"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, 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.

Ever since the start of its second cour two weeks ago, Shinichiro Watanabe's anthology-like Space Dandy has been edging into more surreal and cartoony territory. The show often contains old Hanna-Barbera sound FX--they're the biggest example of how much '60s Hanna-Barbera slapstick shows like Wacky Races appear to be an influence on Watanabe and the other animators during Space Dandy. The vintage Hanna-Barbera noises are at their most abundant during special guest director Masaaki Yuasa's "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby," the most stoner-friendly Space Dandy episode since "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby," which was guest-directed by Yuasa protégé Eunyoung Choi.

The Korean animator's trippy plant world episode was so clever and imaginatively visualized that I wrote, "I'm now interested in whatever her next project will be." That project turned out to be Ping Pong: The Animation, Yuasa's 11-episode, one-cour adaptation of Tekkonkinkreet creator Taiyo Matsumoto's 1996-97 manga about high-schoolers whose lives revolve solely around ping pong (the manga was previously made into a 2002 live-action film I actually rented and watched right before the Yuasa version began airing, as an appetizer to the show).

Ping Pong, which is worth checking out on FUNimation or Hulu, overcame limited animation (done under a really tight, two-to-three-weeks-per-episode schedule) and some patchy earlier episodes to become an enjoyable and occasionally moving sports anime that drew much of its drama from quieter material (the loneliness of the Christmas season; athletes who are so obsessed with winning that they've forgotten about the joy they used to get out of the game) rather than from whether the ultimate victor would be the cocky and outgoing prodigy in a dorky bowl cut or his stoic and introverted best friend/ping pong protégé. Like the first and sixth Rocky movies, the original Bad News Bears, the original Bring It On and the TV version of Friday Night Lights, Ping Pong is the kind of sports story where the outcome of the final match ends up mattering the least. To borrow that old saying derived from sportswriter/poet Grantland Rice's 1908 poem "Alumnus Football," Ping Pong is not about whether its characters win or lose but about how they play the game.





Choi directed an episode of Ping Pong, as well as the show's rotoscoped end credits sequence of a walk and drive through Ping Pong's seaside town setting. Her closing sequence is a good example of Ping Pong's knack for dazzling visuals despite its limited animation and low budget (another good example is the show's opening title sequence, which features perhaps the best opening theme tune on an anime so far this year, Bakudan Johnny's "Tada Hitori (Only One)," a rugged-sounding anthem that suits Ping Pong's equally rugged visuals and perfectly encapsulates the show's emphasis on fighting for self-respect instead of fighting to be at the top). Just as "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" was, for me, a terrific introduction to Choi's work, the LeRoy Neiman-like Ping Pong was a terrific introduction to the work of Choi's mentor, who, towards the end of Ping Pong's run, received even greater exposure in America than the kind Ping Pong was getting on FUNimation when Adventure Time aired "Food Chain," a standout "Finn and Jake learning about science" episode guest-directed by Yuasa ("Food Chain" was also one of the first projects from Science Saru, a new animation studio founded by Yuasa and Choi).

Between Ping Pong, the Adventure Time episode and now this Hanna-Barbera sound library-reliant episode that's even more offbeat than most of the already offbeat previous episodes of the same show, Yuasa is experiencing quite a year as an animator. I have no idea how Yuasa can function from only a half-hour of sleep per night, which he did while juggling Ping Pong, Adventure Time and Space Dandy. While I don't think the story in "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is anything special (if Ping Pong's a gritty but ultimately life-affirming show about plucking the day and not letting the need to win consume you, "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is Space Dandy at its most cynical and Emo Dandy-ish), the crazy, stoner-friendly visuals Yuasa directed while operating on an amount of sleep that's too insane to even attempt are imbued with the same panache Yuasa brought to Ping Pong and "Food Chain." There's an early sequence at a crowded space food court that just looks sensational, and the endless amount of culinary delights amusingly amplifies the torment Meow experiences while suffering from an empty stomach.

The story behind the making of "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is perhaps more interesting than the episode's story itself. Last year, Yuasa used his Facebook account to conduct a search for international animators to help him out on the Space Dandy episode. Two of the animators who submitted reels of their work to Yuasa and were chosen to take part in the episode were Ben Li and Jeremy Polgar, both staffers from Titmouse Inc., the American studio behind Superjail, Metalocalypse, the most recent season of The Venture Bros., the animated version of Black Dynamite and Motorcity, a short-lived Disney show I didn't expect to enjoy but wound up being amazed by its visuals and subversive undertones. So this episode doesn't just boast Yuasa as a guest talent. It also has veterans from Motorcity and a bunch of other enjoyable Titmouse shows.

"Yuasa-san was very open to us using Flash to animate our shots," wrote Polgar on Tumblr, referring to the same software that he and his co-workers deployed to bring Motorcity to life and turn it into one of the best-looking shows ever made with that software. The shots that Polgar referred to take place during a dazzling sequence where Dandy, Meow and the latest alien they've befriended attempt to sail by boat to the alien's homeworld using the strange physics of a planet called Pushy Boyfriend, which they've all been marooned on. The bizarre point-of-view shots in the sailing sequence are reminiscent of Yuasa's remarkable-looking ping pong match sequences on Ping Pong. Complain all you want about the limited animation on Ping Pong, but table tennis rarely looks as striking or as fun as it did on Yuasa's show.

I wish the episode's story was as remarkable as Yuasa's visuals and that it ended on a better comedic payoff for the two characters who suffer the most during the story, Meow and Carpaccio (Daisuke Namikawa), the aforementioned alien from a planet of talking fish called Girlfriend. The episode opens with Dandy, being his usual self-absorbed self, using whatever remaining cash he has in his not-so-fat pockets to buy himself a portable teleportation device called Mr. Teleporter instead of getting the starving Meow a meal, and during an argument with Meow, the Betelgeusian accidentally teleports Dandy's head--and only his head--to Planet Pushy Boyfriend.

On the planet, Dandy's disembodied head encounters Carpaccio, an astronaut who's been marooned on Pushy Boyfriend for 10 years. The little fish is trying to find a way to return to Planet Girlfriend, which has been stuck orbiting Pushy Boyfriend for nearly 100 years due to Pushy Boyfriend's clinginess gravity, so that he can warn his people about the sun inching closer to Girlfriend. After some fiddling around with the Mr. Teleporter gun, Meow winds up on Pushy Boyfriend as well, Dandy gets the rest of his body back and the duo helps Carpaccio return to Girlfriend, on the condition that he agrees to be taken to the Alien Registration Center afterward and registered.

