Weird synchronicity: I recently bought a cup of coffee in a little independent cafe (you know, not Starbucks or Cosi or one of those) and the wrapper thingie had an ad for the Cartoon Network series Robot Chicken. And almost simultaneously, I was assigned the Robot Chicken first-season DVD to review by my editor at Video Librarian, for which I’ve been reviewing TV on DVD for a while now.
I had not yet seen Robot Chicken when I bought that coffee, but I still found it interesting. Because for an ad like that to be successful -- for an advertiser to consider it money well spent -- the assumption has to be that a good percentage of the people looking for a caffeine fix will be interested in what you’re advertising. It’s one thing for Cartoon Network to devote its late-night lineup to cartoons meant strictly for grownups -- that’s niche, and really, how many people are expected to watch late-night on a cable channel way up the dial? (The ratings are apparently considered extremely good even though only a couple hundred thousand people are watching on any given night.) But it’s something else entirely to just figure that a lot of people who drink coffee will be into grownup cartoon stuff. It’s a mark of the mainstreaming of the geek ethos.
And holy crap, now that I’ve seen Robot Chicken? I’ll just quote from my own review of the DVD set:
Geek nirvana doesn’t come any sweeter or weirder than this mad amalgam of toy abuse and pop-culture spoofing: it’s like the entire shared childhood of Generation X ripped to shreds and scotch-taped back together again, with all the seams showing and all the entertainment mojo leaking out of the wounds. Crammed into each of these 12-minute episodes are more rapid-fire sendups than you can count of stuff we Xers hold dear (like James Kirk and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown) and stuff we love to hate (like Kirk Cameron and this-is-your-brain-on-drugs PSAs), often at the same time, and it’s all stop-motion-animated with Barbie dolls and action figures that become the objects of intensely silly violence that all of us who mistreated our playthings as kids will recall with a kiddy glee. But there’s real wit and some very clever commentary behind the goofiness, too: This is the staccato internal psyche of an entire generation made plain and brought to life. This is your brain on the speed that is contemporary junk vulgarity. And it is hi-fuckin’-larious.
It’s not a long review, but there’s a bit more to read over at FlickFilosopher.com.
Oh, and check out the list of allusions to be found in Robot Chicken -- it reads like a strange haiku about late-20th- and early-21st-century pop culture.
