The animators, writers, and voice actors for Robot Chicken are a lucky bunch of jerks. That’s the only conclusion I could come to after watching the show’s Season 3 DVD, currently out in stores for your financial consumption. If you haven’t seen the show, it could be best described as skit-based stop-motion animation using action figures of popular cartoon characters. An average episode consists of watching Optimus Prime, Charlie Brown, Bob the Builder, and Popeye make poop jokes before one or all of them is shot in the face. Yep, these people are paid to play with toys for a living. Did I mention they won an Emmy?
To be fair, Robot Chicken is often more than the sum of its obscenities and the format of the show guarantees that most skits won’t ever run longer than two minutes, let alone thirty seconds. The premise of the show, as seen in the opening, is that the titular Robot Chicken, a cyborg fowl, has been tied to a chair and forced to watch one deranged television program after another as his mad-scientist creator and captor channel surfs erratically.
If a skit ever falls flat on its face, the viewer is mercifully spared by its brevity. The usage of toys also ensures there won’t be any of that cringe-inducing awkwardness you get from watching real actors bomb on shows like SNL or MADtv. When it comes to Robot Chicken, it’s going to be short and sweet or short and painful. Either way, it’ll be short.
Often times, that’s part of what makes the show entertaining. For a minute you’ll watch Smokey the Bear recount his psychedelic youth before switching over to a commercial for “The 33rd Year Old Virgin” staring Jesus Christ which then switches to a ten second clip of a grown Doug Funnie, from the classic Nickelodeon cartoon, drowning his sorrows at a bar. It’s not just the sheer randomness of the skits and their content that entertains; it’s the way they sit next to one another.
Two skits that must be mentioned are Law & Order: KFC and the Gummi Bear sketch. Law & Order: KFC parodies an episode of Law & Order from crime scene to arrest to trial and verdict, using nothing but chickens. Each line of dialogue is replaced with “Bawk bawk bawguck!” and the whole thing makes perfect sense. Law & Order is so overwhelmingly formulaic that you’ll never have to tune into the show or any of its seventy-nine spin-offs ever again. All you need is Robot Chicken.
The Gummi Bear sketch is an entirely different beast. I don’t want to ruin it, but all I’ll say is that those piercing howls of torment and profanity are probably the funniest thing on the whole DVD. Heck, they’re probably the funniest thing I’ve heard all month.
In addition to the twenty episodes of Season 3, the DVD is filled with video blogs, deleted animatics, deleted scenes, a studio tour, VFX comparison, and ample amounts of commentary. They have so much commentary that they had to set aside an entire section called Chicken Nuggets, just to cram it all in.
The animatics in particular are not to be missed. These animated storyboards show skits that could not be made due to their poor quality, budget constraints, or the censors. They include an Al-Qaeda suicide hotline which actually encourages its callers and a 9/11 parody involving cavemen, two tree houses, and the war on pterodactyls which transforms, without cause, into the war on wooly mammoths.
If there was any reason not to pick up the DVD, it would be its length. All of the episodes can be watched within the span of a few hours and watching the creators sit on a couch and chat about random production minutiae can only entertain for so long. Otherwise, just remember that this is the kind of show where they’ll put the words “Emmy award winning” on screen as two guys kick each other in the crotch and fart on one another. Then the words “The Emmy wasn’t for writing” will show up. That’s about as clear as it gets.
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