The following is a repost of my September 4, 2015 discussion of "The Ricks Must Be Crazy," an episode of Rick and Morty. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" can be streamed in its entirety on Hulu.
"The Ricks Must Be Crazy" feels like somebody on the Rick and Morty writing staff had a chip on his shoulder about Tron: Legacy, especially the ways it handled its premise of Jeff Bridges creating an entire universe full of sentient life inside a computer, and he didn't care for what he felt was a simplistic screenplay. Tron: Legacy is a good example of both the story serving the visuals rather than vice versa--however, director Joseph Kosinski's style-over-substance approach still couldn't stop me from watching Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D twice because, holy fuck, that movie looks mesmerizing in IMAX 3D--and those visuals being made to look so sumptuous that they're able to distract the audience from thinking too long about the story's plot holes or unexplained details. Some of the questions that arose from those unexplained details included "How's it possible for Jeff Bridges and his family to enjoy a meal of lechon if fresh meat is impossible to bring into the Grid?" and "Was there a Filipino chef in Jeff Bridges' family whom we never knew about?"
A lot of why "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" is a highlight of Rick and Morty's second season is due to how much fun Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon and credited episode writer DanGuterman are clearly having over imagining if Jeff Bridges could leave and re-enter the Grid freely instead of being imprisoned there by his evil doppleganger/digital avatar Clu and what would happen if Jeff Bridges craved power as much as Clu does and he turned out to be an even bigger dick than the marginally flawed, almost Fred MacMurray-like Zen inventor dad we saw in Tron: Legacy. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" reveals that Rick has created an entire infinite universe inside the battery in his space car, and its inhabitants' only purpose in life is to power Rick's car battery. "That's slavery!," counters an appalled Morty when Rick introduces him to what he calls the microverse.
Instead of the more simplistic scenario of a completely evil duplicate of the universe's creator betraying that creator by enacting ethnic cleansing and plotting to rule the world outside the universe's barriers, one of the microverse's inhabitants, a Frank Grimes-ish scientist named Zeep Xanflorp (special guest star Stephen Colbert, whose Colbert Report writing staff happened to include Guterman), refuses to fall for Rick's white savior act like everyone outside the scientific community in the microverse. Zeep is on to some of Rick's deceptions. Those deceptions range from Rick disguising himself as an antennaed alien savior whenever he visits the microverse to Rick telling the microverse's inhabitants that the middle finger is a peaceful greeting.
Zeep plans to oust Rick from the microverse and free the microverse from servitude, but Zeep's no saint either: he has secretly created his own infinite miniverse in a box to provide the energy for his microverse and make obsolete the technology Rick brought to Zeep's microverse, and he's exploiting the people in that miniverse just like Rick is doing to the people in the microverse. In fact, one of the leading scientists in the miniverse, Kyle (special guest star Nathan Fielder from Comedy Central's Nathan for You), has also secretly built his own teenyverse in a box and...
The following is a repost of my July 10, 2012 discussion of "Isolated," an episode of Disney XD's short-lived Tron: Uprising. I hate the listicle structure, and his piece could have easily gone without that structure, but over at Blastr, Ernie Estrella nicely discussed why the animated Uprising did a much better job at world-building than the live-action Tron movies did.
Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Transformers Prime have been more satisfying than their much-maligned live-action counterparts, and Tron: Uprising has joined them as another example of an animated show that's superior to its live-action counterpart, thanks to its best episode yet, "Isolated." The story puts the spotlight on the animated Tron: Legacy prequel's most compelling creation so far: Paige, a lieutenant in evil General Tesler's army whom Tesler has assigned the task of hunting down Beck, a.k.a. the masked Renegade.
The straight-arrow Beck's evolution from mechanic to hero has been a less interesting arc than Paige's desperate bid for her ruthless general's respect, which has put her in competition with Tesler's supercilious right-hand man Pavel (Paul Reubens) ("Isolated"'s "previously on" segment amusingly counterpoints narrator Tricia Helfer's recap--"Tesler rewards Paige's hard work with praise"--with a montage of clips of Tesler and Pavel both belittling Paige). "Isolated" reveals why Paige chose to work for Tesler and ties her backstory to Quorra (Olivia Wilde, reprising the most interesting character from Tron: Legacy).
Emmanuelle Chriqui voiced Paige during Tron: Uprising's one-season run.
Trapped on a slowly disintegrating island with Beck and forced to work with her enemy (and if Tron: Uprising lasts past a season, inevitable love interest) to find a way out before the rock sinks into the sea, Paige flashes back to her time as a hospital medic. Back then, Paige dabbled in composing instrumental music, even though as another character told her, she's not "programmed" to be a musician.
Her instrument reminds me of the Tenori-on used by electro artist Little Boots in the viral video for her track "Stuck on Repeat":
(Someone on the Tron-Sector fansite forums noted that Paige's instrument is a variation on the Tonematrix, a sweet music-making tool that will prevent you from getting anything else done for a couple of hours.)
The following is a repost of my June 8, 2015 discussion of one of my favorite threequels of all time, Police Story 3, a.k.a. Supercop.
Disney's recent decision to scrap its Tron threequel may be due to the studio becoming cautious about its spending after yet another one of its big-budget films, Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, tanked at the box office, but I think that cancellation is also due to the fact that threequels tend to suck. However, the hugely entertaining 1992 Jackie Chan/Michelle Yeoh action classic Police Story 3: Supercop--a recent subject in Stereogum editor Tom Breihan's "Netflix Action Movie Canon" column for Deadspin, as well as a movie recently brought up in this blog's comments section by both Bay Area film critic Richard von Busack and I--is a rare case where a threequel doesn't suck.
In its overviews of the films of Chan the modern-day Buster Keaton, Subway Cinema noted that Police Story 3 "was a movie that feels like a breath of fresh air for Chan... The foreign locations give things an expensive sheen, and [director Stanley] Tong's eschewing of complex choreography in favor of wide, clearly presented stunt sequences brings a crisp, new feel to Chan's movie repertory." It was also, according to Subway Cinema, a movie Tong (who took over as director after Chan directed the first two Police Story flicks) offered to Yeoh as a way to keep her spirits up after her divorce. The addition of Yeoh's mainland cop character to the mayhem ended up being the high point of Chan's Police Story franchise.
