Teen Titans Go! (2013–Present)

Teen Titans Plz Stop!

Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

Also here’s the unforgivable theme song.

Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Teen Titans Go! is one of those shows where I understand what it is trying to be, and somehow that makes me more annoyed. This is not trying to be the original Teen Titans from 2003. This is not trying to be a serious DC animated show. This is not trying to be a dramatic superhero story about friendship, trauma, villains, betrayal, and growth. No, this show looked at the original Teen Titans, took the same five main characters, stripped away nearly everything that made them compelling, shoved them into an eleven-minute comedy format, and basically said, “What if the Titans were stupid now?”

The show follows Robin, Starfire, Raven, Beast Boy, and Cyborg living together in Titans Tower, except instead of them being a superhero team who occasionally has silly moments, they are basically five chaotic gremlins who occasionally remember they are superheroes. Sometimes they fight villains. Sometimes they learn a lesson. Sometimes they sing. Sometimes they scream. Sometimes they spend an entire episode arguing over food, body parts, money, chores, or whatever random thing the writers found funny that week.

And look, before anyone says, “It’s for kids,” I know. I am aware. I have eyes. I understand the target audience. But that excuse only goes so far because being for kids does not mean it has to be this obnoxious. The original Teen Titans was also for younger audiences, and that show still managed to have action, comedy, emotional stakes, character arcs, and actual tension. Teen Titans Go! feels like the version of Teen Titans you would get if someone watched the original show while eating an entire bag of sugar and said, “You know what this needs? More screaming and waffles.”

Character Rundown

Robin might be the character this show ruins the hardest for me. In the original series, Robin was intense, serious, driven, and kind of terrifying when pushed too far. He had his obsession with Slade. He had leadership issues. He had flaws, but they made sense. In Teen Titans Go!, Robin is basically a tiny dictator with insecurity issues. He is controlling, jealous, desperate for attention, weirdly pathetic, and the show constantly treats him like the joke of the team. At first, I get it. The idea of making the serious leader the most unstable one can be funny. The problem is the show does this so often that it stops being a joke and starts feeling like character assassination with confetti.

Beast Boy and Cyborg are where the show’s humor really starts testing my patience. These two were already the comic relief characters in the original show, but they still had heart. Beast Boy had the Terra storyline. Cyborg had moments about identity, technology, humanity, and leadership. In Teen Titans Go!, most of their personality gets boiled down to loud noises, food jokes, fart jokes, laziness, dancing, and random songs. There are episodes where it feels like the writers looked at Beast Boy and Cyborg and said, “What if we made them as annoying as humanly possible?” Mission accomplished. Congratulations. You did it. Please never do it again.

Starfire is probably one of the less offensive characters in the show, but even then, she still suffers from being reduced to one joke. Her entire thing is basically, “She talks weird and does not understand Earth.” That joke was already part of her character in the original show, but there it was balanced with innocence, strength, kindness, and emotional warmth. Here, it becomes the default button they press whenever she is on screen. She is not the worst part of the show, but she also does not get much room to be more than the alien girl who says things strangely.

Raven is easily the best character in the show, and honestly, sometimes she feels like the only character who understands what kind of nightmare she is trapped in. Her deadpan sarcasm is probably the closest the show gets to consistently making me laugh. She is annoyed by everyone, which makes sense because I am also annoyed by everyone. Raven works because she is the one character whose personality actually benefits from the chaos around her. While everyone else is screaming, she is usually sitting there looking like she wants to teleport herself into a better cartoon. Same, Raven. Same.

Pacing / Episode Flow

The pacing of Teen Titans Go! is like being trapped inside a pinball machine while five children yell directly into your ear. These episodes are short, but somehow they can still feel exhausting. The show moves fast, but not in a way that feels clever or energetic. It moves fast in a way that feels like it is terrified the audience will stop watching if someone is not screaming, singing, dancing, exploding, or making a weird face every ten seconds.

