Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26808654-20150706181027

It's high time I said something good about this stupid show.

So in the past few years, CN has been cutting it's episode times to 15 minutes. You could argue that they've been doing this for years, but it would never be one 15 minute episode aired individually per week. It would be two 15 minute episodes aired together in the same 30 minute slot. I could take this time to theorize why, but I wont.

Now then, SU is a show that relies heavily on narrative. It is extrmely story driven and that's what I love about it. However, 15 minutes (actually, 11 minutes) doesn't really do the show justice. I don't mean this in the sense that I just want more SU time, I mean this in the sense that 15 minutes is often not enough time for this show to hit as hard as it can. A few examples include:

Keeping it Together. Ending was somewhat sudden and the battle against the Cluster could've been focused on more. I could honestly tell that the writers wanted to put in more but couldn't.

Rising Tides/Crashing Skies. An awful episode but if given more time, we could've seent he actual effects of the gems leaving Beach City. If we had that, it might not have sucked so bad.

Story for Steven. Oh hey, it's the 80s gems. Enjoy their 2 minutes of screen time.

Jail Break. If given a proper 22 minutes, we could've seen: more of the ship, Amethyst defeating Peridot, a fight between a weakened Jasper and the Crystal Gems and a brief fight with Malachite.

And those are just four off the top of my head.

HOWEVER, not every episode can handle that much time. Some comedic episodes like Garnet's Universe and Say Uncle are fine being only 11 minutes long. And an extra 11 minutes will only save a small handful of the filler episodes. 22 minutes of Shirt Club and Open Book is still gonna suck. So what's the solution here? Easy, we take a note from the pages of one of my favorite shows of all time: Justice League.



Any of you who watched this amazing series would know that they didn't care about how much time their episodes were given. Most of their episodes were an hour long and if that meant chopping it in half into two 30 minutes episodes, then that's what they'd do. They put the narrative above the network and it worked perfectly. Most of their "episodes" would have a part 1 and part 2. Whenever they felt 30 minutes was all they needed, then 30 minutes was all they'd use.

So for Steven Universe, the answer is simple: make an episode 11 minutes only when you feel 11 minutes is all the epsiode needs. If it needs more time to properly convey the story, divide it into two parts and air them seperately. I've yet to see an episode of SU that needs an hour so this system works perfectly.

Anyhow, that's all. YES, one in a blue moon I don't come on these threads to bash this Acreus-awful show. I also understand that this thread has no real power over what happens to the show; I'm merely giving my two cents. It would be awesome if they did this though. 