AFOS Blog Rewind: Selma

After directing Selma, the 2014 movie that won a Best Original Song Oscar for the Common/John Legend track "Glory," Ava DuVernay has, in addition to being the first filmmaker to ever inspire a Barbie doll based on her likeness, racked up an intriguing bunch of directorial credits. She directed the 2016 Netflix documentary film The 13th and the first two episodes of the OWN drama Queen Sugar (a show she also wrote for during its first season), and she signed up to direct the forthcoming Disney adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, a classic sci-fi novel I remember reading as homework in grade school (here's how long ago it was when I read Wrinkle: the cover artwork on my copy was the version that had the disembodied head of a Darkseid lookalike encased in a crystal ball). The following is a repost of a February 5, 2015 discussion of DuVernay's breakout film in the mainstream. Selma, a historical film about civil rights activism, will continue being timely, especially in a year that will inevitably see an increase in activism against both America's next president (God, those last three words sound like the title of the world's shittiest reality show, which is fitting because reality TV-loving idiots are among the ones who put him and the likes of Omarosa in office) and his inflammatory rhetoric.

The Selma Oscar snubs have disappointed all of us moviegoers who were mesmerized by director Ava DuVernay's third feature film, a historical drama about the civil rights movement's push to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, via civil disobedience and legal strategizing. But Larry Wilmore, currently the only African American host on late-night TV and hardly a stranger to the struggles of bringing more diversity to Hollywood (he was the creator and original showrunner of The Bernie Mac Show and he helped showrun the first few episodes of Black-ish this season), said something enlightening about the Selma snubs, and it's helped me feel a little less disappointed about those oversights. The host of Comedy Central's solidly funny Nightly Show said to the Hollywood Reporter that awards at the end of the day don't really mean as much as making sure a black female director like DuVernay gets a shot at making a movie ("That, to me, is more important; the other stuff is gravy," said Wilmore).

Throwback Thursday: Selma

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

The Selma Oscar snubs have disappointed all of us moviegoers who were mesmerized by director Ava DuVernay's third feature film, a historical drama about the civil rights movement's push to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, via civil disobedience and legal strategizing. But Larry Wilmore, currently the only African American host on late-night TV and hardly a stranger to the struggles of bringing more diversity to Hollywood (he was the creator and original showrunner of The Bernie Mac Show and he helped showrun the first few episodes of Black-ish this season), said something enlightening about the Selma snubs, and it's helped me feel a little less disappointed about those oversights. The host of Comedy Central's solidly funny Nightly Show said to the Hollywood Reporter that awards at the end of the day don't really mean as much as making sure a black female director like DuVernay gets a shot at making a movie ("That, to me, is more important; the other stuff is gravy," said Wilmore).

Wilmore added that awards aren't even as important as the fact that a black female producer, Shonda Rhimes, the Scandal creator/showrunner and How to Get Away with Murder producer (but not HTGAWM's creator, an important distinction that an actual writer from the supposedly observant New York Times failed to even notice), basically now has a night of network TV programming all to herself, something unprecedented in network TV history. He hasn't let the snubs bother him because he's not surprised by them ("It's hard to get me outraged over stuff that happens all the time").

Ava DuVernay

To recap those snubs, DuVernay didn't receive a Best Director nomination even though her film landed a Best Picture nod. She could have been the first black woman nominated for Best Director. The Academy also overlooked Selma star David Oyelowo's breakout performance--in America, that is, because elsewhere, particularly in the U.K., the British Nigerian actor is a familiar face to TV viewers over there--as Martin Luther King, a rare great turn by a British actor where he's not mangling an American accent for once. I'll always love Amy Poehler for making fun of British actors' often forced-sounding attempts at American accents in her 2015 Golden Globes monologue with Tina Fey. Oyelowo (pronounced "oh-YELL-oh-woe") does it well in Selma. Daniel Craig does not. Idris Elba can do it. Lennie James cannot, unless it's a Southern accent like his current one on The Walking Dead. David Harewood can do it. Philip Glenister cannot, and it's why parts of ITV's Demons were an unintentional laugh riot. Marianne Jean-Baptiste can do it. Saffron Burrows was so terrible at it that Boston Legal had to retcon her lawyer character and change her to a British ex-brothel madam pretending to be American. Damian Lewis can do it. Oyelowo's Selma co-star Tom Wilkinson, who portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma, often cannot, but he's such a great actor that his dodgy and cartoonish Mafioso accent in Batman Begins fails to ruin his imposingness during the 2005 blockbuster's best scene, his "this is a world you'll never understand" monologue.

Another frustrating but not as frequently discussed Selma Oscar snub is the lack of a nomination for another black member of Selma's crew, cinematographer Bradford Young. He did excellent work lighting King's church speeches, the harrowing "Bloody Sunday" sequence and a key jail cell scene where a perturbed King asks fellow activist Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo) whether being able to sit at the same lunch counter with white people is worth it when the system continually keeps the marginalized from being able to afford to eat there.

Something else has kept me from being enraged about the Selma snubs: the simple fact that I don't give a shit about the Oscars, an inane popularity contest that's frequently been on the wrong side of film history. When Do the Right Thing was the best American film released in 1989, what did the Academy give the Best Picture trophy to? The "safer choice" of the astoundingly tone-deaf and stereotypical Driving Miss Daisy. And of those two 1989 films about race relations, which one continues to be discussed in think pieces or oral history pieces and dissected in film school courses? Definitely not "Yes, Miss Daisy." And don't get me worked up over Dances with Wolves winning Best Picture over GoodFellas the following year. Sure, we should all be grateful for how Dances with Wolves gave a breakthrough role to the great Native Canadian actor Graham Greene and a bunch of substantial roles to Indian actors, but it's also a frustrating white savior movie, something Selma is not.

It's not going to matter to me which film will win Best Picture on February 22 because Selma has accomplished something greater than that trophy, and that's simply being a rare feature film about the modern civil rights movement that's told from the point of view of the oppressed for a change. DuVernay has defied the common foolishness of inserting a white savior character into a story about the plight of people of color, whether that story is Cry Freedom or Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning, to make it more "palatable" to white audiences. In fact, the original version of Selma's screenplay by screenwriter Paul Webb, who retained sole credit for the screenplay despite DuVernay's many changes to it, positioned President Johnson as the white savior figure and placed more emphasis on the interactions between King and LBJ. But when DuVernay climbed on board the project (Lee Daniels was originally supposed to direct Selma, but he chose to direct The Butler instead), she wisely refocused the screenplay on King and his colleagues, including black women in the movement like King's wife Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey, whom Oyelowo brought onto the project) and Diane Nash (Tessa Thompson from Dear White People).

