In his debut for 10YA, “mediocrity craftsman and pro-hobbyist” James Akita looks at Mystery Team, a sketch comedy-founded feature teeming with popular comic actors near the start of their careers, and wonders how it connects to themes co-creator/co-star Donald Glover would continue to examine throughout his career.

Mystery Team, the collaborative brainchild of internet sketch comedy group Derrick Comedy, doesn’t tread any new ground in comedy or filmmaking. And when I saw it ten years ago, I thought it was an amusing if mostly unremarkable comedy flick in the vein of other sketch-comics-cum-filmmakers such as Picnicface or Broken Lizard.

So then why a ten-year retrospective piece?

Derrick Comedy was a group of students from NYU: Dominic Dierkes and DC Pierson, who went on to be talented and funny podcasters and character actors, and Donald Glover, who went on to become MFing Donald Glover. Also, Mystery Team was the feature film debut of Aubrey Plaza, Ellie Kemper, Ben Schwartz, Bobby Moynihan, and also features the now Emmy-Nominated Matt Walsh of Veep if you’re easily impressed by a list of names. An overlooked all-star comedy ensemble if you will.

Hearkening back to YA detective novels and shows like Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Scooby-Doo, and the like while simultaneously attempting to evoke the nostalgia of the fictional Americana depicted in these books, this movie critiques that nostalgia by juxtaposing it against real life.

Little kids that sneak around solving mysteries sounds cute, but the inherent comedy in this routine is that those same kids at 18 are still breaking into homes they think are spooky to harass an invalid senior citizen that they think is suspicious, or who kidnap younger kids from a school playground to interrogate them about vandalized pies.

What was initially taken as just an amusing if somewhat shallow lampooning of an outdated ideology, I realized upon revisiting this film that it might be a more specific thematic allegory or satire of society as viewed through the specific lens of one of its writers.

Is Mystery Team the introduction to Donald Glover’s career-long examination of race, immaturity, and otherness?

“Dope boy swag, I always wanted that.

But my persona was always more of that Arthur Ashe

But no love for the son of a commuter

Who was a radio head and okay at them computers” “This one kid said somethin’ that was really bad

He said I wasn’t really black because I had a dad

I think that’s kinda sad, mostly ‘cause a lot of black kids think they should agree with that” — Childish Gambino

“Hold You Down”

While I just pointed out that this is an ensemble cast, It’s pretty clear that Donald Glover as Jason is the lead, and while Dierkes and Pierson are funny guys, I’m going to focus on him mostly on Glover for the rest of this retrospective.

It’s also helpful to note that this really is the beginning of his career. Donald Glover was tapped to write for 30 Rock due to someone seeing his work with Derrick Comedy on YouTube, and he got an audition for Community because Dan Harmon saw one of the limited release theatrical screenings of Mystery Team.

I think that, superficially, the plot is that what’s cute and innocent as a child are often considered deranged behavior as an adult. That’s the gag, and it’s a simple one. But underlying the obvious and sometimes ham-fisted comedy are themes that I think Glover has repeatedly used in his other works.

The teens are treated like outcasts at school and at home. While it’s largely brought on by their weird behaviors or socially stunted mannerisms, not one parent, counselor, or other adult ever stops to ask them why they are behaving the way they are. Maybe because the movie is trying to say that they’re culpable in helping to create and reinforce the immature behaviors in the first place.

The attention paid to the “Mystery Team” when they were younger may not have stunted them so egregiously if that were not the only positive reinforcement they seemingly ever received. From what little is shown of the parenting in this movie, they just shake their heads and wish their kids would “grow up” while ignoring them and continuing to treat them like children. Jason’s parents encouraging him to “go to a party with some girls” is in its own way as antiquated an idea of parenting as the Mystery Team is of detective-ing.

“There goes three virgins,” Jason’s father comically sighs as the team cycles away from his house on their color-coded bicycles. A sentiment dripping with the same cliché machismo that fake TV dads often have. It seems to be a failing strategy, both in this movie and an argument can be made that maybe it’s failed those it’s satirizing in real life, too.

Of course, throughout the film, the “Mystery Team” as a whole does learn to mature a bit. Aubrey Plaza plays the potential love interest and emotional plot device, dragging Jason slowly from is childish naiveté into the nascent discovery of his own sexuality, which to some people is synonymous with maturity. While this is the same result that Jason’s parents were looking for, it’s not the fact that she’s simply a “girl” that causes this maturation in their son; it’s that they come together over a common feeling of being outcast and she doesn’t treat him like he’s an eight-year-old that sparks his interest.

But newfound maturity comes with a cost, and the lessons in this movie are constantly taught through physical and emotional trauma. Jason is shot twice by the bad guy when he leans too hard into the unearned bravado that these characters use in place of intelligence. Is that funny? In context, maybe. But people are out there getting shot every day over the real-life version of this. Glover has gone back to the well with this recently in a more direct take with “This Is America.”

It also comes as a shocking revelation to Jason when out of the blue he realizes that next year the other two members of the team are going off to different colleges out of state when he didn’t even bother to apply. The idea that people would expect more from him than being a (grown-up) child detective never really occurred to him. Prior to that moment, he never considered growing up. His hyper-focus on his past glory cut him off from the opportunities life had presented to him in the “now.”

I think that was the specific moment that made me start thinking about Glover’s rap persona as Childish Gambino and his show, Atlanta. I can see a through-line of exploring different kinds of social and racial otherness and types of accepted or even championed immaturity explored for the sake of satire. A lot of it examines being emotionally unprepared for everyday things that maybe other people with different experiences take for granted as well as putting yourself in bad situations because of a lack of good guidance, faking competence, and the lack of good parenting or mentoring. And obviously about feeling different because you don’t dress or act like everyone else around you thinks you should.

I think it’s okay to have childlike wonder or even naiveté, and it’s okay to be and feel different. People learn and mature at their own pace, but it’s a cruel world out there sometimes for those not hardened to it, and growing up without a parent or role model is hard and can get you into trouble. And that’s why maybe Mystery Team is not a comedy, but a secretly tragic allegorical take on modern society.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

“There’s no extra layer. I don’t think about what I’m rapping half the time.

I’m just trying to get paid.” — Atlanta, s01e07

— James Akita