The franchise made its return in 2013 with the non-comedic Police Story 2013, which has nothing to do continuity-wise with the previous adventures of Hong Kong police inspector Chan Ka-kui (Chan's playing a completely different character, just like in 2004's New Police Story). A massive hit in mainland China, the mainland-made Police Story 2013 debuted in American theaters and on digital platforms just last week--to mostly negative reviews--under the title Police Story: Lockdown.
Present-day American viewers are lucky to be able to see Police Story: Lockdown in English subtitles and in its original Mandarin (whereas the previous Police Story movies, all Hong Kong-made, were originally in Cantonese, the most common dialect in Hong Kong), just like how I was lucky to see the original version of Police Story 3 back in 1993, at a Bay Area AMC multiplex that was experimenting at the time with showing badly subtitled--instead of badly dubbed--but thankfully uncut action flicks from Hong Kong. This was three years before Chan had his first box-office hit in America with a redubbed version of Rumble in the Bronx, the filmed-in-Vancouver action comedy that gave us a Bronx surrounded by snow-capped mountains. The surprise hit led to several older Chan flicks hitting American theaters and getting redubbed and butchered as well, as part of a misguided attempt--there's always a tinge of imperialism to this shit--to make them more palatable to American moviegoers. One of those flicks was Police Story 3.
I refuse to ever watch the version of Police Story 3 everyone in America has seen, even though Yeoh's crazy and legendary motorcycle-to-train jump stunt and all the other jaw-dropping stunts remain intact. It's the version that concludes with a very '90s Tom Jones cover of Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting," the same version that Dragon Dynasty--an Asian action film imprint of The Weinstein Company that's otherwise respectful of the Asian action classics it introduces to non-Asian audiences and gives them the option of watching those films uncut and subtitled--stupidly chose as the only version of Police Story 3 for the film's special edition DVD release.
Why do I refuse to watch that Miramax/Dimension version? I don't want my memories of Police Story 3 to be soiled. Police Story 3 in its original form was perfect, man--even with "I Have My Way," the slightly cheesy Cantopop tune Chan sang during the outtakes that concluded the film. Don't get me wrong: Tom Jones is the illest. His Burt Bacharach/Hal David-produced theme from Promise Her Anything is an underrated tune, graced with a guitar riff that's like "Jimmy Page fronting the Byrds," as Allmusic once put it, as well as a tune that's so evocative of Carnaby Street in the '60s. But "Kung Fu Fighting" and its asinine and stereotypical "Oriental riff"? What the hell's it doing in Police Story 3? Miss me with that shit.
I want to always tell anyone whose only taste of Police Story 3 was the Miramax/Dimension version that these Hong Kong films are always better in their original form and that something vital is lost when a terrific sequel like Police Story 3 is deprived of its connections to previous installments. Inspector Ka-kui may not have much of an arc in the four classic-era Police Story movies--in each movie, no matter what rank he's at, he's the same fallible but stalwart character, a "frustrated conformist," to borrow the words of Film Comment's Dave Kehr, rather than a rebel--but in this age of Netflix streaming and Amazon Prime, I wish I could be able to marathon on a lazy afternoon the inspector's fall to demoted cop, followed by his rise to respected lawman (and finally, globe-trotting defender of the security of the world), without any of the changes Miramax/Dimension and New Line Cinema made to the last two classic-era movies (Police Story 4 remains the only classic-era installment I've seen in just its butchered form).
Let's take another enjoyable threequel from a long-running action franchise just like Police Story. Now imagine if Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade got imported to another country, and an editor in that country replaced the first few minutes of Last Crusade's elegant opening sequence in the Utah countryside (actually a seamlessly edited amalgam of Utah and Colorado locations and movie sets in England and Hollywood) with a montage of Tiger Beat snapshots of Harrison Ford, and then the editor changed Indy's name to Adventure Jones. So that when Brody barks on horseback at the end, "Indy, Henry, follow me! I know the way! Ha!," he's been redubbed to say, "Adventure, Henry, follow me!" Then that's followed by John Williams' end credits score music getting replaced by Engelbert Humperdinck doing a cover of the Dazz Band's "Let It Whip" that horribly updates the tune for the '90s. That's exactly what happened to Police Story 3, and that's how inane Miramax/Dimension's butchering of it was.
Occasionally on Friday, 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.
"The Ricks Must Be Crazy" feels like somebody on the Rick and Morty writing staff had a chip on his shoulder about Tron: Legacy, especially the ways it handled its premise of Jeff Bridges creating an entire universe full of sentient life inside a computer, and he didn't care for what he felt was a simplistic screenplay. Tron: Legacy is a good example of both the story serving the visuals rather than vice versa--however, director Joseph Kosinski's style-over-substance approach still couldn't stop me from watching Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D twice because, holy fuck, that movie looks mesmerizing in IMAX 3D--and those visuals being made to look so sumptuous that they're able to distract the audience from thinking too long about the story's plot holes or unexplained details. Some of the questions that arose from those unexplained details included "How's it possible for Jeff Bridges and his family to enjoy a meal of lechon if fresh meat is impossible to bring into the Grid?" and "Was there a Filipino chef in Jeff Bridges' family whom we never knew about?"
A lot of why "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" is a highlight of Rick and Morty's second season is due to how much fun Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon and credited episode writer DanGuterman are clearly having over imagining if Jeff Bridges could leave and re-enter the Grid freely instead of being imprisoned there by his evil doppleganger/digital avatar Clu and what would happen if Jeff Bridges craved power as much as Clu does and he turned out to be an even bigger dick than the marginally flawed, almost Fred MacMurray-like Zen inventor dad we saw in Tron: Legacy. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" reveals that Rick has created an entire infinite universe inside the battery in his space car, and its inhabitants' only purpose in life is to power Rick's car battery. "That's slavery!," counters an appalled Morty when Rick introduces him to what he calls the microverse.
Instead of the more simplistic scenario of a completely evil duplicate of the universe's creator betraying that creator by enacting ethnic cleansing and plotting to rule the world outside the universe's barriers, one of the microverse's inhabitants, a Frank Grimes-ish scientist named Zeep Xanflorp (special guest star Stephen Colbert, whose Colbert Report writing staff happened to include Guterman), refuses to fall for Rick's white savior act like everyone outside the scientific community in the microverse. Zeep is on to some of Rick's deceptions. Those deceptions range from Rick disguising himself as an antennaed alien savior whenever he visits the microverse to Rick telling the microverse's inhabitants that the middle finger is a peaceful greeting.
