Stroker and Hoop Review

Stroker and Hoop is a new Adult Swim show. It aired its pilot on Sunday, August 1, and will air as a series in 2005. The show is about John Stroker and his partner Hoop, two detectives and their talking car CARR, who try to solve crimes for anyone who answers their 1/8 page ad in the Yellow Pages.

This show sounded pretty horrible, and it already had two strikes against it before I even saw one episode:

  1. Late 70's/early 80's cop shows are already so stupid they're hilarious, so doing a parody of them seems pretty useless. Even in a best case scenario, if Stroker and Hoop ruled, it still wouldn't be as funny as the shows it parodies.

  2. It's made by people who write and produce Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law.
Knowing that it would probably be a piece of crap, I watched it anyway, because I enjoy hating; and lo and behold, Stroker and Hoop sucked. Well it didn't totally suck, but it was still pretty bad. Just about all of the jokes fell flat and the show was overall mediocre. There were occasional exceptionally bad jokes, like Stroker saying "not gay" or the dad saying bleeped swear words, but overall it was just forgettably bad. But, even though the pilot didn't make me laugh once, at least it didn't piss me off. Adult Swim sucks so much now that it's pretty much a compliment to say that Stroker and Hoop didn't quite reach the soul-crushing depths of terrible that are par for the course on Birdman and this season of Sealab. The biggest compliment I can give is that the words "Stroker and Hoop" don't physically anger me.

Probably the best thing about the pilot was the animation. It was Flash, but I almost couldn't tell that it was Flash because of how shitty it looked. And I mean the good kind of shitty, not like Birdman shitty (no, Birdman does not have good animation, fuck you) but shitty like the people drawing it had better things to do. A charming kind of shitty. That says a lot about how much Macromedia Flash sucks when the best-looking Flash cartoon I've ever seen looks shitty on purpose.

So, the Stroker and Hoop pilot wasn't completely terrible. That doesn't mean it could ever be good as a series, though. Every episode of Stroker and Hoop will suck more and more. Like the rest of the shows on Adult Swim, it will feel an unneccesary obligation to be "wacky" and "unpredictable" because that's how all the other shows on Adult Swim are and that's what makes them so funny hahaha because you know everything in williams street is so weird dude and then will flaunt wackiness in place of humor and will turn from not so great into complete shit; probably even quicker than the average Adult Swim show because it's made by the makers of Birdman.

Yeah, Stroker and Hoop has potential, but that doesn't mean it won't definitely suck. Communism has the potential to be good, but it doesn't work, and never will. Stroker and Hoop may not be Birdman-bad now, but in time it will be. Watch it thinking it will suck and then hate it for doing so. Don't even give it a chance.

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