"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Bob's Burgers, "Dawn of the Peck"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. This week, due to the holiday weekend, this is being posted on Wednesday. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Bob's Burgers' Thanksgiving episodes have been my favorite Thanksgiving episodes of any current sitcom--what other show comes up with images of a giant headless turkey reenacting My Neighbor Totoro or live poultry attacking people to the tune of Donna Summer?--and each one of those episodes, including this year's "Dawn of the Peck," has been penned by Lizzie and Wendy Molyneux, writers of such standout Bob's Burgers episodes as "Art Crawl," "Boyz 4 Now" and "World Wharf II." Last year's "Turkey in a Can" took the form of a whodunit, with the mystery of "Who's been repeatedly dumping the family's turkeys into the toilet?" cleverly serving as the framework for an oddly affecting story about Bob's anxiety over Tina growing up too fast.

That Belcher turkey mystery is one of many examples of both how much Bob's Burgers resembles The Cosby Show in its improvised moments and its characters' love of playing pretend and why it's actually a better sitcom than The Cosby Show. Bob's Burgers and the underrated Bernie Mac Show will stand the test of time for me better than The Cosby Show--and this was way before recent headlines forever ruined our enjoyment of The Cosby Show--because The Cosby Show's requirement that "Dad's always right" caused that show to lose some steam after a couple of seasons (and "Dad's always right" makes so much sense now, due to Cosby's history of power trips and his need for control), much like how Gene Roddenberry's edict that there should be no conflict between the crew members really hamstrung the storytelling for the first couple of seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Neither Bob's Burgers nor Bernie are afraid to let Dad be imperfect--or get crazy drunk.

"Turkey in a Can" offered us Bob in an altered state via allergy medicine, a follow-up to absinthe's effects on Bob in "An Indecent Thanksgiving Proposal," and hopped-up-on-some-shit Bob--or drunk Bob--always results in an above-average Bob's Burgers episode. Perhaps taking note of that, the Molyneux sisters get him in a less-than-sober state again for the third consecutive Thanksgiving episode in a row. This time, whiskey causes Bob--who's chosen to skip the 1st Annual Fischoeder Turk-tacular Turkey Town Festival and Turkey Trot and stay at home to prepare dinner--to both have angsty conversations with a turkey baster (I bet that part of the Molyneuxs' script just says, "[Let Jon ad-lib here.]") and get his Disco Stu on to Donna Summer's "Dim All the Lights." The presence of "Dim All the Lights" automatically makes "Dawn of the Peck" the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. I'm glad "Dawn of the Peck" went with that track and not the overplayed "Hot Stuff."

But it's not just "Dim All the Lights" that makes this another enjoyable Bob's Burgers Thanksgiving episode. Both the annual tradition of Bob ending up drunk or high on his favorite holiday and Linda, Teddy and the kids' situation in "Dawn of the Peck" really drive home how irreverent and fun Bob's Burgers' annual take on this often way-too-sentimentally-marketed holiday can be. While Bob's getting crunk and rediscovering Donna Summer, the festival at the Wonder Wharf goes awry when the 500 turkeys, chicken, ducks and geese Mr. Fischoeder (Kevin Kline) and his brother Felix (Zach Galifianakis) brought in for the running of the turkeys go on a rampage and chase after Linda, Teddy and the other participants. So "Dawn of the Peck" takes the form of a horror movie that's basically The Birds, but with turkeys that can't fly and no gore at all. Bob's finger injury in "The Kids Run the Restaurant" was way more graphic.

Despite containing as much blood as a Hallmark Channel production of From Dusk Till Dawn, this Thanksgiving episode that's more like a Halloween episode is a brilliant idea and perhaps the first of its kind. Add lots of H. Jon Benjamin trying to sing falsetto (speaking of which, Bob's bizarre "love is in control" kitchen song during the end credits is less Donna Summer and more "Girlfriend Is Better" by Talking Heads), as well as a nice moment where Regular Sized Rudy (Brian Huskey, a highlight of the cast of the recently cancelled Selfie), the frailest of the Wagstaff school kids, gets the chance to be heroic for once, during a Wonder Wharf spinning ride sequence that has to be one of the most complicated action sequences Bento Box ever animated for this show, and you have another winner from the Molyneuxs, who really ought to be writing the follow-up to Jurassic World if this comedy thing doesn't work out.

