Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/UnScripts:Everyone Loves Rasputin

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UnScripts:Everyone Loves Rasputin

I mainly need advice on whether to put pictures in. ,':-( sir Ch00_Bakka )-:', 1045, April 1, Year 29

Humour:	3	Don't be alarmed. Let me walk you through this. So let's see, Tsarina knitting, Rasputin walking in, I guess it's a classic sitcom scene. Lame pun, haemophilia reference. OK, at least the haemophilia reference is actually relevant to how Rasputin was Alexei's healer. That's a nice touch. And then Alexis comes in—typical sitcom entrance, then two lame puns. Oh, and there's a recurring laugh track. Again, nice touch, although you could probably get some more kilometrage out of that by really emphasising how it's canned laughter, or how someone's fiercely cueing/threatening the audience to laugh heartily or else. Just somehow. The Tsar himself—wait, work was murder? Referring to the execution, I guess? OK, by now these puns are getting a little too frequent and close together. Even sitcoms don't have this much concentrated intentional corniness in them—oh hurrah, awkward recurring situation/gag. That's a nice break. Heh heh, Russian roulette, shoot. That was kinda funny. Then reverts back to French bashing, another pun. Nonchalant recaps of wackiness tend to be sitcom-like and funny. Nicely executed. Then a Christmas pun, and the credits roll. And then I give this score.
Concept:	4	To understand why most of this fell flat, we need to look at the concept. The concept itself isn't half bad—fictionalised version of the last Romanovs with Rasputin, in a sitcom! And the title—Everyone Loves Rasputin—is both faithful to history and referential to sitcoms. So the setup is pretty solid. Where you fall down, however, is evidently in the execution of this stellar concept. Sitcoms aren't just a series of lame puns—oh, there's far more to them than that. Awkwardness, everyday scenarios and rivals and relationships blown up into giant catastrophes and nemeses and animosities, corny apologies and togetherness, et cetera, et cetera. These provide situations that become inevitably comedic—hence, situational comedy. That's where this article lacks, er, stuff. There's just not enough content or diverseness in the situations that occur for this to be funny. The lame puns are okay once in a while, but repeated like this? A bit too frequent, I'd say. Space them with all of these other sitcom elements you could use. Really, the Romanovs and Rasputin are insensitive sitcom gold—you have the recurring enemies trying to harm Rasputin (the two princes, whoever they were) coming up with all of these insane plots, you have Rasputin doing all sorts of wacky things, etc. A lot of kilometrage you can get here. Also, have you heard of a British sitcom called Heil Honey I'm Home!? Yeah, you guessed it—fictionalised Hitler and Eva Braun living a trivialised life. It was such an insensitive premise that it was cancelled after the first episode, and the other recorded episodes to this day remain unaired. Maybe some Bolshevik comes on stage at some point and calls off the production and shoots down the Romanovs? That would be a pretty fitting ending. Just a thought.
Prose and formatting:	5	Your prose is pretty good, but suffers from the execution of the concept and humour. Formatting needs some more work. This is a script, so I need to be able to distinguish better at a glance between stage directions and dialogue and speakers. Take a look at some of the other UnScripts on this website, and see how they're formatted. General suggestions: Stage directions: Italics. [alternately, italics with brackets around them] Dialogue: Speaker's name in bold: Hello world. Setting scenes: Scene: TARDIS interior.
Images:	0	OK, so no images. You have a few options: Just take a few serious images of these characters (Rasputin always has crazy looks), and then put bits of dialogue as the captions. Alternately, make your own images—composite images of the Romanovs and Rasputin into some sitcom setting. If you do this, I recommend consulting the fine folks at Image Review. Don't use MS Paint (and definitely don't use MacPaint) if you can help it—stick with GIMP or Photoshop (these are better if you want serious effects like lens flare or fractal generators) or Paint.NET (personal recommendation for Windows computers—it's free) or Seashore (personal recommendation for Mac computers—again, free). If you don't have Photoshopping skills, consult the folks at Image Request. They'll concoct an impeccable image for you, if you're specific enough with your requests.
Miscellaneous:	2	Slightly lower than the average to compensate for overall quality, and to yield a total score of 14 ...
Final Score:	14	... which doesn't mean anything right now. Why? OK, it does mean something, which is that your execution as it stands isn't all that great. All the more a reason for which you should ignore the scores, because right now, you need to focus on the advice I've given you. Which is, to recap briefly—more than lame puns, cf Heil Honey I'm Home, work on formatting, definitely need images, ignore the scores, focus on advice, recap briefly, em dash, puns, cf, format, images, points, focus, recap, dash, pcfipfrdetc. Good luck with this! The concept definitely has a lot of potential waiting to be brought out, so hope you work on this a lot more.
Reviewer:	Sir MacMania GUN—[14:54 25 Jul 2010]