Can we fix it? Yes we can!
Bob the Builder is a British children's animated series that aired from 1998 in the UK (2001 in the US) to 2012. The 2015 series started in 2015 and it's created by Keith Chapman (who also created other cartoons for the UK, and one made Canadian cartoon for Nickelodeon called PAW Patrol). The franchise is currently on its last episode of the third season of the 2015 series and the next Bob the Builder show with the 1998-2011 designs and a revival of the franchise is yet to happen sometime in 2021 or 2022.
Why It Rocks
- The stop-motion animation is wonderful for 1998 standards.
- The theme song is very catchy and fun to listen to.
- The voice acting is great, not to mention that some character's voices including Lofty's voice is pretty cute.
- Likeable characters such as Scoop, Roley, Muck, Dizzy, Lofty, and Travis and some really funny ones like Spud the Scarecrow.
- This show has a cartoony style, which works really well.
- The CGI in Ready, Steady, Build! was also pretty good and takes an interesting approach by making the CGI imitate the look of the models rather than do what shows like Thomas & Friends did with redesigning the characters and buildings into CGI.
- It provides great morals for kids, such as working together.
- Rob Rackstraw doing a lot of voices in the UK dub for other characters in the series is really impressive.
- The album version of "Can We Fix It?" is catchy as the original theme song, and it reached Christmas #1 in 2000 during its major success in the United Kingdom.
- Similarly, their cover of Mambo No.5 became number one in UK Singles Charts in 2001.
- It had some great specials like "A Christmas To Remember", "Snowed Under", "Built to Be Wild" and etc.
- Elton John even made a guest appearance in one of the specials.
Bad Qualities
- While Ready Steady Build is pretty good, the stories can get pretty formulaic and repetitive at times, this also applies to some episodes in the Project Build It series. Though the repetitiveness in those series nowhere near as bad as it is in the reboot.
- The US dub is (arguably) not as good the UK version, while the voices are okay, they don't seem to capture the same charm as the UK version does. Though, a lot of Americans loved the US dub of the show. Project Build It improved it a bit.
- While Project Build It’s US dub is an improvement to the dub from the Original Series, Greg Proops's voice for Bob in the US doesn't sound as good as the other US voice given by William Dufris. He also makes Bob sound too much like Fred from Scooby-Doo.
- Despite being male in the UK dub, Muck was changed to female in the US dub for some reason, it is very unnecessary to change him to a female as no one was complaining about the lack of females in this show, not to mention that it is also confusing for fans of both the UK and US dub (though the reboot changed him back to a male character).
- While the animation in Ready Steady Build is pretty good, it can be jarring how the machines talk with their grill mouths as it looks weird for some characters (mainly Roley and Travis).
- Due to the fact that Project Build It was canceled, a lot was unsolved.
- Spud (from your point of view) can be really unlikable.
- The franchise massively went downhill ever since the 2015 reboot. Similar to Seasons 6-present of Fireman Sam, the franchise went downhill with a truckload of problems:
- The redesign looks way more realistic, which takes away the charm of the original.
- Many characters like Spud, Travis, Scrambler, Benny, Scratch, Gripper and Grabber, Scruffty and plenty of other characters were removed.
- Some of the main characters were flanderized.
- Scoop went from a sensible and reliable leader to a clumsy and careless goofball who messes everything up.
- Lofty went from a friendly, shy coward to a sarcastic, cynical, intelligent crane who isn’t scared of anything anymore.
- Muck went from being a funny but reliable vehicle, into a more dumber idiot who equally screws up like Scoop.
- It instructed kids NOTHING about how construction works and gave kids no morals at all.
- Some plots from each episode of the reboot were either rubbish, frustrating, boring, lackluster, repetitive, formulaic, or uninteresting.
- The Building Sequences are no longer fun to watch.
- Making things worse, they overuse the, "We Are A Team" Song all the time.