Memorable quotes:
* "I just wanted to see the turkeys. I worked on a turkey ranch one summer, when I was 14. I learned a lot about life. And a lot about turkey feces."

* "We're gonna die like we were born. Spinning around in an egg!"

* Mickey (Bill Hader): "Oh, shoot. I threw the key into the ocean... I didn't want the birds to get it. We can't let this technology fall into their hands."

* Linda: "Are you okay, my babies?" Tina: "Yep, I'm probably always going to move in little circles like this though."

* "Oh, hello, uh, turkey baster. How-how-how are you? Good, good. Uh, yeah, good. I'm-I'm doing really good. Yeah... That's funny, I was just, uh... I was... I was... just talking about you. Uh, well, uh, it was good to see you. I should get back to... Yeah, it was... [Laughs.] It was nice to see you. You look great. [Tries to close the drawer.] What? I-I-I-I-I see you, okay? You-you've made your point. [Tries to close the drawer again.] Fine. [Takes the turkey baster out of the drawer and places it on the counter.] Is this what you want? A-Are you happy now? Yeah, yeah? That good? Do you want it to come out? You want to do this right now? You want to do this right now? That's a cl... that's classic! That's classic you, turkey baster! Classic you! Not fitting in the drawer. Deliberately not! [Laughs.] That's great! Oh, come on, don't look at me like that, turkey baster! Don't look at me like that! I... I didn't want this! You think I wanted this? But I didn't! I didn't. This isn't what I wanted. I-I never wanted to be apart from you. It was all an act. It was... it was a lie. [Sniffles.] Oh God. That's so much snot. You know what? I'm gonna do it. You're right, turkey baster. I'm Bob. I make dinner. It's not too late. The grocery store's open for another hour. We can still do this. Let's go! Let's go! Get up! Get... I can't get... Oh my God! I... Uhhhh! Let's get up, drunk! I am dizzy. I'm really dizzy. Oh my God. I gotta sit down. Give us... give us a minute."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Black Dynamite, "Sweet Bill's Badass Singalong Song or Bill Cosby Ain't Himself"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

As a kid, I loved Bill Cosby: Himself so much that other grade school classmates and I would frequently repeat to each other on the bus or on the playground several lines from that concert film, which was a fixture of so many cable channels in the '80s and '90s (including the Disney Channel, whose censors deleted Cosby's entire routine about booze and cocaine addicts from the film). The "I thought my name was Jesus Christ!" bit was particularly popular on the playground. I still do like that film. As Hannibal Buress said in a 2013 GQ piece where he and a bunch of other comedians discussed their love for Cosby's material in Himself, "It's stuff that holds up." But ever since Cosby's infamous 2004 "Pound Cake" speech, my admiration for Cosby--outside of his unquestionable skills as both "a stand-up who sat down" and a storyteller--dissipated.

It dissipated even further after reading this (scroll down to the comments section for stories of Cosby being a power-mad asshole backstage or off-camera) and this and then hearing about one Cosby rape allegation after another (with Cosby now receiving support from Rush Limbaugh--why is Bill Hicks dead while this prick Hicks used to take down so beautifully in his act is still alive?). So I enjoyed Buress' recent rant about Cosby, a routine from his current stand-up tour that went viral last month and has attracted so much media attention even Buress himself has become tired of hearing about it. In the routine, Buress, a lapsed Cosby fan, scathingly slammed both the star of Leonard Part 6 and "the fuckin' smuggest old black man public persona," a side of Cosby that has frustrated Buress and so many other people of color from the hip-hop generation. "He gets on TV, 'Pull your pants up, black people, I was on TV in the '80s! I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom!' Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby," ranted Buress.

