Julio visits Crayola headquarters, where different colors respond to customer service calls. He introduces a new light color and the executives she meets with wonder what the purpose is. "To color something light is to recognize that things are different, and that's okay." What do you want to call the color? “Fatasmas”, which is “ghosts” in Spanish. An executive convinces him to do it in the singular: "Ghost."
Julio hops into a rental car, driven by a chatty driver named Chester (Tomás Matos). Chester tells Julio to delete all of his car rental apps and just download his; he promises to even come pick him up if he leads someone else.
Creator: Julio TorresStars: Julio Torres, Martine Gutierrez, Joe Rumrill
A comedy called MELF is playing on the phone mounted in the back seat; It's about an alien that crashes into the home of an Earth family. He loves to eat cookies and spaghetti for dinner. But the most interesting thing is that MELF (Marc Petrocino) and the father of the family (Paul Dano) are falling in love. He leaves his wife (Sunita Mani) and abandons his children. Funny, right?
Chester and Julio pick up Julio's robot assistant, Bibo (Joe Rumrill), who wants time off for a dental cleaning, even though he is a robot. Bibo also shows another urgent letter from Julio's owner, which Julio decides to ignore.
Julio hears a “siren song” in his head, gets out of the car and enters a jewelry store, where he finds a tiny crystal earring shaped like an oyster. “He said it was part of a cursed antique, so I had to buy it,” he tells “his manager” Vanesja (Martine Gutiérrez) at a club. Of course, he then proceeds to lose it.
The two share Chester's car with a teacher (Eudora Peterson), and Julio tells them how he can feel colors, shapes, sounds, and letters after he was struck by lightning when he was a child. For example, he tells the story of the letter Q (Steve Buscemi), which is too edgy and punk to be so early in the alphabet, surrounded by “normals” like P and R.
At her school, the teacher ends up using the boys' room and is perplexed by a drawing of a penis that runs away from the viewer. She tries to find out which boy drew him and finds a bully who gets angry at people who think he thinks he can't, like wearing a purple shirt.
As Julio tries to figure out if the birthmark shaped like the oyster pendant he lost is growing, he records his recurring dream, where he wears the pointy hat, for analysis.
The first few minutes of the first episode of Fantasams, which includes Emma Stone as one of its executive producers, along with Torres, are very strange indeed, and we wondered if it was going to be one of those shows we just didn't go to. "Getting there." The minimalist sets, Torres's positive but vaguely unpleasant demeanor, the symbolic representations of things as broad as “New York” and as specific as crayons… it was a lot to take in.
But as we are introduced to the people who will populate Julio's world and sketches that further illustrate how Julio thinks and feels, things become a little easier to digest. Torres aims to be incidentally funny when it comes to scenes in which he interacts with people like Chester and Vanesja (pronounced “Vanessa”) and robots like Bibo, and even the sketches balance the funny with the strange and dramatic.
In the MELF sketch, for example, Dano's character has to deal with his family being estranged from him because of his choice. Buscemi is quite funny as the rebellious Q, but he is also alarmed when W, X, Y and Z rise to stardom as the strange letters he wanted to be.
Despite all this, Julio continues searching for this oyster pendant, convinced that if he compares it to his birthmark, which was once exactly the same size, he will be able to persuade a doctor that he is growing and needs attention. So, through the weirdness, Torres knows that a common thread is necessary to keep things anchored to reality, even if it is only by a microfine thread.
Of course, some of the sketches are just absurd, like when Bowen Yang plays a North Pole elf who testifies against Santa Claus for not paying his workers, or when Alexa Demie plays an overly dedicated insurance customer service representative. who bucks the system uses her computer for personal purposes and falls under the domineering spell of a different customer service representative (the aforementioned Ziwe) when she herself needs help.
But with all these insights into Torres' psyche tied together by his search for the pendant, even if it's a silly final line, all the absurdity and messages he's trying to convey come together in a show that's a laugh-inducing thought experiment.
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