My thoughts on Tooned

Image courtesy of www.imdb.com

Hello you, my name is Luca but you can call me Luca. So I'm somewhat of a Formula One fan, I say somewhat because being on social media during the Grand Prix can be depressing with the amount of toxicity that there is. I can say though with certainty that the best years watching F1 for me, even though the driver I disliked the most was dominating, were the years that Britain's two most recent champions drove for the same team.

Starting in 2010, McLaren had both Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button, Hamilton having won the championship with them in 2008 (and would later go onto win the 2014 and 2015 championships with Mercedes) and Button coming into the team having won the 2009 championship in complete and utter fairy-tale fashion with the Brawn GP team. From then until 2012 when Hamilton moved to Mercedes, you'd know what merchandise would be sold the most when you went to Silverstone.

Even with arguably, F1's best driver in Fernando Alonso from Spain (The 2005 and 2006 champion) moving to McLaren in 2015 to partner Button, it didn't cause anywhere near as much a stir as the two British champion drivers. I have to admit, when it was announced that Hamilton was moving to Mercedes, my heart broke, and whilst obviously it turned out to be a great move since Merc became the dominating force and McLaren are now, well.. at the back with a horrible Honda engine, the fact that my two favourite drivers would no longer be team mates sucked.

As team mates, Hamilton and Button had a great battle with Button becoming the first team mate to beat Hamilton over the course of a racing season, and their time together was made that even more special when I got home from the 2012 British Grand Prix to find some weird animated segment on Sky Sports F1's broadcast with Hamilton and Button. That being called 'Tooned'.

The formula (Pun intended) was simple, Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button both muck around at the expense of McLaren's head of engineering Professor M, voiced by British comedian Alexander Armstrong whilst they are testing out a load of high-tech equipment mainly at the McLaren Technology Centre. It was a sitcom during its first season, and it had a great platform on which it could build.

Because McLaren were a British team and their two drivers were not only British, but very contrasting characters, so the Framestore studio and directors Chris Waitt and Henry Trotter had a lot to play with in regards to the British sense of humour considering also they were playing up to a British audience. Even for a pair who aren't normally voice actors, Hamilton and Button took up the series incredibly well, with Hamilton coming off of the back of his cameo in Cars 2 (and will also be in the new Cars 3 movie as a different character) but despite that, Button was much more at home due to his charismatic charm being more prone to seamlessly comedic moments.

It was heading into season two where my problems are brought up, that being in 2013 after Hamilton had left McLaren and therefore Tooned as well, and the man brought in to replace him was Sergio Pérez, who if you can't tell, is Mexican.

Image courtesy of www.framestore.com

I have nothing against Pérez but even if he had not had any characteristics to play upon for the jokes and narrative to play around with, I wouldn't know because Tooned went a drastically different direction for 2013. What they did was, they instead told the story of (Nearly) all of McLaren's champions and its founder Bruce McLaren, since it was McLaren's 50th anniversary that year.

Adding onto the cast of Armstrong as Professor M, along with Jenson Button and Sergio Pérez, there was an old Scottish man - voiced by Brian Cox - who came along to the celebratory event that Professor M was hosting to celebrate the 50th anniversary and took over in order to tell the story of McLaren, as he claims to have been there for all of it. You had an episode focusing on Bruce McLaren, then onto all of McLaren's champions starting at the beginning with Emerson Fittipaldi, then with James Hunt, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna and Mika Häkkinen. (They couldn't do an episode on Niki Lauda and Lewis Hamilton since they're both contracted to Mercedes, though a parody of Lauda was used in the James Hunt episode).

All the surviving champions returning to voice themselves, and with James Hunt's son Tom and Ayrton Senna's nephew Bruno voicing their father and uncle who are both no longer with us, but I have no clue who voiced Bruce McLaren. Funnily enough, rumours were floating around that Hunt was voiced by Thor actor Chris Hemsworth, who portrayed Hunt in the film Rush, set to be released later that year. This fact however turned out not to be true.

I did welcome this concept but with no room left to do typical Tooned, season two left the series in a bit of identity crisis and since Pérez left McLaren after 2013, Button was set to be joined by yet another different team mate for the following year. But the Tooned series stopped and has only kept going in the form of a Mobil 1 motor oil educational series where Button, Pérez and Professor M were joined by three-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Tony Stewart, and into 2014 with Pérez's replacement at McLaren, Denmark's Kevin Magnussen.

Image courtesy of www.framestore.com

Having Magnussen play a very level headed 'teacher's pet' if you will made for some amusing moments when Button and Stewart would lark about, made for some great exchanging of dialogue. There was a lot of potential here but the series did seem to grind to a halt and it still is on hold, I do have some news on its future that I will get to soon but I know what's wrong with Tooned.

I've seen this sort of thing before, and I call it an 'Eddsworld situation'. Eddsworld was a web animated show ran by a man named Edd Gould, and it was a simple yet very charming concept where Gould would just draw him and his real life friends, including Thomas Ridgewell (Better known on YouTube as TomSka), Matt Hargreaves and Tord Larsson, and they would go on various adventures that would range from saving Christmas, going into space or heading down the toilet to Atlantis.