"Sweet Bill's Badass Singalong Song," the Black Dynamite episode that pokes fun at Cosby's "Pound Cake"-era persona by imagining his '70s self as a shrill killjoy who schemes to replace blaxploitation movies with much more family-friendly entertainment, was written about a year before the Buress rant helped to turn the public against the once-beloved entertainer and now inevitable Law & Order: SVU episode subject. That's why "Sweet Bill's Badass Singalong Song" barely acknowledges the current rape scandals, although at the very last minute, episode co-writer Carl Jones was able to squeeze a couple of rape scandal references into the final cut (unlike the low-budget South Park, the much-more-expensive-to-animate Black Dynamite doesn't have the luxury of a fast turnaround). But the episode amusingly sheds light on how irritating and hypocritical Cosby's Bill O'Reilly-ish "Pull your pants up" persona has been, and it gives Cosby a lovely comeuppance--in the form of both a scolding and another kind of punishment (which I'll get into in a few seconds) from a frequently bleeped-out Moms Mabley, who's perfectly imitated by stand-up comic Luenell (you might remember her as the prostitute Borat marries at the end of Borat).

This episode is also quite a showcase for guest voice actor Kevin Michael Richardson (outside the recording booth, he frequently stole ABC's short-lived caper comedy The Knights of Prosperity from Donal Logue, but his greatest moment as a performer remains his guest shot as both an elderly Martin Luther King and a lisping bouncer who criticizes Huey's shoes on The Boondocks). He does impressive quintuple duty as Cosby, a bunch of nameless side characters and Melvin Van Peebles, who turns to Black Dynamite, his old friend from "the days of fucking," for help when Cosby's anti-blaxploitation scheme sabotages the filming of Van Peebles' new Jim Kelly/Pam Grier/Antonio Fargas/Rudy Ray Moore movie Blackity Black Black Black and then threatens to inflict on the public both the concept of reverse strip clubs (a marquee for a new reverse strip club reads, "Throw some clothes on deez hoes!") and a poorly cast primitive version of The Cosby Show called The Huxtables (Jim Kelly as Cockroach!). If you have to see one work of television this year that ends with Richardson hilariously voicing Cosby making gargling noises while being forced to orally pleasure Moms Mabley, make sure it's "Sweet Bill's Badass Singalong Song."

Memorable quotes:
* "As you know, there have been many great black films: Black Caesar, Blacula, Black on This Sucka!, You Blacked My Mama, Who You Callin' Black?, Get Black Jack, All That Black and the very popular Some of My Best Friends Are Black."

* Rudy Ray Moore, voiced by episode co-writer Byron Minns, a.k.a. Bullhorn: "I made Godzilla suck my dick while King Kong held the balls! I whupped a skyscraper's ass and made all the London Bridges fall!"

* Moms Mabley to Black Dynamite: "Why the long face, honey? You look like you lost your dick."

* Series composer Fatin "10" Horton briefly brings back the 2009 Black Dynamite film's old gag of song lyrics that describe everything that happens, during the Bill Withers parody "It's All Fucked Up Now": "It's all fucked up now they gone/'Cause the Cos took them away..."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Bob's Burgers, "The Kids Run Away"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Bob's Burgers' latest episode, "The Kids Run Away," takes an old story that's been done before in similarly small-scale family sitcoms like The Cosby Show and Leave It to Beaver--a kid becomes afraid of dentists--and manages to outdo all those previous dentist's office episodes, thanks to Bob's Burgers' winning blend of warmth and Adult Swim-style weirdness. Instead of the comedic one-two punch of Peter, the Huxtables' silent kid neighbor, and special guest star Danny Kaye in an accent that's as zany as Bill Cosby's "obeekaybee" dental patient shtick, "The Kids Run Away" soars due to inventive writing by Rich Rinaldi (who transmogrifies an entertaining dentophobia story into an even more entertaining story about the craziness of fanny pack-wearing Aunt Gayle), as well as a return visit from Megan Mullally as Gayle, a nicely subdued additional guest shot by the usually not-so-subdued Ken Jeong as Dr. Yap and an incomprehensible homemade board game that somehow makes Cones of Dunshire look like Candy Land.