Zeep plans to oust Rick from the microverse and free the microverse from servitude, but Zeep's no saint either: he has secretly created his own infinite miniverse in a box to provide the energy for his microverse and make obsolete the technology Rick brought to Zeep's microverse, and he's exploiting the people in that miniverse just like Rick is doing to the people in the microverse. In fact, one of the leading scientists in the miniverse, Kyle (special guest star Nathan Fielder from Comedy Central's Nathan for You), has also secretly built his own teenyverse in a box and...
Whether it's Zeep--or the space car security system Rick programmed to keep Summer safe within the space car when she's not allowed to accompany her grandpa and her brother at a certain point during the trio's night out for ice cream and a PG-13 movie on an alternate Earth--Rick's creations all inherited their creator's dickish and easily bored personality. When Summer expresses her objections to the talking space car (Kari Wahlgren) about the bloodshed and cruelty the space car is willing to resort to in order to protect Summer, the space car responds to her with "My function is to keep Summer safe, not keep Summer being, like, totally stoked about, like, the general vibe and stuff. That's you. That's how you talk." They really are their creator's children.
Tron: Legacy and a much more detestable animal than Tron--all those self-aggrandizing movie star vanity projects in which white stars imagine themselves as saviors of less civilized classrooms or neighborhoods or nations or microverses--aren't the only things that appear to be mocked by "The Ricks Must Be Crazy." The episode also appears to be making fun of the benevolent façade the Silicon Valley tech world likes to put on to distract people from how it reinforces the same old evils and inequities of other industries or business communities like Wall Street (like Tajai from Souls of Mischief once said, "Eventually #Hipsters bathe, shave and become the 'out' republicans [sic] they are"). Doesn't that kind of "we're here to help make your world a better place" façade just remind you a bit of those aliens from the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man"? "Gooble boxes," the term the microverse inhabitants adopt for the technology they are unknowingly using to keep themselves subjugated, is clearly the writers' reference to a certain much-criticized corporation with benevolent-looking branding that happens to own the platform that makes this blog post possible. Whattup, Google/NSA.
A certain segment of the TV critic community is understandably tired of narratives about middle-aged or old white anti-heroes. But when a Rick and Morty episode like "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" mines so much darkly comedic gold out of the behavior of Rick and his creations (behavior that Morty and Summer find to be appalling and sociopathic, but Rick's pragmatic way of handling things ends up being the most sane way to respond to a much more insane multiverse) and is visually and narratively inventive (and also perfectly casts a former Comedy Central prankster and a current Comedy Central prankster as pranksters on an epic scale), I say, "Bring on the anti-hero narrative again." Shit, Rick may not even be totally white--his last name is Sanchez and he's probably a white-looking half-Latino like Louis C.K.
It's a relief to see Rick and Morty reverting back to exploring moral quandaries like it has done in such episodes as "Mortynight Run," especially after the previous week's slight misfire, "Get Schwifty," which felt more like a South Park episode than a Rick and Morty episode. It was as if Trey Parker and Matt Stone guest-wrote Rick and Morty and were in the mood to insert another round of their usual barbs about either non-Lorde pop music (although the "Get Schwifty" original songs performed by Roiland and series composer Ryan Elder are amusing, "Love Power" from The Producers-ish spoofs of lyrics from either twerking anthems or EDM) or reality TV. Humor about reality TV stars like Ice-T--a favorite celebrity impression of Harmon's during Harmontown--isn't really Rick and Morty's strong suit. Also, Rick is a less interesting character when he has to play the Doctor and save Earth from disaster (in this case, the trigger-happy judges of an intergalactic reality TV pop music songwriting contest) instead of being the cause of mayhem.
It's hard not to dislike a piece of TV that takes a bit of that mayhem and uses it to briefly riff on Turbo Teen, a short-lived '80s Saturday morning cartoon about a teen who transforms into a Pontiac Trans Am whenever he perspires or eats a spicy burrito. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" also reveals that Rick implanted Morty with a subdermal chip that can trigger dormant nanobots in Morty's bloodstream to restructure his anatomy and turn him into a getaway car during emergency situations. The nanobots fail to get going--until the show's funniest post-credits tag ever, nicely presented without any dialogue. I wish I could say Turbo Teen was really a joke Robert Smigel and J.J. Sedelmaier came up with, but nope, it's what passed for Saturday car chase action fare when I was a kid. You take one look at Brett Matthews' knuckles morphing into tires, and you're like, "Wow, the things Ruby-Spears employees used to come up with after doing trail-of-tears-length lines of coke."
Other memorable quotes:
* Rick: "I guided your entire civilization! Your people have a holiday named Ricksgiving! They teach kids about me in school!"
Zeep: "I dropped out of school. It's not a place for smart people."
Morty: "Ohhhhhhh snap!"
* Rick: "Would it be possible for us to get some kind of tour of your miniverse from the inside?"
Zeep: "This isn't a fucking chocolate factory. I don't have time!"
* Zeep: "That's what you used my universe for?! To run your car?!"
Rick: "Yeah, but don't flatter yourself! There's always AAA, you fucking cocksucker!"
* Zeep: "I crafted the guy that created the planet you're standing on!"
Rick: "Yeah, and I made the stars that became the carbon in your mother's ovaries!"
* Morty: "This is Ku'ala, the spirit tree! For generations, it has guided the... [Takes Rick aside.] You have to get us the fuck outta here! These people are backward savages! They eat every third baby because they think it makes fruit grow bigger! Everyone's gross and they all smell like piss all the time! I-I-I miss my family! I miss my laptop! I masturbate [sic] into an extra curvy piece of driftwood the other day!"
* Rick: "Don't blame my ship!"
Summer: "It melted a child! It killed itself!"
Rick: "My ship doesn't do anything unless it's told to do something! I don't even wanna hear it, Summer... Your boobs are all hanging about, and you ruined ice cream with your boobs out!"
Disney's recent decision to scrap its Tron threequel may be due to the studio becoming cautious about its spending after yet another one of its big-budget films, Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, tanked at the box office, but I think that cancellation is also due to the fact that threequels tend to suck. However, the hugely entertaining 1992 Jackie Chan/Michelle Yeoh action classic Police Story 3: Supercop--a recent subject in Stereogum editor Tom Breihan's "Netflix Action Movie Canon" column for Deadspin, as well as a movie recently brought up in this blog's comments section by both Bay Area film critic Richard von Busack and I--is a rare case where a threequel doesn't suck.