Carpaccio arrives on Girlfriend to find that his 10-year absence actually lasted 100 years and that Yoko (Fuyumi Shiraishi), the lost love he's been aching to return to, is still alive, but she's now a Botoxed grandmother who doesn't welcome him back with open arms and is happily married to a dickweed of a fish. He returns to also find out that everyone on the planet is a climate change denier who won't listen to his warnings about the planet being burnt to a crisp. As the sun fries up Girlfriend, the depressed Carpaccio leaps right into the sun to kill himself (there goes another opportunity for Dandy to register another alien) and is greeted in Fish Heaven by a much more friendly Yoko. Back on the Aloha Oe, Meow, who gets offended whenever Dandy refers to him as a cat and insinuates that he eats fish, gives in to his feline side and wolfs down the meal he's been dying for: it's in the form of Carpaccio's broiled corpse.

The ultimate fate of the Frank Grimes-ish Carpaccio is supposed to be darkly funny, but instead, I felt awful for Carpaccio. Rejected by his climate change-denying planet and left without a purpose or reason to live, Carpaccio ultimately finds his purpose: as dinner on someone's table. Some viewers might view Carpaccio's unintentional transformation into a remedy for Meow's hunger as a meaningful act that Carpaccio will never realize is meaningful to Meow, but to me, it's just a bummer. The ending falls flat and could use a little more bite, no pun intended. I would have gone in an even darker direction and written it so that Meow gets what he wants, but then he chokes on a piece of Carpaccio and dies too. Like inept Dr. Gel and his assistant Bea, who, along with Planet Girlfriend, receive a fiery demise this week, Meow's no stranger to dying, so why not kill him here as well? But the flat ending doesn't detract from how much of a visual--and aural--treat "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is and how, like when "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" made me want to see more of Eunyoung Choi's projects, this week's Space Dandy episode is another reason to delve further into the work of one of Japan's cleverest current animators.

The Doctor and the Devil: These are among the tracks I've added to AFOS rotation this month

(Photo source: Art of the Title)

Delia Derbyshire, "Doctor Who (Original Theme)" (now playing during "Hall H")

In England, hiding behind the couch became a tradition for kids who grew up watching monsters chase after the Doctor and his companions on telly on Saturday night. But in America, those of us who grew up watching The Electric Company and 3-2-1 Contact back-to-back at 5pm on the local PBS station weren't exposed to Doctor Who on only one night of the week. Thanks to PBS, we were exposed to it every weeknight, right after the Bloodhound Gang would try to bust a cocaine ring or something. The Doctor Who opening titles meant that 3-2-1 Contact was over and it was time to change the channel as soon as possible because for a four-year-old like me, the Doctor Who title sequence--with its intense-looking, psychedelic slit-scan vortex FX, its photo of a somber-looking Tom Baker and that otherworldly piece of early electronica written by Ron Grainer and performed by BBC Radiophonic Workshop musician Delia Derbyshire--was scary as shit.



But unlike you Brits who yelped and cowered from the sight of giant pepper shakers with toilet plunger arms hollering "Exterminate!" at'cha boy, I didn't hide behind the couch whenever the Doctor Who titles came on. My brain merely shivered a little and then I switched to a different channel. That's how I rolled, and to me, the Doctor Who titles were scarier than any of the rubber monsters I would see a few years later, which was when I finally had the guts to get past those spooky and unsettling titles and watch the rest of the show.

"I remember as a child I was terrified by [the theme]. It just strikes fear into your very soul," noted British comedian Bill Bailey at the start of his "Docteur Qui" number during Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra, in which he amusingly broke it down on the piano and pointed out how Grainer's melody is basically Belgian jazz.

Delia Derbyshire (top); Sarah Winter as Derbyshire in An Adventure in Space and Time (bottom)

In An Adventure in Space and Time, the BBC's recent made-for-TV biopic about William Hartnell's resurgence as a TV star during Doctor Who's first few years, we get to briefly see Derbyshire (played by Sarah Winter) fiddle around with analog tape reels and perform the theme on keyboard (she's also seen explaining the origin of the TARDIS dematerialization sound FX: house keys scraped against a piano wire). Today, her arrangement of the theme--which, except for a few tweaks in the sound FX and the musical transition from episode credits to opening scene, remained unchanged in the opening titles from 1963 to 1979--isn't scary-sounding at all because since childhood, we've been subjected to much scarier things, like Dana Perino trying to rap or Alison Gold singing about Chinese food. But it hasn't lost its power as a trippy and effective musical encapsulation of exploring the unknown, which is why when I received Silva Screen's Doctor Who: The 50th Anniversary Collection and the Derbyshire version turned up as Track 1, I immediately added it to the "Hall H" playlist.

(Photo source: SMOSH)

Murray Gold, "All the Strange, Strange Creatures" (from series 3 of Doctor Who; now playing during "AFOS Prime," "New Cue Revue" and "Hall H")

One thing I've noticed about modern Doctor Who is that Murray Gold, who's been the show's composer since 2005, hasn't really referenced the Grainer theme, outside of the opening and closing titles and the "Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords" drumbeat motif that represents a certain old nemesis of the Doctor's. It's understandable because the Grainer theme doesn't really represent the Doctor as a heroic character--the theme's alien nature signifies that it's more of a theme about traveling through space and time and, like I said before, encountering the unknown--so Gold has written all-new themes to represent the heroism of the Doctor and his homies and emphasize the adventure side of this modernized and much less lethargically paced Doctor Who. These themes are more heroic-sounding than the Grainer piece, and because the BBC has given modern Doctor Who a bigger budget to work with, they're more cinematic and epic in tone and orchestration. (They also make for slightly more appealing listening than the mostly synthy and atonal score cues that were written for the show from the early '70s to the late '80s. Hardcore Doctor Who fans might enjoy that '70s-to-'80s section of the 50th Anniversary Collection album more than most listeners for nostalgic reasons, while others who are only familiar with Doctor Who in its present form might find that part of the compilation to be kind of grueling as music.)

The rousing "I Am the Doctor" motif Gold introduced in Matt Smith's first year as the Doctor is a good example of modern Doctor Who's cinematic sound, as is Gold's "All the Strange, Strange Creatures" motif from a couple of years before. "All the Strange, Strange Creatures," which reappears on the 50th Anniversary Collection album, is referred to as "The Trailer Music" because it was used in series 3 trailers, while I remember it best in an alternate form as the cue during the pivotal moment when an amnesiac professor played by special guest star Derek Jacobi regains his memory, and it turns out he's the long-unseen Master, the Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock.

Outside the context of the show, "All the Strange, Strange Creatures" brings back all those memories of the 10th Doctor and Martha Jones running around and continuing the show's tradition of chase scenes inside corridors. White sneakers--or as the 11th Doctor and the War Doctor prefer to call them in "The Day of the Doctor," sand shoes--just look wrong when paired with a suit and tie, but now that I think about it, the 10th Doctor's preference for sneaks makes some sense because of all that running he did.

