The movie uses two character names (Nemo and Flip), the general concept of “a fantastical world you visit when you dream,” and the iconic image of Nemo’s bed growing stilt-high legs and walking off with him. That’s it.
When I heard the “Nemo” was a girl in this movie, I went and got my hopes up that she’d have some fun scenes with [a modern-day take on] the art-nouveau, Gibson-girl Princess of Slumberland. No such luck! There’s no princess at all.
The plot we get instead — well, it’s a solid kid’s-adventure story. Imaginative and esoteric kid Nemo is orphaned, has to go live with her boring CEO city-slicker uncle, starts having dreams about this rascal named Flip that her dad used to tell stories about, who asks her to help find a MacGuffin he previously searched for with her dad. Cue a series of misadventures through fanciful half-CGI settings, fun jokes about how weird dreams can be, and heartwarming lessons about post-grief bonding.
One big element that bugged me, though:
Uncle Philip does his best to bond with Nemo. He’s not great at it, for obvious reasons — they’re both grieving the loss of her dad, he’s a single professional who wasn’t planning or prepared to raise a child, etc — and also, there’s a personality mismatch. She’s an oddball who likes secret treasures and dangerous adventure stories! He…runs a doorknob company. Our Phil here is sincerely enthusiastic about doorknobs. When Nemo asks for a bedtime story, he regales her with a doorknob supply chain issue.
This seems like the setup for a nice uplifting lesson about how you can still bond with family members (and people in general) when you’re seriously different. Maybe Philip starts looking up weird stories to read to Nemo. Maybe there’s a key point in her Slumberland adventures where Nemo has to pick a lock, and suddenly she realizes, hey, sometimes doorknob knowledge matters!
…Nope. Turns out, rascal Flip is Phillip’s long-lost dream-self. When Nemo reunites them, it turns out he was actually an adventure-loving oddball this whole time.
Nobody’s actually that interested in doorknobs, haha! It’s not like there are IRL humans with equally “boring” special interests, who are nevertheless full people with rich and valid inner lives, some of whom might end up watching this very movie! Sounds fake.
There’s one exchange near the end that sort of suggests “maybe Flip and Phillip are still separate individuals, they’re just sharing a body now.” At least, enough that if a writer ever pitches “a sequel about Flip and Phillip both being valid people, now with their own mismatched odd-couple dynamic, learning to co-exist as headmates,” the canon groundwork is there for it.
But I do think we’re supposed to infer that the end is “fake half-person Phillip was fixed by him and Flip fusing into one.” Which (a) has all those IRL implications I don’t like, and (b) is just so much less interesting or satisfying as a place to leave a story.
It packs more explicit, unashamed queerness into those 5 episodes than any other cartoon I can think of
The only possible competitor would be if you took the whole 5000-episode run of Steven Universe and pared it down to a supercut of Just The Gay Parts
This in spite of being produced in Brazil, which (in my broad understanding, as a total non-authority on the subject) is more oppressively, dangerously homophobic than the US
The original is in Portuguese
There is an English dub, fabulously voiced by contestants from RuPaul’s Drag Race
It’s wrapped in “for adults only!” warnings, not because the content is any less child-friendly than (say) your Bojacks Horsemen or your Ricks and Mortys, but because Brazilian authorities tried to get it shut down on the grounds of this much gay being Harmful For Children
It was (heartbreakingly) not renewed for a second season
Here’s a promo video, in which the main characters (Portuguese, with subtitles) play Drag Race judges for Shangela, who ends up voicing Scarlet in English:
And here’s a beautiful flashy music video of the big musical number! (Also Portuguese, no subtitles, but the melody and the visuals stand on their own.)
Plot and worldbuilding stuff!
The elevator pitch is “What if Charlie’s Angels, but also drag queens, with superpowers, because magical-girl transformations?”
In this universe, all LGBTQ people have magical energy. The Big Bad is an evil magical-drag-queen nemesis who tries to drain our energy for her own purposes. It’s like if Ursula from The Little Mermaid was a first-season Sailor Moon villain.
…sidenote, in case you were worried, the representation isn’t “cis gay men and nobody else.” There’s a butch lesbian in the recurring cast, a genderfluid person (ETA: that word is exclusive to the English dub; a Brazilian viewer tipped me off that the original Portuguese dialogue includes “bissexual”, which means exactly what it looks like) as a one-off love interest, and all the ensemble scenes are wonderful collages of different races, body types, and gender presentations.
Our heroes also fight non-magical everyday homophobes, who get written with scathing realism.
The moment I knew the show wasn’t pulling any punches was in the first episode, where a newscaster complains about being Silenced by the Law of Political Correctness, then chirps “however, we have a special guest who is thankfully above the law!”
As the Super Drags tell their nemesis (and this is also in the first episode): “How dare you try to turn the LGBTQXYZ community against each other? We do enough of that on our own!”
In between missions, our girls work sitcom retail jobs and deal with other everyday problems. All of which are written in amazingly nuanced and thoughtful ways for a show that also features “defeating an orgy monster with a lip-sync battle.”
Detailed character stuff!
Our heroes are Color Coded For Your Convenience!
The Super Drags themselves go by “she” in-uniform, and a lot of the time when out of it. Like the Sailor Starlights, only more so. I’ll roll with that.
In blue: Safira Cyan, or Ralph by day, an excitable college-age kid who’s built like a football player and squees like a fangirl. (She’s an anime fan in the original, and for some reason all the otaku references were replaced in the dub, but you can see them in the subtitles.)
Ralph lives with her younger sister (they play video games together!) and their dad, comes out to them mid-series, and is very shippable with another young guy who starts out reciting the homophobic beliefs he was raised with but whose heart clearly isn’t in it.