In its overviews of the films of Chan the modern-day Buster Keaton, Subway Cinema noted that Police Story 3 "was a movie that feels like a breath of fresh air for Chan... The foreign locations give things an expensive sheen, and [director Stanley] Tong's eschewing of complex choreography in favor of wide, clearly presented stunt sequences brings a crisp, new feel to Chan's movie repertory." It was also, according to Subway Cinema, a movie Tong (who took over as director after Chan directed the first two Police Story flicks) offered to Yeoh as a way to keep her spirits up after her divorce. The addition of Yeoh's mainland cop character to the mayhem ended up being the high point of Chan's Police Story franchise.
Chan and Tong's wild symphonies of comedic property damage (achieved without any fake-looking CGI!) and "look, Ma, no stunt doubles!"-style martial arts slapstick are represented on the AFOS playlists by J. Peter Robinson's main theme from Jackie Chan's First Strike, the American version of Police Story 4: First Strike. That 1996 installment also had Chan and Tong venturing into foreign locations, for a 007-style story where Hong Kong police inspector Chan Ka-kui, the hero of the franchise in its classic era, gets embroiled in international espionage (the American First Strike theme is part of "AFOS Incognito" rotation, to be exact). The franchise made its return in 2013 with the non-comedic Police Story 2013, which has nothing to do continuity-wise with the previous adventures of Inspector Ka-kui (Chan's playing a completely different character, just like in 2004's New Police Story). A massive hit in mainland China, the mainland-made Police Story 2013 debuted in American theaters and on digital platforms just last week--to mostly negative reviews--under the title Police Story: Lockdown.
Present-day American viewers are lucky to be able to see Police Story: Lockdown in English subtitles and in its original Mandarin (whereas the previous Police Story movies, all Hong Kong-made, were originally in Cantonese, the most common dialect in Hong Kong), just like how I was lucky to see the original version of Police Story 3 back in 1993, at a Bay Area AMC multiplex that was experimenting at the time with showing badly subtitled--instead of badly dubbed--but thankfully uncut action flicks from Hong Kong. This was three years before Chan had his first box-office hit in America with a redubbed version of Rumble in the Bronx, the filmed-in-Vancouver action comedy that gave us a Bronx surrounded by snow-capped mountains. The surprise hit led to several older Chan flicks hitting American theaters and getting redubbed and butchered as well, as part of a misguided attempt--there's always a tinge of imperialism to this shit--to make them more palatable to American moviegoers. One of those flicks was Police Story 3.
I refuse to ever watch the version of Police Story 3 everyone in America has seen, even though Yeoh's crazy and legendary motorcycle-to-train jump stunt and all the other jaw-dropping stunts remain intact. It's the version that concludes with a very '90s Tom Jones cover of Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting," the same version that Dragon Dynasty--an Asian action film imprint of The Weinstein Company that's otherwise respectful of the Asian action classics it introduces to non-Asian audiences and gives them the option of watching those films uncut and subtitled--stupidly chose as the only version of Police Story 3 for the film's special edition DVD release.
Why do I refuse to watch that Miramax/Dimension version? I don't want my memories of Police Story 3 to be soiled. Police Story 3 in its original form was perfect, man--even with "I Have My Way," the slightly cheesy Cantopop tune Chan sang during the outtakes that concluded the film. Don't get me wrong: Tom Jones is the illest. His Burt Bacharach/Hal David-produced theme from Promise Her Anything, which is part of "AFOS Prime" rotation, is an underrated tune, graced with a guitar riff that's like "Jimmy Page fronting the Byrds," as Allmusic once put it, as well as a tune that's so evocative of Carnaby Street in the '60s. But "Kung Fu Fighting" and its asinine and stereotypical "Oriental riff"? What the hell's it doing in Police Story 3? Miss me with that shit.
I want to always tell anyone whose only taste of Police Story 3 was the Miramax/Dimension version that these Hong Kong films are always better in their original form and that something vital is lost when a terrific sequel like Police Story 3 is deprived of its connections to previous installments. Inspector Ka-kui may not have much of an arc in the four classic-era Police Story movies--in each movie, no matter what rank he's at, he's the same fallible but stalwart character, a "frustrated conformist," to borrow the words of Film Comment's Dave Kehr, rather than a rebel--but in this age of Netflix streaming and Amazon Prime, I wish I could be able to marathon on a lazy afternoon the inspector's fall to demoted cop, followed by his rise to respected lawman (and finally, globe-trotting defender of the security of the world), without any of the changes Miramax/Dimension and New Line Cinema made to the last two classic-era movies (Police Story 4 remains the only classic-era installment I've seen in just its butchered form).
Let's take another enjoyable threequel from a long-running action franchise just like Police Story. Now imagine if Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade got imported to another country, and an editor in that country replaced the first few minutes of Last Crusade's elegant opening sequence in the Utah countryside (actually a seamlessly edited amalgam of Utah and Colorado locations and movie sets in England and Hollywood) with a montage of Tiger Beat snapshots of Harrison Ford, and then the editor changed Indy's name to Adventure Jones. So that when Brody barks on horseback at the end, "Indy, Henry, follow me! I know the way! Ha!," he's been redubbed to say, "Adventure, Henry, follow me!" Then that's followed by John Williams' end credits score music getting replaced by Engelbert Humperdinck doing a cover of the Dazz Band's "Let It Whip" that horribly updates the tune for the '90s. That's exactly what happened to Police Story 3, and that's how inane Miramax/Dimension's butchering of it was.
Archer's latest episode recaptures the most exciting part of Skyfall: the scenes where they filled out paperwork.
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.
After Archer's entertaining crossover with Bob's Burgers, the FX cartoon sort of crosses over with another show I love, FX's Justified, by borrowing its star (Timothy Olyphant) and one of its staff writers (Chris Provenzano) for "The Wind Cries Mary." Olyphant, whose comedic chops on Justified are frequently overlooked (even at the A.V. Club, of all places), blends in quite well with the twisted Archer universe while voicing eternal frat-boy Lucas Troy, Archer's previously unmentioned best friend and an operative from ISIS' rival agency ODIN who may not be as trustworthy--or as straight--as Archer deems him to be.
