Prime Video’s latest cartoon hits hard and wild

Right from the start, The Boys Presents: Diabolical comes at you with the energy of MTV cartoon shows circa 1995. Each of eight animated shorts in The Boys spinoff opens with a title card featuring Terror, Billy Butcher’s sweet English bulldog. Each time, Terror is up to something disgusting but with a surreal twist, like chomping on a bone that’s kind of bloody and — oh yeah — is still attached to a human foot; or when he digs an IV bag full of blood from the trash and shakes it so violently that vital fluids splatter across the filthy alley. Just like that, I fall back into my memories of faves like The Maxx and Beavis and Butt-Head.

While each micro-story is the product of a different creator — including Aisha Tyler, Andy Samberg, Justin Roiland, Ilana Glazer, and Eliot Glazer — the overall collection is masterminded by The Boys core creative team, led by executive producers Eric Kripke, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg. As such, Diabolical is also very much a product of The Boys universe.

The live-action show’s cynicism about a superhero world shaped by humanity’s worst impulses is on display in every episode. So is the thoughtful sentimentality that keeps everything grounded. Looming in every short is Vought, the show’s fictional Disney-like corporate empire, which shields its diabolical metahuman experimentation behind the façade of a crowd-pleasing entertainment conglomerate.

The first episode, “Laser Baby’s Day Out,” perfectly captures the two sides of that dichotomous relationship. A Vought researcher, who works with the company’s medically altered metahuman babies, has developed a fondness for one little tyke in particular. But because her eye lasers only manifest involuntarily, she’s marked for termination. That is until her caretaker decides to take matters into his own hands.

Right from the very start, “The Boys Presents: Diabolical” comes at you with the energy of MTV shows circa 1995.

It’s not a spoiler to say that things get ridiculously blood-spattered from there. But what really stands out is how the whole episode is framed around the idea that we’re actually watching an in-universe animated short in the vein of Looney Tunes. There’s an unmistakably familiar jazzy score, and Porky Pig would be within his rights to sue over the “That’s all, Boys!” sign-off, a shameless (and clearly intentional) knock-off.

Each episode flirts with the basic question of what a human society turns into when the fantastical is made real and then subjected to the strains of our real-life modern world. This isn’t anything new for a show like The Boys (or Amazon’s excellent Invincible, which also has Rogen and Goldberg as EPs). But Diabolical introduces us to a sweeping landscape of many different human experiences that the main series can only touch on.

The anthology approach works because world-building is the true purpose here. Whether it’s a haggard Vought researcher’s slapstick antics as he pursues an escaped super-baby or two married “supes” going through a painful divorce, Diabolical twists its source material’s premise around the mundanities of daily life.

The series does all this while leaving space for individual creators to put their signatures on each episode. “Boyd in 3D,” from the sister-and-brother Broad City duo, Ilana Glazer and Eliot Glazer, is obsessed with New York City apartment life and social media escapades. It’s a sharp, modern relationship story that twists rom-com ideas into something darkly funny, violently raunchy, and more dementedly poignant than your typical Hollywood fare. Ilana’s fingerprints are all over this one.

Aisha Tyler’s episode, “Nubian vs Nubian,” puts a very “The Boys” twist on an unfolding divorce.
Credit: Amazon

Then there’s “An Animated Short Where Pissed-Off Supes Kill Their Parents,” which includes creative contributions from Rick & Morty co-creator Justin Roiland and Parker Simmons (OK K.O.! and Metalocalypse). Their episode is filled with splashes of each creator’s wild ideas, like the high-concept supe who has a speaker for a head, but that speaker can only ever play “I Only Wanna Be With You” by Hootie and the Blowfish. Also, can’t you just close your eyes and hear Rick Sanchez reading out the episode’s title?

Vought is the connective tissue that ties the anthology together. On top of anything else it’s doing from one short to the next, The Boys Presents: Diabolical is slowly and systematically revealing how modern society’s collective mental health is subtly twisted by a company with the reach and drawing power of Disney that also happens to be inherently evil and diversified into shady bio-engineering. Whether it’s a researcher putting his life on the line for a test subject he’s grown fond of or a group of disowned kids with useless powers brutally murdering the parents that abandoned them, these violent acts are all symptoms of Vought’s pervasive influence on the world.

Near the end of the two-year wait for Season 3 of The Boys, Diabolical is our bridge back into that world, reminding us of Vought’s role in it all. But it’s not just that. Each short is defined by a unique visual and conceptual signature that easily maps to the work of whoever created it.

This anthology series is technically one for the fans. It’d be easy to get lost in the details if this is your first exposure to the world of the live-action series. But The Boys has always been guided by the subversive sensibilities of creators who were raised on a diet of Mike Judge cartoons and ’90s music videos. We didn’t necessarily understand what was happening on Liquid Television at all times, but it was fun to watch anyway.

That seems to be the order of the day in The Boys Presents: Diabolical as well. You may not pick up on every plot point or follow every reference, and that’s OK. As long as you buckle in and keep your mind open to enjoying the ride, you’ll get eight too-brief stories that paint the picture of a deeply fucked up world and an evil Disney-like force that’s always pulling strings from behind the scenes. It’s dark and it’s jarring, but it’s also upsettingly, rivetingly familiar.

The Boys Presents: Diabolical debuts on Prime Video on March 4.