Elmer Bernstein, "Theme from Devil in a Blue Dress" (now playing during "The Whitest Block Ever")

Before his breakout role in One False Move director Carl Franklin's 1995 Walter Mosley adaptation Devil in a Blue Dress as Mouse the trigger-happy thug ("If you ain't want him killed, why'd you leave him with me?"), Don Cheadle was known only as the uptight, by-the-book D.A. on Picket Fences--or for that one time he showed up as Will's best friend from the Philly streets really early on in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air's run. Devil in a Blue Dress was meant to be a Denzel Washington vehicle, but the unassuming-looking, average-sized Cheadle straight-up stole the flick, like how the equally unassuming-looking, modest-of-height Kendrick Lamar steals damn near every posse cut or collabo he guests on these days: with attitude, energy, calm and wit.

(Photo source: The Blue Vial)

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (05/15/2013): Apollo Gauntlet, Bob's Burgers, American Dad, Adventure Time and Executioner

Pow! She just shit her pants!

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. "5-Piece" has been posted for 54 consecutive weeks--a.k.a. one year and two weeks--since May 11, 2012. I need a goddamn break. "5-Piece" returns on June 5 with a discussion of the first new episode of The Venture Bros. in 47 years.



Goofy-looking rotoscoping of Michael Jackson footage and a polite, purple-skinned baby who speaks in full sentences with a Julia Child-like falsetto are the highlights of "Just Me and You Now, Bud," another enjoyably surreal installment of Apollo Gauntlet. When animator Myles Langlois first streamed Apollo Gauntlet on his own, a few years before the Rug Burn Channel picked up the show to stream it exclusively, someone wrote, "If they were ever to make this into a live-action film, I'm going to suggest Will Forte take the lead." Apollo has the bullheadedness--and pornstache--of a typical Forte character, combined with a "What Up with That?"-style habit of interrupting people, especially his enemies, with rapping and dancing.

For Apollo's big "If I put my golden boot in your ass" dance number, "Just Me and You Now, Bud" recycles Apollo's dance moves from "Belenus Blade"--just as how Filmation used to always recycle footage to cut costs--but this time, the episode cops a few classic Michael Jackson moves, including the late Jackson's still-dope-ass anti-gravity lean from the "Smooth Criminal" segment of Moonwalker. That's not all that "Just Me and You Now, Bud" cops. The character design for the purple baby who agrees to help the Princess free herself from her cell appears to be lifted from the Dancing Baby. The voice Langlois chose for what's clearly a man in a baby's body is unsurprisingly strange--and amusing. The man-baby sounds more like the French Chef than Baby Herman. I keep expecting him to start giving the Princess tips about how to prepare a soufflé.

***

"The Unnatural," the Bob's Burgers third-season finale, caps off one of the most consistently funny seasons of any show--animated or live-action--in typically strong and endlessly quotable fashion. Gene dabbles in a sport he has no understanding of, while Tina gets addicted to espresso and can't bear to give it up. These two storylines are kind of standard-issue for a sitcom, but when Bob's Burgers gets its inventive, "Electric Boogie"-covering hands on them, these storylines soar.

Tina's storyline hits the same comedic beats as other "kid gets hooked on a drink she's too young for" storylines (I'm having flashbacks to Maggie Simpson going buckwild after tasting coffee ice cream). But then Bob's Burgers diverges from the other shows by intertwining her storyline quite smoothly with Gene's A-story (Tina has to go through caffeine withdrawal after Linda pawns the restaurant's new espresso machine to pay for Gene's overpriced baseball camp) and then tossing in a funny Trainspotting shout-out when Tina copes with withdrawal. (According to the comments section below the Movieclips excerpt of Renton's withdrawal hallucinations from Trainspotting, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic referenced the same Trainspotting nightmare scene as well. Sure, that's cool, and yeah, that Trainspotting gag is proof that Friendship Is Magic ain't your mommy's My Little Pony, but that's still not going to make me want to watch more of that cartoon. Sorry, Bronies, I'm still not feeling it.)

I'm glad to hear Rob Huebel return as a guest voice actor, even though it's as the "Dr. Yap" scam artist formerly known as "the Prince of Persuasia," the seduction guru Yap sought advice from, instead of his other Bob's Burgers role, as the Family Fracas producer who kept trying to make out with his show's male host a few weeks ago. Now known as the "Deuce of Diamonds," Huebel's con man character has been scamming wanna-be Little Leaguers and their parents out of their cash by running a half-assed baseball camp full of no actual baseballs and lots of amusingly ill-informed advice about the game ("A famous baseball player whose name I can't remember right now had Lou Gehrig's Disease and he didn't let it slow him down"). When Mr. Manoogian (Jason Mantzoukas, reprising his thick foreign accent from his role on Enlightened), the manager of the motel where the Deuce currently lives, threatens to throw him out on the street for not paying him back $1100, the Deuce tricks the kids into thinking he's taking them on a road trip and makes them act as his hired muscle at the motel ("We're just gonna take some swings... at your soda machine").

I enjoy seeing Bob's pragmatic approach to parenting (he doesn't think Gene is cut out for baseball and would rather have him quit, and he can see through the Deuce's scam) bump up against Linda's optimism (she believes Gene has lots of potential in the sport, and she keeps thinking the Deuce is a legit coach), especially when it leads to a hilarious scene where Bob and Linda argue like an umpire and a manager over Gene's hit in the climactic game, a great example of the overlapping dialogue that distinguishes Bob's Burgers from the rest of the Fox "Animation Domination" lineup. "Ah, you're such a dick, Bob," grumbles Linda to her husband, whose unwillingness to root for Gene and the fact that the kid's baseball skills don't really improve overnight both make "The Unnatural" a cut above the overdone "bumbling kid athlete succeeds at the right moment in the game" story.

Other memorable quotes:
* "I love baseball: the pizza parties, the spiky shoes, the parade at the end of the season where we ride on a float." And later: "I'm gonna have a killer fastball and a magnificent perm!" Yup, Gene bats for the other team. He just doesn't know it yet.

* Teddy, refusing Bob's offer of a cup of espresso: "I don't like those tiny cups! They make it look like I have giant hands!"

* Louise, overhearing Bob's opinion that Gene's thought-to-be-permanent abandonment of baseball has a quiet dignity: "Quiet dignity? Have you met us?!"

* An overcaffeinated Tina rattles off Burger of the Day ideas: "Woulda Coulda Gouda. You Gouda Be Kidding Me. As Gouda as It Gets. Gouda Gouda Gumdrops. A Few Gouda Men. Gouda Gouda Two Shoes, comes with shoes. Gouda Day, Sir..."

(Photo source: Bob's Burger of the Day)

* The Deuce to the kids: "Okay, any questions so far? About anything at all? Girls, boys, life, money, inkjet printer repair?"