I love it when a show suddenly introduces some important buddy from the main character's past who's never been brought up by the lead before, and then after one episode or, in the case of Steve Buscemi's Tony Blundetto on The Sopranos, an entire season, we never see his ass again. The original Star Trek did it all the time, Jim Rockford would be frequently visited by war buddies we'd never hear from again (and not even on that answering machine of his), that beloved teammate of Sam Malone's who came out of the closet in a tell-all book he promoted at Cheers never dropped by the bar again for another beer and so on. I wish "The Wind Cries Mary" would have poked a little more fun at this old trope of the previously unmentioned BFF, besides making this bestie turn out to be gay for Archer (and no one else). But as usual on Archer, there are so many killer lines from cold open to finish (and also, welcome back, workplace humor that's been absent for a couple of episodes) that whatever gripes I have about the episode end up--like "the life that lived" in the Jimi Hendrix tune this episode cops its title from--dead.
Stray observations:
* Ringtone gags in sitcoms always suck, but somehow, only Archer manages to make them work. Archer's choice of "Danger Zone" as his ringtone is as predictable as his frequently ridiculed choice of sidearm.
* I enjoyed this line Archer utters to himself because I once considered enrolling in the two-year Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont and then Googled small-town Vermont and thought, nah, that hood's not for me: "Vermont has liquor stores, right? Yeah, they have to. It sucks there."
* Pam: "So why are these damn peer reviews so hard?! Only like 10 people work in this whole goddamn chickenshit outfit!" That'd be dope if Pam punctuated one or two other lines this season with mic drops, using the same battered-looking mic she dropped at the end of that "chickenshit outfit" line.
* Archer: "There's, uh, there's kind of a lot of blood down there." A dying Lucas: "Said your mom."
* Lucas: "I only did it because I wanted us to be together. Forever." Lana, off-screen: "Called it!" Off-screen, two-to-three-word asides about someone's sex life have been a favorite comedic device of mine ever since NewsRadio once built a great running gag out of Catherine thinking Lisa was trying to seduce Dave for new office supplies, so she continually goaded Lisa on to shake her stuff for Dave.
* Whoever drew Lana's expression during the episode-closing awkward ride home after Luke's half-finished deathbed confession deserves some sort of nod for Outstanding Achievement in Animating Appalled Expressions.
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.
Episodes like "Fugue and Riffs," Archer's wildly funny and violent fourth-season premiere, are exactly why I wanted to expand "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" to include adult cartoons at the end of last year. "When the new year approaches," I asked myself, "do you want another year of sitting through Ben 10 reboots that cause your attention to wander or awfully written Ultimate Spider-Man episodes, or do you want to put that part of your time to better use, like covering adult cartoons that are more up your alley and are worthier of discussion and analysis?"
"Fugue and Riffs" is the kind of adult cartoon episode I should have been focusing on in the first place. It's another sharply written story involving ISIS agent Sterling Archer's ongoing conflict with his mother/boss Malory (Jessica Walter), and it contains a brilliant crossover with lead voice actor H. Jon Benjamin's other current cartoon, more semi-nudity from Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) and esoteric references that are funny simply because they're so damn esoteric (British spy hero Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon! Manning Coles, the duo that created Hambledon! The star of Shazam! Émile Zola!). You won't see Spidey cracking a joke that's a nod to Zola's "J'accuse" letter during Ultimate Spider-Man, that's for damn sure.
The season premiere opens with Archer tending the grill at the exact same titular restaurant from Bob's Burgers, Benjamin's other show, while surrounded by the Belcher kids and Linda (John Roberts, the only Bob's Burgers voice actor reprising his role), who gets to berate Archer with one of the various insulting nicknames that have become one of the Adam Reed cartoon's trademarks ("Well, excuse me, Ike Turner!"). Instead of appearing in their more familiar character designs from Bob's Burgers, Tina, Gene, Louise and Linda are awesomely redesigned to blend in with Archer's '60s comic book aesthetic.
I like how the cold open strings us along into thinking Archer is undercover as a burger joint owner as part of some ISIS op, until it becomes clear that it's no op and he has no memory of his life as an ISIS agent, although a few pieces of that life remain. They include fighting skills, which Archer puts to use during a badass and extremely gory restaurant confrontation with KGB assassins straight out of A History of Violence, his literary tastes (he dubs the restaurant's newest burger "a Thomas Elphinstone Hambledurger with Manning Coleslaw") and his metrosexual side ("What I am gonna do is find out who this Archer jerk is... I'm also probably gonna do a spa weekend").
It turns out that two months ago, Archer developed amnesia due to a moment of extreme stress and ran away to a new life as a seaside fry cook named Bob. He married Linda and apparently became her second husband, which makes me wonder what happened to the original Bob in this universe (Alex, I'm gonna go with "What is dead?," and because much of this show's humor thrives on kinky or freaky behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if Linda has been remolding Archer Vertigo-style to look more like Bob). Both ISIS and the KGB are after Archer for different reasons: Malory assigns Lana, Cyril (Chris Parnell) and Ray (Reed) to stage a fake run-in with the KGB in front of Archer to try to jog his memory and get him back to the agency, while bionic villain Barry Dylan (Dave Willis) sends more KGB assassins to eliminate Archer.
Part of the fun of "Fugue and Riffs" is trying to figure out the stressful moment that triggered Archer's amnesia. We're given a clue early on when Malory complains that her son hates seeing her be happy, and when the catalyst is revealed at the end to be neither a bomb explosion nor a Bourne Identity-style, ISIS-sanctioned attempt on his life, but something far less action-y--Malory's wedding to Ron Cadillac, the most successful Cadillac dealer in the Tri-State Area--it makes perfect sense within the neurotic, wracked-by-mommy-issues world of Archer. In a great bit of stunt-casting, the show has recruited Ron Leibman from The Hot Rock and Friends, as well as Walter's real-life husband, to voice Malory's new hubby, who's won over everyone at ISIS during Archer's two-month absence and whose presence this season is bound to reignite an old thread from a couple of seasons ago: Archer's search for his biological father. (Archer reportedly begins to form a bond with Ron in the new season's fourth episode. I can't wait to see if Reed, who's obsessed with the movies of one-time Archer guest star Burt Reynolds, will toss into that episode a reference to The Hot Rock or Leibman's other '70s crime-genre cult favorite, The Super Cops.)
