Dexter's Laboratory (seasons 3 & 4)

Dexter's Laboratory is an American animated television series created by Genndy Tartakovsky for PBS Kids. It aired from 1996 to 2003, spanning 78 episodes across four seasons.

Though it originally concluded with a television movie, Dexter's Laboratory: Ego Trip, in 1999, it was revived for two more seasons in 2001. As Tartakovsky left the series two years prior to make mh:besttvshows:Samurai Jack, as well as many of the other original staff members also moving onto other projects or to make their own works, Chris Savino was put in charge of the last two seasons of this show.

The first two seasons were well received for their creative stories, good humor, and colorfully detailed animation. However, during the last two seasons, various changes were made to the show and this is where things, unfortunately, started to go downhill.

Why These Seasons Are Mixed
People had mixed receptions on these seasons. Either people think that these seasons are good seasons or bad seasons.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) These seasons were completely unnecessary. The television movie, “Ego Trip”, had a decent ending and was meant to be the show’s finale. At the end of the special, Mandark is defeated and Dexter becomes the most brilliant scientist in the world. However, Cartoon Network insisted that the show was going to be continued no matter what.
 * 2) *The same thing even happened when Craig McCracken put Chris Savino in charge of the final two seasons of The Powerpuff Girls, which suffers as many problems as these seasons.
 * 3) The animation in these seasons, while a decent effort for its time, is a pretty big downgrade from that of the first two seasons.
 * 4) *The colorfully-detailed background color palette from the first two seasons has been replaced with a plain, simplistic, washed-out, and unappealing background color palette. The fourth season did improve in terms of background color palette, but even that wasn't enough.
 * 5) *The characters are sometimes given facial expressions that are too ugly and off-model and feel like they don't suit the characters' normal faces. A good example includes Dee Dee's outbursts in "Folly Calls".
 * 6) *Likewise, the character designs have also taken a step-down:
 * 7) **Dexter and Mandark's respective bodies look more rigid and geometric like a square or rectangle.
 * 8) **Dee Dee looks virtually off-modeled.
 * 9) **Dexter's mom has a larger head and hip, with her eyes constantly pressing flat.
 * 10) **Dexter's dad has a larger, lankier head and his bottom half looks unfinished.
 * 11) Some of the characters have been flanderized:
 * 12) *Mandark receives the biggest flanderization, as he has gone from Dexter's antagonistic science rival to a full-blown evil genius bent on destroying Dexter and ruling the world. Yes, he did turn evil in “Ego Trip”, but these seasons take place before the aforementioned original planned finale. In addition, he is also a filler or comic relief character who grew up in a family of hippies, which is a huge insult to his fans.
 * 13) *Dexter's dad has gone from a bumbling, yet loving father to a Butt-Monkey-type character.
 * 14) **Both of Dexter's parents are also much more clueless and dumber than they already were.
 * 15) *Dexter, while unchanged for the most part, has become a bigger jerk and/or a bigger punching bag than he was in the first two seasons.
 * 16) **Additionally, many of Dexter's experiments weren't creative nor inventive. Neither was Mandark's inventions for that matter.
 * 17) *Dee Dee became more annoying, idiotic, and destructive than she was in the first two seasons.
 * 18) Almost every supporting character from the first two seasons, while not flanderized, doesn't return, notably the Justice Friends (even though they appear in "Dexter's Wacky Races"), Mee Mee and Lee Lee (Dee Dee's best friends), Action Hank, and Commander.
 * 19) The writing has gotten severely downgraded from being creative, resulting in many bad episodes, with the Season 3 side character episodes (e.g. A Mandark Cartoon, A Third Dad Cartoon) being notorious for having loads of lazy filler, including:
 * 20) *Dexter's Library
 * 21) *Sore Eyes
 * 22) *Jeepers Creepers, Where Is Peepers
 * 23) *Dad Man Walking
 * 24) *Beau Tie
 * 25) *Remember Me
 * 26) *Momdark
 * 27) *Copping An Aptitude
 * 28) *A Boy Named Sue
 * 29) *The Lab of Tomorrow
 * 30) *Tee Party
 * 31) *D2
 * 32) *A Mom & Dad Cartoon
 * 33) *Faux Chapeau
 * 34) *A Third Dad Cartoon
 * 35) *A Mandark Cartoon
 * 36) *Oh Brother
 * 37) *Dexter's Little Dilemma
 * 38) *Father Knows Least
 * 39) *Opposites Attract
 * 40) *Height Unseen
 * 41) *Tuber Time
 * 42) *Tele-Trauma
 * 43) *Voice Over
 * 44) *They Got Chops
 * 45) *Comedy of Feathers
 * 46) *Babe Sitter
 * 47) *Sole Brother
 * 48) Slow pacing as the jokes drag on longer than a cutaway gag in modern Family Guy. A glaring example is the episode "A Third Dad Cartoon", where it is nothing but Dexter's dad preparing a golf game for the whole 3-minute episode.
 * 49) Christine Cavanaugh, Dexter's original voice actress, retired from voice acting after the first few episodes of the third season and was replaced by Candi Milo for the remainder of the series' run. Candi Milo does a poor job voicing Dexter in the third season, as she makes Dexter's Russian accent sound rather forced and cheesy. However, she did improve marginally in the fourth season.
 * 50) Overuse of toilet and gross-out humor, which was not too common in the first two seasons. The worst offenders are "Jeepers, Creepers, Where Is Peepers?" and "Sore Eyes".
 * 51) The title cards in the third season are generic and repetitive, as all of them just show the same title card with a completely white background that involves a small oil painting bubble of Dexter or a completely black background with just the titles of the episodes.
 * 52) The episode "The Lab of Tomorrow" is a rip-off/rehash of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Krusty Krab Training Video".
 * 53) Continuity errors and plot holes: For no particular reason whatsoever, these seasons overall heavily ignore and retcon the entire events established in the first two seasons, to the point that it feels more like a soft reboot rather than a continuation of the story, hence confusing the continuity of events throughout the entire series.
 * 54) *For example, in "A Boy Named Sue", Mandark said that it was his first time meeting Dexter. However, he and Dexter meet for the first time at school in "Dexter's Rival", where he is shown to be already more intelligent than Dexter. Not helping matters is that apparently, Mandark's real name is Susan, according to these seasons, even though it was already established that his real name was Ivan Astronomanov.
 * 55) *Not only that, in the first two seasons, Mandark's only known family member was his younger sister Lalavava (real name: Olga Astronomonov), who only appeared the season 2 episode "Dee Dee's Rival". But in these seasons, Lalavava is completely written out of existence and is replaced by his hippie parents Oceanbird and Windbear.
 * 56) Many of the endings are rushed or confusing, especially the one for "Dexter's Little Dilemma" and "Sore Eyes".
 * 57) Dexter throwed a huge tantrum at the SuperShop and threw boxes everywhere, causing the entire supermarket to collapse! This was near the end of the episode "Dexter the Kid" released January 2002 by the way. Also, Dexter was acting like Caillou!