* Andy, recognizing the Deuce's motel: "Hey, this is where our dad goes for his naps."

* The Deuce, encouraging the kids to damage Mr. Manoogian's soda machine: "Babe Ruth used to beat the crap out of a root beer machine. Now look at him."

* "Soda, you made me fat, but you also made me strong!"

* Ollie, defending the Deuce: "He's gifted; he said so." Andy: "He's gonna do a TED Talk."

* Gene, regarding the Deuce: "He gave us his magic and then he disappeared. Just like Toad the Wet Sprocket."

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (04/03/2013): Archer, Out There, Apollo Gauntlet, Animation Domination High-Def and Adventure Time

Louie Anderson should really avoid coffee before making a high dive.

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.

Only on Archer will you see a lengthy comedic discussion of obscure European weapons like arquebuses and halberds (which, according to Archer, were made obsolete by arquebuses). It's what separates Archer from other spy comedies like Get Smart or the Austin Powers movies. What also separates the show from other spy comedies is its ballsiness--it doesn't give a shit whether you get some of its jokes or not--as well as the terrific character writing, which is on display in the coincidentally timely "Papal Chase," a fast-moving tour de farce that gives plenty of much-needed screen time this season to Woodhouse, Archer's long-suffering, smack-addicted butler (has George Coe been in poor health or something lately?). Woodhouse closely resembles the Pope (also voiced by Coe), so Archer uses him as a decoy to thwart an assassination attempt on the Pope's life.

Pam undertakes her first mission as a field agent and goes undercover as a nun, while Archer dons a cassock and seems to have based his priest disguise on old Weekend Update segments with Father Guido Sarducci. Sure, the ISIS HR lady aced the IFAAB (ISIS Field Agent Aptitude Battery), she's a capable fighter due to all those years of underground bare-knuckle boxing, she's amusingly nonplussed every time Woodhouse jabs a heroin needle in her neck and she's great at quickly picking up Italian phrases, but her field inexperience is evident during the mission, especially when she appears to have accidentally killed the Pope by dropping a giant mirror on top of his body while he's sleeping.

Speaking of dropping things, I wish we saw more mic drops from Pam throughout the season (I loved that "Wind Cries Mary" gag of Archer and Pam punctuating their sentences with mic drops) because the season's about to come to a close with a two-part finale that reportedly had Adam Reed treading carefully around Cartoon Network's legal department due to references to Sealab 2021, Reed's old Adult Swim show (like guest star Jon Hamm's role as Sealab's Captain Murphy). Towards the end of "The Papal Chase," Archer experiences a rare moment of genuine distress for one of the other agents when he sees Lana get shot in the arm (Pam's reaction to Archer not giving a shit about her shoulder bullet wound is classic Pam). Has Archer developed the kind of feelings for Lana that Sean Connery once described as "unselfish love, grown-up love" in the 1990 film version of The Russia House, and will the finale address it? Or will it be left abandoned like a halberd?

Stray observations:
* Pam, to an incredulous Archer regarding the Italian phrases she learned during the flight: "Who am I? Cypher? The gayest X-Man?" Archer: "Well, I dunno. Gambit looks like he knows his way around a pair of..."

* I'm more incredulous about Pam being so well-versed in X-Men and New Mutants comics. She always struck me as more of a Mark Millar kind of gal. I didn't know who Cypher was and had to Google him after the episode. As Don't Panic's "League of the Lame Superheroes" list says about Cypher's not-so-dynamic-looking superpower, "Imagine being surrounded by mutants who can fly, control the weather, set things on fire, or morph into other people, and you're just a slightly more charismatic version of Google Translate."

* "Pambit," Archer's nickname for Pam, resulted in an Archer fan drawing "Pambit." Ooh, ooh, somebody should draw "Nightkrieger." He would bamf every time he exits a room with "Smoke bomb!"

(Photo source: All Aboard the Cutie Muffin Fuck Wagon~)

* In addition to all the dialogue about Marvel mutants during "The Papal Chase," the loss of all of Archer's clothes--including his socks and shoes--during the gas tank explosion appears to be a joke about how Marvel characters like Hulk and Wolverine often emerge from explosions with most of their clothes torn off, yet the remainder of their threads somehow strategically cover their bathing suit areas.

* Cardinal Corelli (special guest star Rene Auberjonois): "Mio dio!" Archer: "I know, right? Trope alert!"

* Archer: "Goddammit, quit telling me what to do! I'm the goddamn agent-in-command!" Pope: "Figo! He really drops the G.D. bombs..."

* The parachute pants-clad Swiss Guard Commander: "Well... ISIS has a certain reputation." Archer: "Hey, whoa! Not cool, Payne Stewart."

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (03/27/2013): Archer, Out There, Apollo Gauntlet, Bob's Burgers and Adventure Time

Al suggests to his son-in-law Bob an idea for a burger, which he calls the Rusty Trombone Marrow Burger.

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.

When Mel Brooks and Buck Henry tried to pitch Get Smart to ABC in the mid-'60s, network executives found their pilot script to be too strange for their tastes and proposed to Brooks and Henry that they give Maxwell Smart a lovable dog to add more heart to the show. According to Time magazine in 1965, "Brooks and Henry went back and perversely put in a cowardly, mangy, wheezy dog that chased cars and bit strangers." Fang continued to bungle Max's directions for a few more episodes of Get Smart (which ended up on NBC after ABC considered the show to be too "un-American"--oh, conservative America and your idea of humor), until the writing staff (which, by this time, Brooks was no longer a part of) wrote the canine CONTROL agent out of the show because the producers fired the dog who played Fang for being equally uncooperative, just like how the new Broadway production of Breakfast at Tiffany's recently shitcanned a feline actor for being unruly on-stage.

This week, another spy comedy adds a dog to the proceedings, but with pukier, fartier and gorier results. In "Un Chien Tangerine," Archer sends Sterling and Lana on a mission in Morocco to extract an agent who turns out to be a giant, gun-hating dog named Kazak. His purpose is to transport on his collar microfilm that contains intel about "nukes in Pakistan or one of the -akistans." Archer, who's far kinder to animals than humans, gets the brilliant idea of feeding shitloads of kufta (Middle Eastern meatballs) to Kazak, who proceeds to frequently puke out the snack on Archer and Lana for the rest of the mission. When he's not blowing chunks, Kazak's farting up a shitstorm that's like a soundboard someone on the Web assembled out of each of the many different toots from the bean-eating scene in Brooks' Blazing Saddles.

The animation for Kazak is sublime and is the highlight of a story that's one of the more inessential ones on Archer this season, despite a climactic car chase that's probably one of the best action sequences in animation to ever involve a dog who gets to save the day by tearing apart human flesh. A far more interesting development takes place over at ISIS Headquarters, where debt-ridden Pam tries to talk Malory into making her a field agent after she aces the IFAAB (ISIS Field Agent Aptitude Battery) and overpowers Cyril, Ray and Krieger in the fighting portion of the IFAAB (and she does so naked, like Richard Roundtree in the training sequence in Shaft in Africa).