The helmeted villain with no name attempts to trim Mike's bangs.
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. There will be no new columns this week and next week due to the holidays and the lack of first-run programming (only Tron: Uprising and Motorcity are first-run because Disney XD chose to burn off the rest of their episodes over the holidays). In a special year-end edition of "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," here are previous reviews of five of my favorite non-Adult Swim cable cartoon episodes from May to December 2012.
Motorcity, the only one out of the five cartoons this week that's not based on a superhero comic for a change, is only two episodes in, and this unlikely collabo between Disney and the not-so-family-friendly Titmouse animation studio (of Metalocalypse and Freaknik: The Musical fame) is already the most inventive and thrilling of the five. It's not a superhero show, yet it's dealing with questions about heroism (and even activism) more interestingly than most cartoons that are actual superhero shows.
In Motorcity's future setting, the socio-economical punching bag that is Detroit has been divided by greedy developer Abraham Kane (Batman: The Animated Series and Metalocalypse vocal MVP Mark Hamill) into two sections, the sparkling-clean, EPCOT-like Detroit Deluxe for the city's most affluent inhabitants and Motorcity, a subterranean ghetto that Kane is plotting to completely bulldoze. Teenage gearhead Mike Chilton (Reid Scott, currently appearing on HBO's Veep as the conceited douche on VP Selina Meyer's staff) has banded together with cowardly hacker and best friend Chuck (Nate Torrence), industrial spy Julie (Kate Micucci) and mechanics Dutch (Kel Mitchell), Texas (Jess Harnell) and Goat Jacob (Brian Doyle-Murray) to prevent Kane and his Shockbots from wiping out Motorcity. These tech-savvy rebels call themselves the Burners. If an older Phineas and Ferb joined Dominic Toretto's crew from the Fast and the Furious movies and then were all forced to live in a dystopic ghetto of the future, it would look something like the Burners.
To borrow a line from the infamous Super Bowl XLVI Chrysler ad where Clint Eastwood big-upped the Detroit auto industry, now Motorcity is fighting again. But will Kane succeed in turning the Burners and the people of Motorcity against Mike, who, like Jacob, used to work for KaneCo? Will the fog, division, discord and blame make it hard for the Burners to see what lies ahead?
Even though Motorcity must have been created by Titmouse honcho Chris Prynoski long before the Occupy movement began (and judging from how much work Titmouse put into making the show's visuals look amazing, it had have to been created that long ago) and Prynoski is more concerned with high-octane action than political allegory, it's hard to ignore how similar the Burners' opposition to Kane is to the struggles of us 99 Percenters. It's about time Occupy protesters got an animated show they can root for and embrace--and of course, watch while being camped out between protests, most likely through Burners-style illegal means that would make Disney's blood boil.
Speaking of Disney, how the hell did a show with a clear disdain for EPCOT-like things manage to get Disney's approval and make it on to a Disney-owned channel?
"When I asked Prynoski about this [satirical] aspect of Motorcity," wrote Jim Hill in his article about Motorcity, "all Chris could do in response was laugh and then say 'I don't think I'm allowed to comment on that. But I will say that you're a very perceptive fellow.'"
For a long time, I found it difficult to get over Cartoon Network's cancellation of the Titmouse-produced Megas XLR, which, like Motorcity, had a bunch of teenage gearheads as the heroes (instead of souped-up hot rods, their ride was a giant robot from the future). I think I'm finally over it. Motorcity is a great substitute, and in some ways, it's an even better show. Sure, there aren't as many amusing pop culture reference gags on Motorcity as there were on Megas XLR, which, for instance, regularly ridiculed MTV for cancelling the Titmouse cult favorite Downtown by destroying a "PopTV" sign in every episode (Roth, a robot named after car customizer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, and a shout-out to Admiral Ackbar's "It's a trap!" line from Hamill's Star Wars past are as reference-y as Motorcity gets). But the Burners are more interesting characters (I especially enjoyed the matter-of-fact way the "Battle for Motorcity" premiere episode revealed that Julie is Kane's daughter) and more fallible heroes than Megas XLR's Coop, who always triumphed over the Glorft at the end of each episode despite leveling most of New Jersey in the process. On Megas XLR, the destruction of Jersey was a running gag, but on Motorcity, the impact the Burners' battles against Kane have on the fragile ghetto they call home is treated a little more seriously.
This week's "Power Trip" episode, scripted by Megas XLR co-creator George Krstic, features a great scene where the Burners brainstorm how to break into the KaneCo Tower and realize why each of their ideas would suck donkey balls. In that comedic scene and in later moments where characters debate over weaponizing an unstable KaneCo energy source, "Power Trip" deals with how heroism sometimes requires compromise, but without getting preachy about it. Mike gets a KaneCo R&D scientist (Jim Cummings) to steal from Kane an energy core, which would result in Kane's evil empire being shut down once and for all. But even though the energy core is too unstable and dangerous for the Burners to keep around in Motorcity, Mike insists on using it as a weapon, and his stance is met with opposition by Chuck and the scientist. The series isn't afraid to show that while Mike is a great leader, he's also an adrenaline junkie, and his recklessness can be a liability for the people he wants to protect.
In "Battle for Motorcity," the constantly whiny Chuck, who's so squeamish he makes Shaggy from Scooby-Doo look macho, quickly became the show's most grating character. He's still a whiny crybaby in "Power Trip," but luckily, this second episode gives Chuck more to do than just whine, squeal and activate his ejector seat, and in the scenes where the characters express their hesitancy over handling the energy core, we see why Mike values Chuck as the conscience of the group and why Mike needs him to keep him in check (over on Tumblr, several Motorcity fans are already shipping Mike and Chuck as a gay couple, and I wouldn't be surprised if some female viewer somewhere is currently hard at work on her Mike/Chuck slashfic).
I'm making Motorcity sound like a serious show, but it's far from it. It's as wild a ride as that rollercoaster Phineas and Ferb built in their backyard. Disney and Titmouse may turn out to be the most worthwhile partnership between The Mouse and another animation studio since Disney and some little computer graphics company from the Bay Area.
