Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes

Well, let me explain my heading.

Wedding Peach was an anime from the mid 1990's that ripped off the very popular anime at the time named Sailor Moon. I have never watched either anime because, since I don't speak Japanese, I hardly watch anime, but I heard about Wedding Peach from a guy on YouTube who made his list of his Top 20 Worst Animated Series from the 90's. You could also say that it's Sailor Moon minus everything that gave Sailor Moon structure. You know about those cool action scenes in Sailor Moon and the true feel of anime fighting-hero shows? Well, that's all absent in Wedding Peach. Instead of fully-developed heroes in sailor outfits attacking with strong powers and defeating demons, we get heroes devoid of any personality in stupid wedding dresses attacking by slapping hearts and flowers on everything and purifying demons.

When I first watched this show, I realize that this is a complete ripoff of PJ Masks, which I think is a really horrible show. And both PJ Masks and Kiya & The Kimoja Heroes have three kids going around fighting villains in their city that want to ruin everyone's fun, and learn a lesson along the way after making the same mistake more that twice. What is even more infuriating is that both PJ Masks and Kiya & The Kimoja Heroes were made by Hasbro and aired on Disney Junior. After that, I began to wonder: What happened to you, Hasbro? You were better than this!

Now that I know this show exists and what it's basically about, I am beginning to fear that Hasbro became in 2015 what Hanna-Barbera became in the 1970's (because according to Mr. Enter, Hanna-Barbera lost their charm in the 1970's because they began cashing in on cartoons and losing their originality; in his words, Hanna-Barbera was the "king of cashing in" and now, I might say the same thing for Hasbro.)

But since Hasbro wanted this cartoon to thrive, what were they to do to make kids think that they weren't rehashing PJ Masks? Simple. Because PJ Masks was mostly for a male audience, they made their rehash mostly for a female audience. And because they're, well, Hasbro, they made almost 75% of this show dancing. Cool music, and typical girly things that little girls like, just like they do for every cartoon that is owned by them and directed towards a female audience.

However, I don't just find Kiya & The Kimoja Heroes a ripoff of PJ Masks. It's kind of also a bad fanfiction of Ninjago (another show mostly for a male audience, but this one I find mediocre) made by someone who NEVER watched Ninjago before. They certainly don't know what a ninja is, because I don't think Kiya's a real ninja. She doesn't dress like one, and she does use martial arts, but she just uses them to show off, and mostly to look cool. This is NOT what martial arts are for. Martial arts are used to defend yourself. And last time I checked, ninjas don't wave batons around. That's what marching band leaders do.

Speaking of the heroes, I think their superhero names were just thought up of by the creators because it made them sound cool, but they don't exhibit the names really well.

Plus, just like the ninja in Ninjago, the Kimoja Heroes in this show don't even try to keep their identities secret, since I'm pretty much sure everyone in Kimoja City knows these kids are superheroes, and they don't even try to cover up their faces or even wear a mask. At least Clark Kent took off his glasses and wore contact lenses when he became Superman!

Most fighting-hero shows and movies have the heroes keep their identities secret not just to avoid embarrassing themselves, but not having a secret identity raises the chances that their enemies can hurt their friends or family if they want to find them. Ninjago has shown this a few times in their show, while Kiya & The Kimoja Heroes is blissfully unaware of this, which is the last thing you want in a show with fighting-heroes that don't have a secret identity at all.

But the biggest and most important nail of the coffin in this show is, of course, the action scenes, or the lack thereof. Just like in Wedding Peach, this show just has the heroes and villains attacking each other by throwing obstacles at the villains, whom they don't really defeat.

But unlike PJ Masks where the voice actors sound like they want to kill each other, the voice actors in this show sound like they don't want to even be on the set.

The overall formula for this show? Ripoff of PJ Masks + Ripoff of Wedding Peach + bad Ninjago fanfiction - everything that saved Ninjago from being horrible = Kiya & The Kimoja Heroes. This show is so unoriginal, shallow, and boring that it makes be wonder if the person who greenlit this show for Disney Junior was wearing a blindfold when the idea was submitted.

Overall, this show makes Ninjago's trainwreck of a final season look like a masterpiece in comparison to this.

Yes, this show is for children, but that doesn't mean it should be empty, shallow and bland, let alone repetitive. I guess the point is to curb children's behaviour by showing them examples of how to deal with simple problems. Fine, not the first, not the last show to do this. However, beyond this moralizing simplicity there is nothing. Just good ol Kiya being cocky and making the same mistakes over and over again. All characters are utterly annoying and all they do is dancing and yelling like there's no tomorrow.

Be thankful if you've watched it in English, at least their voices sound like children's. In the Spanish dubbed version (done in Mexico, I believe), children sound as though they were fourteen and on the brink of a mental breakdown.

A typical episode goes like this:

Heroes having fun and yelling.

A villain (another child) does something extremely annoying.

Drums.

Heroes transform into themselves but with other clothes.

They yell like slaughterhouse animals.

Villains are punished (including being tied with ropes) Heroes go back having fun.

More yelling.

Another user mentioned that Kiya aims at a female demo and PJ Masks at a male one. PJ Masks is mediocre at best, but slightly more interesting, there are better characters and more things happen, although the yelling (and the awful dubbing) are pretty much the same. This makes me think that Kiya, far from distancing from stereotypes just aims at preserving them (boys get a more 'interesting' and nuanced story while girls get the shallow one).

Perhaps the sole positive aspect of this show is that white characters are not the paragon of virtue they are anywhere else. Though I'm still perplexed by the fact that in both shows scientists are portrayed as selfish and evil, which makes me raise my eyebrows.

As I'm sure you are aware, this is a children's show, and so it was made for children. One thing I didn't necessarily understand about the last comment is that they probably have no children. I have children, five of them. And the show was made to entertain children. It doesn't matter if their identities aren't a secret or if it's not rooted in logic because it wasn't made for some strange adult child who didn't know how to move on or grow up; it was made for a child. Most children's shows are made for children and lack logic. Anime comes in dub. And it also comes in subs if you don't speak Japanese. So, to base the rating of this anime off of shows with a higher standard of a TV show like Sailor Moon, to be dragging it to comparison makes no sense. This is a show about self-love and inclusivity for the new age generation. That's all it is. Yes we understand that this is not what a ninja is. But the likelihood of an actual child being a ninja is slim to nun, so let's not play stupid.