Something tastes off.
The voice casting is perfect. Most of the characters sound true to the original. And they also pay homage to the original series with a generous portion of references. The characters all have their original look and costumes in bright animated form. And let me just say that these character designs are brilliant. Each of the original characters are distinctive and more or less timeless.
But the show is not very satisfying and I can't say exactly why. And I don't say it because of the absence of La Chilindrina, one of the central characters of the original show. As I see it, there are three main problems that could be the culprit:
1) It's too long. Each episode is made to fit in a one-hour time slot and the writers really didn't know what to do with it. Each episode is a hectic hodgepodge of vignettes stitched together. If you happen to come in halfway and start watching, you're barely missing anything as nothing more than a thin weak plot provides the stitching for the different parts. It's really just random things happening. Makes it hard to get invested in any episode and also makes it terribly dull to sit through a whole episode from start to finish.
2) Whereas the original was made to appeal to adults and was the best thing on TV at the time for children (I don't think many would be terribly interested in it now in the age of animation and big impressive sets and puppets for live-action children's TV, but back then it was either this or play outside - yuck!), this one is definitely only for the kiddies. The background music NEVER stops, it plays relentlessly. The action is also frantic and the show jumps from random scene to random scene without taking a breath. They expected their target audience to get bored within 30 seconds if there wasn't something frenetic going on.
3) No more social commentary: The original Chavo was a poor orphan who the people in the apartment block felt sorry for. However, seeing as they were themselves barely making ends meet, their pity was left jaded and rarely, if ever, was transformed into satisfaction as they could never really help him.
Case in point - the thing El Chavo always dreamed of was a sandwich, but he only very rarely got to indulge in one. It wasn't uncommon for an episode to end with him crying in the barrel he made his home.
Aside from Chavo himself, most of the people who lived in the block could barely stand each other but had to do so because they were so poor and couldn't live alone. In that environment, they begrudgingly would come to care about each other to some extent.
Some romantic relationships were apparent but they were usually unrequited or did not manifest themselves completely because of apparent shyness or formality. The whole show was an ode to human limitations and dashed hopes.
There's none of that here. Everyone is friends, El Chavo always gets what he wants at the end of the episode, and the romances become quite well-developed.
Honourable Mentions: Batman: The Animated Series (1992). A cartoon for children that had serious, if simplistic, plots memorable characters, and consumable social commentary. Just about the highest echelon of children's programming.
