"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Bob's Burgers, "Tina and the Real Ghost"

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.

The funniest line in "Tina and the Real Ghost," this year's Bob's Burgers Halloween episode, takes place when Louise unveils her Halloween costume, which simply consists of her regular clothes combined with a toothpick, a pair of leather driving gloves and a certain white satin scorpion jacket. She says, "I'm Ryan Gosling from the major motion picture trailer Drive."

The moment is also emblematic of the beautiful efficiency of the writing on Bob's Burgers. On Family Guy, this would have been an excuse for the show to do another cutaway gag and pointlessly probe into why the girl said "major motion picture trailer." Bob's Burgers doesn't feel the need to do that. It rarely opts for cutaway gags (there have been flashbacks though, to either Bob as a kid or Tina as a baby, and we get occasional glimpses into Tina's elaborate fantasies about male classmates, either human or zombie). Louise's line is already funny enough as it is that it doesn't need to be embellished with a cutaway gag. We're left to imagine Linda and Bob trying their damnedest to prevent their most mischievous and conniving kid from watching the ultraviolent Drive in its entirety, and letting us picture that in our heads is funnier than actually depicting it. That's smart writing.

The same could be said about the rest of the episode, which was written by Steven Davis and Kelvin Yu and centers on Tina's crush on what she's led to believe is a ghost in a shoebox named Jeff ("I'm pretty sure that's his handwriting. It's girlie, but it's just because he's sensitive," says Tina about a message on a girls' room mirror that she thinks was written by her spectral boyfriend). Once again, Bob's Burgers does terrific and funny work exploring the imaginative and romantic sides of Tina, who's somehow a more fully realized character than most girl characters on live-action sitcoms who are about the same age as her. As Katie Schenkel once said over at The Mary Sue, "the show took what could have been a cheap running gag of 'let's laugh at the weird girl' and turned her into the best character on the whole damn show."

It helps that the show doesn't punish Tina for being her libidinous, erotic fanfic-writing self like the Griffins cruelly do with Meg for being awkward and unpopular on Family Guy; Bob's Burgers always takes Bob's or Louise's position that "Sure, Tina's weird, but let's not be a dick to her about it." In the case of Louise in "Tina and the Real Ghost," she quickly realizes the cruelty of her Ouija board prank of tricking Tina into thinking Jeff is real and attempts to undo it. Louise's remorse exemplifies another thing I appreciate about Bob's Burgers: the support the Belchers have for each other, without having to get goopy and '80s sitcom huggy about it, expressive and affectionate Linda aside (if Louise wound up on Full House or Family Ties and she had to experience one of those shows' hugging scenes, she'd punch Bob Saget in the face or light Michael Gross' beard on fire). On Bob's Burgers, there's no time to be goopy and huggy. They've got burgers and side orders of puns that need to be cranked out.

Stray observations:
* There wasn't even enough time for the opening titles. "Tina and the Real Ghost" is the fourth consecutive Bob's Burgers episode to go without opening titles. The absence of the titles is making me wonder if the Bob's Burgers writing staff is running out of puns for the names on the exterminator vans and the failed businesses next door to Bob's. I remember watching an interview where the late Stephen J. Cannell talked about how the Rockford Files writing staff used to have problems coming up with new humorous messages for the answering machine gag at the start of Rockford's opening titles.

* Those alien noises that come out of special guest star Jenny Slate--whether they're Tammy's horror movie screams during this Bob's Burgers Halloween episode or whatever this is during Kroll Show--never lose their funniness.

* Gene's costume as half-Turner, half-Hooch makes me realize there aren't enough Tom Hanks project-inspired costumes out there on Halloween or at cons. Bosom Buddies, The 'Burbs, A League of Their Own and Apollo 13 are long overdue for the cosplay treatment (but definitely not Cloud Atlas; keep that yellowface/brownface/redface/blackface shit away from Halloween next year or any other year, white people, or prepare to get stabbed).

