[Adult Swim]

Being that I am becoming pretty bored with playing silly little on-line games, I am gonna throw another post up here -Possibly a week before anyone is expecting it-, which is the great thing about actually paying for your own website. I don’t really have a deadline, I don’t really have a lot of fans, I just type something out when I feel like it, and stay silent for weeks when I don’t. That is not really a good path to follow if you ever do want to develop a readership, but, I have given up on that aspect of this whole ‘blogging’ thing long ago.

• On tap today, I offer you Robot Chicken. This is a really bizarre show that they show on Cartoon Network as part of the late night edition that they call Adult Swim. Since that seems a little bit confusing as I write it, I will elaborate in a moment. But first, I must elaborate on the aforementioned show.

Robot Chicken is basically a show that comes on, lasts for fifteen minutes (it plays straight through for twelve minutes with no commercials, followed by three minutes of commercials leading into the next show) then is gone. The airtimes for the show (as listed on the website) may differ by region. Since I live in Arizona, which is sometimes on Pacific time and sometimes on central time, we get some of the cable feeds hours early while we get others hours late. That is kind of screwy in and of itself, but I was wanting to talk about Robot Chicken so I will forget that all for now.

In a nutshell, Robot Chicken is twelve minutes of short sketches. Some of the sketches are as short as two seconds while some of them play out over several minutes. They are all done in animation, claymation, or using action figures (at least the several that I have seen), and they run the gamit from being dopey to outright hilarious. I am not even sure if it is possible to explain the show’s premise, not that I really think it has much of one. I really doubt that anyone much under the age of thirty would/could understand a lot of the parodies, some of them are contemporary, but the majority are spoofing stuff that I watched as a child. Things like G.I. Joe, Thunder Cats, He-Man, Voltron, and other cartoons or action figures that were popular in the early-mid eighties.

This is a show that is certainly not meant for children, yet it doesn’t seem to be specifically aimed at adults either. It is frequently hilarious, while being boring or confusing at other times. You really would have to watch it to get a sense of the weird fascination I have with it. To give you a sense of the humor involved, I must tell you about one sketch where they were spoofing Voltron. One of the lions was mounting (for reproducing purposes) another of the lions, while they were trying to build Voltron. Though when spoken (typed) it might not seem that funny, in the context of the short it was hilarious.

Seriously, if you have the cartoon network on your t.v. you should check out a couple of episodes. Hell, it only lasts for ten or twelve minutes and you will likely laugh a couple of times (if remember the cartoons and action figures from the eighties).

• The Adult Swim thing is what the cartoon network is doing after the sun goes down. It is far from porn, it has nothing in it that your average teenager hasn’t seen, but your five or six year old wouldn’t understand a word of it. They use the show Family Guy to lead into “Adult Swim”, after which you should not have children viewing, at least not if you don’t want to warp their fragile little minds.

I was thinking about Cartoon Network’s dilemma today, which was why I typed this out actually. They made a channel that you can sit your kids in front of so that you don’t have to take care of them all day, yet, when the kids go to bed at nine, the Cartoon Network is a Ghost Town. I really doubt that many infomercials would be willing to buy time on the Cartoon Network at two in the morning. They took the only logical step; cartoons for kids in the day, cartoons for adults at night. What were their other options?

Funny aside here. The cable company where I grew up showed Nickolodeon from 6a.m.-6p.m., then switched it to A&E from 6p.m.-6a.m. I am not even entirely sure if that would be legal in today’s market, but it worked for that cable company. It was very specifically targeting the consumer. I only noticed it since I woke up late one night and turned on Nickelodeon. I was expecting to see more green slime getting dumped onto people, instead I saw the last half hour of the movie “Deliverance”. I have never been quite the same since…

Anyway, Robot Chicken, watch it once. You will either like it or hate it, there is no in between. Sort of like porn, only less gender-biased as to the likers and haters.

Funny puppy story to come later today or on the next update, I am not yet sure which.

Leave a Reply