A little backstory first – back in 2003, the mysterious and uncharismatic Tommy Wiseau (who may or may not be never-captured plane hijacker D.B. Cooper) filmed and starred in The Room, a work of cinema so dreadful, so profoundly god-awful, it achieved the kind of cult status and notoriety which good and even great films can only dream of. It’s not the kind of bad film one can simply forget – like a car crash, it perversely draws the attention of those who should know better, with film professor Ross Morin describing it as ‘the Citizen Kane of bad movies’. Now, having become one of those weirdly beloved internet figures, Wiseau returns with his friend and The Room co-star Greg Sestero with the cartoon Spaceworld.
It’s quite common for lazy critics to describe works of sci-fi as being another work ‘in space!’, but Spaceworld is clearly and unabashedly Wiseau’s mumbling, rambling character from The Room transplanted directly into a sci-fi setting. The pilot’s up on Youtube, so judge for yourself:
As you may have gathered from that, assuming your brain didn’t reflexively tune it out or interpret it as white noise, Wiseau plays the swashbuckling space bounty hunter TX (presumably an abbreviation of ‘Tommy Xiseau’), opposite Sestero as dark lord-looking bloke Drogol, who, just as Sestero has in real life, ends up swept into Wiseau’s slipstream, doomed to go along on whatever ridiculous project he cooks up. The ostensible plot is TX searching for his home planet, but don’t take that too seriously, since the project isn’t. The real heart of it is evidently having Wiseau flannel around in much the same way as he did in The Room for the benefit of those who, for whatever reason, are fans of that sort of thing.
Watching the pilot, one can’t help but think of Mike Tyson Mysteries, another naked star vehicle which wore just enough of the veil of parody not to be sued by the existing cartoons they were clearly drawing upon. The Mysteries had a similarly fantastical, so-very-random approach to storytelling, and also had its celebrity lead spend most of the time largely oblivious to what was going on and more focused on his own bizarre tangents. However, the Mysteries seemed more confident in its status as adult animation, incorporating all the smutty content and tone you’d expect from an Adult Swim property, and indeed from Mike Tyson, whereas Spaceworld could have passed as an actual (albeit oddly written) children’s cartoon until Sestero curses.
The strange thing is that The Room was organically bad. It was, wholly and completely, a Tommy Wiseau joint, with the man assuming full creative control, and the script being a story he had originally written for the stage, then translated into a 500-page novel. Spaceworld, however, seems to be a deliberate effort to recreate that same strange flavour. It’s written and created by Brock LaBorde, who, to give him his dues, has form for this kind of material, being the man behind The Tommy Wi-Show, where Wiseau helmed a video game vlog. Not necessarily a bad idea, given that overreaction and sounding vaguely European is PewDiePie’s whole persona.
The simple fact is this – when you commission a series starring a famously bad actor, and when you sit down to watch it, you know perfectly well what you’re getting. And, when something is widely regarded as ‘so bad it’s good’, it’s very hard to lay any conventional criticism against it – which is likely what Spaceworld will be relying upon.
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