As an Asian American viewer, the four words I immediately think of whenever I encounter "white savior genre" are Come See the Paradise. That's the 1990 Oscar-bait flick that's better remembered these days for spawning ubiquitous '90s trailer music than for its story of World War II Japanese American internment camp inmates told through the eyes of Dennis Quaid as Tamlyn Tomita's white husband (Come See the Paradise also happened to be Parker's follow-up to Mississippi Burning; like Jerry Seinfeld used to say in that ear-piercing whine of his, what is the deal with this Parker guy?). Almost every white savior genre movie goes like this:

Hi.

I'm white.

My best friend is not white.

Some people are being mean to my best friend for being different.

That makes me very sad.

Here are 95 minutes about why I'm very sad.

Also, see all the things I will do to make the bad people be nice to my best friend.

The genre is stupid, infantile, offensive and always worthy of ridicule. As far back as 1990, In Living Color was skewering anti-apartheid white savior movies with a great fake trailer for a tearjerker about the suffering of a wealthy white South African lady who loses her black housekeeper to apartheid and cries and pleads by letter for her return and then cries again. Even Avatar, the sci-fi action flick where Antony Starr Chris Hemsworth Jai Courtney Sam Worthington becomes enlightened by a race of mistreated aliens, suffers from white savior syndrome. Selma basically says "fuck off" to that type of film, a genre that's rarely questioned or criticized by white Hollywood, and that's probably a reason why neither the 94 percent white, 77 percent male Academy nor the LBJ defenders who aren't former LBJ press secretary Bill Moyers really care for Selma.

The LBJ defenders who were more extreme in their beef with Selma than Moyers (he appreciates the film despite his problems with how it portrays his former boss) proceeded to mastermind a smear campaign that succeeded in ruining the film's Oscar chances. Their accusations that Selma distorts LBJ into a villain are silly. The film humanizes him by showing his flawed ways of thinking and how he ultimately changed his mind about hesitating over voting rights legislation, just like how it takes King, a figure who's either been sanitized, reduced to a catchphrase ("I have a dream") or exploited by both Madison Avenue and right-wing TV hosts whose ideologies he would have opposed, and explores his doubts and insecurities as a leader (like in the jail cell scene) and depicts his generational conflict with younger activists. King's infidelity in his marriage is even addressed, something the last major film about King, director Clark Johnson's equally effective 2001 HBO film Boycott, didn't do (Boycott also happened to feature Ejogo in the same role of Coretta, who was younger and less jaded about both her marriage and activism in general in Johnson's film because it took place in 1955).

Selma rarely turns into the kind of stiff and formulaic Oscar-bait The Boondocks made fun of nine years ago when it actually predicted Cuba Gooding Jr.'s appearance in an MLK movie--in Selma, Gooding has a cameo as an attorney--and briefly mocked how often Hollywood mishandles historical figures like King. Part of Selma's verisimilitude is due to the way DuVernay follows various figures in King's cause and not just King himself to show how much the cause became bigger than him.

The DuVernay film's ensemble feel on a low budget is reminiscent of A Night to Remember, the documentary-like, British-made 1958 Titanic movie that's far better than the James Cameron version. Selma glimpses the movement's impact on the likes of young protester Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) and his family; John Lewis (Stephan James, whose resemblance to Lewis is uncanny), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member who later became both a Congressman and a historical graphic novel author; and even some of the white activists or ministers who joined King's marches.

DuVernay avoided creating composite characters--the usual practice of an Oscar-bait biopic--and wanted to include as many different real-life figures as possible. There is one moment though, when Selma sets itself up for the kind of parody The Boondocks used to often excel at in its first three seasons: the bizarre sight of Oprah punching a cop, although Annie Lee Cooper actually did punch that cop. I imagine this is where Oprah intervened and said, "I'm the producer. I wanna be the one to play Annie and punch a cop." While it's a rousing scene taken from history, it's also the one distracting moment in the film that borders on "John Wayne crashing Christ's crucifixion" campiness.

Otherwise, like Boycott or any other historical drama that doesn't feel like a stiff and formulaic biopic, Selma takes subjects like King's struggles with voting rights legislation and the scourge of police brutality and finds ways to make them resonate in a current climate of ignorance towards voting rights and outrage over police brutality. One of those ways is Common and John Legend's Golden Globe-winning end title theme "Glory." In that track, Common, who portrays James Bevel in the film, links the activism in Selma and Montgomery to the activism in Ferguson and echoes the film's communal focus when he raps, "No one can win the war individually" ("Glory" is also a unique track in hip-hop: like The Physics' "These Moments" in 2011 and Jay Electronica's "Better in Tune with the Infinite" last year, almost all of "Glory" contains no percussion, perhaps to mirror the film's subject of non-violent activism). DuVernay herself best explained Selma's contemporary-minded and non-stodgy approach to historical drama when she said, "Oh gosh, I'm completely allergic to historical dramas. Particularly those around the civil-rights movement. It's not my favorite thing to watch. So often they feel like medicine... I really wanted it to be nuanced and feel urgent, and to have some life to it."

Oscar trophies are nothing when compared to a simple accomplishment like that.

"Glory," the Oscar-nominated Selma end title theme, can be heard during "Color Box" (weekdays at 10am Pacific) and "New Cue Revue" (Wednesdays and Fridays at noon Pacific) on AFOS.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Black Dynamite, "The Wizard of Watts," and Bob's Burgers, "Speakeasy Rider" (tie)

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

Adult Swim's animated Black Dynamite is at its weakest when it's recycling sight gags from the 2009 film of the same name (which Black Dynamite star Michael Jai White co-wrote), like when the cold open of "The Wizard of Watts," the show's ambitious second-season finale, runs into the ground the film's funny absurdist gag where Dynamite's sexual prowess is so great he's able to give multiple women in the same bed orgasms at the same time. Dynamite may be able to get half the population of '70s L.A.'s hottest honeys off, but it doesn't get the finale off to a good start.

