Bad Rap is a timely and often funny look at Asian American rappers who want to have a radio hit like P-Lo or Far East Movement do

Dumbfoundead in Bad Rap

A longer and heavily-updated-in-2020 version of the following blog post can be found in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. The 2020 book was written and self-published by yours truly. Get the paperback edition of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You now!

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This is the 12th of 14 or 15 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Back in 2011, I typed out an outline for a graphic novel or screenplay I wanted to someday write about the Minneapolis rock music scene in 1985, and the story was to be told from the point of view of a female Filipino American Prince fan who leads a band of otherwise all-male musicians called the Beautifully Complex Women. In the outline, I explained that a rumor spreads around Minneapolis that Prince, the city's favorite son, is looking for a new act to sign to his Paisley Park label, and the Beautifully Complex Women and a whole bunch of other local bands vie, often over-aggressively, for the attention of the unseen Purple One.

I called the script idea The Beautifully Complex Women. It was going to be my way of exploring why it's so difficult for Asian American artists--whether they're the power pop band Moonpools & Caterpillars in the '90s or the Philly rap group Mountain Brothers in the early 2000s--to find mainstream success in the recording industry:

Bad Rap, African American filmmaker Salima Koroma's 2016 documentary about the various hardships Asian American rappers have to deal with in the industry, covers all those above questions and more in a lean, efficient and enjoyably provocative manner that makes me say, "Wow, I think I'll let this 1985 Minneapolis battle-of-the-bands script idea remain a script idea." Her film turned out to be better than my script idea.

Koroma's documentary was the 2016 film I most eagerly wanted to watch last year, even more so than a tentpole blockbuster like Captain America: Civil War or a critics' darling like Moonlight. (Sorry, Barry Jenkins.) Now Bad Rap is streamable on Netflix after a run on the festival circuit, and, man, the doc was worth the wait.

Bad Rap producer Jaeki Cho and director Salima Koroma

Bad Rap, which was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, took Koroma and Korean American producer Jaeki Cho--the (now-former) manager of one of the film's four main subjects--three and a half years to make. The doc follows four Asian American spitters who either have often toured together or have done guest features on each other's tracks.

The amiable and quick-witted Jonathan Park, who's now in his thirties, was an L.A. skater kid who, as a teen, stumbled into the battle rap scene--the Detroit version of the battle rap scene was famously depicted in 8 Mile--and fell in love with the art form, or as I like to call battle rap, "Don Rickles insult humor by people who, unlike Rickles, have rhythm." Park, a.k.a. Dumbfoundead, is a hero in L.A.'s Koreatown (judging from his music videos and YouTube shorts, he is to K-town what De Niro is to New York: the unofficial mayor) and in battle rap circles, but he's unknown elsewhere. Bad Rap reveals--and I wasn't previously aware of this--that Drake is a fan of Dumbfoundead's battle raps, which makes me like Drake a little more.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Tanks for Nuthin'"

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. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



Venture Bros. creator Jackson Publick's statement that "this season, like Season Five, lacks a satisfactory finale, because we didn't write one" is an interesting lament because Publick does an outstanding job intertwining this season's storylines and building those storylines towards that unsatisfactory finale in his consistently funny script for "Tanks for Nuthin'." Sometimes I think maybe Publick is trolling his fans and he likes to dupe them into thinking the finale will be a letdown like "The Devil's Grip" was to a segment of the fans (newsflash: "The Devil's Grip" is actually better than those fans think).

Or maybe Publick's just being honest. I don't know. It's all a mystery--like whether or not Dr. Venture and the Monarch are actually a second pair of titular brothers.

The sexual mishaps that have led to Dr. Venture having a brother he doesn't know about (and possibly an additional child out there who was mentioned once in the second season and has never been mentioned again), the narcissism of the wealthy and the failure of a space age that promised us jetpacks and hasn't yet delivered aren't the only recurring themes on The Venture Bros. There's also the recurring idea that many of the second-in-commands or underlings in the Ventureverse are far more deserving to be running things than the idiots who somehow ended up with the keys to the car, whether that idiot is the Monarch or Dr. Venture.

