8BitKid: Living Bit by Bit

My not-so-guilty Saturday morning cartoon guility pleasure has been Cartoon Network’s “Ben 10″ for a while now.  It is the story of a kid who finds an alien watch, called the “Omnitrix”, that allows him to shift his DNA to a variety of different alien forms, each with distinct abilities, in order to fight intergalactic n’er do wells.  He travels around the country with his grandfather, Max, and his cousin, Gwen in a motor home solving crimes and keeping order in an alien-infested world.  This weekend I watched the debut episode of the new season: “Ben 10 Alien Force”.

I forget at which precise point I stumbled across this show two years ago, but it struck me a well-written and fun adventure series.  Recently, the studio decided to relaunch the show.  In a brilliant move rarely seen in american animation, the creators felt that the time was right to get away from the “villain of the week” cycle and take the chance on exploring what would happen to the characters and their adventures once they got older.

For this season they accelerated Ben Tennyson and company 5 years into the future.  Ben is now a high-schooler who has retired his super-hero spurs and Gwen is continuing her over-achiving and excelling at martial arts.  The pilot opens with Ben and Gwen enjoying a normal life, but this all changes when they discover that their Grandpa, Max, has gone missing.  Their investigation into his whereabouts quickly gets them wrapped up in an alien arms deal, and it becomes apparent that Max’s disappearance has some serious implications beyond his absence.  Ben makes the decision to “go hero” once again and dons the Omnitrix.  However, the Omnitrix behaves differently this time around and Ben is presented with a variety of new alien forms to utilize.  As they fight their way through the first episode, their former foe, Kevin Levin, joins them in their search for Grandpa.  The three of them defeat their alien, arms-dealing foe, but find that they have just scratched the intergalactic surface of unraveling the mystery surrounding Grandpa Max’s disappearance.

In terms of evolving the series, I really appreciate that they decided to do this overhaul before the show got stale.  The characters have more nuanced personalities, and they have clearly matured.  The show also featured a darker feel, both in terms of color palette and tone.  I was initially reluctant to take the plunge into “Alien Force”, and so I let the new episodes languish on my Tivo out of fear that the retooling would ruin a series I really enjoyed.  Luckily, the creators assuaged my doubts with the pilot, and I am looking forward to watching the new adventures unfold.