Clang Invasion

Starting this page off I should probably mention something important for clarification: I have lived in Canada for the entirety of my life up to now. As most of you may know if you've watched at least a handful of cartoon reviewers on YouTube, most Canadian cartoons since the mid-to-late-2000s are frequently cited as the worst type of media imaginable, be it for the cheap animation, cliched writing, jokes that only someone 12-15 or younger could laugh at, and gross-out humor years after most people stopped finding that amusing, not helped that Canadian content laws require a certain amount of those kind of shows to be pushed out quickly and consistently, making all those flaws even more glaring.

Unfortunately, I was around 12-15 at the time a lot of said shows started gaining traction, thus I did not give a hoot unless the main character(s) did something that abhorrent, and it wouldn't be until a few years later that I'd run into video reviews of them that I'd find out how hated they were. Even after that, though, I still sometimes come back to the shows that weren't nearly as hated as all the others (read: were obscure enough that no one noticed them) for a cheap thrill, Clang Invasion being one of them.

So stop me if you've heard this one: A trio of robotic aliens crash land on Earth in the backyard of a brother and sister. One of the aliens likes inventing shit that frequently causes wacky hijinks, usually from the brother doing something with them he shouldn't have. Other shit happens, including other aliens showing up for one reason or another, the kids asking the aliens to make something or otherwise help them out with a problem, a conspiracy theorist tries and fails to get the drop on them, etc., etc., etc. Admit it, one of you probably tried to stop me mid-paragraph, but this is text, so you can't exactly do that without opening Inspect or something.

As for the cast themselves, they're about what you'd expect. There's Rivet, the aforementioned inventor guy who's apparently voiced by a well-known-at-the-time Canadian comedian; he had a pretty dramatic and excitable personality, kinda like a more confident Flint Lockwood if I had to compare. Then there's Widgit, the girl one; kind, a bit naive, and usually happy to go along with whatever the hell the other guys were up to. And then there's Socket, the small one with the one wheel who constantly fell apart due to being an older model or something; a lot of jokes involving him centered around how easy he was to break, at least from what I can remember. After that, we have the kids -- Robin, the impulsive and slightly-selfish brother who sometimes causes the plot of the episode, and Daisy, the responsible voice-of-reason sister who nonetheless isn't above participating in the above-mentioned hijinks; if you've watched any cheap Canadian cartoon with a set status quo you could probably figure that one out on your own. They also have a dog, Sam, who is dense as hell and also can talk thanks to a thing Rivet built for him.

That's pretty much the gist of it, really. It also had an official website, but I never knew about it until a couple years ago and by then it was relegated to the "partially functional" club on the Wayback Machine. I watched it a lot while it was airing in the afternoon on YTV, but I can only really be arsed to remember a select few episodes, and even then just some of the major bits, which considering how bad my taste in media is today in general probably says a lot. I'm not even sure how it's managed to stick in my memory for this long.