'Orlando's Joint' Preps Season 2, Offers Fresh Greens

Think a little bit of Friday and a little bit of South Park.

That’s more or less what gets us to Orlando’s Joint, a Flash-animated web series about pot-puffing Orlando (voiced by Rodney J. Hobbs) and the trials and tribulations of running The Coffee Joint, a neighborhood coffee shop that unexpectedly came into his possession.

Joining Orlando are his two good friends Magda (Sonia Maria Martin) and Ponzi (Kevin John); the former is a girl-seeking girl who moonlights as a (hilariously boring) phone sex operator when she can’t get work at the Joint, and the latter is a wannabe thug who was named after a “famous entrepreneur” who taught his mother everything she knew about business. Together with the spirit of the previous proprietor, Bumpie, who has been reincarnated as a cockroach, they keep the Coffee Joint together amid the pressures of city life – until Orlando’s shady DJ past comes back to haunt him.

Created by Terence Anthony, the show originally started as a Flash cartoon on Newgrounds.com, where it ran for ten episodes. Now the show is being re-released on blip.tv to build hype for the beginning of Season 2, which is expected to drop in Fall 2009. So far, three episodes have shown up on blip.tv, each about four minutes long, and episodes will be released every Wednesday.

If you absolutely can’t wait that long, the shows are available in their original Flash form on Newgrounds, albeit without the support for iTunes subscriptions and such that blip.tv offers. There’s also plenty of reading material about the show – follow the Orlando’s Joint Twitter account, or read up on how Ponzi got his name.