Strawberry Shortcake 2003 Review

Berry Bad Adventures

After watching all 3 generations of Strawberry Shortcake cartoons (The 80s cartoon, 2003 cartoon which is the one i’m reviewing and Berry Bitty Adventures) I can honestly say that this one is the weakest. It suffers from common things that cartoons aimed at 5-10 year old girls in the early-mid 2000’s suffered from.

For starters, it amazes me that you would make a show for little kids and have characters this BLAND. Each character is equally boring and they don’t have much of a personality. They act certain ways only when the plot demands it. For example there is one episode where two characters become selfish and greedy while digging up sand dollars, it’s very obvious that they only acted that way so that the plot would be able to move on. You neither expect that from them or are surprised due to the fact that they are all just hollow shells. It’s like “Oh this episode deals with getting over shyness, lets make one of the characters shy for this episode”. This might keep the attention of three year olds due to the colorful (otherwise mediocre) animation. But Five and Six year-olds who are starting to understand and fully comprehend what people are talking about in conversations and pick up on a characters mannerisms will get bored fast.

The voice acting is HORRENDOUS. The characters are either really high pitched or incredibly monotone. The high pitched characters give of very little emotion while the monotone characters show none. Characters will have the exact same emphasis in there voice whether they have found something exciting or have been slapped across the face with a giant strawberry. I really don’t see how you plan to entertain kids with such dull voice acting.

The plot is next to nonexistent. They should have made 2 or 3 segments per episode instead of dragging one story on for 20 min. since it’s clear the writers don’t know how to do that. The episodes center around the typical formula where a character or characters discover a problem and must fix it, whether it’s a physical problem or an emotional problem. The issue with this is that there are hardly ever any twists and turns in the process of solving the issue. It’s just lets get from point A to point B and throw in some crappy songs to fill the time.

Oh and lets not forget the songs. They are awful. They aren’t catchy, they don’t rhyme and are altogether just unpleasant to listen to. The lyrics for these songs makes me want to cry and not in a good way. I’m sure many of you have been bored and sang a random song to a random tune, while singing didn’t follow the tune all the way and just made up words as you went along. That literally sums up every song in this show.

Most of the people I see giving this show good reviews are people who grew up with the show. To those people I must say that I am glad that they were able to get a kick out of the series (It lasted 4 seasons and had a CGi feature film, it must have done something right). But this show will struggle to hold the interests of Kids today. Even Dora the Explorer has much more exciting episodes (and I despise that football headed hybrid of Stewie Griffin and “Teach me Spanish” computer game). The show has poor writing, poor voice acting and mediocre animation.

I highly recommend you check out the 1980’s Strawberry Shortcake specials or watch “Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Bitty Adventures” instead.

NOT RECOMMENDED