Motorcity introduces yet another adversary for the Burners during another solid episode of this finely crafted cartoon, "Vendetta." This time, it's a nameless, red muscle car-driving warrior (Eric Ladin, just recently killed off on The Killing) in a spiked helmet who looks like a rejected Tron: Uprising baddie and is referred to in the end credits only as "Red"--although this mystery man's beef is mainly with Burners leader Mike Chilton. On the one-year anniversary of the day Mike severed ties with Abraham Kane, Red emerges from out of nowhere to take revenge on Mike and eliminate him.
In juicy flashbacks that finally explain what Mike did when he was a KaneCo employee, we learn that he was a cadet in Kane's army of soldiers known as the Ultra Elites. The fact that a businessman assembled an army to guard him and do his dirty work shows how psychotic this particular businessman is.
At the height of Donald Trump's still-continuing racist nonsense about President Obama, Lewis Black did a hilarious Daily Show "Back in Black" segment where he joked that he wants Trump to be the next president because America needs to be run by someone as insane as Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong Il. Kane is like a mash-up of Trump's Third World dictator-style craziness and Steve Jobs' technological genius, his dickish treatment of his Apple colleagues and his love of the color white--in the wardrobe and burly body of a douchey gym manager.
And then Elise tore off her clothes and reenacted Sandra Bernhard's crazy monologue from The King of Comedy.
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired. There will be no new column next week due to Christmas. Instead, five previous reviews of the best non-Adult Swim cable cartoon episodes I saw between May and December 2012 will be reposted on December 26.
Back in September, I caught most of the series premiere of Nickelodeon's CG-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This reboot of the '80s indie comic-turned-cartoon is noteworthy for bringing back to the franchise '80s and '90s TMNTvoice actorRob Paulsen, who, when TMNT exploded as a merchandising phenomenon, was four years away from getting the chance to work with better and funnier animated material as the voices of Yakko, Pinky and Dr. Scratchansniff on Animaniacs (but on this new TMNT, Paulsen voices Donatello instead of his old role of Raphael). I might have liked this TMNT reboot if I were 12, but because I'm not 12, eh, it's not so appealing to me. The only other TMNT episode I've caught is "It Came from the Depths," the latest installment.
Sure, the animation is much more fluid during this CG version and the theme song is 2000s-style lite-rap instead of very '80s lite-rock (little-known fact: the '80s theme, which the new theme lifts its chorus from, was co-written by a then-unknown, pre-Dharma & Greg/Two and a Half Men Chuck Lorre), but otherwise, the Ninja Turtles aren't much different from the Ninja Turtles I first saw (and tolerated) as a kid. They still fight like Japanese swordsmen and talk like white dudes. They're still obsessed with pizza, a joke that wasn't funny in 1988 and still isn't funny in 2012.
However, there's one genuinely funny gag during "It Came from the Depths," and it has nothing to do with the episode's boring plot, which reintroduces mutant alligator Leatherhead, a Killer Croc-ish character from the old show. Ninja Turtles leader Leonardo (Jason Biggs) is a fan of Space Heroes, a popular sci-fi cartoon that's a mash-up of Filmation's barely animated version of Star Trek from the '70s--a show I first caught on Nickelodeon!--and Hanna-Barbera's Sealab 2020. The cel-animated clip of Space Heroes is a great animation industry in-joke from episode director Juan Meza-Leon about how stiff and crappy the animation looked on the Trek cartoon. The Space Heroes clip even resembles an actual episode of the Trek cartoon, "More Tribbles, More Troubles" (but here, the Tribbles make honking noises instead of purring sounds and are called "Trumpets"). They even nailed the Trek cartoon's strange, Ingmar Bergman-esque two-shots of Kirk and Spock! That was one of Filmation's famously lazy-ass ways of restricting the animation to just mouth and eyebrow movements.
Aside from that terrific little spoof of the Trek cartoon, Nick's TMNT isn't a show I'll be revisiting. The controversy surrounding Biggs' involvement in the show is more interesting than the show itself. The American Pie star has an off-color and not-exactly-Nick-audience-friendly Twitter account where he tweets racist jokes about Indian American spelling bee contestants and raunchy ones about Ann Romney and Paul Ryan's wife (what else would you expect from a guy who became famous for sticking his dick in a pie?). During the week of the Republican National Convention, Fox News anchor and pepper spray expert Megyn Kelly reacted to Biggs' tweets about the Romney and Ryan wives by yelling, "Off with his head!" Nick ended up apologizing for Biggs' RNC tweets and "our mistake to link from our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles twitter feed to Jason's personal twitter account" and yadda yadda. So Nick apologizes when the GOP whines about Biggs' anti-Republican jokes, but the channel's silent about the racist jokes he cracked a couple of months before about Indian kids? Ninja please.
***
As someone who got involved in writing a few pieces of Asian American fiction (one published, the others either unpublished, unfinished or read by barely anybody) to help take away the power of the Jason Biggses of the world, I think it's kind of sad that the only current action show with an Asian American lead as the main hero is a kids' cartoon where he's voiced by Scott Wolf and the heroes cheesily shout aloud reverbed I-have-the-power incantations like "Tatsurion the Unchained!" and "Scaradorable of Gloom Hollow!," a kids' show-ism that usually makes me fumble for my remote. I initially didn't think I'd be able to withstand the TV-Y7-rated Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters, but in spite of its kids' show-isms and occasionally clunky dialogue, the Hasbro Studios cartoon has grown on me. The fact that it's rather nicely animated by the Korean studio MOI instead of poorly animated like the '80s versions of G.I. Joe and Transformers sort of helps, along with little touches like the attention to Ray's biracial background, the lead duo's names of Bob and Ray (c'mon, man, that's gotta be a shout-out to Chris Elliott's dad and his late comedy partner!) and Bob's words to Ray when he wishes him luck in part 2 of "The Rising," the first-season finale.
"Don't forget: bob and weave," says Bob, a.k.a. Tatsurion, to Ray in a rousing callback to the battle instruction from Ray that was misunderstood so badly by Tatsurion in the series premiere that it wound up becoming his nickname.
Ray doesn't kill his cruel nemesis the Choten like I wanted him to, but with the help of the other Duel Masters, their kaiju sidekicks, a resurrected Sasha (Kari Wahlgren) and even his newly-outed-as-a-Duelist mom, Ray's able to foil the Choten's season-long plan to open the Veil that the Order of the Duel Masters keeps sealed in order to protect Earth from the creature realm. Alakshmi (Grey DeLisle), the Shane Vendrell of Kaijudo, continues to get screwed over, even after finally wising up about her evil boss and deciding to help Gabe thwart him. She's rewarded for her moment of clarity by winding up a prisoner in the Fire Civilization, where the Fire God excites a coliseum full of bloodthirsty Fire Civilization creatures by declaring war on Earth.
