Aaron's "The 3dmm Game Show" Review

The 3DMM Game Show does what the massive collection of community-themed talk shows have failed to fully do up to this point: It captures the insanity of community personalities in movie form precisely and hilariously by simply letting the insanity happen, rather than trying to stylize or put some kind of polish on it. This isn't a new idea, but Tom Breed is able to ringlead this crazy circus in a brilliantly balanced way, building his game show format in a way that lets the contestants' irreverence add to the joy of the movie rather than subvert some rigidly structured plan. When I first read the chat transcript, I recognized his ability to let the contestants take charge of the flow of the conversation without constantly forcing the show back into the focus, but the finished movie takes that craziness and builds it directly into the framework of the proceedings. I never imagined I'd see the community's penchant for self-parodic retardeness translated into voice and film, but here it is. When Taco says "OH GOD EXPLAIN THE BLACK BOX :O" in the chat, every bit of the implied lack of self-control is captured, as his actor (an edit of the Slam model with Frank Evans' face on it) starts rapidly turning back and forth, his outstretched hands repeatedly smacking Denny Betterman, standing next to him. The comic energy of the movie is astonishing.

The entire film was scripted verbatim from the chat transcript of Tuna, Breed, Taco, Denny, Chippy, and Ferret going through the gameshow questions, and every bit of high-octane stupidity you might expect from that crowd stuck together in one chat room is gleefully included and portrayed in brilliantly creative ways. I didn't know it was possible to perfectly capture Taco saying "*is fat*" as a visual gag, but there it is. And the visual gags themselves were the most surprising part of the finished product. Rather than simply cut around the set to have the contestants talk, Tom comes up with a hundred and one ways of visually interrupting the show for running gags, visual approximations of chat room events, random silliness, and occasionally full-blown segments (two of which are elaborately constructed and played out, and are in themselves the two funniest moments in the movie). Somehow, despite the innate tendency of the contestants to get off-track, the pacing of the movie rarely drags, and usually only does so during long visual interpretations of gags that don't work as well as others.

I feel like a lot of credit for this has to go to the voice actors, of whom only Tuna and Denny actually portray themselves. Russ Stepan does the best job as Digital Taco, blurting out all-caps observations in a snappy, fast-paced monotone that sounds exactly like I always imagined Taco's text sounding like. Denny is Denny as usual, though he does a better job voicing his grumblings at failing to ding in ahead of Taco or Ferret, grabbing a few chuckles simply for that. His sister plays Ferret, which is simultaneously creepier and less creepy than it would have been had he voiced himself. Tuna is Tuna as usual, though not the scenery-chewer he was in 3DMMers United magazine episodes, where he had no one else to play off of; here, he's funny as host, but rarely the center of attention, which works well. And Andrew Salter has a kind of thankless role as Tom Breed, who appears the least out of anyone (excluding Chippy, whose role is....well, you'll see). It's hard to truly comprehend or appreciate the difficulty in voicing a project like this; Tuna and Denny are veterans at playing themselves and quickly comfortable adapting their chatroom dialogue to spoken word, but for Russ and Amanda, playing the two craziest people in the gameshow, it's a tightrope balance. The "characters" of Taco and Ferret had to be almost perfectly captured if this was to work at all, and THEN the proper emphasis had to be given to their lines if the jokes were to work. And perhaps the most impressive part of the voice aspect is that every actor's line feels natural in the context of any conversation in the film. No one hits a sour note, or seems to have done all their voices in one batch without context; if it doesn't sound like every actor is in one room actually doing their performances, it sounds like Breed was standing behind them explaining how each line fit in context of what was happening. The challenges of voicing this thing were probably insane.

The questions (partly written by me) are split up into five categories with five difficulty levels, Jeopardy style: Movies, Personalities, History, Teh Psych Ward, and Comedy Option (sample question: "Hmmm....my computer is running kinda slow. What should I do?" The correct answer, which no one gets, is funnier than you'd think). Comedy Option has only four questions, leaving a black box at the very bottom. Upon seeing it on the scoreboard, the contestants are derailed for a full minute before they can focus on the show again. In the chat, Tuna would ask the question picked by whoever was in control of the board, at which point the contestants would type "ding". In the movie, rather than hit a buzzer, the contestants simply say, "ding". Since the script for the movie was based off the chat transcript, the contestants are constantly interrupting each other, dinging at the slightest provocation of any sort, and almost always before the question is asked. Denny is almost always a millisecond too late, and at one point tries to quit the show in frustration. The point system is randomly generated by Tuna or Breed; after the second question is asked and the contestants are given a chance to catch onto what is happening, Taco pounds his fist into his podium and declares, "I'd just like to say, this point system is FANTASTIC."

Occasionally points are bribed away from the hosts, given from one contestant to another, or wiped completely. Taco is usually the first person to get most of the questions, Denny dings in confidently and sweats over what the answer is, Ferret randomly switches between answering correctly and just not even trying (after the mid-game Lightning Round, he's so in love with one running joke that he's useless for the rest of the game). The psychotic and fast-paced nature of the show stimulated the guests enough to stay focused on the chat, firing off nonsense and playing off of each other in entertaining ways. Breed and Tuna make the perfect ringleading team, as Tuna is only slightly more interested than the guests in taking the thing seriously at all, and Breed organizes the show in a way that just rolls with the punches and gives the contestants whatever elbow room they want for derailing the proceedings. And where the simple gameshow format isn't enough to carry the runtime, supplementary gags are provided to either match or act as a counter to the chatroom content and add spice to the transcript. The visual interludes and extensions of ideas from the chat are for the most part brilliant and exceptionally well-animated.

With a 35-minute runtime, well over a hundred jokes, and a script entirely culled from a chat transcript with five 3DMMers in it, not every single second of the movie is going to work. Some gags fizzle, others made me smirk but went on too long, others gave themselves away too quickly and kept going, creating a dead air feeling. But Breed is quick on the rebound, layering each joke with multiple punchlines, and jumping quickly from one gag to another to keep the rhythm going. It's easy to feel drained when the movie ends; it's like watching Hot Shots or Airplane!, with a million and one gags pelting you at every turn, an almost exhausting comic intensity. It has a rough quality to it, like Breed wanted to capture the essence of the community in a jar and simply display it without a lot of polish or restructuring. This is the film's key strength and possible weakness, and may work against it from a standpoint of staying fresh in the audience's mind. But with the probability of more episodes on the way, and in the interest of getting right down to the most honest level, let's make it official: I laughed until my sides hurt. I was grinning the whole goddamn time. It has such energy and such joy in coming together that it's almost contagious. You just want to bounce around the room when it ends.

Critical Score: 92/100.
Personal Score: 100/100.