It's a crazy gag I liked so much during the film--because it makes no anatomical sense at all--that I kept hoping the animated version would never rehash it. But it ended up rehashing it, and not just in "The Wizard of Watts," but earlier in the second season as well. That's my biggest problem with the animated Black Dynamite or any other animated small-screen version of a live-action movie: there's no need to remind viewers of all the scenes we loved in the original (hell, it's also a problem with movies that are sequels to classic comedies, which is why I was relieved when White announced that his next movie with Black Dynamite director Scott Sanders will most likely be an unrelated comedy featuring White and his Black Dynamite co-stars as new characters instead of a Black Dynamite sequel). As kids, we enjoyed The Real Ghostbusters not because of the countless times Peter Venkman would get slimed by Slimer just like in the original Ghostbusters, but because of the effective ways The Real Ghostbusters expanded upon the Ghostbusters universe, thanks to the efforts of a pre-Babylon 5 J. Michael Straczynski as the show's story editor, as well as a few genuinely funny jokes that weren't in the 1984 film, like the moment when a demon opened a thick book that listed his least favorite creatures on Earth and he flipped past a page that said "Mimes." Re-establishing the animated show's connections to the original source material is just lazy writing, when time can be better spent coming up with new comedic material, like any moment where Dynamite finds himself literally tangling with the evil '70s kids' show puppet That Frog Kurtis (J.B. Smoove), an enjoyable antagonist who makes a long-overdue reappearance in "The Wizard of Watts" and is a character that the 2009 film would have been incapable of pulling off due to both budgetary and live-action limitations.

The rehashed multiple-orgasm gag is a glaring misstep (this show is capable of coming up with cleverer ways to depict Dynamite's month of fighting and fucking), while the rest of the hour-long "Wizard of Watts" is the animated Black Dynamite at its best, whether it's demonstrating why White, who's otherwise known as a star of straight-to-DVD action flicks like the beautifully choreographed MMA fight film Blood and Bone, is a pretty skilled comedic actor (he doesn't overplay the humor) or offering a demented comedic spin on not-so-funny subjects like Donald Sterling's racist attitudes and racially motivated police brutality. The finale was written about a year before the nationwide furor over both Ferguson and Eric Garner's death at the hands of the NYPD (showrunner and episode co-writer Carl Jones' attempt to make the episode more up-to-date by dubbing in audio of Honey Bee saying "I can't breathe" during a riot scene screams out "last-minute"). "The Wizard of Watts" has to be one of the few pieces of television that made me laugh at something so wrong: the sight of Rodney King--he's depicted here as an orphan at the Whorephanage and referred to during the episode as "Little Orphan Rodney King"--getting a beatdown from cops. If you're uncomfortable with humor being mined from the sight of children getting beat up, stay away from "The Wizard of Watts." Honey Bee's big musical number in the episode has her slapping around unruly orphans at the Whorephanage with '60s Batman-style onomatopoeia filling the screen.

"The Wizard of Watts" presents what has to be the world's first parody of the '70s Broadway hit The Wiz. (Let's just forget the unsuccessful 1978 movie version with a badly miscast Sidney Lumet and an ill-suited-to-be-director Diana Ross existed. Get it? Because Diana Ross bossed around both Universal and Motown in order to become part of... Okay, you get it.) The episode jokingly refers to its vision of Watts-as-Oz as "the black version of The Wiz" and places Dynamite in the Dorothy role, a leg-humping, foul-mouthed poodle named Broto (rapper/Loiter Squad star/extraneous comma lover Tyler, the Creator) in the Toto role and the Wicked Bitch of the Westside (Tim Blake Nelson), a pig from the LAPD who's literally a pig, in the nemesis role. The musical numbers in "The Wizard of Watts," which are riffs on both The Wiz's show tunes and '70s hits like the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," exemplify why second-season composer Fatin "10" Horton has been a nice addition to the show: he's like a less family-friendly Weird Al, perfect for the animated Black Dynamite's profane--and according to Jones, "socially irresponsible"--brand of humor.

My favorite numbers in this episode are the ones based on "Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News"--Dynamite's chicken-and-waffles chef friend Roscoe sings about both the joys of "mixing Fiddle Faddle, chitlins and fondue" and his promise to "never bring you no fucked-up food"--and "Home." Yes, White himself attempts to sing this episode's version of "Home," without the aid of Auto-Tune to make him sound on-key, and it's one of the funniest things this show has ever done. White once explained in the 2009 Black Dynamite DVD's commentary that his performance in the film was intended to parody Jim Brown's stiffness as an actor, like Brown's visible discomfort with trying to look relaxed during a simple romantic scene like going out on a date (it's easy to forget that White was portraying an injured ex-football star portraying a blaxploitation hero, and the stoic demeanor was partly due to his injured neck). On the animated Black Dynamite, White is committed to making Dynamite sound uncomfortable with any other moment where he has to show some vulnerability--is there anything more vulnerable-looking than singing in public?--and that commitment pays off hilariously here when Dynamite has to sing to get back home. This is what I mean when I say White is a skilled comedic actor. He doesn't treat the material like it's comedy. He treats it like it's any other dead-serious action flick he's starred in and lets the comedy come to him, just like how Dynamite lets the women come to him. Part of that is probably due to Jones' additional work as the show's voice director (I bet the direction Jones gave to White for Dynamite's musical number--or maybe White thought of it himself--was "Sing it like how Jim Brown would have sung it," which is perfect). Erykah Badu, who reprises her recurring role as Whorephanage employee Fatback Taffy (named after the Jill Scott jam, perhaps?) in "The Wizard of Watts," once praised Jones as a voice director and said he's an actor's director who "helps us bring the best out of our characters to leave us room to create who they are."

I was initially worried when Black Dynamite switched from Titmouse Inc. to MOI Animation for the animation work this season. But MOI ended up being a great substitute for Titmouse, and the Korean studio's work on "The Wizard of Watts" resulted in a remarkable-looking finale, a swirly, mindfucky '60s psychedelicization of a '70s Broadway musical that's being retold through 2015 eyes. The clips of past Black Dynamite episodes that are shown during Dynamite's climactic musical number lend "The Wizard of Watts" a sense of finality, not just as a last episode of the season (by the way, the episodes about Roots, Bob Marley and Bill Cosby were my favorites from this season) but as a possible last episode of the show as well. A third season for Black Dynamite hasn't been announced by Adult Swim yet, and if this is indeed the last episode of Black Dynamite, "The Wizard of Watts" is a hell of a way to go out. But part of me feels like the show still has more work to do. There are a lot more stories for Black Dynamite to tell and a lot more subjects from the forever-lampoonable '70s to lampoon or humorously tackle--or rather, a historically inaccurate version of the '70s that's as intentionally and amusingly inaccurate as Everybody Hates Chris and The Goldbergs' respective depictions of the '80s, although Jones' decision to give legendary Asian American Soul Train dancer Cheryl Song a fobby accent in the American Bandstand-vs.-Soul Train episode "American Band Standoff" really bugged me (she doesn't have an accent, bruh). I'm surprised that the show hasn't riffed on the 39-year-old Rocky franchise--which, by the way, will pair up Sylvester Stallone with Michael B. Jordan as both Apollo's grandson and Rocky's protégé in a spinoff movie tentatively titled Creed--because Tommy Davidson, who voices Cream Corn, does the best Stallone impression in the game. The way Davidson nails how white actors like Stallone shout when their characters get angry always kills me. I really wish the show found an opportunity for Davidson to trot out that comedic trump card of his.