* It's funny that this episode where Louise cosplays Drive premiered immediately after BBC Three aired a rescored version of Drive, which was music-supervised by Zane Lowe. The Radio 1 DJ recruited artists like The 1975, Baauer of "Harlem Shake" infamy and L.A. R&B singer Banks to record new original tracks for the movie, and the results were lukewarmly received (Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn is one of the few who likes the rescore). I really like "Get Away" by Chvrches, which was chosen to replace Kavinsky's 2010 song "Nightcall" in Drive's opening titles, but thematically and tonally, it doesn't really fit with the establishing of Ryan Gosling's nighttime activities as a getaway driver during the opening titles, despite the song being called "Get Away" (the romantically minded "Get Away" would have been better suited for any of the later scenes where Gosling bonds with Carey Mulligan). The Drive rescore is an interesting experiment for about a track or two, but it's otherwise unnecessary because the music that was used in the final cut is so irreplaceable. Okay, maybe I'd rescore that hammer-to-the-hand moment at the strip club with Black Sheep's "U Mean I'm Not" because that tune is life.

* Once again, co-composer and series creator Loren Bouchard and the duo known as the Elegant Too excel in the music department. The episode's silly song about Jeff is like a cross between the ballads of Serge Gainsbourg and Nelson Riddle's "Lolita Ya Ya" from the Stanley Kubrick version of Lolita.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby"

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.

Musical episodes aren't my cup of tea. Usually, they're the kind of episode that's way more fun for the actors involved than for the viewer, especially a viewer like me who doesn't care for musical theater (and prefers musicals only when they're strictly satirical, like South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut or Community's "Regional Holiday Music"). But "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby," Space Dandy's musical episode, is a rare case where it's vice versa. It helps that the songs aren't too awful. In most musical episodes, the enjoyment the actors must have had from reliving performing arts summer camp (or channeling it) while they worked on the episode just doesn't translate for viewers like me, whereas "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby," penned by special guest writer Hayashi Mori, a playwright and J-drama writer, soars on the basis of Mori's solid writing, fanciful animation and a climactic musical number that contains lyrics like "Ass, ass, ass, ass, ass, ass! Come on, ass!"

Dandy, a middle school dropout, gets to experience high school when he pretends to be a transfer student at famous Baberly Hills High, "the setting for a lot of dramas," in order to track down a rare Category-A "Cliponian" alien and bring her to the Alien Registration Center (Cliponians are distinctive for transforming from plain-looking to attractive when they find their mates). The high school setting gives Mori and the animators a chance to reference all kinds of works. Your response to whatever past high school movies or shows are referenced during "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby" gives away how old you are. If your thoughts during the episode were "This is an awful lot like Grease" or "Dandy's prom suit mashes up Travolta's suits from Grease and Saturday Night Fever," you were a '70s kid. If your response was either "I'm having flashbacks to Galaxy High School," "This training montage is straight out of Better Off Dead and the Rocky sequels (okay, Rocky's not exactly the high school genre, but whatever)" or "Dandy's giving off a creepy Wooderson vibe in these early scenes," you were an '80s kid like me. If you immediately exclaimed either "Glee!," "High School Musical!" or "A non-violent Kill la Kill!" and said something along those lines on Twitter, you're a zygote.

Speaking of age, Dandy may be in his 20s or 30s, but unlike many of the student characters in the two 21 Jump Street movies (which poked fun at how the undercover cops on the original Jump Street were too easily accepted as high-schoolers by civilians and criminals), no one at Baberly Hills cares that Dandy looks too old to be a student. Instead of Dandy's looks, what Queen Bee Sofia (Yuuka Nanri) and the other popular kids at this singing and dancing school are more concerned with is Dandy's singing and dancing skills. His musical ability doesn't compare to Sofia's, so the mean girl relegates him to the bottom of the social totem pole and designates him an "otaku," along with a mousy-looking alien girl in glasses named Hanahana (Yui Makino) and a couple of other supposed losers. Will Dandy and Hanahana be able to upgrade themselves in time for prom night? Will Dandy find the Cliponian and finally get that bounty he's yearning for? Will Dr. Gel finally be face-to-face with the pompadoured alien hunter he's yearning to capture?

If questions two and three ended in "yes," the series would be over (we have a lot more episodes to go). As for prom night, Dandy and Hanahana make like Donna Summer and work hard for the money in an '80s training montage parody that, frankly, was done to better effect in Wet Hot American Summer and on South Park, and together, all the otakus manage to bring an end to the school's evil caste system in a prom night number that immediately won me over with lyrics like a refrain that's "Ass is all!" in Japanese (FUNimation's English dub modifies it to "Booty is all!").

Even Sofia is won over by the "Viva All!" number as well, and she ends up joining the otakus in abandoning the caste system. Part of why "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby" stands out as a musical episode is its brief length--it's over before you know it, and fortunately, it doesn't drone on for 42 minutes or more--but it's also a standout because of the way it delivers its pro-underdog message, not through any speechifying, which proliferated all the preachy American animated shows that dominated the decade that much of the episode is an homage to, but through irreverent lines like "Ass is all!"