I'm dying to see Pam in the field because it's time to see another female ISIS agent in action, as well as a female agent who'd be more enthusiastic about the job than Lana has been lately (she seems to be considering getting married and settling down, as evidenced by the unspecified "decision" she was weighing in "The Honeymooners" and her thinking that Archer was going to propose to her at the end of "Un Chien Tangerine"). Is it me or is Lana's constant complaining during missions starting to get tiresome, as is the tendency to put her in situations in which she has to get rescued by Archer? We've seen enough bark from Lana this season. How about a little more bite?

Stray observations:
* Archer: "Didelphis virginiana! My second favorite animal with a prehensile..." Lana: "Tail." Archer: "Thanks, Brett Somers. Yes, a tail."

* My favorite sight gag in "Un Chien Tangerine" is a wordless payoff to a scene in which Malory tries to blow off a phone call from Lana and tells Cheryl/Carol to pretend she's not in the office, but Cheryl/Carol takes her literally, thinks Malory's really an apparition and checks her mirror to see if she's visible. During a later scene at Malory's office, Cheryl/Carol can be seen at her desk through Malory's door, slowly checking her mirror again.

* Pam, after being told by a less-than-thrilled Malory that she'll think about promoting her to agent: "Is that a real you'll think about it or a 'Pam, if your pig Leon wins a blue ribbon at the county fair, maybe we won't kill him and eat him for Easter dinner and render what's left into soap' you'll think about it?... Because I never really got over that."

* Archer to Kazak: "Okay, buddy, so here's the deal. A. Scrooch down! And B. Normally in this situation, I do a pit maneuver, but if I do, the truck will flip, and if Lana doesn't die, best case she's a quadriplegic and I marry her out of guilt. But after a few years of feeding tubes and colostomy bags, I start to resent her, and the night nurse is like Brazilian and 20." Kazak: "Rrrrrr..." Archer: "Don't judge me! I have needs, man!"

* Archer, deciding to spare a Moroccan thug's life: "Nah, guy's probably got nine wives and a jillion kids and... Holy shit, that's racist, Archer. What is wrong with you?"

***

Out There pokes gentle fun at Manic Pixie Dream Girls in "Enter Destiny," when Chad, who's been frustrated over his longtime crush Sharla swooning over a jock, falls for free-spirited Destiny (special guest star Selma Blair), his egg drop science project partner and the new girl in town. This Pat Benatar headband-wearing MPDG likes to snack on sugarcubes, reads Albert Camus' The Stranger and enjoys hanging out in abandoned roller skating rinks.

For a while, Chad thinks he has a shot with Destiny, but he pisses her off when he defends his little brother Jay from a bully named Tenebres (Flight of the Conchords member Jemaine Clement, the episode's other special guest star) and makes Jay's tormentor cry, only to discover that this bully who sounds like he was named after a Dario Argento giallo is Destiny's little brother. Out There takes this moment of triumph for Chad, who's rarely this assertive (or charitable towards Jay), and gleefully flushes the triumphant moment down the toilet with the reveal about Tenebres.

To apologize for their son's rough treatment of Tenebres, Wayne and Rose extend an olive branch to Destiny's equally artsy parents--Dad's a snooty poetry teacher named Babel (also voiced by Clement)--by inviting the family to their house for dinner. Here's the point where "Enter Destiny" goes from a bland episode about the quirky love interest that got away to a slightly amusing one that has some fun with how infantile most of these inane MPDG characters essentially are: at the awkward dinner between the Stevenses and Destiny's family, the episode takes this seemingly mature, Camus-reading teenage chick and unpeels her artsy layers until all that's left is a not-so-attractive girl who still throws temper tantrums in front of her parents like a four-year-old. Babel's refined demeanor also dissipates when he winds up in a fistfight with Wayne, while Tenebres remains an asshole who deserved to get roughed up by Chad.

But the biggest laugh in "Enter Destiny" belongs neither to Blair nor to Clement. It belongs to series cast member Pamela Adlon, who voices both Astoria, Babel's wife, and Martha, Chris' unpleasant lab partner (Joanie, Adlon's usual character, is absent in this episode). Martha grumbles only two lines to Chris, but the raspy voice Adlon came up with for Martha is the funniest part of "Enter Destiny." Adlon does more with a couple of gravelly, Nina Hagen-esque grunts than most celebrities do with some starring role they're phoning in during some lame DreamWorks Animation feature.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (02/27/2013): Bravest Warriors, Archer, Out There, Do's & Don'ts and Adventure Time

I keep misidentifying Out There as Over There, that Gulf War show that starred Sticky Fingaz from Onyx. What I really need to do before writing is... cram! Duh duh duh, duh duh duh. Let the boys be boys!

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.

"Ultra Wankershim," the penultimate webisode of Bravest Warriors' first season and one of the series' strangest installments, marks the return of the enigmatic Emotion Lord (series showrunner Breehn Burns), a cross between a Jedi and a Time Lord. This older and nutty incarnation of Warriors leader Chris travels back to his past to witness the Dawning of Wankershim (also voiced by Burns), the moment in Martian history when Wankershim, the holographic elf from the Warriors' Holo-John who has evolved from hologram to actual lifeform, becomes so large and infinite in size that he absorbs all of humanity and the universe into his "Wankerbeing."

The Emotion Lord explains to the Warriors that the Dawning also brings about the end of the universe, but he's not allowed to divulge anything else about the future because doing so could damage the space-time continuum, so he can only help the Warriors to figure out how to save the future on their own. Chris becomes curious about his future with Beth, the fellow Warrior he has a crush on, so he gets his older self to teach him the Emotion Lords' power of seeing visions of future events. The few images of the future that Chris is able to briefly glimpse include the emergence of an evil version of Plum (Tara Strong), the alien mermaid chick who threw herself at Chris in "Gas Powered Stick," and Beth making out with a darkened stranger who appears to be Danny, Chris and Beth's fellow Warrior. Chris also inadvertently receives hints about a grim future for Beth when his older self starts to weep while staring at Beth. To keep himself from ruining space-time, the Emotion Lord makes himself vanish and departs with a phrase he's been repeatedly saying during his latest visit: "It's always been Wankershim."