And as long as police brutality or the microaggressions within something like New York Times TV desk moron Alessandra Stanley's treatment of Shonda Rhimes continue to be problems, we'll always be in need of satirical takes on these problems from unapologetically black shows like Black Dynamite. Towards the end of "The Wizard of Watts," Dynamite, who usually settles things with violence, finally manages to defeat the Wicked Bitch of the Westside--he melts to the ground, of course--after he chooses to handle the Wicked Bitch in a way that's completely different from how he usually handles his adversaries. Dynamite figures out that "the only way to defeat a crooked pig is to catch him on tape." The scene reminded me of "Oskar Barnack ∞ Oscar Grant," a great 2011 track about responding to police brutality by Blue Scholars (the duo of Prometheus Brown, one of hip-hop's wittiest Filipino American rappers, and producer Sabzi, who's currently killing it as the producer half of another duo, Made in Heights). "Oskar Barnack ∞ Oscar Grant" calls for regular citizens to use cameras as their weapons against racist cops ("Shoot the cops/Shoot the cops/Shoot the cops/Take your cameras out your pocket, people"), and Dynamite kind of does the same thing when he defeats the Wicked Bitch, but he arrives at that decision to use a camera without speechifying about it, which would have been beneath this show. If someone told me 10 years ago that Adult Swim would become a haven for largely experimental, sharply written and sometimes socially conscious comedy from black folks, whether it's a scene like that one between Dynamite and the Wicked Bitch or a show like Black Dynamite, Jones' previous show The Boondocks, Tyler and Odd Future's Loiter Squad, Black Jesus or The Eric Andre Show, I would have said, "Sure, when cops fly."

***

"Speakeasy Rider" is a strange case where Bob's Burgers borrows from some of the staff writers' favorite sitcoms but never once feels derivative or tired. It's also a case where the episode title recycles a pun. "Speakeasy Rider" is the second Bob's Burgers episode to play around with the title Easy Rider, after "Ear-sy Rider." Not even that is tired. It's Bob's Burgers. It can get away with it--for now.

The story of siblings becoming Williams sisters-style rivals in the same sport is a familiar one. "Lisa on Ice" is one of my favorite Simpsons episodes because of its outstanding gags about the lunacy of Springfield's citizens, represented in "Lisa on Ice" by their bloodthirsty attitudes about hockey, and its poignant look at the relationship between Bart and Lisa. "Speakeasy Rider," which centers on Tina and Louise's rivalry as go-kart racers (their racing scenes are impressively animated, under the direction of Jennifer Coyle) and was written by Rich Rinaldi, contains a tension-filled dinner table scene between the sisters that's reminiscent of the "I won't have any aggressive condiment passing in this house!" scene in "Lisa on Ice." Even the ending is similar to the outcome of Bart and Lisa's conflict on the hockey rink. And the B-story of Bob and Linda trying to sneak Teddy's surprisingly good home-brewed beer past the tenacious eyes and noses of health inspectors Hugo (Sam Seder) and Ron (Ron Lynch) is essentially one of those old Cheers stories where the bar has to pretend everything's normal while it's operating without a liquor license or the bar has to pretend it's a gay one.

But "Speakeasy Rider" is unmistakably Bob's Burgers all the way, which means it's weird, weird, weird--like when Tina has conversations with her go-kart or when H. Jon Benjamin and Robert Ben Garant ad-lib an awkward picnic moment between Bob and Garant's biker character Critter--as well as warm and affecting in the least expected of places and consistently funny. The day when Bob's Burgers stops being this consistently funny is going to be a sad one, as sad as a burger without buns, unless Loren Bouchard and his crew manage to avoid shark jumping or, to borrow some racing lingo, they end up sandbagging the competition.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Black Dynamite, "Roots: The White Album or The Blacker the Community, the Deeper the Roots! Or Those Cotton Pickin' Crackers"

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.

Black Dynamite is, along with MacGruber and David Wain's recent rom-com spoof They Came Together, one of the few genuinely funny spoof movies of the last five years (this current period was preceded by what The Dissolve has referred to as "the sad decline of the cinematic spoof," a genre that's been partly ruined by "the debased, reference-dependent school of comedy practiced by [Jason] Friedberg and [Aaron] Seltzer"). After I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, I thought it would be impossible for someone else to craft another blaxploitation spoof as hilarious as Keenen Ivory Wayans' Sucka--and Louis C.K. and Jonathan Kesselman came close with Pootie Tang and The Hebrew Hammer, respectively--but director Scott Sanders managed to surpass Sucka, by going in a completely different direction from Wayans.

A clever "Michael Jai White and the other actors are portraying amateur '70s actors portraying pimps, black radicals and thugs" gimmick distinguished Black Dynamite from Sucka ("We tried to make sort of a meta movie. It wasn't like Michael Jai White was playing Black Dynamite. Michael Jai White was playing Ferrante Jones playing Black Dynamite," said Sanders). Also, Sanders directed White to be completely straight-faced a la Leslie Nielsen on Police Squad instead of having him be a broadly played, Inspector Clouseau-esque buffoon like Nielsen in Police Squad's much more conventional Naked Gun spinoff movies or the dorky soldier Wayans portrayed in Sucka (Sanders and White, who co-wrote the film with Byron Minns, a.k.a. Bullhorn, clearly prefer Police Squad over The Naked Gun). The juxtaposition of a serious and stone-faced action hero with absurd goings-on like visible boom mikes, inconsistent accents and continually flubbed line readings ("Sarcastically, I'm in charge")--a juxtaposition that was an unintentional fixture of the low-budget blaxploitation flicks Sanders spoofed--made for a weird and often funny film. White-as-Jones-as-Dynamite expressed only two emotions, rage and inexpressive calm ("What about the smile?" "I am smiling."), and the one time we did see him laugh was when he killed a bad guy after lifting him and his car off the road with a giant magnet attached to his helicopter and then dropping him off a cliff.

On the animated version of Black Dynamite, which returned to Adult Swim last Saturday after two years of no new episodes, showrunner and voice director Carl Jones makes Dynamite even more of an unsmiling and surly character, which causes White's earnest delivery of silly lines like "I used to be a children" or his reason for not observing Black History Month in the season premiere ("Black Dynamite ain't celebrating his blackness on any month that the white man tells him to, so for all of February, I refuse to acknowledge one damn great thing my people have done") to be especially amusing. But other than White, Minns, Kym Whitley, Tommy Davidson, Cedric Yarbrough and Arsenio Hall returning from the 2009 film's cast and the use of Sir Charles Hughes' 1975 tune "Your Kiss Sho-Nuf Dy-No-Mite," the film's end title theme, as a musical sting, the Adult Swim show actually has little in common with the film, which is a good thing. Too many animated shows based on live-action movies have been pointless and ineffective retreads of the original source material (the smartly written J. Michael Straczynski era of The Real Ghostbusters is a rare exception).

