Sigh...I had such high hopes for this show too...
The Renaissance of Cartoon Animation didn't last too long, did it? Some shows ended too abruptly, some shows dragged on for way too long and some were excellent shows that were replaced by garbage ones. An era that was once helmed by Adventure Time, Regular Show, Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, The Loud House and others truly did stumble badly as the 2010s drew to a close. Now, we sit in an era of cartoons where the only shows getting greenlit are preexisting franchise shows (Teen Titans Go, the seventh or eighth Ben 10, the thirteenth variant of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) or shows going directly to one of seven different streaming services. Heck, Cartoon Network is even losing ground on it's own channel, with a Programming Bloc geared towards little kids being in operation from early in the morning to mid afternoon and Adult Swim taking over from 8:00 EST onwards. To be blunt, this is precisely why I suspect these channels we've come to know and tolerate (I won't go as far as to say love) will go the way of the dodo as soon as streaming services eclipse Cable TV. I for one, will not be partaking in any new or rebooted shows for a while, as Disney and Nicks attempts to constantly reboot things have definitely drained me of a significant portion of my sanity.
Disney has attempted to have feet in both ponds, with shows and movies exclusively on Disney+ while also releasing new content onto their channels (some of which no longer are in service overseas). It's had...middling success. Some of their shows have been very hit and miss. For every Rapunzel's Tangled Adventures, Amphibia and The Owl House there is on the channel, there's always another lousy Star Wars or baby show to counteract it.
Star Vs The Forces of Evil wrapped up it's drastically uneven series just around the time Disney+ was beginning to launch. The show had once been one of the finest shows Disney ever put onto one of their channels, with drama, comedy, heartfelt emotions and stunning animation. But the transfer from hand drawn animation to flash animation, combined with the show's increasingly convoluted storylines and misuse of characters resulted in a show that by Season 4 was limping it's way to completion instead of getting the fluid kind of finale everyone expected to get. It's unknown whether the faults of the series lay with the creative team or the executives at Disney who didn't want to stray too far from the status quo. But there was a steep and rocky crumbling from the peak of it's episodes (at least in my opinion) of "Bon Bon the Birthday Clown". It's never good to see a show limp it's way to a finale rather than end gracefully or even too early. I will take a hundred shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender if it means I never have to see another show like Lost or The Walking Dead drag on until everyone is sick of it.
And that's not to say people got sick of Star. The thing was, though, it felt like someone at Disney was definitely sick of it. The way they were telling the story from the start to the end of Season 3 seemed fluid and appropriate. Even midway into Season 4 things were tolerable though a bit too melodramatic to me. But the joy quickly died out as soon as they reached the episode "The Blood Moon Curse", which is the episode I believe they jumped the shark with. By that point, anyone with half a brain cell could tell where the show was going to go. And it's a shame. I'd rather some muddled water to come before the finale to a show I was truly wrapped around.
As I mentioned in a post five years ago (wow, I feel old), "Bon Bon the Birthday Clown" was not just the best episode of Star that had aired to that point, it was also one of the finest episodes of any show I had seen to that point. It made the characters grow and develop. Marco seemed to be veering off the expected path of choosing the eccentric magical princess and instead getting the confidence to date the girl he'd loved since kindergarten. Star seemed to be going down a dark path where she began to flirt with using evil spells and dark magic to get what she wanted, which now we knew included Marco. Everything was gearing for the season to end with one cataclysmic showdown after another. And the rest of Season 2 certainly delivered on this, putting the seemingly immortal Toffee up against Star and her mother with the fate of all Mewni hanging in the balance. On top of that, Star's feelings for Marco began to boil up to the surface after this episode and caused her to lose focus on many things. By the time Star leaves and Marco's world begins to crumble, we knew Season 3 was setting up to be a doozy with the Butterfly Family taking on their greatest enemy yet.
And Season 3 delivered...in it's first few episodes. The showdown with Toffee only lasted a short while, though I had expected it to take over the whole season. With Toffee gone and Marco and Star separating for their own worlds (Star becoming a full time Princess and Marco returning to Earth), things began to change for both of them. Now, it was Marco who was beginning to realize he missed Star and Star was the one who was finding her world changing for the better. She found and reunited with her ancestor, the powerful former Queen Eclipsa and had even begun another relationship with her ex boyfriend Tom. Marco's intrusion back into her life was mirroring Star's involvement in Marco's life. Marco would ultimately become Star's squire, but would find himself realizing he actually did love Star, only to see her happy with someone else. Marco seemed to find solace in his squiring duties and in a new friend and confidant in Kelly.
Who replaced Toffee as a villain? Why, Miss Heinous from the Perfect Princess school, of course. In a shocking twist, not only is it revealed that the Magical High Council stripped Eclipsa of her power because of her love and affinity of monsters, but that Star and her mother weren't actually descendants of Eclipsa, but of a commoner who was raised as Eclipsa's daughter. If that was the case, did Eclipsa have a child? Why yes, yes she did. And it was none other than Miss Heinous herself, who is revealed near the end of the season to be the half Mewni-half Monster child known as Meteora Butterfly. She proves to be too powerful to control and Eclipsa is forced to take her daughter down...and by down I mean she makes her an infant again. With Eclipsa restored as the rightful Queen of Mewni, Marco continuing to serve as Star's squire and Meteora back in place, everything seemed hunky dory and Star could go out on a high note.