This season, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch--the wifey who's always been too smart to be playing second fiddle to supervillains but is also too principled and levelheaded to be in the business of arching--gets to run things. The Sovereign's death has resulted in her trying to keep both the Guild of Calamitous Intent and the Council of 13 from falling apart, in addition to her new tasks as Councilwoman 1. But "Tanks for Nuthin'" implies that Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is turning into yet another idiot in power. She's apparently developed Lois Lane-itis in the eyes and ears and is unable to look more closely at the evidence of the Blue Morpho's return to recognize that the man in the Morpho's old mask is actually her husband, not Dr. Venture. But unlike the Monarch and Dr. Venture, that's not because she's a lifelong imbecile. It's because she's becoming distracted by both the marital problems that are being caused by her new job and the stress of that very job.

"Tanks for Nuthin'" follows Dr. Mrs. the Monarch (I know it'd be easier to simply call her Sheila, but Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is just a funny name to repeatedly say in its entirety) on a part of that job nobody would enjoy doing: informing the spouse of a Guild member that her husband's dead. Accidentally killed by Gary when he tossed him into a pit in Ventech Tower's under-construction lobby at the end of "Rapacity in Blue" last week, Haranguetan left behind a wife who also happens to be a supervillain: Battleaxe (Barbara Rosenblat from Orange Is the New Black), a Celtic warrior woman who, by day, runs an Irish pub full of costumed villains who drown their misery over the drudgery of arching in booze (one of those villains is Brick Frog, the loser in the frog costume whose whole deal is the throwing of bricks, and a great little touch during one of the pub scenes is the off-screen jukebox blasting some depressing Irish song). While investigating the whereabouts of Haranguetan's unseen killer, whom everyone assumes is the Morpho, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch has to go break the news of his demise to Battleaxe, who turns out to be inconsolable, even though she clearly bickered a lot with Haranguetan and "his breath was crap and he beat me."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Vixen, "Episode 1"

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.

At only five minutes per weekly episode, the six-part CW Seed miniseries Vixen, an animated reintroduction of a black DC Comics heroine who previously appeared in animated, Gina Torres-voiced form on Bruce Timm's beloved Justice League Unlimited, is hilariously short. I expected Chris Rock to channel his old SNL character Nat X and joke about how a black superhero can only get a five-minute webtoon because the Man won't give her a two-hour movie. So I was surprised to discover that Rock has been raving about Vixen.

The best superhero I've seen all summer is #vixen http://t.co/MV9C7fmgAu @megalyn pic.twitter.com/8MMqJKJAKJ

— Chris Rock (@chrisrock) August 25, 2015

In a summer that's consisted of Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man on the big screen (we'll just forget the whole Fantastic Four fiasco, and, oh, by the way, the only Fantastic Four that matters is these guys), that's huge praise for a superhero webtoon. So is Vixen--which takes place in the Arrow/The Flash/Legends of Tomorrow shared universe and will feature the voices of Arrow stars Stephen Amell and Emily Bett Rickards and Flash stars Grant Gustin and Carlos Valdes in upcoming episodes--as terrific as Rock implies? Animation-wise: yes. Storytelling-wise: it's too early--and too short--to tell. So far, I'm not in love with the presence of the ubiquitous in medias res device--an old storytelling favorite of the Arrow writers, who also scripted Vixen--and the clunky-sounding exposition during a diner conversation between aspiring Detroit fashion designer Mari McCabe (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who's about to discover that a family heirloom she's been wearing can grant her the power to mimic the abilities of animals, and her white foster dad Chuck (Neil Flynn, a.k.a. the dad on The Middle) in this first episode.

My least favorite aspect of Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti's now-defunct DC Animation show Young Justice comes back to haunt this new DC Animation project. Early on in one episode of Young Justice, Miss Martian was seen explaining to a skeptical and typically monosyllabic Superboy why she used her shape-shifting powers to disguise themselves as her uncle J'onn J'onnz and Superman at a press conference that just took place, more for the sake of bringing the audience up to speed than for her ex-boyfriend's sake. "Conner, you know we have to maintain the illusion that Superman, Manhunter and the other Leaguers who went into space are still on Earth. We can't let our enemies know how short-handed the Justice League is right now," she said to Superboy, who, in addition to being miserable about his life as a teenage clone of both Superman and Lex Luthor, has to go to work each day with a pro-torture ex-girlfriend who's fond of speaking in IMDb plot summary-ese.

