User blog:DCT0473/Reviewing Literally Every Season of Total Drama Finale: Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race

After a bit of a hiatus and one long Netflix binge watch, I’m back with the finale to Reviewing Literally Every Season of Total Drama. Today, we’ll be going over Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race, Total Drama’s first spinoff series and latest season as of August 27, 2018. I know a couple of Total Dramarama episodes are already online, but until the season officially airs on TV, I’ll be considering The Ridonculous Race the latest season. Anyways, let’s jump right into the review!

The Ridonculous Race, as a concept, seems to be heavily based off of The World Race, a reality TV show where people race all around the world to win money. In the Ridonculous Race, teams of two race around the world while doing various challenges, some as simple as dancing, and others as deadly as scaling a tower.

This concept may seem simple, but the writing really helps it. After the insult that was TDAS and the boring shlog that was TDPI, we finally got a TD season that was actually well written. The episodes are all entertaining and the humor in the Ridonculous Race is some of Total Drama’s best, rivaling and/or surpasing both TDI and TDWT at times.

Then we get to the cast. There are 18 teams of two, adding up to a total of 36 contestants, an all time high for Total Drama. While most of these teams consist of new characters, we do see some familiar faces. Owen and Noah are a team, Geoff returns to compete with his buddy Brody, and strangely enough, Leonard of all contestants returns. Yeah, Leonard… one of the least popular Total Drama contestants… why him of all contestants? There are so many characters fans are begging to see more of, yet we get a character who has the same joke concept repeated over and over? Goes to show how much the writers listen to the fans.

Anyways, most of the characters are fairly good, and when you combine them with whoever else they’re paired up with, you get great banter and character interactions. Sadly, with a cast so large and only 26 episodes to focus on them, this leads to a problem that plagues the season’s half. You can only focus on so many characters at once, so some characters barely get any screen time and are left undeveloped. Other characters do get a decent amount of screen time but are shoved off to the background in some episodes just to make room for other characters. A good example of this would be how the writers handled Chet and Lorenzo, the stepbrother team. For most of the series, they are almost always reduced to the background, and its only until the final 2 episodes they compete in where we see actual character development from them. Maybe if the writers reduced the cast size from 18 teams to 11-13 teams, this problem could be avoided entirely.

There is one more major cast-related thing I must mention, and that’s the new host. Instead of Chris or Chef returning to host the Ridonculous Race, we get a new character called Don-whom I almost thought was Topher-to host the show. I mean, he’s fine. It’s nice to have a host on a Total Drama season who isn’t much of a jerk who’s been consumed by fame, but compared to Chris and Chef, Don is nothing.

Final Verdict:

Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race is easily one of my favorite Total Drama seasons. Great writing, mostly great characters, and a ton of charm. Just maybe shrink the cast size a little and make Don more memorable, and this would probably be the best season in my eyes. Anyways, the Ridonculous Race gets a 5/5.

Favorite Character Team of the Season: This was really hard, since there were a ton of teams I liked. I managed to narrow it down to my five favorite teams, so here they are (In no particular order).

1. Sanders and MacArthur, the Police Cadets: When it comes to comedy, these two are probably my favorite. MacArthur is just a complete lunatic, and Sanders is the perfect straight man-er, straight woman to counteract MacArthur. They are a hilarious duo, and I was really excited to see them win.

2. Josee and Jacques, the Ice Dancers: Two more great antagonist for Total Drama. Josee is the embodiment of fame hungry and desperate, and Jacques is a nice bumbling assistant.

3. Noah and Owen, Reality TV Stars: These two were entertaining in the first three seasons of Total Drama. Naturally, they’re still entertaining here.

4. Emma and Kitty, the Sisters: These two are really sweet together, and make a great team.

5. Ryan and Stephanie, the Daters/Haters: These two really grew on me as the season progressed. At the start, they were one note generic characters. Then, Stephanie became unbearable for a bit. After that, their dysfunctional relationship became a highlight of the season for me, just for how ridiculous and crazy it was.

Least Favorite Team of the Season: This was a very easy choice for me: Kelly and Taylor, the Mom and Daughter. Taylor is a complete brat, and a very annoying one at that. Kelly isn’t much better, as she’s the textbook definition of a washed up, shallow celebrity mom who bend head over heels just for Kelly.

Favorite Episode of the Season: Down and Outback. This episode is just hilarious for focusing on something as simple as rabbit challenging. My favorite bits are Spud trying to explain Carrie the seven stages of breakup and Chet and Lorenzo trying to catch a kangaroo that they believe is an “Albino Rabbit”.

Least Favorite Episodes of the Season: A Tisket, a Casket, I’m Gonna Blow a Basket and Hawaiian Honeyruin. Stephanie is just unbearable in both of these episodes and Hawaiian Honeyruin has Kelly and Taylor at their worst.

Anyways, before we leave, I’d like to rank each Total Drama season from worst to best. So here it is:

-#7: Total Drama All-Stars (Here’s a drinking game for you: Watch Total Drama All-Stars at full volume from start to finish with no breaks. Take a shot for every OOC moment, plothole, predictable elimination, bad elimination, and poor writing choice. By the merge, there’s a chance you’re dead. By the season’s end, you’re almost definitely dead. If you manage to survive, I’ll consider you the second coming of Jesus Christ)

-#6: Total Drama Pahkitew Island (So boring)

-#5: Total Drama Action (I’d like it more if there was less character ruining)

-#4: Total Drama: Revenge of the Island (About the middle ground for TD season quality. It isn’t great, but it isn’t bad)

-#3: Total Drama Island (Good)

-#2: Total Drama Presents: The Ridnonculous Race (See the review above)

-#1: Total Drama World Tour (What I consider the standard for Total Drama: Great writing and incredible character building)

Anyways, that is all for today. The next time you see me, I might be doing a Total Dramarama review, or a TD Controversy Meme, I just don’t know. But for now, bye!