(Image Courtesy of Society of Virtue).
Considering a new video is put out every Friday, the animation quality is very high and clearly borrowing from the style of early Hanna-Barbera cartoons such as Scooby-Doo and Jonny Quest.
Article by Jacob Borislow, AKSM News
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written…well, anything on this blog so I apologize for that but now that I’ve adjusted to my new job and schedule I plan to write a lot more articles and already have some great ideas to talk about with you guys. We will come back from my well-deserved (I already wrote two whole articles after all) break to have another Sunday Spotlight! The name does a fairly good job of explaining what this feature is but at least once a month on Sunday, I will be featuring and discussing someone or something that I feel isn’t getting the attention they deserve. Today’s topic is the YouTube animated pop-culture parody channel Society of Virtue which as of this writing has 278 thousand subscribers. A rule I’m going to try to hold myself to is for each Sunday Spotlight which is on a YouTuber I’m going to try for smaller and smaller channels to help bring to the public’s attention even more indie channels that deserve more attention.
Now that all the business has been taken care of, let’s dive into the YouTube channel Society of Virtue. As I briefly mentioned, the channel features weekly animated shorts taking place in the channel’s own original universe which offers a wide array of original (but usually parody) heroic characters in various everyday and not-so-everyday scenarios.
Considering a new video is put out every Friday, the animation quality is very high and clearly borrowing from the style of early Hanna-Barbera cartoons such as Scooby-Doo and Jonny Quest. The look is probably not the only aspect the channel borrows from Hanna-Barbera which would help explain how they can put out videos so quickly. Early Hanna-Barbera cartoons often reused animations either directly or with small changes to save time, cost, and be doable with the number of staff the studio had. The same seems to be true with Society of Virtue which often only changes the faces and shows post-movement frames (a hand is immediately cut to being on someone’s face when they are in shock rather than the actual transition being shown). These small and honestly not very noticeable changes help keep the animation quality high even when they ultimately do only amount to high facial movements and slight other movements.
The animation may be for a weekly show high quality but that of course means nothing without some fun and quality plots of the shorts. While every video I have seen can be watched with no prior knowledge, there are overarching plots and recurring character tropes which can be appreciated such as several of the videos featuring the character Jonathan (he has the superhero alias Flaring Roach but is usually just called Jonathan) teaming up with a prostitute named Samantha (always just Samantha) who is much more adept at saving the day than he is. There are a range of stories that are used which are sometimes clearly tyed into what movies are coming out such as the Shazam-based character Bordam being used mainly when the Shazam! movie was coming out but typical videos just use the channel’s characters. The videos are genuinely funny, creative and the amount of effort to create distinct and engaging stories is extremely evident. Animation Youtube channels are unfortunately a dying breed and so it is more important than ever to support the channels that still do animation, especially those that do more than just “story-time” videos as much as I do appreciate that type of video as well.
The recurring characters, although many of them are parodies of pre-existing properties, are all great and still differentiate themselves from their original sources. Some of the characters who feature in the videos are the team I already discussed of Jonathan and Samantha, the rough and tough drinker Jack who is a parody of Wolverine, Majestic whose very scantily clad outfit is a parody of many of the costumes women wear in comic books, the crossdressing spy Ginger Panther, and the Society of Virtue themselves consisting of the parodies of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and others that you would expect but still somehow feeling fresh and different among all the many other parodies out there.
The videos are typically only 3-5 minutes and so I seriously suggest checking out a few of them to see if it is for you and if you see a video-based off a character you already enjoy then it is even better to see what spin the channel put on the character’s classic mythos. My personal favorites are the Jonathan and Samantha stories as well as the Ginger Panther stories with the most recent Ginger Panther video “Accidental Spies” being especially entertaining. Feel free to let me know in the comments what you thought of the channel (both good and bad) and if you have any suggestions for YouTube channels I should check out that are similar to Society of Virtue either in animation or pop culture parodies.