Nerding Day: Z.O.M.B.I.E.S. The Reanimated Series (Patreon)

Is there a Gen-Alpha equivalent to Fonzie and The Happy Days Gang traveling through time? Of course, every generation gets its own terrible, confusing spin-off cartoon of a popular show that gets canceled after one season. For Gen-Alpha, that show is Z-O-M-B-I-E-S The Reanimated Series. A spinoff cartoon of a beloved Disney Channel original movie franchise that started as an allegory for racism and quickly evolved into the straightforward story of monsters who kiss and sing songs about it.

You might remember seeing the trailer for Z-O-M-B-I-E-S in 2018, but you’re probably less aware that there has been a new entrance in the franchise every two years since. Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 5: Secrets Of the Sea is currently in production. In each movie, they introduce a new oppressed species of monster for the humans of the town of Seabrook to discriminate against and eventually befriend and/or kiss. Now the town of Seabrook contains zombies, werewolves, aliens, and vampires. The humans of Seabrook have had to learn this lesson so many times; I think it might be kind and just for the monsters of Seabrook to simply eat them, but the franchise disagrees.

The main stars of Z-O-M-B-I-E-S have grown too successful for the franchise. Meg Donnelly, who plays Human/Alien hybrid Addison Wells, is moving on with attempts at a music career. She has the distinction of being the first Disney star to collaborate with Fetty Wap. Milo Mannheim, who plays Zombie Zed Necropolis, is moving into feature films, but I bet Fetty Wap would be open to a collab if he asked.

The entire main cast of Z-O-M-B-I-E-S graduated in Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3, so to continue the story in cartoon form, Disney decided to have an alien rewind time so they could all relive their senior year over again, sort of. They really don't want you to think about how this show is happening. I know that because they have Zed look into the camera and say that immediately, which I kind of respect. “DON’T ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT THE PREMISE OF OUR SHOW” is the premise of the show, and I’m sure the kids who watched it had no questions about that.

After this, they immediately launch into a rap about how cool it is to repeat your senior year, but I fear some children will take it out of context. “Feel the beat move your feet, senior year is on repeat” is not how most people celebrate having to do senior year again, but I guess it’s not a total bummer if it’s due to alien science magic at your high school for the tap-dancing undead.

One of the scariest things about the show is how empty it feels. There are almost no background characters because Disney didn’t want to pay for the extra animation. They usually just stick one of the main characters in the background of a scene doing nothing if they need background characters, to the point that if someone new shows up, it feels jarring. These children are running around in an empty void of time created by aliens so they can relive their senior year. This is their packed cafeteria at lunchtime.

The concept of this show is already pretty wild to begin with, so you would think this horrific spinoff with Bratz movie-level computer animation couldn’t get much weirder, but freed of the burdens of physics, the writers of this preteen monster porn have really thrived. They did an episode where a cursed soda turned the students into zombies (even though some of them already were zombies, a rare double zombieing). They introduced a witch character with a pet armadillo. They did a Christmas episode where they decided werewolves celebrate meat-cember, and zombies celebrate Z-mas.

Again, this show began as a metaphor for racism. The first movie is about integrating zombies into a non-zombie high school after a nuclear reactor meltdown turned half of the town into zombies, so the way they handle the monsters' different religions in the Christmas episode is especially upsetting given that information.

They open the show as usual, two white teens rapping about how dope it is to be forced to repeat your senior year of high school. Then Addison sings a few bars about how excited she is for the generic holidays. What holidays, you might ask? Well, these monsters have some pretty crazy holidays. In addition to Z-Mas and Meat-Cember, there’s Hanukkah. END OF LIST.

These episodes are only twenty-two minutes long, so the show doesn’t dig into the actual traditions of each holiday very much. We learn the most about Meat-Cember because you can’t really throw something like Meat-Cember out and just walk away from it. The Werewolves celebrate their winter holiday by trying to capture a mystical creature called Santler Claws who is attracted to bottles of hot sauce that they leave out for him. They also decorate their homes with meat, and eat massive piles of meat with lime soda. I’m not sure if the lime soda is part of it or is just an artifact of this extremely cheap animation. They weren't going to make more than one bottle of soda; this is a mono-soda show.

What we learn about Hanukkah from the show is that it involves candles, eight nights, and cool-looking tops. This is most of my Hanukkah knowledge, and that's a real holiday, so I should probably not know less about it than Meat-Cember. The holiday we learn the least about is Z-Mas, which I think is because it’s just Christmas but Zombies can’t be seen worshiping Christ for some reason. It’s probably the same reason the Veggie Tales were never allowed to depict Christ as a vegetable. God has some strict rules around how animated abominations worship.

It could also be that Christianity does not exist in this world because there’s never any mention of Christmas at all in this holiday special. It’s honestly kind of refreshing. Take that, Christmas. Now you know how Kwanza feels. The plot of the episode is that Zed isn't feeling the Z-Mas spirit this year, perhaps because Z-Mas is a generic, non-denominational holiday where zombies decorate trees with garbage for some reason. Zed decides to go to the local witch and buy a box that says "holiday spirit" on it, but the holiday spirit senses his lack of holiday spirit, so she challenges him to a spirit-off for his immortal soul. Which, I guess, means he does have one of those.

The non-denominational holiday specter and Zed have a holiday rap battle that includes the phrase “Santler Claws is my homie.” It feels like a hate crime on par with making Hanukkah a monster holiday. I didn’t think they could do something worse than that, but a slow rap about who has the most holiday spirit is a crime in all fifty states.

Zed wins the rap battle by inviting the holiday spirit to his Z-Mas party because that’s what you would do if you had the most holiday spirit. She’s sucked back into the box she came from, and Zed’s undead soul is safe. The episode ends with Santler Claws, the werewolf monster God of Meat-Cember, wishing everyone a merry Z-Mas. Finding out Santler Claws is real and stalking the woods of Seabrook is not the heartwarming ending they think it is.

Disney must have decided that you can’t have Santa Claus in the Zombie World either. Santa would have stopped the nuclear meltdown that killed all of those people, you see. I feel like there were so many phone calls between executives and the creative team where they were denied full access to anything tangentially tied to Christmas. Hanukkah’s fine though. The monster kids can dreidel their asses off. This allegory for racism has evolved into the most antisemitic show I’ve ever seen. Happy Days would never have done this.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jared MountainMan, an official Meat-Cember Game Warden asking everyone to stop baiting Santler Claws with hot sauce.

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