by Panpardus » December 8th, 2016, 6:03 pm
[quote="Kallo"]The most annoying thing I see people often say about the show is "I watched Return of the Roar. It was NOTHING like the original movie so it sucked. I'm so disappointed". Like wtf. 'Return of the Roar' isn't even a proper film, it's just a two-parter pilot of a preschooler show, that was made into a short TV-movie. What were you expecting? A proper, cinema quality, feature-length Disney movie? It's not even a proper Disney straight-to-DVD sequel, let alone a proper new feature film. So annoying. Sometimes I really wonder what goes on in people's heads.[/quote]
I think part of it is that people in general didn't/don't know that The Lion Guard is more than just Return of the Roar, that it was supposed to set up an entire TV series. The hype I saw in the media reports about its impending release pretty much glanced over that fact and presented the special in a way that made it seem like more than it actually was. That said, I still think it generally sucked, especially compared to the actual episodes; the story was rushed, the conflict felt quite forced, they wasted way too much time with way too many shoehorned callbacks to the other movies, the voice acting was generally pretty stiff, and even the dialogue was lacking in comparison to an average episode. Even though it's a preschool show, it tried too much to tug at the nostalgia strings rather than proudly being its own thing, which isn't really a good thing for a sequel to do at all, let alone one that's supposed to get people interested enough to come back for the entire series. The only aspects - for me anyway - that add some re-watch value are the underscore and the cinematic moment of Kion using the roar at the end; pretty much everything else I couldn't bear to sit through, and this is coming from someone who generally likes The Lion Guard. So yeah, to add to my own statement above, my baseline expectation for every new episode is that it's better than Return of the Roar, and so far I haven't really been disappointed in that regard, though there have been some flubs along the way.