Meow Meow Beenz although I’m not going to sign-up even though they said they definitely won’t share your contact information. I saw this early today, and since then they’ve added “not associated with NBC etc.” It would have been a cool tie-in if the app was real and available when the show aired.
I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. I’m not trying to say you’re wrong for enjoying it, though. Just using this as a forum to discuss the show and what makes it great. In past high concept episodes they would draw from the continuity of the Greendale story line and give it that extra twist of absurdity/surreal humor to make it epic. Fat Neil was introduced a few episodes prior to Advanced D&D, Digital Exploration of Interior Design/Pillow’s and Blankets draws on the AC Repair School’s attempt to separate Troy and Abed, the entire end of season 3 was a culmination of several plot lines, Paintball II draws on the rivalry with City college, and they mocked Glee several times before Regional Holiday Music. In this episode there was too much that had to be explained in the episode. They were, in effect, winging a self-contained plot rather than expanding on prior ground work.
They’ve done that before in Modern Warfare and Epidemiology (Halloween Zombie episode), but I feel that both of those needed to catch the viewer and characters off guard.
I saw the episode so I know the explanation they gave. It doesn’t change the fact that they suddenly appeared out of nowhere just for the episode. You bring up FaceBook. They didn’t use Harvard to beta test their site. Mark Zuckerberg invited his classmates at Harvard to try it out. I’m guessing this is how most social networking sites work. Invite your friends and let it spiral out. And it wouldn’t have had to change the way Abed was used in the episode. He wasn’t just trying to make small talk and connections. He was using the app to try to make small talk and connections because the App would give him objective feedback he wasn’t otherwise able to pick up on.
Again, I saw the explanation. But, for example with the costumes, they made a jump from the 2-3s wearing drab colors so as not to look like they were trying too hard (which was clever) to gray Orwellian jumpsuits and shiny futuristic togas. I noticed the show make that jump and couldn’t follow along.
The bold part was essentially my first criticism. A lot got lost in the shuffle because they tried to cram too much together and/or hadn’t laid the groundwork for it to be done subtly. Or, as AV Club put it:
Oh, you mean like the website http://coolbeans.com/ which will sue you and your app out of existence? Or do you mean the variant http://coolbeenz.com/ which also exists?
And you realize the phrase “cool beans” has been around for years, right?
I don’t think you understand how trademark infringement works. But suffice it to say, no they could not. Not to mention, the app is a figment of a TV shows imagination. (And, BTW, the second link with the spelling I suggested is a domain name for sale, as in one could purchase it to start a company! Hooray!)
Yes. That is the whole point. The phrase is used when you think something is good. The app would be a play on that wherein that thing which is good would be awarded not stars, not points, not thumbs up, but actual ‘cool’ beans. Did it need to be explained?:dubious:
There’s a reason Community didn’t name it pepsibeenz. NBC doesn’t like lawsuits. Hence, they named it something that doesn’t already exist. No lawsuits that way.
There’s also a reason real tech startups don’t choose names of existing sites. When the time comes to get buy the domain name, the owner might sell it to you, but demand a King’s ransom. So much easier to just choose a non-existent name. Far cheaper that way.
Yeah, that AV Club review puts it nicely.
Not one of the better episodes this year, maybe even the worst, but still a solid B. Very messy but with enough good to make it well worth it. I loved the previous 2 episodes, so I’ve been surprised to see more criticism here of those than this one.
Crawlspace, if you’re going to complain about how they didn’t write the episode the way that you would have written it, could you at least have better suggestions? Your ideas for how they should have written the show seem, at best, like the sort of things that would have been discarded after the first draft.
The Controvert is right; MeowMeowBeenz is a much better name for the app, especially considering that it’s a really crummy app that’s being beta tested at Greendale.
What major guest stars were in this episode? Other than Hurwitz, who I had to look up.
That reminds me, the fake trailer in the tag was great! Spot on 80s movie parody!
As far as the other guest stars, as mentioned earlier in the thread the developers of the App were the two guys from the Sarah Silverman show.