"Ultra Wankershim" may sound like a somber installment that's concerned with advancing the show's mythology and is all business, but the episode doesn't forget to be funny and tosses in silly gags like a play on that old time-travelling term "paradox" and a Martian anchorperson (Maria Bamford) who oozes slime from her face when she speaks, a gross and amusing alien version of Albert Brooks' sweating scene in Broadcast News (except this anchor is unruffled while slime oozes out of her). This first season of Bravest Warriors may be a bit short, but the series compensates for the small amount of webisodes by featuring clever writing, as well as animation that exceeds what we usually expect out of a web series and is equal to the animation quality on series creator Pendleton Ward's Adventure Time. Bravest Warriors has seen the future of animation produced exclusively for the Internet, and it's not crude Flash animation with wonky sound quality anymore.

***

I knew at some point in Archer's current fourth season that the show would revisit the titular spy's curiosity about the identity of his dad, whose absence from his son's life was one of many reasons why Archer's such a screwed-up man-child. I just never expected the arc to resurface in "Once Bitten," while Archer's poisoned from a snake bite in the middle of a mission in fictional Turkmenistan and hallucinating sketchy and rudimentary flashbacks to his boyhood, with James Mason's Mr. Jordan character from Heaven Can Wait (special guest star Peter Serafinowicz) as his spirit guide. (In a couple of other Heaven Can Wait shout-outs, Archer is clad in Warren Beatty's football sweats from the film, and he finds himself playing Beatty's sax, which Archer clobbers Buck Henry's officious angel character in the head with. You can tell how young some Archer recappers are by their inability to notice the Heaven Can Wait references.)

Archer's mind reimagines his hazy memories about why he is the way he is as clips from '80s HBO fixtures like Beatty's 1978 hit movie and The Natural instead of reimagining them as something more typical of his obsessions, like The Cannonball Run or Gator (although his fevered dreams are full of gator imagery, which is connected to his fear of gators, but does the imagery also mean some part of him believes Burt Reynolds is his dad?). The material about both Archer's past and the mixed-up movie references in his poison-addled state ("What frickin' movie is this? What's next? Mr. Gower slaps me deaf? C'mon, you're all over the road here!") is easily the most entertaining part of "Once Bitten."

Several critics have found the plotting of "Once Bitten" to be flat and underwhelming (I'm not as underwhelmed by it), but even when the storyline may be sort of underwhelming, the dialogue on Archer is always golden:

* Malory: "Look, I don't want to sound racist, but..." Lana: "But you're gonna power through it."

* Archer to an injured Ray: "Are you shitting me? Bionic legs, and you lifted with your back?"

* Everyone's hatred of Lana, the agency's voice of reason, and her "self-righteous clomping" in "Once Bitten" seems to be building towards either a future office mutiny against Malory led by Lana, who questions Malory's actions in this episode, or the Truckasaurus-handed spy's departure from ISIS (and switch to ODIN?). Insane but sometimes lucid Cheryl/Carol's mini-monologue to Lana about the latter's self-loathing is so terrific (and is responsible for one of many excellently animated expressions from Lana this season) that I've included it word-for-word: "Please, if you really cared, you'd resign, but there's no way you ever will because you're just counting the days until, her face bloated and yellow from liver failure, she calls you to her deathbed and, in a croaky whisper, explains that Mr. Archer is totally incompetent and that you, the long-suffering Lana Kane, are the only one qualified to run ISIS, and you weep shameful tears because you know this terrible place is the only true love you will ever know... What? Oh my God, was I talking?"

* A barely conscious Archer (to Cyril and Ray), while reacting to the arrival of the fur-hatted Turks: "Hey, check it out, Fred and Barney, we're at the Water Buffalo Lodge!"

* Cyril to the Turks, whom he thinks want revenge for the camel he accidentally ran over with Archer's Jeep (in, as usual on this show, extremely gory fashion): "No, I had the right-of-way!"

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (02/20/2013): Archer, Gravity Falls, Bob's Burgers, Robot Chicken and Adventure Time

After the vacuum cleaner in the "Legs" episode's flashback, Katya is the second machine Archer has banged. That can only mean one thing: watch your back, El Camino.

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.

One of my favorite recurring bits back when Conan O'Brien hosted NBC's Late Night was "Closed Captioning," where a disgruntled captioner would sneak insults about Conan and Andy ("Audience laughs. Barely.") into the closed captions. The snarking would escalate into threats to derail Conan's show with pranks like the captioner pulling a fire alarm or flashing his junk on-camera to delight his girlfriend, which the captioner would end up doing. The captioner who types up the captions for Archer may not be as disgruntled about his show as the Late Night captioner was during Conan's era, but he makes Archer's captions equally fun to read by slipping in occasional Easter eggs that can be missed when the captions are shut off, like translations of the unsubtitled Japanese lines uttered by creepy Krieger's holographic anime child bride in the solid Valentine's episode "Viscous Coupling."

The captioning also drops a hint that Archer's cyborg ex-fiancée Katya (Ona Grauer), who also resurfaces in "Viscous Coupling," is conning Archer during the description of her reaction to the recording that Archer badly doctored to try to win her back and make it sound like her current beau Barry (Dave Willis) cheated on her aboard the space station ("KATYA: [almost feral sobbing/screaming]"). Other sitcoms use the Hallmark holiday of Valentine's to display their warm and uplifting side (particularly Parks and Rec), but because Archer is a dark spy comedy, its Valentine's episode involves characters like Katya using their sexual relationships with others to get ahead in the spy game--a view of relationships that's far from warm or uplifting.

And because much of Archer's humor thrives on kinky or freaky behavior, the show's idea of a Valentine's episode is gag after gag of ISIS employees indulging in their usual kinks or getting sexually violated while passed out (in "The Wind Cries Mary," Archer learned he was sexually assaulted in his sleep by his best friend Lucas Troy, while here, Pam tranqs Cyril and Ray and makes them do a tentacle porn video). While this would get tiresome in the heavy Truckasaurus hands of the writers of lesser adult sitcoms, "Viscous Coupling" exercises restraint with these gags by leaving most of the twisted sex-related acts of Archer's co-workers to our imaginations, which is funnier than cutaways that graphically show the freaky-deaky. Simple and effective shots of Cyril and Ray waking up naked, intertwined and with tranq darts in their necks while they discover an octopus swimming in the nearby toilet, followed by hilarious and off-screen "Noooooooooo!"'s, are all we need to put two and two together.

While we're quick on the uptake in regards to gags like the aftermath of the off-screen tentacle porn video shoot or the unremarked-upon ligature marks on the neck of erotic asphyxiation addict Cheryl/Carol after her night out with a fireman, Archer isn't as quick on the uptake in regards to Katya, who tricks him into bringing back to Earth her marooned-in-space beau (with the unintentional help of an oblivious Krieger). Barry, in turn, isn't aware that he too has been tricked by Katya so she could attain her ultimate goal: ousting him from his top position as head of the KGB. In addition to being an enjoyable anti-Valentine's episode about the loneliness Archer has wound up experiencing as a result of his self-serving behavior, "Viscous Coupling" nicely sets up both a future Archer-vs.-Barry rematch and a new role for Katya as Malory's KGB counterpart. And if Archer doesn't take better care of his hearing ("Damn you, tinnitus, you're a cruel mistress!"), a future in which all his favorite Burt Reynolds flicks have to be watched with the closed captioning always switched on may await him.