"We've been playing this game for six hours, and no one has even made it past the Cliffs of Huxtable!," groans Louise during Gayle Force Winds, Gayle's homemade board game, while hiding out in her aunt's apartment to avoid being taken by Bob to another appointment to Dr. Yap's office. The Huxtable reference is, besides Louise's fear of the dentist, a sign that "The Kids Run Away" is an homage to The Cosby Show, particularly its characters' love of dressing up or playing pretend (whether those characters were the Huxtables or friends of the family like the Danny Kaye dentist character). It's the one major trait that the Belchers and their friends inherited from The Cosby Show.

The comedic centerpiece of "The Kids Run Away," in which the Belchers, Gayle, Teddy and Dr. Yap role-play as characters in an imaginary spy thriller in order to help Louise overcome her dentophobia, takes a page from one of The Cosby Show's funniest episodes, "Theo's Holiday." If you haven't watched "Theo's Holiday" in ages (it's currently available on Hulu in the form of a badly truncated syndicated edit, but none of the episode's best gags were sliced out), it had Cliff, Clair and their daughters pretending to be apartment landlords, bankers, businesswomen and modeling agency employees, as part of Cliff's elaborate lesson to teach aspiring male model Theo about how money works in the real world.

But in "The Kids Run Away," the game of make-believe to ease Louise's fear and get her toothache treated isn't Bob's idea. Instead, it's Gayle's idea, and I like how the climax of "The Kids Run Away" gives the crazy cat lady, whose attempts at art, poetry and board game creation tend to puzzle and confuse her sister Linda's husband and kids, a chance to shine and prove how great an aunt she can be. The combination of invisible-gun-toting absurdity and low-key sweetness elevates "The Kids Run Away" from obeekaybee to excebeellentbee.

Stray observations/other memorable quotes:
* The animation for Gayle's self-absorbed cats is brilliant, as is the little background touch of Gayle's computer looking like she first bought it back when CompuServe was still a thing.

* Tina, trying again to flirt with an uninterested Dr. Yap: "You know, we don't always have to make this about business. I'm more than just a mouthful of perfect teeth."

* "I was only seven when I packed this go bag. I guess I was just a kid back then."

* "Wagstaff was my platoon in 'Nam. Oh, man, they said there'd be people like you when I came back. Serving my country, protecting your ass."

* "Louise, what a surprise! I'm so glad it's you and not a murderer."

* "Hello?" "Gayle, it's Linda." "Hey, Lin, it's me, Gayle!"

* "Oh, good thinking, Lin. You're the smart one, I'm the hot one." "No."

* "Happy Things We Should Send Into Space: A jar of mayo, magazine clippings of Scott Baio..."

* "Hmm. Hey, Aunt Gayle, I wish there was a board game that we could play that stimulates the imagination but that was too good for the major board game companies to even touch." "*GASP* I made a board game that stimulates the imagination but that was too good for the major board game companies to even touch!"

Robert Culp (1930-2010)

Learning about the I Spy and Greatest American Hero star's death yesterday was a bit of a shock because Culp was a terrific (and Emmy-nominated) action show lead and such an underrated comic actor, even though he was also responsible for this:


That's why watching most older TV shows can be such a pain in the ass for me. I have to put up with lame bits of yellowface and brownface in everything from Bewitched to I Spy, where Culp, who was once married to half-Vietnamese actress and frequent I Spy guest star France Nuyen, played both his regular role of Kelly Robinson and a Chinese warlord in an episode he scripted (Culp also wrote frequently for TV, a little-known fact pointed out by Film Score Monthly label head Lukas Kendall in his excellent liner notes for FSM's I Spy CD).


