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First off, I would like to point out that I love this drama. I just like to see kids act and to watch a drama that's free of questionable topics but still keeps you coming back for more is really refreshing. The story line has been great, they do a great job of creating needed suspension and although I hate them, cliff hangers. In addition, the humor in the drama is also great. I can tell that the producers have been investing a lot for this drama, as a handful of celebrities, largely well-known actors, have made cameos. These cameos are a good idea as EBS is not your go-to channel, it is actually just an educational channel for children, it's a Korean PBS. Nonetheless, they have made these children's dramas in the past but 'Pluto' is their first one in two years. So to keep up the viewer ratings and add pizzazz, they've been having these more popular celebrities make cameos.
Another praiseworthy thing is that like any children's drama should be, 'Pluto' has been doing a good job of keeping up to the producers' goal of making a "developing children's drama (성장드라마)", pretty much meaning, it's for kids who learn life as they grow up, so it has good morals, kind of like your Disney channel shows, don't they always have some kind of lesson in each episode? That's what the children's dramas do, but it's different from your Disney channel shows in that the characters do not necessarily make a catastrophic incident and then learn something from it. So 'Pluto' has been a good hearty drama, where you can be kept on your toes for all the suspense from the mysteries that the characters are trying to solve and that it gives you laughs as well.
But as a Korean who has grown up watching few of the original and most popular children's dramas, I have some criticisms that derive in comparison. First off, in the blog post that I've linked, I mentioned how the characters are middle-school students, totally different from any children's dramas before. But when I actually started watching 'Pluto', turns out that I was wrong, 4 out of these young actors and actresses who play the main character roles are in middle school (two are in their second year and the other two are in their first year in middle school) but the characters that they play are still elementary students. So although 'Pluto' didn't disgrace me by breaking the uniform of having the children be elementary students, but I'm still not satisfied with the fact that they're still middle school students in real life. Because boy, the two oldest actor and actress, 2nd year middle school students, look way to overgrown to be in the last year of elementary school.
Maybe it's because Korea has been so deprived of once prominent children's drama for a long time, I just feel like the producers in the broadcasting networks have lost their flow. They're ability to come up with super creative stories are still a little rusty. I'm not necessarily talking about the plot here, because I just praised 'Pluto' for that, but one of the things that make up a drama (or any film) are the lines that the characters say. Now, Korean dramas are known to be, well, dramatic, so the lines that the characters say will always be cheesy, but I feel like the cheesy level has stepped up a lot since the last time children's dramas were on the high rise. I've been kind of cringing a lot at the lines of these Pluto characters.
I've been typing and typing, and the result was a gigantic, 1420-word post. So I'll post the next half-ish part as the next blog post, so come back next week for part 2 of my review of 'Pluto'. :)
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