Review: THE LEGEND OF NEIL is Hilarious Fantasy-Comedy Web Series

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Review: THE LEGEND OF NEIL is Hilarious Fantasy-Comedy Web Series

Posted on 12 January 2010 by Brent Hartinger, Editor

Four and a Half Torches (Out of Five)

The premise of The Legend of Neil, a new fantasy-comedy web series, is that a loser named Neil is masturbating to a female elf inside the game of Zelda when he auto-erotic-asphyxiates himself and somehow ends up magically transported to a land of fantasy cliches.

If you find that premise hilarious (and I admit, I do), you’ll like this NSFW series a lot.

First, it must be said: for me, a little bit of ironic-hipster slacker humor goes a long way, at least in these days of irony-overload.

What saves The Legend of a Neil from a feeling of “been there, done that” is its still-ironic, but very fantasy-specific humor, sending up every kind of fantasy cliche and convention imaginable.

It pretty much all works: a cave is marked “Level 1,” and a character is able to carry all manner of equipment by storing it in his (non-existent) “inventory.” The (cliche gay-esque) villain threatens, “Don’t make me turn the fog machines back on! Yes, fog equals power.” The dragon says, “Hey, you’re in the one part of the room that I can’t reach! That’s not fair!”

Like Buffy and Xena, the show even has a musical episode — the third one of the second season (and the music is surprisingly good!). During “The Mentor Song,” the mentor sings, “Our clues are often confounding, our lessons condescend, and we wait until you’re practically dead before we come through in the end!”

I’m sorry, but for a fantasy (and musical theater!) geek like me, this is some pretty funny stuff.

More humor is mined from the sets and special effects, which are both gloriously cheesy and impressively inventive.

The series flags a little from time-to-time, but it’s still much more consistently funny than last year’s Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, which ran on Comedy Central and, no doubt, had a far larger budget.

I’m not surprised The Legend of Neil has been one of the more successful web-series to date, and even been picked up for distribution by Atom.com (a partner of Comedy Central, all owned by MTV).

It’s pretty great.

Here’s the first episode:

Watch the other episodes.

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