Battle for Dream Island
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Battle for Dream Island (often shortened to BFDI) is a American animated reality TV viewer-voting web series created by Michael and Cary Huang, who are most known by their YouTube channel name, jacknjellify. The series is about a competition between inanimate, anthropomorphic objects. It premiered on January 1, 2010. It has five seasons: BFDI, BFDIA (Battle for Dream Island Again), IDFB (Island Dream for Battle), BFB (Battle for BFDI/Battle for BFB) (also called as BFB pre-split/post-split) and TPOT (Battle for Dream Island: The Power of Two).
Plot
Season 1
"Battle for Dream Island" tells a story of twenty, later twenty one, inanimate anthropomorphic objects living in a place called Goiky, where they have known each other their whole lives. They are living peacefully until a mysterious announcer drops from the sky and announces a competition to win "Dream Island", a luxury island that all the objects lust after. They're split into two teams at first, The Squishy Cherries, and The Squashy Grapes. They competed in challenges each episode, and the losing team's fate is put in the hands of the viewers, who decide in the comments section who they want to be eliminated from the show. The format continued with several plot twists until three contestants were left competing, then a winner out of three was directly voted. This contestant was declared the winner and gets to choose who is to be allowed onto the island with them.
Season 2
"Battle for Dream Island Again" tells a story of 22 inanimate objects (12 veterans, 10 newbies) that were voted by the viewers to compete for Dream Island, which despite declaring a winner last season, still doesn't have an owner. The contestants are divided up into 2 teams, and before a contest, players may switch teams if they want to. Contests are chosen by spinning a wheel, and the winning team gets immunity, while the losing team is up for elimination. The viewers vote by rating (liking/disliking) contestants' videos. The contestant with the most likes on his/her video can spin a wheel, and receive a prize depending on when the wheel stops, while the contestant who has the most dislikes on his/her video is eliminated and sent to the Tiny Loser Chamber, which is itself located in the Locker of Losers.
Season 3
"Island Dream for Battle" takes place three years after "Battle for Dream Island Again" episode 5e. The Firey Speaker Box has disappeared, and the BFDI contestants now live in Yoyleland. Woody and many more former contestants have been recovered. The show is a reverse of BFDI, as every episode, the viewers vote who to take out of the TLC, rather than which contestant to put in the TLC. The show has also been diminished by the competition format and is now focused more on the humor, the story, and even the characters.
Season 4
Unlike "Island Dream for Battle", "Battle for BFDI/BFB" goes back to the traditional format of challenges and eliminations, similar to the first and second seasons. The elimination style changed to a choice of saving rather than eliminating in BFB 17. The art style is more simplified and animated more loosely, which in turn allowed the running time of the first episode to be nearly half an hour-long, and later episodes to be able to be made within a shorter time frame.
Season 5
Unlike post-split "Battle for BFB", "Battle for Dream Island: The Power of Two" will focus to be similar to the pre-split "Battle for BFB" episodes. Likewise, "The Power of Two" episodes have higher quality in both animation and writing, but tend to release less frequently, unlike "Battle for BFB", which tends to have its episodes 3–4 weeks apart.
Why Dream Island Should Belong To It
- Many of the characters are great, funny, cute, heartwarming, likeable and memorable, such as Firey, Leafy, Pin (BFDIA-onward), Flower (BFB), Announcer, Book (except in BFB), Blocky, Gelatin (expect in BFB), Woody, etc.
- Many of the challenges and eliminations (known as Cake at Stake) are fun to watch and are entertaining.
- It would also inspire other people to do their own object shows on the Internet (usually on Youtube) such as Adam Katz/AnimationEpic (who would voice Nickel) with Inanimate Insanity, Niall Burns/Xanyleaves (who would later voice Two and Profily in this show) with Object Overload, and etc.
- Amazing animation from the second season onwards, it also improves as the show progress, especially on Battle for BFDI/BFB (season 4).
- A lot of voice acting are either adorable or just plain appealing (e.g. Bell, Needle, etc.).
- Two finale episodes, "Return of the Hang Glider" and "Chapter Complete", were good ways to end the seasons.
- Wonderful and great soundtracks by Michael Huang in season four and five.
- Several funny moments here and there. For example, Needle's "Don't call me Needy!", or funny faces, such as Book's and Puffball's.
- The post-voting scenes are only made for a quick laugh, but also can sometimes even foreshadow events in the following episode(s).
- Most of the episodes are good and entertaining.
- It is one of the few object shows to have a weekly object show of it's own, that being BFDI Mini (a weekly object show that is an object show that has a small amount of characters, the episodes are short, and the episodes come out everyday or at least a few days away after the previous episodes was released).
- Battle for BFDI is a giant improvement over the previous two seasons.
- Speaking of the contestants who were in the TLC, their redesigns in IDFB onwards are quite nice and looking more appealing.
Bad Qualities
- The episodes can be mean-spirited at times. For example, in "Why Would You Do This On A Swingset" up to "Return of the Rocket Ship", Taco is accused by few of the Bleh members for how she abandoned her team, even though she didn't, since she has been stuck inside the jawbreaker until the said episode. This caused several of the BFDI fans to consider Bleh to be the worst team on the series, due to how brain dead and surprisingly invincible the team is, and don't even get us started with the one that you know who.
- "What Do You Think of Roleplay?" also that has one moment. Book has literally entered the flanderization territory where she jumps into conclusions and believes Taco/Pin abandoned her team once again, when Taco was trying to make her team win. Even through, she later realises that Taco didn't betray her team in "Return of the Rocket Ship" and saved Taco and Ice Cube from the lava in "Don't Dig Straight Down".