Other memorable quotes:
* Lana: "Your apartment is one level. How do you have a dumbwaiter?" Archer: "It goes sideways."

* Katya: "Yes, my dear Sterling, come for me. Phrezzing, boom."

* Krieger, as Archer tries to lure him with the image of cyborg fights between Ray and Barry to persuade him to keep Barry trapped in space: "Bup bup bup bup bup! Stop. My penis can only get so erect." Hologram bride: "Honntou ne... [Very true...]"

* Archer speaks for many viewers like myself when he discovers that Ray's choice of bathroom reading is tentacle porn: "Seriously, how is that even a genre?"

(Photo source: Archer Wiki)

* "Sorry, that's, uh, just a sympathy boner."

* Barry: "So tell Archer I'm coming for him--phrasing, boom--and both Barrys out."

* A frustrated Archer to Krieger: "Hey! Thanks, Neil deGrasse Tyson!" Hologram: "Oooooh, deGrasse Tyson-san..."

(Photo source: Archer Wiki)

* A Malory-like Katya: "Now who do I have to screw to get a drink around here?" KGB soldier Boris: "Nobody, ma'am. Unless you wunt. And if you do wunt, I ken be buttum. No problem there."

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (02/06/2013): Archer, Green Lantern, Young Justice, Robot Chicken and Adventure Time

Best Super Bowl beer ad ever.

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.

The first minute of "Legs" is a thing of comedic-editing beauty and an atypical way for Archer to kick off a cold open. It centers not on Archer or a bunch of the major players in the same room but on secondary character Ray and his frustrating morning routine ever since Archer's crash-landing of the escape craft at the end of last season left the gay agent paralyzed (for real this time, after he pretended to be paralyzed for much of the third season).

The sight of Ray struggling with his medical bills and the difficulties that come with being actually paralyzed--like having to relieve himself in a plastic bag--is slightly reminiscent of a much more somber montage during Ed (the Tom Cavanagh lawyer show, not the Matt LeBlanc baseball monkey shitpile), in which handicapped cast member Daryl "Chill" Mitchell, whose character on Ed was wheelchair-bound Eli, wordlessly demonstrated how much longer it takes for a disabled person to get out of bed and change clothes. But because this isn't Ed, where the characters were far less irritable, cynical and TV-MA-mouthed, Ray is grumbling aloud to himself while getting ready for work and cursing Archer, "the other shitbag in my life." Ray is like the long-suffering Frank Grimes to Archer's oblivious Homer Simpson, and this episode's subtlest and cruelest joke (but not as cruel as the countless ways Meg's been humiliated on Family Guy) is that even in an episode where Ray gets to drive much of the story's events, he ends up sidelined for most of it, due to undergoing surgery to receive robotic legs from Krieger.

Despite being a bottle episode, "Legs" is a shining moment for the show's editors. Besides that cold open about Ray's crappy morning, they also demonstrate their editing skills through that "cutting away from one conversation to another so that it sounds like the character in the next scene is replying from faraway" device Archer deploys, but rarely to the extent that the show does in this episode. (The funniest of these gags cuts away from Cyril asking Lana if Terminator cyborgs are asexual to Krieger in mid-conversation with Pam while operating on Ray: "Not when I'm done with him.") It's fitting that "Legs" makes use of this choppy comedic device so often because Ray is being rebuilt in a similar (and much gorier) way.

Word of Ray's surgery causes Archer's fear of robots to resurface, which distracts him from heading to Rome with Lana and Cyril for an ISIS mission. Convinced that the robot apocalypse is near, Archer defies uptight ISIS armory supervisor Rodney and collects an array of weapons from the armory. He tries to thwart the surgical operation by himself, while Krieger races against time to finish Ray's new legs before Archer can burst in and ruin Ray's legs again.

Archer is that rare spy show where the hero occasionally becomes the villain, not because of mind control or brainwashing by some adversary but because he's simply an immature prick. When Archer fires a rocket launcher inside the armory and becomes a danger to the office building, Lana takes up the task of stopping Archer and gets to outwit him while he crawls through ducts like a typical, post-Die Hard '90s action hero. She has a repairman overheat the building's furnace, which causes Archer to doze off. Lana vs. Archer is always an amusing rivalry, whether she's verbally sparring with him in other episodes or pitted against him strategically like in "Legs" (most of her verbal sparring here is with Cyril rather than Archer). But both Archer and Lana wind up looking stupid at the end of "Legs" because Archer is also that rare spy show where the female spy who's supposedly more competent than the lead character sometimes screws up when she gets her chance to step up. Two days after she stops Archer from wreaking further havoc in the building, Lana realizes she forgot to turn off the furnace and let him out of the ducts.

Overheated furnace/ginormous heating bill screw-up aside, Lana and Krieger have helped Ray to receive something the ill-fated Frank Grimes never got: a happy ending. Ray regains the use of his legs--that is until the next time Archer causes him to end up paralyzed again. Because this is Archer, chaos reigns. On this show, happy endings don't last like chaos does--and are not as entertaining.

Stray observations:
* Ray: "I piss and shit in a plastic bag!" Krieger: "Me too!"

* According to Cheryl/Carol's dialogue with Archer about cyborgs, the show takes place in a universe where the Voight-Kampff machine from Blade Runner is now apparently a household item (extra points to Archer for not having Cheryl/Carol awkwardly point out it's from Blade Runner for the folks in the audience who never saw the film). The Voight-Kampff test ought to be used on reality TV stars like Kim Kardashian to confirm that they're all really machines because when most of these attention whore-bots cry on-camera, they don't look like normal people crying--they look like Cameron the Terminator when she creepily imitated human grief during Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

* Someone finally came up with the brilliant idea of giving Krieger and the equally crazy Pam a bunch of scenes together. Krieger's form of crazy is rarely in sync with Pam's form of crazy, except for when Pam, the world's worst nurse, asks Krieger if she was supposed to scrub up before surgery. His answer is "Eh, I didn't."

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (01/16/2013): Bravest Warriors, Out There, Bob's Burgers, American Dad and Adventure Time

"Oh God, the ship's computer put Pluto Nash on a loop! Yellow alert!"

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.