The issue with the show arose in 2008 when Tord Larsson didn't want his character to be in the show anymore due to the attention he was receiving from fans, so Edd wrote Tord out and the show became locked in with the characters Edd, Matt and Tom. Ridgewell ran the show after Gould passed away in 2012 after a long battle with cancer, up until last year where he handed control back over to Edd's family and leaving the show.

I think Tooned has a very similar problem, that ever since Hamilton left and there didn't seem to be any opportunity for some comedy but it has not maintained a consistent cast over the years and it didn't maintain a particular method of narrative and style. The contrast between the sitcom style first season and the cinematic season two, I'm not sure if it did any good for the show because if there is a season three, I imagine it will revert back to season one's style but now there's a bigger concern.

Image courtesy of www.mclaren.com

To celebrate 40 years since James Hunt won the 1976 world championship, McLaren put out a special Tooned episode where they pretty much repeated the James Hunt episode from Tooned season two but with Jenson Button talking to Fernando Alonso (fourth team mate in four years) in the modern day as well.

After nearly two years away, McLaren confirmed only a few days before this one-off video was released that Tooned would be making a comeback. With Fernando Alonso, and McLaren's Belgian newcomer Stoffel Vandoorne, maybe with Button involved in some way since he's still contracted to McLaren. I imagine we will see the first episode probably during Sky Sports F1's build-up to this year's British Grand Prix on July 16th.

I'm obviously very happy that Button may still be involved though I believe it will be to a much lesser degree now that he doesn't race in F1 full time, but the fact that he may still be in it means we can laugh since he's proven himself to be very funny quite easily. Alonso and Vandoorne on the other hand? I'd be happy to be proven wrong but Alonso's lines in the Hunt special didn't particularly, flow off of the pages and sound convincing as also didn't Vandoorne's small cameo at the end of that episode.

I want this series to succeed as I love the concept of Tooned, but I do have some way of redeeming it. Having struggled to think of the word all evening, Button carried this series because of his wit and great comedic timing so having him in this supposedly upcoming series of Tooned is a no brainer, but the lack of consistency in regards to the characters and the series' struggle to write around them due to racing drivers not always being naturally funny or even very flowing with what they say, but there is huge potential.

McLaren as a team has proven themselves to very in tune with the future and technology, I saw someone suggest Ferrari should do a show like this and I'm not sure that would work since Ferrari are still fairly old fashioned. Anyway, I got off track there (Pun intended), seeing in Tooned a team that had access to such incredible technology that you'd think would never exist outside of fiction, makes for some great scenes and how they all play off in the actions that Button and Hamilton would end up doing.

But more so than any of that, having a British audience who are accustomed to British humour, with lead characters who can easily commit to that made season one of Tooned work and you never had too much in the way of conflicting elements. Which is why despite the fact that my main pull to this show being seeing my two favourite drivers, I stayed because the comedy and the ability to write around Button and Hamilton as characters and not real life people was why I stayed, and I know for a fact that the reason I was pulled into the show was because of their presence means that what I am about to propose will be negated immediately.

I want to see a proper Tooned like show, but without any of the real life elements like the real drivers voiced by themselves. A team like McLaren with their futuristic setting, with two British drivers who are written with very contrasting personality traits but meet the expectations of the British sense of humour, and a no-nonsense boffin like Professor M to take a lot of the hits in the comedic scenes.

That way, having fictional characters means you no longer risk losing them if circumstance dictates that a certain person will have to have their character written out. If Professor M had instead been Martin Whitmarsh when Tooned started, he would have been forced out of Tooned then we would have had Ron Dennis but after Dennis left McLaren at the end of last year, we would then have had Zak Brown. See what I mean?

With Button having been joined by Hamilton, then Pérez, Magnussen and Alonso, then Vandoorne joining, it's hard to maintain a grip on a show when the characters keep coming and going. With fictional characters, it won't cause any of those headaches and having a show like this born out of the ashes of Tooned should this show unfortunately fail, I reckon the fictional character version of Tooned would be successful if it shows links to the McLaren version.

So this pretty much is what I think, if Tooned had kept a consistent cast with two British drivers, it would have worked out. I do hope this apparent upcoming season of Tooned with a Spaniard and a Belgian driver isn't what I fear it will be, I am happy to be proven wrong.

That will be all for now, everyone. Hope you did enjoy my article on Tooned, all episodes are available via McLaren's YouTube channel if I'm not mistaken, so go check them out if you aren't already aware of them. Oh one last thing, if Tooned is 'rebooted', could we see that pigeon or parrot brought back in some way, Cosworth was its name I believe, from the last episode of season one. He was a legend.

Alright! If you like what you've seen and want to see more, either follow me on Twitter @TheLucaFormat or put your email in the Follow By Email option that you can find on the right hand side of your screen if you're on laptop. Hopefully, we will meet again.

So until we do.
Luca.