Time Bandits

Wonderfully quirky adventure. It has some scary bits, but the bad guys always undermine their scariness with silly asides. Historical references are often educational, and always fun.

This show is alright, but I do think young elementary kids may not handle the violence well and may not understand everything (such as some of the historical time periods). There is some violence, but really no characters suffer severe injuries. Violent comments, however, such as, peel your skin off, and slice your head, are frequent in the show. Purest Evil and his companions are very creepy, such as a demon, and a character with two heads, one where a stomach should be, Also Fianna, a witch demon like thing that shoots lasers through eyes. Also, the fact that they are bandits is not great role modeling. On the bright side though, the action is entertaining, the one-liners are pretty good. And the characters have a good personality. I finished the series, and I was glad I watched it, but it wasn't my favorite.

The trailer really made me want to like this, but in the end it just wasn't that great. Some well-timed, intelligent humor that will likely go over most kid's heads wasn't enough to overcome the many unoriginal and borrowed ideas that make up the meat of this show. While there are some great nods to moments in history, some re-imaged in a creative way, with fun characters, the overall story felt a bit rushed and made it hard to care much about any of the characters in any meaningful way. There are easily identifiable ideas that felt taken The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, pretty much any Roald Dahl book, Harry Potter's parent's and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. While those are all very different stories done far better, it made this show feel like something I've seen before. I almost always enjoy anything Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clements's name on it, but this wasn't one of their best attempts. Sure it had their trademark styles of humor, but it wasn't enough to overcome the aforementioned issues. While some of the darker characters are often portrayed as silly; visually and audibly there is healthy dose of scary, demonic creatures, especially the creature known as "The Huntress". Because of this I would easily skip this with little ones and only recommend for ages 13+ While there isn't much bad language that we encountered, the scary/demonic creature factor would make me slap a PG-13 label on it for sure. Perhaps others aren't as sensitive to this, but for our family it was enough to turn it off after a few episodes.