Arrow veterans Wendy Mericle, Keto Shimizu and Brian Ford Sullivan (all paired up with Lauren Certo, who co-wrote another Arrow-related webseries, the live-action Blood Rush) are a little more skilled at handling exposition than Weisman and Vietti because of the experience they've had writing dialogue for a live-action prime-time show that can't really get away with that type of Saturday morning cartoon exposition too often. So Vixen is slightly more cognizant than Young Justice about how people who know each other well actually talk to each other and is a little less ridiculous and awkward about the exposition--we learn Mari is looking for her birth parents, the difficulties of finding the fashion design job she wants have left her with an understandable temper and she's closer to Patty, an absent and most likely ailing member of Mari's foster family who's presumably Chuck's wife (and will be voiced by Kari Wuhrer), than she is to Chuck--but much of it is still unnatural-sounding expository dialogue. The opening action sequence is much closer to what I want out of an animated sister show to Arrow, The Flash and the forthcoming Legends of Tomorrow, and that would be nicely staged action that's full of visuals an animated show can pull off with more panache than a live-action one, with minimal dialogue during the action. But that rooftop sequence in which Mari outwits the Arrow (Amell) and outraces the Flash (Gustin)--only to accidentally slip and fall--actually goes one better by containing no dialogue at all. It's a wise stylistic choice by both the Arrow writers and miniseries director James Tucker, who previously directed the 2013 DC Animation movie Superman Unbound and showran Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the surprisingly good DC Animation show that proved a light-hearted take on modern-day Batman doesn't have to suck like a Joel Schumacher Batman movie.

The effective animation for Mari's escape from Oliver Queen and Barry Allen, a sequence in which miniseries co-composer Blake Neely gets to restate his main themes from Arrow and The Flash, is mainly what earns the Vixen premiere episode the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week title. But there are a couple of extra touches that elevate Vixen and will make it worth following on CW Seed in the next few weeks.

The show's dialogue recording team is clearly made up of fans of Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was distinctive for having its vocal cast record their dialogue outside the recording booth and outdoors in order to make their stop-motion-animated movie sound naturalistic. I'm not sure if the Vixen sound team actually did venture outside the booth to record Mari's reverby scene in jail, her diner scene with Chuck and an upcoming S.T.A.R. Labs scene between Barry and Valdes' lab tech character Cisco that was included in the series premiere trailer, but the Fantastic Mr. Fox approach to getting Mari and the other characters to sound like they're actually in reverby and chilly rooms gives this DC Animation project an interestingly grounded feel and makes it a seamless part of the live-action Arrow/Flashverse.

Oh yeah, and there's the simple fact that Mari is the first female superpowered hero of color in the Arrow/Flashverse (Katana, a heroic swordswoman played on Arrow last season by Rila Fukushima, doesn't have any powers). The character is an appealing middle ground between the fantasy-based heroism of the supers on The Flash and the more flawed (and non-superpowered) heroism of the street-level crimefighters on Arrow (the time frame of the miniseries begins with Mari in jail for self-defense, and the episode implies that the man she attacked was such a disgusting perv that she didn't deserve to be put behind bars).

I'm curious to see how Echikunwoke--whom I remember from her eye-candy roles on The 4400 and House of Lies and is an ideal choice to play Mari if she becomes a live-action character--will tackle both voice acting, especially in a setting that's way more family-friendly than House of Lies (but still salty in the dialogue department, in a CW kind of way, of course), and a heroic character who, like Static from DC's Milestone imprint, clearly means a lot to African American DC readers. So far, the premiere episode has shown that Echikunwoke is a great screamer. I never read the Justice League Detroit comics. I don't think Vixen screams like Mel from Doctor Who in those comics.

I'm also curious to see how Vixen will handle what's essentially a story about a black adoptee raised by white parents (she appears to be embarrassed about it)--and in search of both her heritage and her purpose in life--that happens to be dressed up in superhero genre garb. Will it handle that kind of story with the same kind of aplomb Penny Dreadful has demonstrated as a story about identity that's dressed up as a Gothic horror drama? Or will it drop the ball like 2011's Green Lantern, which Arrow creators and Vixen co-executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Greg Berlanti both co-wrote, and turn into another unimaginative--and emotionally flat--daddy issues-driven origin story?