Jones made the right choice in not rehashing the film's "Michael Jai White was playing Ferrante Jones playing Black Dynamite" shtick. That kind of shtick would have been difficult to pull off, both comedically on a weekly basis and in animated form; it would have lost its novelty quickly. Also, the show is well-animated as opposed to intentionally done on the cheap like its live-action counterpart. The second season's impressive new opening title sequence, directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi of Kill la Kill fame, is the best example of the Adult Swim Black Dynamite's high production values. When I first heard that Sanders' film was going to be turned into an animated series, I was expecting the animated version to closely resemble the cookie-cutter Hanna-Barbera and Filmation cartoons that dominated Saturday mornings during the decade when Black Dynamite takes place. Instead, Black Dynamite character designer LeSean Thomas and his design team interestingly based their show's look on animator Takeshi Koike's big-budget 2009 feature film Redline (South Korea's MOI Animation studio, which did excellent work on Young Justice, is handling Black Dynamite's Redline-esque visuals this season). I'd rather see more Adult Swim animated shows try to work harder and look as lavish as The Boondocks and The Venture Bros.--which is what Black Dynamite is doing--than have to sit through another show that lazily regurgitates the cheap look of Sealab 2021 and Aqua Teen Hunger Force.



The animated Black Dynamite expands upon one of the major gags in the original Black Dynamite's third act--President Nixon is the villain behind everything--and creates an alternate history where Dynamite and his crew encounter a bloated Elvis Presley who works for Nixon's DEA, a young Michael Jackson who turns out to be an alien, a completely insane Richard Pryor (in the show's funniest episode to date) and now both Rev. Al Sharpton (special guest star Godfrey) and "pedophile-looking motherfucker" Woody Allen (Jonathan Kite) in "Roots: The White Album." Jones, who worked on The Boondocks back when Sharpton lashed out against that show because he was offended by its depiction of Martin Luther King, clearly relishes establishing Black Dynamite's young version of Sharpton as a spotlight-seeking buffoon during "Roots: The White Album": the reverend's appetite for publicity is as voracious as his appetite for the chicken titties at Roscoe's, and at one point, Sharpton is overheard mentioning that he doesn't want to be late for his appointment to a Brazilian scrotum wax. The episode is purposely designed to rile up Sharpton--early on, his fictionalized self is seen unveiling a giant statue that depicts Dr. King with his pants down, doo-dooing for peace, justice and equality on a "white cheeks only" toilet--but I doubt Sharpton is even aware of the animated Black Dynamite's existence. It's been six days since the season premiere's airing, and the rev hasn't raised a single stink about Black Dynamite.

"Roots: The White Album" may not have exactly succeeded in generating the same type of publicity and outrage that erupted from Sharpton over The Boondocks eight years ago, but it does succeed in generating a few laughs, whether they involve cultural appropriation or African American viewers' reactions to the Roots miniseries when it first aired on ABC in 1977. "Wait a minute, black people were slaves? I thought we were from Cleveland!," says Dynamite's pimp friend Cream Corn while watching the miniseries' Kunta Kinte whipping scene at Roscoe's. The episode's concept of the ABC slavery drama being the catalyst for Sharpton and the black population of L.A. capturing and enslaving all the white people in the city is brilliant, as is the episode's reenactment of the Kunta whipping scene, the funniest bit of Roots-related humor since the Roots blooper reel sketch on Chappelle's Show.

The season premiere contains more social commentary than previous episodes, but it delivers it in the show's typically profane and irreverent fashion: after Dynamite karate-kicks the Dr. King statue off the toilet to stop black folks and their former white slaves from killing each other, he says to the black half of the crowd, "Look at yourselves, black community. If Dr. King was here to see this, he would shit a brick," which is followed by a small chunk of marble falling from the downed Dr. King statue's buttocks. Yeah, the humor of the animated Black Dynamite isn't quite as subtle as the humor of the original film, but in a time of cultural appropriation at its worst and the racial divide in Ferguson, we need a few more laughs--whether satirical or toilet-related--from sharp satirists of color like the Black Dynamite writing staff, and the return of this less subtle Black Dynamite is better than no Black Dynamite at all.

Tip-Top Quotables: "It's like she's walking on a carpet of mice," plus a few other great lines this week

My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.

So this week, I wrote my first piece for Splitsider, "The 'Gas Leak Year' of The Boondocks," about why I, a Boondocks fan, have been disappointed with most of the show's new episodes. Complex podcaster Desus, who's big on Black Twitter and writes frequently hilarious tweets, retweeted the link to my Splitsider article, so thanks to Black Twitter, my piece received more RTs and faves than I expected. If there's any half of Twitter you'd be glad to have on your side, it would definitely be Black Twitter, and not having Black Twitter on your side is something Stacey Dash would know all too well.

If I didn't write the Boondocks critique and someone else wrote it instead, I would have included an excerpt from it below. But because I wrote it, I won't quote from it in "TTQ" because doing so would be masturbatory and self-congratulatory, like favoriting your own tweet. Sorry, Harry Allen, you'll always be a hip-hop journalism hero of mine, but favoriting your own tweet is the epitome of being way too up your own ass. I hope the favoriting of his own tweet was an accident (maybe he was trying to favorite the retweeting DJ QBert did of his tweet, and instead, it ended up looking like he was favoriting himself). He's middle-aged. Folks on Twitter who are middle-aged always make a bunch of blunders over there, like hyphenating a hashtag or doing the social media equivalent of wearing squeaky Selina Mayer shoes. Speaking of which, those very shoes are the subject of a couple of this week's best quotes.