Safira’s weapon is a classic magical-girl wand that casts protective force-fields. Which are shaped like condoms. Because of course.
In yellow: Lemon Chiffon, aka Patrick, the oldest of the group and generally the smartest/most strategic. In most cases, the other two treat her as the de facto team leader — unless she pushes it too far.
By day she’s a single guy with thick thighs and thinning hair, who has some body-image insecurities on the dating scene. And this show has Things To Say about unrealistic beauty standards within the community…not to mention, about masc guys who look down on anyone too flaming or femme because straight people disapprove.
Lemon’s weapon is a fluffy boa that can be used as a whip or a lasso, especially when there’s a bondage joke to be made.
In red: Scarlet Carmesim, also Donizete, the loudest and most aggressive teammate with the most cutting insults, who refuses to suppress that attitude in an attempt to appease racists. (But will give it a shot when trying not to get fired.)
Donny still lives in her religious/homophobic mom’s apartment, and I’m pretty sure it’s because neither of them can afford to move out. Her rock-solid sense of fierce self-confidence is the reason it doesn’t bring her down.
Scarlet’s weapon is a fan that she uses to throw shade. Yeah, you knew that was coming.
The Charlie to these angels is Champagne, who runs operations from a cool magitech compound and breaks the fourth wall at the end to petition for viewers’ support in getting a second season.
…we let her down, folks :(
So here’s a thing. The show never draws a sharp line between “people who become drag queens because it’s a way they’re driven to express themselves as gay men” and “people who become drag queens because they were trans women all along.” That’s consistent with how South American LGBT+ culture works. (Again: best of my knowledge, not personally an authority on this, etc etc.)
Many of the characters, including Champagne, never describe themselves in ways that translate to one of our sharply-defined Anglo-USian identity categories. And I’m not going to try to impose any English labels on them here.
But I can say (in contrast to Safira, Lemon, and Scarlet), Champagne never switches out of her “drag” name/voice/presentation, not even in the most candid off-duty scenes, and still has the same bustline when naked in the tub. Make of that what you will.
If you ever do a Netflix free trial month in the future, make a note to yourself to watch Super Drags!
It’s one of their original productions, so there’s no risk of missing your chance because the license expired. But it’s absolutely not getting the promotion it deserves. Which means potentially interested viewers won’t find it, which means Netflix will think there’s no interest, which means they’ll keep not promoting it…etc etc etc.
No idea if there’s any chance of getting it un-canceled, but maybe we can at least convince them to release it on DVD.
And the sheer gutsiness it took for a group of Brazilian creators to produce this show in the first place — that deserves to be rewarded with your attention.
In spite of various anti-discrimination laws that sound good on paper, the country has serious problems with homophobia, transphobia, and anti-LGBT violence (warning, article has a violent image which is only partly blurred).
Maybe the creators could’ve gotten a second season if they made this one softer, less sexually-explicit, more restrained…but honestly? I bet that wouldn’t have helped.
And it didn’t get renewed past the first season either.
(Note: it had a trans woman showrunner and a queer-heavy creative staff, so I blame all that restraint on executive meddling, not the creators themselves. The showrunner even liked the tweet of my review that complains about it.)
So there’s something very satisfying about how Super Drags went all-out, balls-to-the-wall (sometimes literally), all the rep explicit and unapologetic, packing every 25-minute episode with all kinds of queer content that would be censored or muted elsewhere — but here it’s exaggerated and celebrated and just keeps coming.
(…as do jokes like that, and I’m not sorry.)
Okay, there are a few legitimate reasons to not watch this show
Some caveats.
None of these things are Objectively Bad Problems that the show itself should be shamed for…but maybe they’re genuinely not your cup of tea.
It does have actual Adult Content beyond “the existence of gay people.” This show loves to swing barely-clothed cartoon genitalia in your face. There is, as mentioned, an orgy monster. If that kind of humor is going to bother you too much to appreciate the rest of the show, give it a pass.
I wasn’t kidding about how realistic the homophobes are. Opening of the first episode has a guy trying to murder a busload of people while shouting slurs at them. If that level of hatred on-screen is gonna crush your soul, even in a show about sparkly queens flying to the rescue with dick-shaped magical weapons, don’t push yourself.
Any fiction with this much crossdressing and gender-transgressing is going to hit some trans viewers in a bad way. Because trans people are such a broad group, with so many different experiences, that Every Possible Trope Involved pushes somebody’s buttons. (See also: “some trans readers complain about a storyline that turns out to be drawn from a trans writer’s actual life experience“.) If this show goes does gender things that turn out to be personally distressing for you…or even just distressing for this specific time in your life…don’t feel obligated to keep watching.
It has aggressively-sassy queer characters making jokes and calling each other things that are affectionate in-context, but would not be okay coming from straight/cis people. If you can’t wrap your head around that, go watch something else.
Other Than That, Go Watch This Show
For all its big heart, big ambitions, and big gay energy, Super Drags is tiny enough that I’ve binged the whole show 2 times in the past 2 weeks. Thankfully, it’s highly re-watchable — lots of fun background gags and subtle foreshadowing that you don’t catch on the first round.
(Pausing one last time to appreciate that a show with elements like “the high-tech robot assistant is called D.I.L.D.O.” can be subtle at all, let alone be this good at it.)
I’ve also paged through all the fanart on Tumblr and Deviantart, looked up the single fanfic on the AO3, and started brainstorming plans to request it in Yuletide next year. Someone, please, come join me in (the English-language side of) the itty-bitty fandom for this ridiculous, glittery, over-the-top, fabulous series.
Humanist+Humorist 