DreamWorks Dragons: Race to the Edge discussion thread

[Christopher]

The third season of DreamWorks Dragons, subtitled Race to the Edge, premiered on Netflix this week. I figured I'd start a new thread since it's fairly distinct from the previous two seasons, which were covered in this thread. Actually it's just the first half-season that's gone up so far, which makes for an odd binge-watching experience compared to other Netflix originals, since it just kind of trails off rather than coming to any kind of climax.

It starts off rather more solidly, though. It's three years since the end of season 2, and about a year and a half before the second movie. Things have been quiet in Berk in the intervening years, but the recurring villain Dagur the Deranged (David Faustino) escapes, continuing his role as the series's big bad. Also, in fighting Dagur, Hiccup discovers a mysterious artifact called the Dragon's Eye, which contains maps and data about new islands and dragon species, so he leads the dragon riders on a quest to both explore new territories and hunt for Dagur -- although they do much more of the former, while also establishing a new home base called Dragon's Edge.

The animation is mostly very good. The character models are essentially the older versions from the second movie, but with different clothes and less facial detail, though there are some improvements in detail from the previous models -- especially in Astrid's hair, which has become immensely more realistic. There's also some really good character animation here and there, though there are occasional moments where it seems cheaper. Still, this is a series that's often been quite gorgeously made, and that's still true of the new version -- even though it seems that moving the gang to an uninhabited island for most of the season may have been an excuse to save money by animating fewer characters.

Even though the characters are older, they're still written much the same as they were before, the cast is still the same (aside from Tom Kenny replacing Tim Conway as Mulch), and most of the stories aren't that different from what we got in previous seasons. But there are attempts to foreshadow elements of the second movie, for instance, showing how Stoick hooked up with his new dragon from the sequel, and having Hiccup start thinking about building his own wings. And I suppose the whole overall premise of the season shows the beginnings of Hiccup's mission to map the world as seen in the sequel. So it still meshes pretty well, I think.

There are a few changes I noticed now that this is on Netflix rather than TV. There's a bit less censorship -- there's more acknowledgment of violence and death (though not by much), characters sometimes say "Oh my Thor" or even "Oh my gods" in one case, and there's even an overt same-sex attraction in one episode that's treated as fairly normative (well, it's a source of comedy, but only in the way that any unrequited attraction would be, with the gender of the participants being a non-issue). Also, while the episodes are still the same length and have act breaks, the gaps are virtually nonexistent and the audio even carries over in some cases.

No word yet on when the back half of the season will be released.

 

[Destructor]

This came totally out of the blue and I am both surprised and delighted. Haven't had a chance to watch the episodes yet (am finishing up S1 of 'Vikings' first) but am very keen to do so.

I just wish the Netflix app had a way to 'save' episodes for commuting purposes- I can't really handle the data load watching the show on the train.

 

[Christopher]

^Do you watch on a smartphone or a tablet? I think one can appreciate the animation more on a larger screen, so if you use a phone on the train, you might be better off watching the show at home anyway.

 

[Destructor]

My home viewing is generally shows that my wife and I watch together (OitNB, Veep, Portlandia, Thrones, etc) while shows that have a more, let's say, niche appeal, are unfortunately restricted to my commute, which necessitates tablet viewing. I watch the previous two seasons of Dragons in such a format, so I may have missed some animation detail. I'll probably watch them again with my daughter when she reaches an appropriate age.

 

[Christopher]

Oh, well, a tablet isn't as bad for seeing detail as a phone would be, I guess.