I just think he thinks it seemed condensed - which is fair. It could have been a very good 2-parter. In fact, I think community would benefit from being an hour long (40 mins runtime).
The 5 part caste system (with the 5s ruling over all & the 4s being middle management) was a clear reference to Brave New World.
I think the Mustard was just random comedy and not meant to be anything deeper than that. It was just a silly reason to take Britta seriously.
I’m not sure what you’re on about. I’m not complaining about how they didn’t write the episode. I’m not complaining at all, really. If you liked the episode, great. I’ve just explained why this particular episode fell flat for me, especially since I got the stock, “Well I guess this isn’t the show for you,” after being the first voice of dissent. And really, the only change I suggested was having Abed (or someone else at Greendale, FWIW) be the developer. I think this would have helped simplify a story that I felt had too much going on by reducing the number of characters involved.
The whole point of the episode was that it’s a fantastically addictive app, which by the end of the episode is out of Beta Test and on sale in app stores with a perfect 5/5 rating. That aside, the name just struck me as them trying to make a joke about app developers for trying to be too cute by half, but instead of coming up with something clever or witty they resorted to petty mockery. Not the most rational reaction, but something that irks me when I see it.
I just watched it again and I think that might be a large part of it. I thought things were good up until Abed explains why the 2-3’s wear grey and he’s happy because he can make small talk about being a 2-3. Then they go to commercial and when they’re back the scene card says it’s day 8 and everything is futuristic. It jumped too far too fast for me (possibly too far, period) – and once it made that leap everything came across as ridiculous and forced, not bizarrely-natural and funny.
I think, for me, if they wanted to execute that concept they would have needed 40 minutes or a simpler plot to ease the descent.
Best lines of the night were Jim Rash’s:
"This could be good for us. Look what Facebook did for Harvard, right?”
“Fives have lives
Fours have chores
Threes have fleas
Twos have blues
Ones don’t get a rhyme 'cause they’re garbage.”
And Brave New World is a clear reference to Plato’s Republic. As a political theory geek, this made me enjoy this episode quite a bit even if it did have its flaws 
That didn’t faze me at all. I remember a few times when I was in college there’d be some company on campus trying to promote something. College seems like a perfect market for promoting/testing new apps. There are a lot of people with smart phones, but they also have the time to download the app and play with it.
There are a lot of apps with stupid names, so the name MeowMeowBeenz seemed appropriate to me. Shazam, Spotify, Waze, Yelp, are all fairly popular apps with silly names. You can read about other apps with ridiculous names and sometimes ridiculous ideas on ValleyWagand plenty of other tech sites. MeowMeowBeenz is a somewhat sillier name, but it is because it’s a comedy show.
I thought the episode was definitely funny and clever. But I’m almost tired of the novelty episodes where all the rules of the school are rewritten and everyone goes crazy, then everything is back to normal at the end of the episode.
Agreed. It was really awesome when they did it early on - Modern Warfare 1 & 2 - but they only did it every once in a while. It’s just too much when we’ve had, what, 3 episodes this season with the same theme of the campus goes to Hell (twice during a game, and once during the Ass Crack Bandit’s reign of terror)?
I wouldn’t count ass crack bandit as the category of universe-transformation as the floor being hot lava or the app.
Maybe not as much, but instead of the inner workings of community college life, it became a noir episode.
It took until post #31 to have someone mention Brave New World? The rest of you never should have gone to Greendale for your educations.
I’m pretty sure Dan Harmon has realized there’s no possible chance of a season 6, so he’s having fun messing with the NBC executives’ heads for as long as he can. Imagine someone not as completely, thoroughly, mindlessly obsessed with Community as we are trying to watch this episode. They would buy an app just to rate it one meow. Maybe even create one just for the purpose. Can a tv show actually be a fuck you to tv viewers? Apparently the answer is yes. We’ve never seen that before. This season will go down in tv history till the end of time.
P.S. I don’t miss Troy.