Good Qualities

 * 1) Despite the animation being cheap, stilted and lackluster, it is still at times quite colorful, smooth, fast-paced, decent for Rough Draft standards and is a nice treat to the human eye.
 * 2) *But, the animation in "Chicken Scratch" is wonderfully smooth, as Genndy Tartakovsky directed it.
 * 3) Some of the characters are still likable, such as Dexter himself.
 * 4) There are still some good and/or decent episodes. Examples:
 * 5) *Streaky Clean (The first episode of this era)
 * 6) *Robo Dexo 300
 * 7) *Lab on the Run
 * 8) *My Dad vs Your Dad
 * 9) *Head Band
 * 10) *Comic Relief
 * 11) *Used Ink
 * 12) *Poppa Wheely
 * 13) *Chess Mom
 * 14) *Dos Boot
 * 15) *Dexter's Wacky Races
 * 16) *Dexter the Barbarian
 * 17) *Go Dexter Family Go
 * 18) *Poetic Injustice
 * 19) *School Girl Crushed
 * 20) *2Geniuses 2Gether (which is the last episode of the revival series in production order, ending these seasons and the series on a high note)
 * 21) Season 4 is a slight improvement.
 * 22) *The backgrounds do look better than in the third season, with much more detail, but still fell flat compared to the first two seasons, mainly due to the washed-out colors.
 * 23) *The episode title cards are original, creative, and are surprisingly the best aspect about this otherwise lackluster revival.
 * 24) Decent voice acting from the cast, though Candi Milo was not all that great voicing Dexter, especially in Season 3.
 * 25) Some funny jokes here and there that are still worth a chuckle.
 * 26) Genndy Tartakovsky was still involved, albeit as the show's executive producer, though is not much.

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