Stray observations:
* In addition to a sight gag involving the teleportation device from the David Cronenberg version of The Fly and a jock whose character design is modeled after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Slimer makes a cameo during Sofia's expositiony caste system number and is seen wearing a hat that resembles--but isn't quite exactly--the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man's hat.

* The shot of the school's Sentinel-like security guard robot stopping the merged jock bullies from Hulking out at the prom is my favorite example of how striking this musical episode looks.

* Was an entire subplot about a long-suffering janitor and his two-timing wife cut out of the episode? The duet between the janitor, who doesn't speak elsewhere, and his wife, who sings about an affair with some other alien, during the "Viva All!" number is all that remains of this obviously deleted subplot.

* Feminist viewers probably won't care for Dandy objectifying Hanahana to boost her self-esteem during the climactic number. But it'd be boring if Dandy were enlightened Alan Alda in space instead of the Johnny Bravo-ish jerk who frequently gets his comeuppance, and he gets that here when he fails to put two and two together and notice that Hanahana is the Cliponian who's been "chweeting" anonymously about her Cliponian heritage.

* Why hasn't anybody told me a Space Dandy score album was released in March? I'm crazy about the original music on this show, especially the Japanese duo LUVRAW & BTB's Zapp & Roger-inspired "Anatato" from "Even Vacuum Cleaners Fall in Love, Baby," and I'd love to include more of it in AFOS' "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" playlist.

A Space Dandy cosplayer at last week's San Diego Comic-Con (Photo source: Fuck Yeah Space Dandy)

A playlist through space and time: The best of the AFOS block "Hall H" on Spotify

I named the AFOS weekend block "Hall H" after the huge-ass hall in the San Diego Convention Center, the home of San Diego Comic-Con, partly because at a total of 10 hours from 7am to 5pm Pacific on Saturday (and again on Sunday), the block is equally huge. "Hall H" is full of selections from scores to shows and films that are popular with the comic or anime con crowd, so it's all the fun and excitement of a comic or anime con, but without the horrifying smells.

So some British show celebrated the 50th anniversary of its premiere over the weekend. Inspector Spacetime didn't just prove that it hasn't shown any signs of aging even though it's a show that's so old Larry King discovered his first liver spot on the day it premiered. It also proved that even when the budget is at its lowest, the zippers on the Ocean Demon monster suits are at their most visible and the corridors that the Inspector and Constable Reggie are often seen running through are at their creakiest, it can still entertain, as long as there's plenty of charisma from whoever's portraying the Inspector and his associate and the storytelling is as impeccable as the Inspector's taste in bowler hats.

These days, Inspector Spacetime, or as it's known to people outside the Community universe, Doctor Who, looks much more spiffy and baller than it used to, and the interior of the time machine our favorite anti-authoritarian time traveler rides around in no longer looks like it's going to tip over if someone sneezed at the roundel-covered wall. The premise remains the same: an eccentric alien hops around space and time to protect the universe and a little planet he's come to love called Earth, and thanks to his bizarre alien physiology (he has two hearts instead of one), he regenerates into a completely different person whenever he dies. But now there's more of a focus on the humans he's befriended and how he's affected their lives, as well as a focus on the angst that makes him tick: guilt over the toughest decision he's ever made. That would be causing the destruction of his own native planet Gallifrey--he's responsible for killing off his own people, the Time Lords--to put an end to the off-screen Time War between them and the Daleks, one of the Doctor's biggest adversaries.

The PTSD from the Time War was added to the character by former showrunner Russell T. Davies, who revived Doctor Who 16 years after its cancellation by the BBC and modernized the show in ways that enhanced and improved it (the less said about Davies' love for farty alien jokes, the better), and not just in visual terms. Towards the end of Sylvester McCoy's late '80s run as the seventh Doctor, the show started to hint that the Doctor was less than saintly and could be as devious and shady as his enemies. Sure, in the past, he's been a cantankerous old man (the first Doctor) and an arrogant asshole (the sixth Doctor). But unless I'm mistaken because I haven't watched all the pre-Davies episodes, the show rarely raised questions about some of the Doctor's actions (I haven't seen all of them because--and longtime Doctor Who heads might disagree with me--I've found some of them to be too slow-paced for my tastes, even when I first caught some of the immensely popular Tom Baker episodes on PBS, and since all of them were shot on videotape, except one of my favorite old-school Doctor Who episodes, the shot-entirely-on-film "Spearhead from Space," they look like moldy '70s and '80s episodes of General Hospital).

