Are you watching Robot Chicken? All the cool people do. Wait, do we even use ‘cool’ anymore? Jeezus I’m so out of touch. But that’s the great thing about Robot Chicken – it’s for everyone that remembers (fondly, or not so fondly) Fraggle Rock and He-Man, The Thundercats, and Monchichis, but it’s also for anyone up on their current pop culture. Perhaps that only means my exact age group. Which is a really small demographic, but I have to say, if they’re aiming for the age group that is me, they freaking nailed it.
Robot Chicken, currently finishing up its Fourth Season on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim is a stop motion animation comedy series using toys, action figures, dolls, and clay to animate hilarious sketch comedy bits. The show, created by Seth Green and Matthew Senreich, with head writers Douglas Goldstein and Tom Root in tow, has had a surprisingly successful run considering it is only a 15-minute show, but Adult Swim has wisely let its loyal audience and great word of mouth keep it going.
While there are plenty of completely original skits in Robot Chicken’s repertoire, most of the skits, much like other live action comedy sketch shows, are based on parodies of everything from fairy tales and reality television, to politics and pop culture, and Robot Chicken has been nominated for and won several awards including two Emmys for animation. The voice actors that lend their talent to the show as guest stars are also impressive ranging from Stan Lee and Paul Rudd to Carrie Fisher and Scarlett Johansson.
The show is not recommended for the faint of heart or the non pop-culture savvy as Robot Chicken is often gross and offensive, but if you can handle it, then not unlike The Daily Show, when it’s “on” it can easily be the funniest 15 minutes of your day. The writers are genius at keeping the show fresh, always smartly drawing from current events, and finding new ways to inject the show with relevant comedy.
Like any sketch show, the show succeeds or fails based on the power of individual skits. For me personally, I tend to prefer the quick sketches, which when they work, are perfect one line jokes. A recent favorite of mine that I caught on a repeat episode is this Gummy Bear bit. Pointless and silly perhaps, but I laughed out loud, and precious few things illicit that reaction for me these days:
There are also the hilarious longer sketches like The Dark Crystal parody Dark Cristal, which turns the original puppets characters from the movie into a “hip” rap video for “teh kids”. The lyrics are priceless.
At the end of the day, Robot Chicken isn’t doing anything important or mind blowing, but just reaching back into the roots of sketch comedy to bring us something light and fun…something that is pure entertainment. I don’t know about anybody else, but sometimes that is exactly what I need.
The final episode in the current run of Season Four premieres on Sunday, September 20th at 11:30 pm on Adult Swim. There are several more episodes scheduled to premiere in 2009, but Sunday’s episode ends their latest mini-run.
Seasons One, Two, and Three are available on DVD. Robot Chicken repeats also play Monday through Thursday on Adult Swim, generally at midnight and there is a huge stock of episodes available through the Adult Swim website.
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Kelly is a freelance writer and artist living in New York who is relatively obsessed with comics and feminism, which generally make horrible bedfellows and explains a lot of her recurring headaches. You can read her rantings about such things at: http://1979semifinalist.wordpress.com