Over on the YouTube (this must be how Mr. Burns refers to YouTube--as "the YouTube"--like when he tries to relate to his employees by talking about something he watched on "the DuMont" the other day), the Cartoon Hangover channel has been posting since November five-minute webisodes of Bravest Warriors, a terrific new sci-fi cartoon created by Adventure Time mastermind Pendleton Ward. The series follows the adventures--some action-y, others not-so-action-y--of 16-year-old space heroes Beth (Liliana Mumy, which is inspired casting because she's the daughter of Lost in Space's Bill Mumy), Chris (Alex Walsh), Danny (John Omohundro) and Wallow (Ian Jones-Quartey), who's someone we've never seen on Star Trek: a Samoan crew member.

Though Ward isn't as creatively involved with Bravest Warriors as he is on Adventure Time--showrunner Breehn Burns, who's written and directed every webisode so far, is really the main creative force here--the Cartoon Hangover series is full of many of the same elements that make Adventure Time a standout cartoon. Maria Bamford steals the show voicing a side character or two like she does over on Adventure Time, everyone has button eyes and speaks in slangy and bizarre dialogue like the denizens of Ooo do (although it's less stoned-sounding here) and the surreal, rubbery and brightly colored visuals are a feast for the eyes, just like on the other show. The surreal vibe distinguishes Bravest Warriors from slightly more straightforward sci-fi comedy shows like Futurama and Red Dwarf.

"Butter Lettuce," the funniest and most inventive Bravest Warriors installment so far, takes place entirely in a Holo-John, a futuristic bathroom that allows people to play 3-D video games while they're doing their biz. Because they're horny teens, Danny and Wallow mess around with the Holo-John to see what Beth (whose last name, by the way, is Tezuka, clearly a shout-out to Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion creator Osamu Tezuka) would be like if she were more sexed-up. They try to get Chris, who's too shy to act on his feelings for Beth, to join in on their type of fun, but the holo-fantasizing about Beth wearing Barbara Eden's I Dream of Jeannie outfit and Princess Leia's metal bikini weirds him out.

The guys aren't aware that Beth is just like them and has fantasies of her own that she's obsessed with too. So after trying not to get caught by an amusingly disheveled and barely awake Beth when she enters the Holo-John to brush her teeth, they wind up trapped inside her favorite holo-fantasy, a hilarious scenario that involves a spa full of sweaty male unicorn strippers, and are unprepared for the, uh, sweatiness of it all (although the perpetually laid-back Wallow seems to have no problem with it). During "Butter Lettuce," I couldn't help but notice that someone on the cartoon's staff must have remembered how creepy and pathetic most of the Star Trek: The Next Generation holodeck episodes were and decided to humorously comment on the creepiness of those episodes. ("Booby Trap," the one where LaForge seeks engineering advice from a holodeck version of a respected female scientist who dresses like the sister wife from Shameless and ends up wanting to bang her, is especially creepy. That episode is also proof that some of the TNG staff writers had some really fucked-up issues about men of color. The fact that the TNG cast is aware of that, like whenever they mention why TNG's "Code of Honor" planet-of-the-Africans episode was such an epic fail, is one reason to love that cast.)

Cartoon Hangover touts itself as "the home for cartoons that are too weird, wild and crazy for television," and without a prudish bunch of execs like the suits in charge of the non-Adult Swim half of Cartoon Network breathing down the animators' necks, Bravest Warriors gets to go places Adventure Time attempted to dip its toe in but got in trouble with CN for doing so (like when it hinted that Princess Bubblegum and Marceline were once more than just friends). The title characters are a little older than 14-year-old Finn, so sexuality is a huge part of their lives, and Bravest Warriors doesn't shy away from that, like in the latest webisode, "Gas Powered Stick," in which Danny and Wallow vie for the attention of Beth's hot best friend Plum (Tara Strong), but she's setting her sights on Chris, who would rather hook up with Beth.




"Gas Powered Stick" isn't as sharp as "Butter Lettuce" because it's a little more focused on teen drama, as Burns put it in the webisode's behind-the-scenes featurette. But fortunately, because this is a Pendleton Ward creation, the teen drama is leavened by offbeat humor that, in this case, involves a little teddy bear who speaks like a baritone-voiced Boondocks character (Michael Leon Wooley) and an X-ray vision superpower that Chris--and anyone else who's a 16-year-old kid--is eager to make use of, until it subjects him to unsexy sights he wasn't expecting to witness, like Beth shaving her armpits. I love how Bravest Warriors continually tries to ruin Chris' view of Beth as this perfect, idealized object of affection. It reminds me of a similar thing Ward has said he's been trying to do with the equally flawed Princess Bubblegum over on Adventure Time. He told io9 that "there's so many stereotypical girl characters, and the easiest thing to do is the opposite: girl power, making them extremely intelligent or extremely tough. I just want to make girls that are normal, just like Finn is normal."

I can't wait to see what else is normal about Beth on this show. For instance, what does her face look like when she drops the kids off at the pool?

***

The character design of IFC's Out There, which officially premieres on February 22, is completely--what else?--out-there. (A family of Totoro-faced humans? Button noses on everyone else?) But the show's themes of awkward adolescence and small-town boredom aren't so new and different, and while I wish "A Chris by Any Other Name," the school dance episode that IFC sneak-previewed after Portlandia last Friday, had more than just one or two genuinely funny scenes, there's enough interesting material in Out There's low-key, not-so-broadly-played and nearly melancholy take on coming-of-age humor to make the cartoon worth checking out each week when it begins in February.

Longtime South Park director and Out There creator Ryan Quincy voices Chad Stevens, an unassuming high-schooler in the small town of Holford and the eldest kid in the aforementioned Totoro-ish family. He's loyal to his new best friend Chris (Justin Roiland, a.k.a. the Earl of Lemongrab from Adventure Time), the class prankster, but he also might be starting to outgrow Chris' antics now that he's getting to know Sharla (Linda Cardellini), whom he has a crush on and is the opposite of Chris: well-behaved, respectful of authority and never getting into run-ins with bullies. Chad's younger brother Jay (Kate Micucci) is even more worshipful of Chris and constantly wants to join in on Chris' pranks and daredevil stunts (speaking of stunts, Chris has an Evel Knievel poster up on his bedroom wall, and both that and the famous Farrah Fawcett poster next to it are hints that this show is a '70s or '80s period piece).

The show is narrated by Chad, presumably when he's several years older, and while the voiceover narration isn't necessary, it's not as overbearing as Peter Parker's narration on Ultimate Spider-Man. There are a couple of left-field casting choices here that I find amusing: John DiMaggio takes a break from his usual party-animal voices (Bender, Jake, Tracy Morgan...) to play Chad and Jay's meek dad, while Micucci is voicing a little boy (and is great at it, like another Out There cast member, Pamela Adlon, was when she voiced Bobby on King of the Hill). The brief glimpse into her character Jay's silly imagination during "A Chris by Any Other Name" (which is the third episode, by the way, not the first) is one of the episode's few genuinely funny bits, and the peeks at his daydreams are something Out There will hopefully make more use of.