* "It just destroyed me. I mean, I was bulimic the whole first year, and I didn't even lose any weight from it."--Chief of Staff Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn) on his first year as the last president's Chief of Staff, Veep, "New Hampshire"

* "It's like she's walking on a carpet of mice."--Mike McLintock (Matt Walsh) reacting to the squeaky high heels Gary Walsh (Tony Hale) gave to President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) as a gift, Veep, "New Hampshire"

* "Sounds like the theme from Psycho."--Ben on Selina's squeaky shoes, Veep, "New Hampshire"

(Photo source: Mara Wilson)

(Photo source: Frank Conniff)

* "It's like getting divorced in the '50s. People didn't go to divorce court. They just looked at their wife like, 'Baby, I'm gonna go get a pack of cigarettes. I'll be right back.'"--Dave Chappelle on the controversial way he bounced from Chappelle's Show and became "seven years late for work," during his first Letterman interview in 10 years

* "It's not a criticism to say that Jon Brion absolutely bullies his score onto the screen in Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 romantic drama Punch Drunk Love--in fact, the director rather preferred it that way. Distracting, percussive, and chaotic, there's a parallel storyline happening with Brion's work in the film next to Adam Sandler's rage-ridden character Barry, and viewing the film is a fantastically exhausting attempt to figure each thread out. Together, Anderson and Brion achieved a new expressionistic form with a film score, down to the instruments used on-screen and behind the scenes. The broken harmonium that Barry decides to fix was planted in Anderson's mind before the script was even finished, and as it turned out, Brion recalled a harmonium that he fixed with duct tape before going on tour with Aimee Mann--a situation which ended up in the final film."--Charlie Schmidlin, The Playlist, "16 Musicians-Turned-Film Composers and Their Breakout Scores"

* "Depending on how much time you have, explaining Ruby's impact on African-American women in Hollywood could take hours."--The Smoking Section's J. Tinsley on the late Ruby Dee

* "I anticipate that I'll always write about race and racism in some professional capacity. Still, wouldn't it be wonderful if writers and creatives on the periphery were welcomed in from anonymity, not thanks to their accounts of woe, but simply because they have things to share--tales of love, joy, happiness, and basic humanity--that have nothing to do with their race and also everything to do with their race. I'm ready for people in positions of power at magazines and newspapers and movie studios to recalibrate their understanding of what it means to talk about race in the first place. If America would like to express that it truly values and appreciates the voices of its minorities, it will listen to all their stories, not just the ones reacting to its shortcomings and brutality."--Cord Jefferson, Medium, "The Racism Beat: What it's like to write about hate over and over and over"

* "Just before they got rid of Owen Gleiberman, EW trumpeted the launch of 'The Community,' a blog 'featuring superfans with passion and unique voices' recruited from the blog's readership. In other words: a way for EW to exploit the labor of fans, students, and other aspiring bloggers who'll write for free, a model made notorious by The Bleacher Report... The idea of working for free for Time Inc., which had $3.35 billion in gross revenue, and $337 million in pre-tax operating income, in 2013, seems beyond absurd."--Anne Helen Petersen, The Awl, "The Trials of Entertainment Weekly: One Magazine's 24 Years of Corporate Torture"

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Bob's Burgers, "World Wharf II: The Wharfening (or How Bob Saves/Destroys the Town, Part II)," and The Boondocks, "Freedom Ride or Die" (tie)

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.

So special guest star Kevin Kline's ad-libbed attempt at beatboxing while voicing Mr. Fischoeder, the eccentric owner of both the Wonder Wharf and the Belchers' apartment building, didn't quite make the final cut of "World Wharf II: The Wharfening" like I had expected. But plenty of hilarious bits of business made it into the conclusion of Bob's Burgers' two-part fourth-season finale. My favorite running joke in "World Wharf II" has characters being able to find time, even when Bob's life is in danger, to make the usual potshots at either Bob's age ("It's not your time, Dad! I want to put you in a nursing home next year!") or his hirsute, sad-looking body ("Your butt... Up here, you're okay, but down here, it gets bad.").

Throughout "World Wharf II," which marks the first time the show has ever placed Bob in such peril (the camping episode doesn't count), I was reminded of how often Diff'rent Strokes and its mid-to-late-'70s misery-porn precursor Good Times would subject their characters to cliffhanger situations that were as perilous as Bob and Mr. Fischoeder getting kidnapped and tied to the pier together by Mr. Fischoeder's greedy brother, but were much more depressing. Kidnapping was a favorite dramatic device of the Diff'rent Strokes writing staff (Arnold and Kimberly were kidnapped by a rapist who attempted to sexually assault Kimberly, and Sam was later abducted by an insane dad who wanted Sam to replace his dead son), while on a very special, chroma-key-heavy two-parter of Good Times, a deaf kid almost fell into an elevator shaft because he couldn't hear the Evanses' warnings about the shaft and was too busy trying to entertain them with an impression of the crappy chroma-key flying FX from The Bugaloos.

Bob's Burgers is so much better than those older shows and their misguided and wildly inappropriate (especially when they're accompanied by studio audience laughter) attempts to raise the stakes and be taken seriously by the press (I'd like to know what sort of drugs were involved in the decision to place Kimberly in danger of being raped as if she were Edith Bunker, during a family sitcom that's meant for little kids). If there's anything that's serious about last week's "Wharf Horse" and "World Wharf II," it's the issue of gentrification (Felix's scheme to get his brother to sell the wharf is a comedic take on a not-so-funny real-life matter), but Bob's Burgers never feels the need to preach about the evilness of gentrification or go down a completely somber path regarding the issue. It's sort of the same approach King of the Hill brought to gentrification in my favorite late-period King of the Hill episode, "Lady and Gentrification" (an episode that gets extra points for giving guest star Danny Trejo the following line to say: "They put salmon in the fish tacos, Hank! Look at it! It's salmon! They're ruining everything!").

Even when Linda panics after realizing Bob's been kidnapped or when Teddy starts weeping over Bob's disappearance, the writers keep things light, hence the characters' comments about Bob's weird body. It helps that those writers are the sister duo of Lizzie and Wendy Molyneux, my favorite writing pair on Bob's Burgers (they were behind series highlights like "Art Crawl" and last year's "Boyz 4 Now," as well as a bunch of jokes in episodes they didn't receive on-screen credit for, like Gene's line about Linda's apron in "Lindapendent Woman"). I feel like the Molyneuxs remembered what those lurid Very Special Episodes of Diff'rent Strokes were like and thought, "Those shows were awful. Let's not be like those shows during this two-parter."

The Molyneuxs' skills with funny rat-a-tat-tat dialogue make "World Wharf II" such an enjoyable mock-dramatic experience (while "Wharf Horse" is credited to Nora Smith, who wrote "Mother Daughter Laser Razor"). "World Wharf II" is also noteworthy for being the first time the Belchers say "I love you" to each other. Of course, when Bob's Burgers finally gets them to say "I love you" after Bob's rescued, the Molyneuxs and the other writers undercut the potentially sappy moment with offbeat touches like abrasive Louise's slightly standoffish version of "I love you" ("I love you all. But that's just between us.") and the Belchers saying "I love you" so repeatedly that Mr. Fischoeder groans in disgust, a noise that Kevin Kline must have also made while skimming through the script of Life as a House. They're great examples of how Bob's Burgers gets the characters to express their affection for each other without becoming too goopy. There's only one thing that's corny about Bob's Burgers, and it's all those genuinely funny puns.