A typical episode starts with some dumb problem. Robin wants attention. Beast Boy and Cyborg want food. Raven wants peace. Starfire misunderstands something. Then the situation escalates into complete nonsense. Sometimes that nonsense can be mildly amusing. Other times, it feels like the writers are throwing darts at a board labeled “random things kids might laugh at.” By the time the episode ends, I usually do not feel like I watched a story. I feel like I survived a colorful seizure with DC characters in it.

Pros

I will give the show this much: sometimes it is clever. Not often enough for me to call it good, but enough that I can see why some people defend it. There are moments where the show makes surprisingly deep DC references, brings in obscure characters, or pokes fun at superhero tropes in a way that actually works. When Teen Titans Go! decides to be a parody of DC comics, it can occasionally be funny. The problem is that for every clever DC joke, there are about twenty jokes about butts, waffles, or someone screaming so loud that my soul tries to leave my body.

The animation is also colorful and expressive. I am not going to sit here and pretend the show looks bad. It has energy. It has a recognizable style. The characters move well, the colors pop, and the exaggerated facial expressions do fit the kind of cartoon it wants to be. The problem is that the animation is often being used to sell jokes I do not find funny. So yes, it is technically well animated. Congratulations. You made the screaming look smooth.

Raven is the one character I can honestly say I still enjoy. She has the best delivery, the best reactions, and the best energy. A lot of the time she feels like the audience member stuck inside the show. She is miserable, sarcastic, and surrounded by idiots. Honestly, Raven is not just the best character in the show. She might be the only one who feels like she remembers what dignity is.

Cons

My biggest problem with Teen Titans Go! is the humor. This show’s sense of humor is not just childish. Childish humor can be funny. The problem is that this show often confuses being loud with being funny. It thinks repeating something over and over makes it funnier. It thinks screaming makes everything better. It thinks gross-out humor is automatically hilarious. It thinks random equals clever. And after a while, the whole thing becomes mentally exhausting.

The waffles joke is one of the worst examples. The Titans chanting “waffles” over and over is the kind of joke that makes me feel like I am being punished. I get the joke. It is random. They keep saying waffles. That is the joke. And then they keep going. And going. And going. It is like the show grabs you by the shoulders and screams, “ISN’T THIS FUNNY?” No. It is not. It was barely funny the first time, and then you beat it into the ground until the ground filed a restraining order.

Then there is the constant treatment of Robin as a pathetic joke. I do not need Robin to be serious all the time. I am fine with making fun of him. Batman media has always had room for Robin jokes. But Teen Titans Go! goes so far with it that Robin barely feels like a hero anymore. He feels like a tiny maniac who somehow became team leader because nobody else wanted to do paperwork. The joke that Robin is insecure, bossy, and desperate for respect could work in small doses, but this show made it his entire personality.

The show also has this weird obsession with twerking, butts, and body humor that feels less like comedy and more like the writers discovered one joke and refused to put it down. Again, I get that kids laugh at dumb stuff. I was a kid. I laughed at dumb stuff. But at some point, even dumb humor needs timing. Teen Titans Go! often has no timing. It just throws the joke at you, then throws it again, then throws it again, then asks if you want another one while you are already lying on the floor begging for mercy.

And then there is the way this show sometimes seems to poke fun at fans of the original Teen Titans. I know Teen Titans Go! is not responsible for Teen Titans 2003 ending. I know it is its own thing. But when you take the same characters and then spend years turning them into goofy caricatures, you cannot be shocked when older fans compare the two. The original show had Slade psychologically tormenting Robin. It had Terra betraying the team. It had Raven facing Trigon. It had real emotional weight. Teen Titans Go! has episodes about sandwiches and waffles. So yes, I am going to compare them. You used the same characters. You walked into this argument wearing the same costume.

Final Thoughts

I hate Teen Titans Go! I really do. I understand why it exists. I understand why kids like it. I understand why some adults find it funny. But for me, this show is almost everything I do not want from a Teen Titans show. It is loud, obnoxious, repetitive, and way too proud of how stupid it is. It takes characters I actually like and turns them into walking punchlines. Sometimes it is clever. Sometimes it has funny DC references. Sometimes Raven saves an episode from being completely unbearable. But most of the time, I am sitting there wondering how we went from Slade haunting Robin’s nightmares to Beast Boy and Cyborg screaming about food again.

