Seth Green

More manic mayhem from Adult Swim’s hilarious stop-motion program.

September 26, 2006 - Those animation fans with attention deficit can rejoice, as it seems that Robot Chicken has got back on track. After coming back from their hiatus with a pretty mediocre episode, they rebounded nicely with "The Munnery." From top to bottom the gags and skits were all pretty humorous... but not hysterical. But after last week having hit-and-miss jokes, it was nice to enjoy good skits all the way through.

The main skits that the show focused on were: a gay Navy sketch; a workout routine with Zod from Superman; Dorothy from Wizard of Oz wishing her way back to her parents house; a retarded take on Monk: Cork; a music video using Weird Al Yankovic’s song "Weasel Stomping Day"; kids’ wishes coming true; and Star Trek characters deciding who lives and dies. We enjoyed most all of these skits, but we can’t help but wonder when we are going to get a break from "retarded" handicapped jokes. As mentioned last week, jokes making fun of certain groups of people are okay when you do them every once and a while - as it doesn’t show any malicious intent - but when you make jokes about certain topics and people frequently it looks as if you have an agenda, or are just plain crass in this situation. Plus the Cork skit wasn’t even all that funny.

Personally we found the best skits to be the ’Bod By Zod’, the Wizard of Oz, and the Star Trek bits. Just hearing Zod command the viewers to follow him, in aerobics, was hilarious. This was a skit that could have just been a couple seconds long but seeing him actually teaching was pretty funny. The Dorothy skit took me a moment to understand its humor, but once I got it, it was very funny. Being that she is a poor girl from the farmland of Kansas, she was sent back to her actually mother and father from Oz, instead of back to Auntie Em and Uncle Henry. Just as you would expect from the show, Dorothy’s mother and father are trailer trash, that she is scared to be back with. The best sketch of the show however was the Star Trek skit. After losing all their power due to pornographic holograms, the crew of over 400 had to decide which five members of the crew got to beam down to the local planet and survive. The five that get away are Kirk, Uhura, Bones, Spock and a red shirt. But in the humorous twist to the skit, when they all get hungry and contemplate cannibalism, the red shirt finally turns the tables and eats the rest of the crew. Trekkies understand the humor in this skit... and it is the esoteric gags like this one that make the show so funny.

So was it the best Robot Chicken episode ever? No, but it was much better than average. The skits were really funny, and the great nerdy use of Superman and Star Trek characters was enough to have us laughing out loud. But, still Robot Chicken isn’t as good as it was the first season, and so we will all just have to wait until next week to see if Seth Green and company can show us why Robot Chicken is still considered to be one of Adult Swim’s best programs.