Seth Green

The Shorts

When Greg the Bunny first hit the Fox airwaves back in 2002, I knew two things right away:

1. It was a weirdly funny and surprisingly clever mixture of The Larry Sanders Show and The Muppet Show.

2. It’d never survive on Fox, a network infamous for green-lighting dicey projects — and then abandoning them as soon as the first few rocky ratings reports hit the wire.

So I enjoyed the episodes while they were on, said goodbye when the inevitable wrecking ball hit, and remembered to save a few bucks for the eventual DVD release.

And then I recieved a DVD called Greg the Bunny: Best of the Film Parodies. And I got confused. Film parodies? Was it new material? Stuff deleted from the Fox series? What was going on here?

Well, apparently I missed the memo, but Greg’s creators were approached by the IFC Network, and asked if they could put together a bunch of goofy little indie film parodies for the station to play between, well, actual movies. And so they did. And now there’s a DVD to prove it.

All of the shorts star Greg the Bunny and Warren the Ape, and these guys make for a pretty consistently hilarious comedy team. Greg’s aggressively naive and upbeat; Warren’s a slobbering perv and self-promoter. Together (along with frequent co-stars Count Blah, The Wumpus, and Seth Green) the pair wander through a variety of half-scripted, half-improvised, entirely self-referential movie parodies that are funny more often then they’re not.

Plus the puppets can curse freely now, which helps make the material that much more childishly amusing. Film geeks will have a ball with all the in-joke references, be they blatantly obvious ones — or be they an offhand comment about Mannequin, for example. Series co-creator Dan Milano provides all the funny voices; even more impressive are his fast-paced improv skills.

Throughout the 14 episodes (which run anywhere from 8 to 15 minutes), the Bunny gang takes aim at Easy Rider, Annie Hall, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fargo, The Godfather, Eraserhead, and (of course) Pulp Fiction — and the puppets spend most of their time bitching about how many Pulp Fiction parodies we’ve already seen, which makes the joke even funnier.

The DVD

Video: The episodes are presented in their original full-frame format, and the picture quality is often quite choppy, but that’s just part of the joke.

Audio: The Dolby Digital 2.0 track seems a bit louder than it needs to be, but I just turned my volume down a bit.

Extras

On disc 1 we’re greeted with two extra shorts: Ezekiel 25:17 and Affurmative Action (cut scenes from the Pulp Fiction episode), both of which come with optional filmmaker commentary. (Absolutely everything on this DVD comes with audio commentary: every episode, all the deleted scenes, and even the two featurettes. The main commenters are GTB creators Dan Milano, Sean Baker, and Spencer Chinoy, although a few surprise guests do drop by from time to time.)

We also get three minutes of deleted scenes, a 20-minute gag reel, and a still gallery.

On disc 2 we get all the standard commentaries, plus another five minutes of deleted scenes and another photo gallery.

Final Thoughts

Does the idea of foul-mouthed sock puppets breaking out some seriously geeky movie parodies sound funny to you? I was skeptical at first, but found myself giggling quite often. Fun stuff. (Not for kiddies.)