The most frustrating thing about Teen Titans Go! is that it is not completely talentless. There are talented people working on this show. The animation is good. The voice actors are still great. Some jokes do land. Some episodes have actual creativity. But the show’s default mode is so annoying to me that I cannot enjoy it. It is like someone occasionally hides a good joke inside a dumpster fire and expects me to thank them for the warmth.

So yes, I hate this show. I hate the screaming. I hate the waffles. I hate what they did to Robin. I hate how often the humor feels like it was written by someone who thinks “butt” is a full punchline. And most of all, I hate that every time I watch it, I am reminded that these characters were once part of a much better show.

Rating

2/10

The animation is colorful, Raven gets some laughs, and every now and then the DC references are clever. But that is not enough to save the show for me. This is not my Teen Titans. This is Teen Titans after someone replaced the writers’ room with a sugar rush and a whoopee cushion.

Spoiler Warning

From this point on, I will be talking about specific episodes, jokes, and moments from Teen Titans Go! If you somehow care about spoilers for this show, this is your warning.

Spoilers

One of the moments that sticks out to me in the worst way is the waffles episode. I know I already talked about it, but I need to bring it up again because it perfectly represents everything that annoys me about this show. The Titans repeating “waffles” over and over is not a joke with layers. It is not clever. It is not character-based comedy. It is just repetition. The show basically says, “What if we annoyed the audience until annoyance became the joke?” That is not comedy to me. That is psychological warfare with breakfast food.

Robin’s obsession with being respected is another joke that gets old fast. There are so many episodes where Robin is desperate for approval, desperate for control, or desperate to be seen as cool, and after a while, it stops feeling like satire and starts feeling like the writers just enjoy humiliating him. I do not mind Robin being the butt of the joke sometimes, but Teen Titans Go! acts like Robin existing is the joke. This is supposed to be the leader of the Teen Titans, and half the time he feels like someone who should not be trusted with a microwave.

The twerking jokes are another thing that made me sit there in silence, wondering what life choices brought me to this moment. Why is there so much twerking in this show? Why is this a thing? Why am I watching DC superheroes shake their butts while the show acts like this is peak comedy? I am not saying cartoons cannot be weird. I like weird. But there is weird, and then there is “why am I watching Robin twerk?” weird. There is a line, and Teen Titans Go! keeps tap dancing over it while screaming.

The episodes that mock serious superhero storytelling also annoy me because they remind me that the writers know exactly what fans wanted and decided to do the opposite. Again, I am not saying the show had to become Teen Titans Season 6. It did not. But there is something irritating about watching a show that knows fans miss the original and then seems to laugh at them for wanting anything with emotional weight. It feels like the show is saying, “Oh, you wanted Slade? You wanted Terra? You wanted Raven’s arc with Trigon? Too bad. Here is a joke about pizza.”

And yet, weirdly enough, The Night Begins to Shine is probably the one major exception where I can admit the show actually cooked. That whole arc is so bizarre, so energetic, and so committed to its weird 80s music video fantasy nonsense that it somehow works. It is still ridiculous, but it feels like ridiculous with effort. That is the difference. When Teen Titans Go! actually puts its chaos toward something creative, I can see the appeal. The problem is that too much of the show feels like chaos for the sake of chaos.

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is also better than the show, and that almost makes me more annoyed. The movie proved that this version of the Titans can be funny when the writing has more structure and stronger jokes. It roasts superhero movies, it roasts DC, it roasts itself, and it actually has more momentum than most episodes of the show. So now I know the writers can make this version work better. Which means when the show goes back to waffles and butt jokes, I am even more irritated.

At the end of the day, Teen Titans Go! is not a show I can vibe with. It is too loud, too repetitive, too random, and too far removed from what I liked about these characters in the first place. I know it has its audience. I know kids love it. I know some people think it is hilarious. Good for them. Truly. But for me, this show is like watching someone take the Teen Titans, put them in a blender, add sugar, glitter, fart noises, and screaming, then pour it into a bowl and call it comedy.

No thanks.

I will go rewatch the original. Anyways hope y’all enjoy today’s review.