Doctor Who was cancelled before it could further explore the dark side of McCoy's Doctor, but when Davies brought the show back and introduced the backstory of the Time War (which took place off-camera during the interval between the 1996 Doctor Who TV-movie starring Paul McGann and the show's 2005 return), he picked up on that dark side. He and several other writers, including current showrunner Steven Moffat, made the character of the Doctor more relatable, imperfect and human, even when the Davies seasons reimagined him as a cross between a thinking person's superhero, a god with a mischievous streak and a rock star who's charming to both women and gay guys (Billie Piper's lovestruck Rose Tyler was clearly a surrogate--some haters will say she was a Mary Sue--for the openly gay Davies; some probably consider John Barrowman's Captain Jack Harkness to be more of a surrogate, but Captain Jack is the dashing gay action hero Davies wishes he could be but isn't).

"The Day of the Doctor," last Saturday night's satisfying 50th anniversary episode, revisits the previously unseen tough decision that's haunted the Doctor since the first season of the Davies/Moffat era and finally gives us glimpses of that much-discussed Time War. To the show's fans, Moffat has been as polarizing a showrunner as Davies was in the last few episodes of his reign--Moffat haters think Moffat's writing on Doctor Who is overly convoluted, repetitive, misogynist and possibly racist and they're not so fond of his rather dickish response to their opinion that the Doctor doesn't have to always regenerate into a white guy--but Moffat has excelled at making us feel the giddiness the Doctor experiences whenever he achieves the impossible, whether it's during the climax of "The Doctor Dances" or during Matt Smith's current run as the 11th Doctor (which will come to a close in next month's Christmas episode, in which the 11th Doctor dies and regenerates into a profanity-free Peter Capaldi).

The quintessential moment of Moffat's take on the Doctor as "the mad man with a box" is that funny and clever scene in "A Christmas Carol" where the Doctor demonstrates to Michael Gambon's skeptical, Scrooge-like miser character that he's going to change his past and make himself appear on screen in the childhood home movie Gambon's watching, right after he leaves the room--and a few seconds later, thanks to the magic of the TARDIS, there he is, up on screen with Gambon's younger self. The Doctor is always rewriting history, and in "The Day of the Doctor," with the help of his current sidekick Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman), his most recent self (David Tennant), the War Doctor (John Hurt), the "forgotten" past incarnation who obliterated both his own race and the Daleks, and a mysterious figure only the War Doctor can see and who looks an awful lot like Rose (the three Doctors wind up meeting each other for reasons too convoluted to explain here), the Doctor figures out how to rewrite history to fix his biggest mistake, and it's a moment as exhilarating as that home movie scene in "A Christmas Carol." It exemplifies why Doctor Who remains appealing to viewers all over the world (and why the BBC, which is now remorseful about the 1989 cancellation, has gone all-out for the franchise's 50th anniversary by bringing "The Day of the Doctor" to theaters in 3-D and producing An Adventure in Space and Time, a TV-movie that flashes back to Doctor Who's unusual and humble beginnings as TV that originally wasn't designed to scare or thrill kids but to educate them): the three Doctors' solution is--to borrow the words of longtime fan Craig Ferguson when he sang about why he loves the show--the ultimate triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.

Selections from Murray Gold's epic score music for the third, fifth and sixth seasons of modern Doctor Who are featured during "Hall H," and they kick off the following sampler of tracks from "Hall H" that are found on Spotify. The complete sampler tracklist is at the very bottom of this post.

(Photo source: Greendale A.V. Club)

The fictional Inspector Spacetime, the Doctor Who counterpart we've seen bits and pieces of on Community (some of Ludwig Göransson's Community score cues are in rotation during "Hall H" but aren't part of the above sampler), is so popular with Community fans that's it's been made into a web series. It's even been cosplayed at cons.

(Photo source: The Casual Costumer)

(Photo source: The Casual Costumer)

(Photo source: !Blog)

A compendium of cool cosplay

Star Trek: The Next Generation cosplay!

Degrassi "Purple Dragon/naked Emma" episode cosplay!

Galactica cosplay!

Sydney Bristow whenever she woke up in a hospital on Alias cosplay!

Beetlejuice cosplay!

Spaceballs henchman cosplay from the waist down!

