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What We're Watching Wednesday: Craig Before the Creek
In which Nevanna overthinks children’s cartoons, in ways that probably won’t make sense unless you’ve watched the Craig of the Creek prequel movie.
I think that Craig Before the Creek worked equally well as a prequel and a standalone adventure, which is not always easy to pull off. I liked Kelsey’s and JP’s introductions (the latter’s approach to piracy invited comparisons to Our Flag Means Death, of all things) and Craig’s relationship with his little sister Jessica. I loved the detail that the wish-granting McGuffin was a paper fortune-teller. And the songs were fantastic.
I was less sure about the battle “inside the Wishmaker,” which apparently offers a decisive answer to the “does this world have magic?” ambiguity that I praised in an earlier post about this show. One could argue that that sequence takes place in Craig’s imagination and his adversary is just committing fully to the make-believe (or maybe the other way around?), and that the timing of the rainstorm is a coincidence, but that conclusion feels like a stretch. Other episodes that took place partly in an imagined reality, like “The Ground is Lava,” also show what’s going on outside that reality, and the movie didn’t offer that.
We’re currently in Season 3 of the series proper, and I have no spoilers. I continue to love this show, and whether I continue to love it will not be contingent on where, and how, the ambiguity of the world-building is resolved. I enjoyed the way that the movie balanced mundane and more fantastical concerns, and I’ll be interested to see whether, and how, future seasons emphasize one or the other.
I think that Craig Before the Creek worked equally well as a prequel and a standalone adventure, which is not always easy to pull off. I liked Kelsey’s and JP’s introductions (the latter’s approach to piracy invited comparisons to Our Flag Means Death, of all things) and Craig’s relationship with his little sister Jessica. I loved the detail that the wish-granting McGuffin was a paper fortune-teller. And the songs were fantastic.
I was less sure about the battle “inside the Wishmaker,” which apparently offers a decisive answer to the “does this world have magic?” ambiguity that I praised in an earlier post about this show. One could argue that that sequence takes place in Craig’s imagination and his adversary is just committing fully to the make-believe (or maybe the other way around?), and that the timing of the rainstorm is a coincidence, but that conclusion feels like a stretch. Other episodes that took place partly in an imagined reality, like “The Ground is Lava,” also show what’s going on outside that reality, and the movie didn’t offer that.
We’re currently in Season 3 of the series proper, and I have no spoilers. I continue to love this show, and whether I continue to love it will not be contingent on where, and how, the ambiguity of the world-building is resolved. I enjoyed the way that the movie balanced mundane and more fantastical concerns, and I’ll be interested to see whether, and how, future seasons emphasize one or the other.