Oh how wrong we were...
Season 4 was where the show truly began to derail. Marco ultimately succeeds in his quest to be named a Knight and is tasked with guarding the Earth from the likes of evil and Monsters. He even seems to be rebounding quite well from missing out on Star with Kelly, whom he starts to date after the episode "Kelly's World." Everyone seems happy and things are progressing naturally to the point where the show subverted our expectations and gave us a show where for the first time in memory, the lead two characters don't end up together, even if fate had something to say about it.
Because they deal with that in the episode. "The Blood Moon Curse". Tom confesses to Star and Marco that the whole point of the Blood Moon Ball from Season 1 was so that he and Star could be destined to be together, but Marco and Star were bound by that at the same time. So, he takes the two to have the curse broken so everyone can be happy, as Star chose Tom this time around and Marco was getting things going with Kelly. But then they had to show the two dancing to end the curse. And in that scene, we learn that both Star and Marco believe that the Curse had nothing to do with how they felt towards one another. Maybe it was another fake out?
Oh how wrong we were...
Only a few episodes later, Marco and Kelly have abruptly stopped seeing each other and Tom breaks up with Star for completely unexplained reasons. This, coinciding with the rising prominence of another former side character Mina, a crazed monster killer, made the last few episodes of Season 4 truly a chore to sit through. You know Star needs to destroy magic so that the worlds could exist without wars and conflicts between monsters and non monsters. You know that with both Star and Marco free from their previous relationships, the two were going to end up together. And with all of the normal subversions rerouted, we know that Disney would never end a show on a somber note and that even if the two end up separated by all the powers of the universe, that they would still find a way back to each other.
This show proved to me a few things with it's lackluster final season. The first thing, is that even though a show has the chance to buck trends and subvert expectations, there's a very good chance they won't. I mean, this is Disney. If they had kept The Last Jedi's ending and not completely retconned it in the final episode, that would have shown they were a studio with conviction. Disney was not going to have an episodic show end when it's two of age romantic pairings weren't together. This isn't even a trend that's unfamiliar to Disney. Penn Zero, Kim Possible, Star Wars Rebels, The Emperor's New School, Beavis and Butthead (whatever that lousy platypus show was) even something as vacuous and inane as The Lion Guard did it. Gravity Falls was the only show I can think of that bucked the trend and that was because the main emotional tether for that show was between brothers Stanley and Stanford and then of course with Dipper and Mabel (plus, it would have been weird to see Dipper and Wendy get together considering the age gap).
The second thing I learned, chiefly from a writer's perspective, is that you cannot go into a show like this without knowing who the main antagonist is going to be. Ludo is a comically inept villain, so you know he wouldn't be the one on top in the end. Toffee and Meteora were both excellent candidates, but both were quite thoroughly disposed of by the end of Season 3. Mina cannot be introduces as a comically bonkers hero for Star in one episode and then turned into a vicious killer in another random one. There needs to be setup, payoff, consequences for it. Mina just seems to suddenly resurface as a villain, almost as if Disney wanted to extend the show, realized how much it was gonna cost and then said just wrap it up in Season 4 with Meteora and Toffee both disposed of. There was no reasoning behind just slapping Mina on as a villain, outside of there being literally no other candidates left. And I think that's a little unfair, as they wrote many one time villains into the show that could have filled he slot. Heck, even one of the Magical High Council could have served that role, like Heckapoo or perhaps even Star's mother. But Mina only works if that episode was one of the more memorable ones from Season 2. And let's be frank, it wasn't.
The third and most depressing thing about the way this show ended is that shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender are an exception to the rule and not the rule itself. This will also have something to do with another post I'm writing about The Empire Strikes Back, but chiefly I mean that more shows end with lackluster finales than quality ones. Nickelodeon has never had a finale for a show pan out quite like Avatar's did. Disney has not been able to replicate Gravity Falls ending and the way they forced a fourth season out of Kim Possible knows they don't understand the right time to end a show. Cartoon Network either drags shows on for way too long or ends them too abruptly. It's not just Disney doing this, as plenty of other networks and shows follow this trend of just limping to the finish line (Looking at YOU Game of Thrones!). But Star is a prime example of it. If you're setting yourself up for an exciting ending for one of your favorite shows, you are more likely to get a dud than you are a worthwhile ending to all the years you've put into a show like this.
I gotta be honest with you guys, sitting through this show again was one of the most thankless and depressing things I've ever had the displeasure of doing for the blog. It hurt to see such potential go to waste, but I'm think I'm beginning to become desensitized to it. After all, I've been getting through revisiting Game of Thrones and the Disney Remakes, as well as Kingdom Hearts III fairly well enough. I just wish I could get one more show like Avatar that can shine brightly and win me over for it's entire run. Unfortunately, none of these companies seem keen on doing that at this time. Guess I'll have to move on to Netflix or something...
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