 

[Christopher]

I just dredged up this thread to let people know that Season 3 went up on Netflix a few weeks ago, and it seems we never even talked about season 2. Anyway, the show's still going on and there have been a lot of developments. Season 2 (which was really just the second half of season 1, but Netflix lists it as a separate season) brought in new villains, a band of dragon hunters led by Ryker Grimborn (J.B. Blanc), and at the end of the season we met the real leader, Ryker's smarter brother Viggo, played by none other than Alfred Molina. They're back as the big bads in season 3 as the battle against the dragon hunters continues. The season also does something very interesting and effective with Hiccup's longtime nemesis Dagur (David Faustino), as well as bringing Mae Whitman's recurring character Heather into a more prominent role. And there's more setup of things from the second movie (which is still in the show's future), like how Gobber got his dragon and how Hiccup devised some of the new gadgets he had in the sequel, as well as the occasional subtle hint of Hiccup and Astrid falling in love.

The writing is still good, but there are a couple of odd inconsistencies. For instance, last season, the team got into the habit of putting armor on their dragons to defend against the drug-tipped arrows the hunters used, but this season there's just a passing allusion to the armor in the first episode and then it's forgotten. The animation is also still fairly good, but there are some cost-cutting measures in evidence. For one thing, a lot of the episodes have only a few characters in them. And the supporting characters we do see are a problem, because they're mostly various subordinate dragon hunters, and they all pretty much look exactly alike aside from having a few different outfits. It gets tiresome after a while seeing so many episodes where the bad guys are these nameless, interchangeable mooks, even when they're written as more individual characters and cast with different actors. Yes, Viggo is the main nemesis, but they tend to save him for the big stories, presumably because they could only afford to use Alfred Molina so many times. We don't see many other guest characters either, just a few familiar faces from previous seasons, though the cliffhanger season finale introduces a couple of new characters, one of whom is played by Adelaide Kane of Power Rangers RPM and Reign.

 

[Christopher]

I'm reviving this thread after two years to note that Netflix has concluded its run of Race to the Edge after six 13-episode seasons. I just finished the series finale today, and though the story ends about a year before the second film, it basically leads directly into it, foreshadowing its events and giving us glimpses at its villain Drago (for whom the show's recurring villain Krogan has been implied to be working) and a certain other major character introduced in the second movie. It also wraps up the show's main arcs and positions the main characters for the start of the second film (e.g. briefly and somewhat randomly setting up Snotlout and Fishlegs' romantic rivalry over Ruffnut).

All in all, I'd say the series turned out fairly well. It did suffer from a tight budget that limited the number and variety of supporting characters it could depict, as I mentioned before, but the storytelling was strong overall, and it did a good job of fitting the stories credibly into the movie continuity (although I'd have to see 2 again to see if the finale really meshed perfectly with it). I particularly liked the complex and rather moving character arc that the villain Dagur went through, and the nuanced writing of Viggo, the main villain of the latter few seasons.

It's a shame that Netflix doesn't carry the movies or the first two seasons of the show (under the titles Riders of Berk and Defenders of Berk), since I'd enjoy the chance to watch the whole sequence in order. Although it's not over yet, since the third movie comes out next year. I wonder if it will be followed by a new iteration of the TV series set between the second and third films.

 

[David cgc]

And I'll revive this thread after a month. A few weeks ago, I watched the original HTTYD film with a friend who'd never seen it, and was inspired, since I'd never seen the sequel or any of the spin-offs, to catch up on the whole franchise in storyline order, so I can speak to how well the Netflix years of the show ended up patching over the gaps between the first two seasons and the second film.

On the pro-side were the new things the series was able to "introduce," like Stoik and Gobber's dragons, Hiccup's sword, the way Toothless and Stormfly would rough-house whenever Astrid and Hiccup were having a moment, Fishlegs' trading cards, and the wing-suit. There were even a couple things in HTTYD 2 that seemed to reference the original run of the show, like Gobber's brief moment of dragon dentistry. My understanding was that the sequel was made in isolation from the TV show, but maybe there was some cross-over or behind-the-scenes awareness lower down the chain.