Yellowface aside, the understated I Spy was groundbreaking TV: it envisioned itself as more like a feature film than a TV show (the title sequence even began with the rather cocky "Sheldon Leonard Presents"--Nick the Bartender wants to conquer the spy fiction business!); instead of recycled library music, it featured completely original score music every week (courtesy of the late Earle Hagen, whose I Spy theme is one of my favorite TV themes of all time); it favored location shooting in foreign countries(*) over studio backlots; it took a chance on a stand-up with no acting experience named Bill Cosby and made him the first black lead in a prime-time drama; and it gave birth to the buddy action comedy, years before Butch and Sundance. Even The Greatest American Hero--Culp's other classic buddy comedy series and the show where I and countless others from my generation first saw Culp the snarky, over-the-hill action hero--is a descendant of I Spy.


(*) I doubt any of the five major networks would allow the Culp/Cosby show--which once had to pay the Yakuza a ransom for a show crew member they kidnapped while the crew was shooting in Japan--to be filmed all over the world today like it was in the '60s, because of inflated network TV budgets and certain other obstacles. Instead, 24 tries to pass off L.A. as Washington D.C. and New York (rather miserably), and Alias (which was slightly more convincing) dressed up the Disney backlot to look like Madrid or Casablanca, among other cities. I assume the latest episode of Lost, which flashed back to Richard Alpert's original home on the Canary Islands, never even left Hawaii.

Culp had great taste in sci-fi and horror scripts. His guest shots on the original Outer Limits were among the highlights of that series ("The Architects of Fear," "Demon with a Glass Hand"), and his hard-to-find-but-YouTube-able 1973 TV-movie A Cold Night's Death--one of those thrillers where the twist ending isn't as shocking as the film thinks it is, but the journey to that ending is still entertaining--would make for a great double bill with John Carpenter's The Thing (it features an unsettling synthesizer score by Gil Melle of The Andromeda Strain fame). On a similar note, who can forget Culp's creepy performance when Bill Maxwell got possessed by an evil ghost chick in "The Beast in the Black," the Greatest American Hero ep I remember most fondly?

Alicia Keys and Jack White record Quantum of Solace theme

And we have a winner--or rather two. After months of rumors about the search for an artist to perform Quantum of Solace's opening theme tune (Beyonce, Leona Lewis and Duffy are some of the names that have been most recently bandied about), Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli announced today that Alicia Keys and Jack White have recorded the tune.

The Keys/White collabo is called "Another Way to Die," which spared the White Stripes frontman from having to visit RhymeZone.com to find words that rhyme with "quantum" or "solace."


It's funny that White (who was last seen on the big screen in a cameo as Elvis Presley during Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, one of my favorite movies of the year so far) thought he'd never be able to pen music for the Bond flicks. The main guitar riff that he came up with for "Seven Nation Army" was something he planned to use for a 007 theme if he ever got the opportunity to write such a theme.

"Another Way to Die" will be the first duet in Bond theme history. It will also be the first Bond song that was performed by somebody who once was a Cosby Show kid.

The other day, I happened to catch a YouTube clip of Alicia's appearance in one of The Cosby Show's most famous episodes, "Slumber Party" (the clip was removed right after I watched it). During the "bucking horse" game sequence in which the kids took turns riding Cosby's leg like a horse (whoever stayed on the saddle the longest was the winner), Alicia was the little girl with the boyish-looking haircut--the one whom Cosby jokingly called "my wife," in what I assume was an in-joke about her Camille-like hairdo. It's no surprise that Alicia the skilled pianist was the most coordinated one out of all those kids--she didn't fall off Cosby's leg and kicked those other kids' asses at "bucking horse."

Crap, it looks like David Arnold--the composer of the Quantum of Solace score, as well as every single 007 score since Tomorrow Never Dies--isn't involved at all with "Another Way to Die." Whenever the producers allowed Arnold to participate in writing the opening theme, one thing I would always look forward to was Arnold's awesome John Barry-style instrumental version of the opening jawn during his score ("Blunt Instrument," track 4 on Arnold's Casino Royale CD, contains a sweet version of "You Know My Name," which Arnold co-wrote with Chris Cornell). Color me disappointed.

But in the race for the Bond house, a Keys/White ticket is more promising than a Racist Crack Whore Winehouse/Ronson one.