Eartha Kitt cosplay!

Ennio Morricone cosplay!

Justin Bieber cosplay!

"Hall H," a 10-hour block of original music from shows and movies that are popular at comic or anime cons and are frequently cosplayed at those cons, airs Saturdays and Sundays at 7am Pacific on AFOS.

"Hall H," a new AFOS weekend block, begins this Saturday

(Photo source: The Beat)

Every time I log on to AFOS via the widget on the right side of this blog to check in on what's being shuffled, I notice a lot of Batman animated series or live-action movie score tracks get streamed during "AFOS Prime." That's because I like Batman, especially the animated incarnation that Warner Bros. Animation produced from 1992 to 1999. But even I think I've put too many Batman tracks into "AFOS Prime" rotation.

I want to see a little more variety during "AFOS Prime," so I'm going to reduce the number of Batman tracks (as well as Michael Giacchino Star Trek tracks and a few other sorts of tracks) in "AFOS Prime" and transfer every Batman (or Bad Robot-era Star Trek) track over to a new weekend block that's called "Hall H."

The 10-hour block will focus on selections from scores to shows and films that are popular with the comic con crowd or were promoted at cons, including Batman: The Animated Series, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, the rebooted Star Trek, the Marvel Universe film franchise, X-Men: First Class, the Hobbit trilogy, Attack the Block and Doctor Who. I turned to illustrator and AFOS fan Kevin Greene, the man behind Heroes & Villains: The Science Fiction Caricature Art of Kevin Greene, to pick which name the block should have--it was either going to be "Hall H," as in San Diego Comic-Con's Hall H, or "Masquerade"--and Kevin picked the former. Thanks, Kevin. Now that I think about it, "Masquerade" isn't as original as "Hall H." It was the title of an early '80s Kirstie Alley spy show and was later the title of a Rob Lowe neo-noir. George Benson's cover of "This Masquerade" was playing in my head while I was thinking up block titles, so "Masquerade" wound up as an idea for the block title. "Hall H," which, for about 10 minutes, was going to be called "Masquerade," will air Saturdays and Sundays at 7am-5pm, beginning this Saturday.

In the meantime, enjoy these photos of comic con folks cosplaying as Cloak and Dagger--not the Dabney Coleman Cloak & Dagger, although that too would be interesting. I stumbled into loads of Cloak and Dagger cosplayers while Googling Cloak and Dagger as research for a review I just wrote for Word Is Bond about Adrian Younge's Ghostface Killah project Twelve Reasons to Die. And then I got distracted by a picture of a Psylocke cosplayer and found myself going on a Psylocke cosplayer image search.

(Photo source: Quantum Continuum)

(Photo source: David Ngo)

(Photo source: lenlenlen1)

(Photo source: VampBeauty)

(Photo source: VampBeauty)

(Photo source: VampBeauty)

(Photo source: VampBeauty)

WonderCon 2009 wrap-up

Out of all the comic book cons I've been to, I prefer San Francisco's WonderCon because it's more laid-back than the other cons and Moscone Center South isn't so packed. And yes, there are TV show and movie panels like the Chuck panel with cast members Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski (above), Adam Baldwin and Joshua Gomez and series co-creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak, but there aren't so many TV and movie panels that they cause the programming schedule to be overcrowded, so that gives me more time to talk shop with people and check out their comics. Plus, WonderCon is right across the street from Jollibee and Red Ribbon. Automatic win.

WonderCon! Fighting evil as it comes!

I'm attending this weekend's WonderCon, where the lead actors from Chuck and Sit Down, Shut Up (Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz's upcoming animated sitcom) will plug their shows and attempt to make sense of strange and awkward questions from creepy fans and microphone hogs. In San Francisco, you know it's WonderCon time when you see Stormtroopers and Sailor Moon try to cross Howard Street. The cosplayers and their cool costumes are always a highlight of any con. At WonderCon, I'll be going as an unemployed loser who's trying to jumpstart his scriptwriting career.

Above is a snapshot of a cosplayer at the 2007 WonderCon, which is the first--and last--WonderCon I attended. The Team Misaki Studios site snapped this photo of Wonder Woman doing the "up yours" gesture or blocking bullets or something. WonderCon '09 will feature the West Coast premiere of next week's DVD release of the badass Wonder Woman animated movie, which I saw at the New York Comic Con.

I'm looking forward to the Star Trek and Ed Brubaker panels and the overpriced Costco-quality pizza.