There were a couple of things that gave me pause, though. The biggest one was that I hadn't realized how much of a visual style-shift there was between the first and second films, with the sequel having a different approach to exposure and color saturation to get a more "filmic" look than the more colorful tones of the first movie, which the entire run of the TV show stuck with. I'd imagine that the reasoning was they already had such a large foundation from the first two seasons based off the look of the first film, and they didn't want to redesign their entire pipeline and lose all the fine-tuning they'd done, but it was still a shock to go from bright, cheery Dragon's Edge to cloudy, diffused, desaturated, overexposed Berk in the sequel.

The other issue was more a case of conflicting priorities between one movie versus a hundred-ish episodes of TV, but that love-triange subplot was really undercooked, and seems like it was just a quick way to give (most of) the secondary Riders a straightforward dynamic so they could be doing stuff in the background without having to put a lot of time into it. Which, I totally get, the film belonged to Hiccup and his whole family thing, but I had to remind myself that the entire Dragon's Edge run post-dated the movie, and I couldn't hold it against HTTYD 2 for not drawing on the dynamics established in that era of the show. Not to say I think they should've buried the movie in obscure TV lore or anything, but I feel like having a backstory to draw on can help with the creative process even if the final result doesn't demand prior knowledge by the audience, like the adage about deleting the first chapter of a story because it's stuff you as the writer needed to get moving from a cold start, but the reader doesn't need to see the table being set, or how the characters in Marvel team-up movies tend to be heightened, greatest-hits versions of who they are in the solo films, so they're consistent, but still understandable to people seeing them in action for the first time.

I do agree that the set-up for Fishlegs and Snotlout fighting over Ruffnut in the series finale was perfunctory, but that aspect of the movie was also perfunctory, so I feel like it would've been weirder if the show actually committed to it like they did their other plotlines, only for it to end up being a series of shallow throwaway jokes when it was "paid off" in the movie. Of course, my biggest problem with the way that subplot was used in the sequel was that while it gave Fishlegs, Snotlough, and Ruffnut some business to play with, it left Tuff almost entirely out in the cold, which was deeply weird coming off of a few seasons of him and Chicken being the comedy MVPs of "Edge." God, that chicken was funny. Cartoon babies and passive pets never fail, because they're basically set decoration most of the time, so whenever they do anything at all, it's a delightful surprise. Look at Maggie and Snowball II in the Simpsons. Fingers crossed for a Chicken cameo in HTTYD 3.

Spoiler: Race to the Edge series finale

I think the final moments of the series could've set up Hiccup's impending solo expeditions a little more. As it is, one minute he's packing up their frontier base and heading home for the foreseeable future, and the next minute, he's further into terra incognita than ever before. And while I'm sure they wanted to avoid a downer ending to their series, it would've made a lot more sense for the bad guys to actually get the Bewilderbeast egg. Sure, it seems like a stretch for one to grow from egg to mountain-sized in a year or so, but most of the rest of the baby dragons established in the show grew to full size in that amount of time. Plus, the scene in the ice-lair established Drago didn't already have one, and judging by how completely he'd broken its spirit in the film, he must've found his Bewilderbeast when it was an egg, or at the very least small enough for him to abuse into submission, so the series as-is still leaves us with the same compressed timeframe, without actually filling in a blank.

 

[Christopher]

^Thanks for the perspective. Sounds like the series fit into the movie about as well as it could, and the only glitches were from the movie's obvious inability to acknowledge a series that hadn't been made yet.

I don't really see much of an incongruity between the end of the series and the start of film 2, because I thought it was clear enough in the film that while Hiccup was still mapping the archipelago, he was doing it from Berk as his and the other Dragon Riders' home base, rather than from Dragon's Edge. The existence of Dragon's Edge may have been meant to foreshadow Hiccup's further explorations in the future (though of course it was mainly a device to avoid the need to animate a bunch of background townspeople by isolating the Riders, and maybe to sell Dragon's Edge toy sets), but they still had to reconcile with a movie that made no mention of it. So it ended up being a forerunner to the later expedition rather than the first stage of it. Which makes sense, since the Edge ended up being less of an exploration outpost and more of a strategic base for defense against the Dragon Hunters and diplomacy among the various populations of the archipelago.