Other memorable quotes:
* Tina: "I have a great new nail polish I've been dying to try. It's called Clear." Gene: "Sure, if you want to look like a prostitute."

* "Quit squirming around, Bob. Do you have worms? 'Cause I do, and you're making them crazy."

* Fanny (Jordan Peele): "Hey, what are you looking at? My boobs are up here."

* I like how John Roberts, as Linda, can be heard breaking character and chuckling when Tina's able to identify Mr. Fischoeder's butt in the picture Bob sent to Linda: "How do you know what Mr. Fischoeder's butt looks like?" "I have photographic butt memory."

* Linda attempts to decipher Bob's garbled cry for help in his text: "Could it be... 'I tried blow'? We were gonna do that together. Just once."

* "You have to pull yourself together! You have two children and a Louise to take care of!"

* Teddy suspects a waiter (Paul F. Tompkins) of kidnapping Bob and proceeds to channel Mel Gibson in Ransom: "Let me at him! Give me back my son!"

* "And now I'll never know who wins Game of Thrones/Oh, things are bad!"

* "No, no, we need your dad. You kids are a two-adult, two-bottle-of-wine-a-night job."

* Fanny: "Shut up! I can't think!" Mr. Fischoeder: "What else is new?"

* "You saved us, Linda. Thank God we live in a time where women can learn to swim."

***

An equally irreverent approach to a serious issue also distinguishes The Boondocks' latest episode, "Freedom Ride or Die," which flashes back to 1961, when a young Robert Freeman became part of the Freedom Riders movement--against his will, of course (this time, young Robert's voiced by a digitally sped-up John Witherspoon, instead of now-absent ex-showrunner Aaron McGruder, who previously voiced young Robert during a non-canonical flashback to Rosa Parks overshadowing Robert's attempt to make civil rights history in 1955 Montgomery in "The Return of the King"). While trying to hide out after getting caught starting a different kind of movement inside a whites-only bathroom in a segregated bus station ("It was a dump for freedom. A stinky load for the dignity of the black man."), Robert accidentally hops onto a Freedom Rider bus headed for Birmingham and immediately wants to get off because of all the violence down there. Rev. Sturdy Harris (special guest star Dennis Haysbert), the leader of the protesters, believes that Robert, who's uninterested in getting himself killed and finds Sturdy's non-violent form of activism to be completely insane, is born to be a Freedom Rider and continually prevents him from jumping off the bus.

No Boondocks episode involving historical figures from the civil rights movement could ever top the quality of the Rev. Al Sharpton-angering "Return of the King," especially when McGruder's no longer involved. "Freedom Ride or Die" doesn't even try to revisit the highs of "The Return of the King" or outdo them. But thanks to the solid satirical writing of Boondocks veteran Rodney Barnes, as well as the fact that it's not burdened with the fourth season's inane "Granddad in debt" arc, "Freedom Ride or Die" is easily the funniest episode of this underwhelming McGruder-less season (however, there was no need for present-day Uncle Ruckus to explain the Speed reference; that just killed all the funny out of the bomb-on-the-bus gag).

"Freedom Ride or Die" even contains the reliable laugh-getter of Robert taking out his belt (the same belt he'll later use to frequently punish Riley with), a sign that this Boondocks episode's a solid one. The sight of Robert attacking racist rioters with his belt makes me wonder why neither Wesley Snipes nor Michael Jai White have ever made a martial arts flick set during the civil rights movement. Who gives a shit what Sharpton would say? A '60s black activist martial arts flick would be brilliant.

Other memorable quotes:
* "Take that, you cracker-ass cracker! That's why I shit in your bathroom and used up all your special white people quilted toilet paper!"

* "I noticed she was reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book I had meant to read many times."

* Young Robert to Sturdy: "You want to know how to end Jim Crow? Get out of the fuckin' South!"

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Boondocks, "Breaking Granddad"

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.

You can tell it's been a mediocre week for animated TV shows when the strongest piece of animated TV is an episode of The Boondocks' fourth and final season, the only season that was completed without Aaron McGruder's involvement. For those who forgot that The Boondocks is still on the air, McGruder exited his own creation under circumstances that still remain mysterious, even after he posted on his Facebook account in March an unusually benign message of thanks to Sony Pictures Television and Adult Swim for the show's first three seasons. A writer from The Root compared hearing the news of McGruder's departure to "buying tickets to a Public Enemy show only to find out that Chuck D is no longer with the group." Sony claims McGruder exited because he and the studio couldn't come to an agreement over the fourth season's production schedule.

Getting the full story behind the tight-lipped McGruder's departure is about as likely as Dr. Dre dropping Detox. I bet we won't know the full story, perhaps due to legal reasons, until a few years from now (which would be much longer than the amount of time it took for Dave Chappelle to address his fans after he quit Chappelle's Show because he was dissatisfied with sketches that he felt were making white people laugh for the wrong reasons, the same issue that's currently fueling the debate over whether or not Leslie Jones' controversial SNL monologue about slavery is "coonery").

For now, what McGruder's departure has left us with are episodes that mysteriously don't contain any writing credits (the "Created by Aaron McGruder" credit has also been erased from the opening titles, just like when Matt Groening took his name off a Simpsons/Critic crossover episode he despised) and have so far been mostly limp rehashes of earlier Boondocks episodes, with very little of the effective social commentary that distinguished past McGruder-scripted gems like the Peabody-winning "Return of the King." The Boondocks is the latest show that's stumbled creatively after the creator who was so essential to crafting most of the show's greatest hits went ahead and bounced (exhibit A: the departures of Gene L. Coon and Gene Roddenberry from the original Star Trek; exhibit B: Dan Harmon's Sony-related absence during what's come to be known as the "gas leak year" of Community).

Though "Breaking Granddad" is another example of how much the gas leak year of The Boondocks pales in comparison to the seasons when McGruder was involved and was proud to leave his name on the product (the episode is another one this season that doesn't contain a writing credit), it's easily the funniest of the three fourth-season episodes that have aired so far. That's not due to the Breaking Bad gags, which mostly fall flat and are riffs on just the events in the Breaking Bad pilot episode and no other episode in Breaking Bad's history (spoofs of network or cable dramas have never been The Boondocks' strong suit; the third-season finale, which aired 120 years ago, was an underwhelming 24 spoof that showed signs that maybe it wasn't a good idea for McGruder to agree to a fourth season). What redeems "Breaking Granddad" is all the genuinely funny satirical material about hair-care products for black people, a subject that's never really been satirized on an animated show before (the plot has the Freemans inventing and selling a gel that both relaxes and lengthens hair). Even though "Breaking Granddad" is watered-down Boondocks, it's still more daring than late-period Simpsons, even when the latter experiments with CG animation for one episode (which it did this week with the okay-but-still-not-up-to-classic-Simpsons-level "Brick Like Me," a story set mostly in a Lego world fantasized by Homer).

