This is a bit of a odd one for me since I figured I wouldn't be writing for a online show so soon, but this show is getting around to a third season, so I figured I should talk about it since it's such a relatively unknown little internet show.
It's fairly short- you can clear all the main content in barely a hour. Some episodes barely get to a minute long in length, even. Yet, it's still interesting enough to talk about, and given it's relative obscurity, I might as well cover it.
So as far as I can tell, "Season 1" consists of everything from episode 1 to 4? I assume this also includes some other content, but it kind of seems the scope of the series kind of outpaced what was possible with a monthly production schedule for each episode, so episode 5 marked the start of a new "batch/season". If this sounds slightly confusing, it is, because the creator hasn't seemed to mark what a season consists of at this point.
Sublo and Tangy Mustard comes from a crew member that worked on Bojack Horseman and Tuca and Bertie, as well as some other projects, but that dna is absolutely on display, especially by the fourth episode. The series kind of has a happy-go-lucky nature to the entire thing that stays (mostly) grounded, and it's really more of Sublo and Tangy Mustard being bad at their jobs while their boss operates on whatever insane logic he needs to be on for it to actually be the thing they should be doing, while their co-worker Katy tends to be the straight man to their shenanigans.
The series pretty quickly and efficiently paces itself around it's core concept, which is two guys in mascot costumes dancing on the street for a sub shop that never seems to get any actual customers in these first four episodes. The fourth episode proves to be the biggest deviation, and a really important one for the show as it goes further, as it shows that removing them from this enviroment can actually be more interesting, even if it's a bit of a tone shift.
The first episode, entitled "First Day", is less of a origin story than you'd think- you will never see Sublo and Tangy Mustard out of their costumes. They will never be called anything else. The opening of the episode is an old ad for Subpar that kind of shows the origin point for the costumes and then we're introduced to the characters proper pretty quickly and you get a good idea for their personalities. Since these episodes are so short, it does leave me with a lack to really talk about much of the plot- ultimately it's just setting up the rules for the show at it's most basic. Tangy Mustard can't take off his costume and that leads into his boss yelling at him, attracting a costumer, which is the victory condition of the story. Short and sweet.
The animation for the show is actually mostly derived from a bunch of shortcuts and simple measures to make it dead-easy to animate to the creator's liking, but I actually really like it. It captures a very grounded sense of animation but also gets extremely cartoony from frame to frame, which fits the show's world in a way. Characters stumble and impuslively move- and you see their asscracks when they bend over, but they also leap over the counter and get very extreme when they yell.
Out of this batch, I'd argue episode 2 ("Mascot Melee") is actually the weakest, as it feels sort of a repeat of episode 1 but with a better ending. It kind of reflects the sort of thinking the show has when it just comes up with it's best friends dynamic for Sublo and Tangy Mustard, and they stay very much best friends for the entire run at least as of writing. I do like the ending a lot though, Katy just in disbelief as you hear broken glass in the background as Sublo and Tangy Mustard dance.
Episode 3 (entitled "Inspirational Art") does a lot more character work for Katy than anyone else, but has one of my favorite gags from this season where Katy points to a swatsika on Sublo's photo of a submarine that he's hung up to decorate the sandwich shop, and he just claims he'll cover it up, and Katy reveals a second flag behind her head that he struggles to cover up at the same time before finally just discarding of it. It's interesting that Katy says she went to an art college, and in season 2 we'll have more of a focus episode around her artistic abilities that kind of implies she doesn't even understand the fundamentals. I wonder how much she actually knows or if she just sucks at painting and just majored in something else that ended up not being a passion for her?
The last episode of the batch is the show at it's most ambitious, and puts the show in an argubably much more interesting direction with where it wants to go. Sublo and Tangy Mustard aren't at the sandwich shop anymore, they're at Katy's house, and Katy gets to be more of her own character here, especially given she's drunk for most of it. At a staggering 6 minutes in length, this is where the show begins to kind of break away from it's Regular Show-style dynamic of Sublo and Tangy Mustard just being bros and gives a little more pathos. These are social situtations with real sort of stakes, even as Sublo and Tangy Mustard continue to look like, and even to a extent, still act like cartoon characters. The show never really commits to giving either of them a deeper social stake yet, but you can already tell Tangy Mustard thrives in a public enviroment while Sublo is a more introverted character.
The sheer ambition in this episode to do a party scene with multiple new characters, with an much more cramped house enviroment. While none of Katy's friends are all that deep, they still are relatively characterized, and Katy herself reams between party girl to the straight man to Sublo and Tangy Mustard, often swinging between those two states in scenes. It's a promising direction for her character, as it allows her to be much more dynamic than the usual. The characters are going to know each other on a much more personal level after this point.