In another set-up for season 2, the Choten, now trapped in the creature realm with his henchmen and his new ally Nigel Brightmore, hatches another plan: to conquer the realm from the other side of the Veil. Meanwhile, the Order chooses the no-longer-inept Gabe as the new Light Civilization Master to replace the traitorous Nigel, and Ray must deal with losing his dad Ken again, but he's unaware that Ken is alive and was rescued by Water Civilization creatures. Also, Masters Chavez (Freddy Rodriguez) and Nadia (also DeLisle) stop playing timid and finally express their feelings for each other (as do Ray and Allie, but less overtly) to cap off a season-long romantic subplot that consisted of nothing but very minimal dialogue and strange electricity between Chavez and Nadia whenever the Choten's attacks forced them to be huddled together in tight corners.
Of course, nobody watches Kaijudo to see these humans make out. We tune in mainly to see kaiju wreak havoc on each other, and "The Rising, Part 2" delivers plenty of kaiju rampaging on each other (and emerging from the opened Veil to attack Earth during some of my favorite epic shots of the series), although Guillermo del Toro's robots-vs.-kaiju epic Pacific Rim, which hasn't been released yet but has just dropped an amazing-looking trailer, is already making Kaijudo look like a bunch of rough notebook doodles.
"Forget it, dude. I'm not going back to Romney to shake his hand backstage. You saw what happened to Pacquiao."
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.
How to Train Your Dragon fans who have been bored lately with Dragons: Riders of Berk have complained on Toonzone about the character of dragon-hating Mildew (Stephen Root) and have found him to be an underwhelming antagonist compared to Mark Hamill's Alvin ("[Mildew] makes for a terrible villain," "very flat and uninteresting"). As for me, I like how the other major antagonist on Dragons isn't a mustache-twirling thug like Alvin and is more like most of the Republican Party: old, hateful and afraid of change.
Mildew is basically the Viking version of Mrs. Carmody from Stephen King's novella The Mist, the terribly written radio drama-style Mist audiobook from the '80s that starred Bill Sadler (that's the version of The Mist I'm most familiar with) and Frank Darabont's 2007 film version (which also featured Sadler, but in a different role). Both Mildew and Carmody are crazy old zealots who use religion to brainwash neighbors and bully those who don't share their beliefs. In "When Lightning Strikes," Berk is being ravaged by a wave of lightning storms, which Mildew believes to be the thunder god Thor's angry response to Toothless' "unholy" presence after the lightning seems to follow Toothless wherever the dragon goes, and this provides Mildew with another excuse to call for Toothless' banishment. Meanwhile, Hiccup discovers that the reason for the storms has something to do with a concept that's completely foreign to the Vikings and their polytheistic Norse culture: science.
Those viewers who despise Mildew's appearances (however, they might be right about these "villagers having difficulty trusting the dragons" episodes becoming tiresome) have said they wish he were thrown off the island, which "When Lightning Strikes" chickens out of doing. The fate I wish for Mildew is far worse than him getting evicted from Berk or getting electrocuted inside his house like at the end of "When Lightning Strikes": the villagers chain him to a chair and force him to listen to the radio drama version of The Mist.
***
"I think Saguru is Ray's presumed-dead father," I wrote back in July, when Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters first introduced the mysterious bounty hunter (Andrew Kishino). "Mr. Okamoto must have used the memory-wiping Cyber Virus creatures on his family to protect them from his life as a Duel Master (what good that did because his son is now part of the Order of the Duel Masters) and then had a Cyber Virus erase his own memories of Earth."
The show's recent confirmation that the one-eyed amnesiac is indeed Ray's long-missing dad was far from shocking. But the additional revelation that Ray's mom Janet (Grey DeLisle) knew all along about the Duel Masters and learned how to use a gauntlet from her husband--whose real name is Ken--came out of nowhere and was the first genuine surprise to emerge from a cartoon that's rolled out one predictable twist after another (Ken and the Choten, the Order's nemesis, used to be friends… a long time ago! Ken is a former Duel Master! Master Brightmore, who was never comfortable with Ray's unorthodox approach to dueling and the changes the kid has brought to the old ways of the Order, switched sides and now works for the Choten!).
However, the reasons why Ken lost both his memory and his right eye and became Saguru remain a mystery, and the fast-paced first half of "The Rising," Kaijudo's two-part season finale (the best part of this first half, by the way, is Bob the half-dragon's discovery that he can fly), doesn't delve into them. I won't be surprised if the Choten was responsible for mind-wiping Ken and gouging out his eye. I also won't be surprised if the Choten bites the heads off baby pandas for dinner and is a Chris Brown fan.
I've made fun of Kaijudo's occasionally clunky dialogue (particularly when the show has dealt with the hot-button issue of bullying) or its unsurprising twists like I did just now, but to its credit, the show hasn't shied away from depicting how cruel and destructive the Choten has been to Ray's family. This isn't some half-assed villain who makes very little of an impact like any of the heavily watered-down rogues gallery on the frequently underwhelming Ultimate Spider-Man, and Oded Fehr helps make the Choten such an intimidating figure by underplaying him and delivering his lines with nary a shout or Snidely Whiplash-style laugh. Screw the TV-Y7 rating. I want Ray and his dad to dismember and kill this cold and unfeeling bastard by the end of part 2.
***
If you've ever been ripped off by a mechanic before, Dan Vs. has come up with a clever explanation for why many mechanics are unreliable: it's because they steal components of your car to build giant robots for underground robot fights. As a viewer who loved Megas XLR, the entertaining giant-robot-sci-fi spoof that Titmouse has lately been attempting to bring back to TV, I got a kick out of the underground robot fight club scenes in "Dan vs. the Mechanic," even though the robots are much tinier than Megas and equipped with far less weaponry. The casting of RoboCop heavy Kurtwood Smith--who currently voices Gene the ruthless vending machine on Regular Show--as Dan's sloppy mechanic Mike is an inspired choice, as is the ED-209-from-RoboCop-style design for The Widowmaker, the robot that Elise pilots to take down Dan in the ring after she's had enough of his bossiness.
