Robot Love

Seth Green is the man! I never thought I'd say it, but I can think of nothing more appropriate to describe the comic actor who got Adult Swim to bring us "Robot Chicken," a show that brings the toys of childhood to a semi-permanantly infantiized culture.

I love it, really I do, and what's not to love? Tonight's early episode, "Gold Dust Gasoline," had a Cannonball Run between Knight Rider's KITT, Speed Racer, Ponch and Jon of CHiPs, the Mario Brothers, Bo & Luke Duke et al, and a parody of "That 70's Show" as "That 00's Show" featuring the actual cast doing the voice acting, while other themes generally touched by typical child-hood play absurdism, the kind forced on you simply by not having all of any toy universe.


direct YouTube video link

The world of my childhood was one where my brother and I had one of the Dukes of Hazzard's General Lee replica Matchbox cars, but that's about all of note you could buy from that show that would allow you to otherwise pretend/play the TV show. So we certainly could have added in a 1960s era Batmobile we had no idea the origins of, plus the cyclically cool/uncool Mach 5, and then whatever else happens to be current like an A-Team van and we'd have races, or demolition derbys, make bad sound effects with our mouths, drove cars off cliffs, killed off entire casts if we felt like it, and generally just did whatever entertained us.

The world of childhood imagination implicit in the conceit of Robot Chicken makes for an incredibly flexible canvas to play off, as its twisted sorts of logic enable the overlapping of not just genres between film and tv, but eras as well. We used to have Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars doubling as the legions of Tie Fighters and X-Wings in a Star Wars battle, since our parents didn't have the budget to adequately reproduce the filmed version, or even a boy-sized small scale version. Not that really anybody much South of George Lucas's financial world would likely want to have thousands of toys like that, given that I believe they ranged in price from about ten to the hundreds or thousands of dollars for high-end replicas rumored to be available, but still we had to have more than one of each to have a real battle, so we improvised, and anybody who had ever done that would recognize what we were doing if they saw a filmed version of what was in our heads. That's the genius of Robot Chicken.

Of course that's obvious, since this was in fact most people's childhoods to some extent or other. But if it's so obvious, why hasn't it been done before? I mean, it's just stop-motion animation mostly, one of the cheapest, and easiest to get a basic level of proficiency at, using facsimiles of common childhood toys, brilliantly voiced by Seth Green and an amazing array of the best and brightest of contemporary American comic actors. Cheap computer animation helps further lower the production costs, but still this is the first time I feel like I can see my childhood on TV. Kind of cool, and creepy at times, and sometimes flat, but most commonly clever and plenty hilarious.