My Review of All Hail King Julien · 10:06pm Sep 15th, 2022
My TV Show Rating Score:
5/5: It is an awesome show!
4.5/5: it is a great show albeit not perfect
4/5: It’s a good show with minor flaws
3/5: It’s overall okay/guilty pleasure
2/5: It’s bad but not awful
1/5: Look, up in the sky! It’s super bad!
0/5: MY EYEEEESSS!!!
Greetings, everyone! This is Mr. J back with another TV show review for today! This evening, I will be reviewing a Netflix original series entitled: All Hail King Julien from 2014 per the request of A Man Undercover! Coming from someone who grew up and watched the Madagascar trilogy along with the The Penguins of Madagascar TV series, this was a fine addition within the franchise. In fact, I immensely enjoyed watching this show for its character development, story, character arcs, and the obvious type of humor it went for. However, this show has some flaws that somewhat annoys me when it comes to certain running gags or jokes that felt unnecessary and out of place. Not to mention that it has a certain unlikable season which I will address later in this review. But still, I liked both the premise and the story structure of the show.
This series serves as a prequel to the first Madagascar movie, explaining how Julien rose to power and how he functioned as the king of the lemurs. His crafty uncle sets him up as the new king just to be fossa food until the young prince instantly grew to enjoy the power and kicks off a wacky yet unforgettable journey throughout his rule over the kingdom.
Seeing how deeply invested Danny Jacobs was in his voice-over role for King Julien, I couldn't help but admire his every line of dialogue; seriously, you cannot deny how over-the-top and in-character he was just like before...which says a lot about how much he cared for the character, I'm sure. While I enjoyed his vocal performance for that, there were moments in the series that showed him doing something stupid or batshit crazy which kinda irritated me. Maybe that was the point of those moments, I guess? Huh, even Maurice or Clover would consistently groan at those moments, so I'm not alone.
Speaking of Clover, I love her in this show. She was ferocious, impulsive, foolhardy, yet humorous in her own cute way. Considering the fact she never once appeared in the original trilogy--much less the first movie--I was expecting the final season to explain why she never appeared in the films, and they did just that. Her marriage and chemistry with Sage was well-written and had a solid pay-off. I can tell India de Beaufort and Jeff Bennett had so much fun voicing these characters (and for Bennett to voice several other characters too).
As for the season Exiled, that is frankly my least favorite season out of them all. The plot was all over the place and felt so disorganized overall; in every episode, there were three primary subplots happening simultaneously which took me out of the experience. Julien is trying to find his way back into the kingdom, Mort and the other lemurs are trying to escape from Koto, Clover and Sage must discover the hidden weapon to defeat Koto, Julien has to recruit an army--there was too much happening. Two subplots would have been much more preferable for each episode so that the season would flow more cohesively, in my opinion. With that said, that season could have been so much better.
Those are the only issues I have with this show; despite that, all the other seasons had very interesting slice-of-life type of episodes with applicable morals and lessons to learn from. Plus, the series gave Julien and Maurice better character growth and writing. We can clearly see that Maurice actually cares about Julien no matter how many times he finds some of his antics annoying and idiotic. Even if he was originally payed to be his friend, he eventually grew to like him, and he always stood by his side--regarding him not only as his king but also as his best friend and brother, unlike how previous iterations of him depicted him as someone who dislikes Julien or wants to dethrone him or something. Both characters love each other despite some of their differences and stood together till the end. Tom McGrath and Eric Darnell did a great job making this show.
In conclusion, I will rate this a solid 4/5: all hail a great story!
Peace!
There were times Juilen was a good king
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A good, brilliant, idiotic king with a big heart.
"I like to move it, move it-"
God, that song is STILL stuck in my head!
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Yep. Overall, better than his uncle
I LIKE TO MOVE IT, MOVE IT!
Sorry, couldn't resist. XD
I'm so happy that you enjoyed this show, Dude. I was worried that you wouldn't because there were some aspects that I knew you'd likely have an issue with, which were aspects that I too wasn't particularly fond of. But, it's wonderful that you had fun with it regardless.
And I agree with you about "Exiled". I thought it was interesting what they were going for with the overall season, but the amount of subplots and character-switching in each episode caused everything to feel too all over the place. It would've been way more enjoyable if they separated every character arc into their own individual episodes instead of cramming them all in at once, because then things wouldn't have felt so disorienting.
Out of curiosity…
Were there any villainous characters in the show that particularly stood out to you in a good way?
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Karl and Uncle King Julien. Those dudes were the best.
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I agree.
Karl in particular was my favorite villain of the series, in large part because of his charming personality and Dwight Schultz’s performance.
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His rivalry with Julien reminded me so much of The Joker in his dealings with Batman. It’s another reason why I liked Karl as a villain.
I kinda wished that Clover joined King Julien, Maurice, and Mort when they joined the Zoosters in the later movies.