game industry? Unlikely.) They're just smug and self-absorbed but always painted as better people than the parents in the show. UPN's way of trying to be hip I guess. Patrick Warburton is the saving grace of the series and I guess there's a few game references in the first couple of episodes to validate your taste. In the end, nothing really memorable about this series.

Disc problems.......2005-08-06

I enjoyed this short-lived series on UPN and was delighted to hear it was coming to DVD. I purchased it from Suncoast and quickly found out there are problems with the menus on both discs. Suncoast replaced the set I bought and I encountered the same problems. I recently recieved my third set from Suncoast and found the same problems. In all cases the curser is missing from the menus and it is impossible to chose an option. In spite of this I would recommend this DVD set because of the content and the extras. As long as you don't have any problems navigating the menus. Has anyone else had this problem?

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