- The major problem of BFB pre-split was having a very large cast as there's 64 contestants. It can be hard to give them time for developing or appearing them talk or compete in challenges, even if everyone got their shine in BFB 1, 13, 14, 17, 22, 29 and 30 the rest of the season had some of the characters either not talking, not competing, being there for filler, or even not appearing at all. It would even cause issues in the long run, especially on making episodes since they never do double eliminations. This lead to some cases of flanderization of characters (especially from problematic characters like Four, Gelatin and Book), when they decided to do fewer minutes of episodes.
- That was until BFB 16 "The Escape from Four" where they split season 4 into two shows so 14 contestants will still compete on BFB, while the other 40 will compete on TPOT. Even though this was a rather good decision, it doesn't change the fact that the original idea was to kill off the contestants competing in TPOT.
- There are some bad or mediocre episodes, such as "Yeah, Who? I Wanna Know" (which was a terrible way to start Season 2), "Insectophobe's Nightmare 3", "Zeeky Boogy Doog", "Fortunate Ben", "Questions Answered", "The Escape from Four" (which ended Season 4a in poor note), and "A Taste of Space".
- Some challenges didn't get executed very well, such as BFB 19, aka "How Loe Can You Grow?"
- While IDFB 1 "Welcome Back" episode is good and seemingly to be an improvement of BFDIA, it is disappointing that its the only episode in the season before it gets cancelled (presumably), despite how the creators didn't confirm IDFB was cancelled, and promise the next episode will happen. It hasn't (Though it might be going through development hell).
- It also expected the viewers to sympathize with Match, who had JUST gotten put back into the TLC.
- There are some characters that are very unlikable, including some of them who ended up getting worse like:
- Pencil (BFB): She was generally flanderized from a caring friend to a stereotypical teenager. Her beef with Bubble led to her elimination.
- Match (BFB): Same reason as Pencil.
- Flower: Was very unlikable, egotistic and mean in BFDI.
- Book (BFB): Was extremely flanderized into an idiotic jerk through the first half of BFB.
- Gelatin (BFB): He became a troublesome and annoying little prick throughout much of the first half of BFB.
- Two: Stole alot of contestants from the show to the point where it made half of the community leave.
- Rocky: His personality depends entirely on gross-out humor.
- Profily: While being funny and depending on your view, their plotline can be considered very dumb.
- Their debut in BFB 26 sparked controversy around 100 dollar RC's, as people assumed that their character was entitled to the same relevance as Profily, leading to the effective and eventual removal of RC's altogether.[citation needed]
- Firey: Very bland due to the large cast, but was given more attention in post-split. He was also flanderized in BFB 1-22 as he became immature.
- David: Doesn't do almost every challenges.
- Donut (BFDIA): Somewhat rude and irritable in BFDIA.
- Evil Leafy: Was only created to be filler.
- Gross-out humor, especially from Rocky.
- Depending on your view, the first season uses cheap flash animation, although it can be forgiven since the creators were only kids at the time of the show's release.
- The contestants' faces and limbs in first few episodes of BFB were (drawn by Satomi) and animated pretty badly. Thankfully, started on "Fortunate Ben", it began to improve quite quickly.
Trivia
- The show was inspired by Total Drama, hence why the first iteration of it was called “Total Firey Island,” an obvious reference to the name of Total Drama’s first season, “Total Drama Island.”
- BFB was originally going to be called "Sloppy BFDI".
- The first episode in "The Power of Two", "You Know Those Buttons Don't Do Anything, Right?", was announced to release on January 9, 2021, according to the stinger in "Uprooting Everything". However, it was delayed a few hours due to glitches of the intro and ended up being released on January 10, 2021.
- There were 2 episodes of the season that had to be re-uploaded due to fatal errors in the originals.
- The first was Episode 12 ("A Leg Up in the Race"). In the original, Golf Ball and Rocky were shown on the Another Name team, despite the fact that in the previous episode ("Lofty"), Golf Ball got eliminated and Rocky got moved to the Squishy Cherries, and neither of them should have been there. As a result, the episode was taken down, and a new version was uploaded, with the error fixed.
- The second was Episode 20 ("Gardening Hero"). This episode was originally missing a 30-second portion that contained elimination/rejoin details and the recommended characters for that episode. The episode was later re-uploaded with that part of the episode included.
- On the intro of the 25th episode of BFDI, Eraser said that there might be a cool coincidence if you put the 1st spoken word of the first episode, the second word of the second episode, and so on all the way to the 25th spoken word of the 25th episode and made a message. The message says: "Yeah, what is it? Now I see you are taking the word with the place of the episode number. This is the message, no coincidence."
- It could possibly be made for kids due to containing no adult content aside from having slight gross-out humor as said in BQ#6.
- Each multi-part episode is denoted differently:
- BFDI 1 denotes the parts with letters under the same episode number and the same title.
- BFDIA 5 denotes the parts with letters under the same episode number, but each with different titles.
- BFB 13, 14 and 15 denote the parts with different episode numbers and different titles.
- It started the whole Object Show community, which is nowadays rather toxic, and it did spun several rip-offs.
- BFDIA5b was a game instead of a episode. You play as Book (and later Match and Ice Cube) as you make your way through the inside of Evil Leafy. The game remains unfinished, due to Carry getting busy, and Flash was discontinued in 2020.