This whole fourth-season arc, in which Robert Freeman (John Witherspoon) winds up so broke that, like pre-cancer-diagnosis Walter White, he's taken a job at a car wash owned by Uncle Ruckus (Gary Anthony Williams), is straight-up character assassination. Sure, Robert's always been a loser, but he's never been as dumb as Riley (Regina King). It's hard to buy that Robert would be so clueless that he'd lose ownership of his house and be forced to sell both himself and his grandsons into slavery. I'm getting the feeling that McGruder left because the storyline wasn't his idea and even he thinks it's inane.

Or maybe it was McGruder's idea and he felt burnt out from both the show and dealing with Sony (he's since moved on to creating a live-action Adult Swim show called Black Jesus), and leaving The Boondocks was the only thing that would make him happy. McGruder has a history of sometimes appearing to be bored with his own creation, especially back when it was a comic strip. Too many of the strip's post-9/11 weekday installments were lazily drawn rehashes of the same scenario--Huey sits and watches some idiotic soundbite on TV--and towards the end of the strip's run, McGruder stopped drawing it and left the illustrating duties to an uncredited artist.

Fortunately, "Breaking Granddad" doesn't rehash material like how the strip would recycle that same damn pose of Huey parked in front of the TV or how the season premiere (with special guest star Michael B. Jordan as a Chris Brown-esque celebrity) laughlessly recycled the much more hilarious "Tom, Sarah and Usher." This week's episode is the first (and judging from King's comments to the press about behind-the-scenes infighting over the direction of her show's writing, most likely to be the only) time I've ever felt like The Boondocks' fourth season wasn't a complete mistake.

Memorable quotes:
* "Well, you see, I'm a little short on cash. [Sound FX of the woman on the other end of the phone line hanging up.]"

* "Oh, thank you, Jesus! Always knew if I pretended to believe in you, it would pay off someday!"

* Boss Willona (special guest star Jenifer Lewis): "Don't you get it? These bitches would put napalm on their hair if it would make it straight. Put a warning label on it!"

* "The ironically named hair gel is the hottest-selling on the market, but experts claim a single jar contains enough high explosives to destroy a small plane or a Prius."

From 2010: My homemade recipe for Bluth's Original Frozen Banana from Arrested Development

(Photo source: JJA)

This Sunday, Netflix will finally unveil--all at once--15 new episodes of Arrested Development, the hilarious cult favorite that aired from 2003 to 2006 on Fox. These new episodes will be available exclusively at the streaming video service. Ever since I posted in 2010 my attempt to make Arrested Development-style frozen bananas, I've seen some Arrested Development fans on Pinterest and Twitter link to my post. If you're having an Arrested Development season four viewing party, try the following frozen banana recipe I'm reposting, and if the results are as disastrous as Gob's racist ventriloquist act, then try again just like I did (it took me a couple of tries to get the frozen bananas right).

(Photo source: Balboa Observer-Picayune)

I learned a lot from watching Arrested Development, like the importance of always leaving a note, the existence of a dessert known as a frozen banana (which, in the show's universe, was created by a Korean banana stand owner and known as "Cold Banana in Delicious Brown Taste" before the Bluths stole the idea from him) and George Bluth Sr.'s adage that "there's always money in the banana stand." I had never heard of a frozen banana before Bluth's Original Frozen Banana Stand (a.k.a. "the Big Yellow Joint," the subject of Arrested Development composer David Schwartz's amusing fake '70s stoner anthem "Big Yellow Joint"). I thought a frozen banana was Asian American slang for a McCain-supporting Asian guy who lives under the Uncle Ruckus-style delusion that he's as white as Edward from Twilight while suffering from hypothermia.

I didn't realize a frozen banana is a banana covered in chocolate until when I became curious about fictional foods that were integral to episodes of sitcoms like 30 Rock, The Boondocks and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which gave us "milksteak" and "the grilled Charlie"), and I stumbled upon online recipes for the not-so-fictional dessert.

Yeah, it kind of looks like a chocolate-covered dick, and when peanuts are added to the coating, it starts to resemble poop on a stick, but it's also a delicious snack that's alright for any season. It's essentially a banana Popsicle in a chocolate coating.

Bananarchy (Photo source: A.V. Club)

In 2009, a couple of Arrested Development fans in Austin opened their own Bluth-style banana stand called Bananarchy and offered toppings like cinnamon and coconut. They even named an item after Will Arnett's breakout character. "The Gob" is two bananas double-dipped in chocolate and covered in peanuts.

Arrested Development narrator/co-executive producer Ron Howard and Terry Crews, a guest star during AD's new season, both help Netflix promote the show's return at an actual Bluth's banana stand opened by Netflix in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, I attempted a few times to make for myself a frozen banana because I always wanted to re-create a snack that came from a show I admire (and occasionally revisit on DVD). I failed the first time with the chocolate coating, which is the trickiest component to master while making this otherwise simple snack. The coating shouldn't be Oreo cookie-esque, which was how my coating turned out the first time I made the dessert. It should be as smooth as Tobias Fünke's shiny blue pate:

Ingredients
1 ripe and peeled banana
1 cup (6 oz.) of Nestle Toll House Milk Chocolate Morsels
1 tbsp. vegetable shortening
1 Popsicle stick

(Photo source: JJA)

1. Unpeel a banana. Cut an inch off one end of the banana. Push a Popsicle stick into that end of the banana.

2. Put the banana in a Ziploc bag and freeze it overnight.

3. The next day, place the chocolate morsels and the vegetable shortening together in an uncovered microwave-safe bowl. The shortening will thin out the chocolate and make it easier to work with. Heat the bowl on medium-high (70%) power for one minute. If there are still some morsel shapes in the melted chocolate, heat it again for a few more seconds. Stir.

4. Unroll a sheet of wax paper and pour the melted chocolate onto the sheet. Take the banana out of the freezer. If there are ice crystals on the banana, scrape them off. Roll the banana around in the chocolate until it's completely coated in it.

(Photo source: JJA)

(Photo source: JJA)

5. Seal the chocolate-covered banana in an airtight container and place it in the freezer. Keep the banana inside the freezer overnight or longer or until you're secure enough in your sexuality to stick a chocolate penis in your mouth.