Chris Rock's praise of this webtoon's premiere episode, as well as Flash cast member Candice Patton's similar endorsement of it--even though she's not in Vixen and she didn't get to reprise her role as Iris West--and black viewers' interest in it on Twitter, all remind me of when I was involved in the creation of a similar female superhero of color for an indie graphic novel about Asian American superheroes. I noticed a glint of excitement in the eyes of both male and female Asian American readers who were fans of that novel back in 2009. It was a glint that said, "I've been hungry for this my whole life."

I'm unable to glimpse that same glint on people from Black Twitter for obvious reasons, but judging from Vixen viewers' #DatTotem hashtag and enthusiastic tweets from the likes of BlackGirlNerds and the hosts of The Fan Bros Show, that glint is definitely there in their writing. Everyone's getting tired of superhero movies starring white guys named Chris. There needs to be more Chrisiquas and Cristinas up in this piece.

Times are changing, and the increasingly inclusive Arrow/Flashverse appears to be responding to the frustrations younger viewers have expressed about the presence of underrepresented groups on the screen, but it's responding in mostly sensible--and now with the arrival of Vixen, fascinating--ways. For instance, on The Flash, the police captain isn't an old, pasty Irish guy like it always used to be on cop shows and superhero shows before the '90s (neither is the captain some African American authority figure with no inner life). He's a younger and openly gay Indian Canadian guy. And now the Arrow/Flashverse is boldly placing a black woman at the center of the action instead of behind the action like spymaster Amanda Waller or on the sidelines like Iris. The five-minute webtoon format may make Vixen seem like a small step towards progress, but this step's a big one.

I don't want to write listicles anymore

Every time I see a numeral followed by a plural noun followed by "That You Didn't Know Were This" in an article hed, I feel like punching a millennial hed writer in the face.

It didn't used to be this way. In fact, about a year ago, I used to write some of my blog post heds like this. But then over time, my tune changed. It started changing when I saw the following depressing snapshot in somebody's tweet.

Why have there been so many articles in the past few years where people list things? Is this all part of the rise of the borderline-autistic nerd? So his need to count things or list them and be fastidious and organized about what he likes or hates has to dominate the format of everything I read on the Internet now? "The listicle concept lends itself to digital media more so than any other medium. With ubiquitous clouds of content to select from, choosing something to read or information to digest can be downright cumbersome"? Fuck that noise. I want cumbersome. I want to read full-bodied paragraphs. I don't want to read grocery lists anymore. I want to see thought put into lists, just like I how I want to see thought put into anything that's not a list. I don't want disposable, less-than-150-words shit that's made for smartphone zombies to easily digest because they're too damn lazy and feeble-minded to scroll through an article with both substantial and substantive content on their phones.

Even Chris Rock's new film Top Five isn't immune to this habit of listing things--the characters in the film rattle off lists of their five favorite rappers or comedians--hence the title Top Five. The only listicles I like reading these days are any of the ones Rock himself was asked to assemble, the ego trip interviews with beatmakers about their favorite sample flips or the A.V. Club "Inventory" pieces. The "Inventory" listicles have always been smartly written. Everything else is mindless and lazily written click-bait.

Jack McCoy used to theorize during Law & Order about how the first Menendez brothers trial's hung juries put an end to "the Oprahfication of America," the first and last place where I heard the word "Oprahfication." I wish the original Law & Order were still in production so that the murder of some douchey Silicon Alley news site CEO that EADA Cutter has to prosecute would cause McCoy to complain about the BuzzFeedification of writing. (Not all of BuzzFeed is awful, by the way. A few good pieces about Asian Americans in hip-hop have been posted by BuzzFeed, which, for a while, I didn't know is being run by Jonah Peretti, the brother of the very funny Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Chelsea Peretti, a fact of trivia that intrigued this Brooklyn Nine-Nine fan when he found out they're siblings because it makes me wonder what dinner with the Peretti kids was like. Maybe it was lots of "Mom, Jonah's bothering me in .GIF form again!" Anyway, BuzzFeed's also got Alison Willmore, who's an excellent film writer, and Kate Aurthur has written for them several terrific hard news pieces about all the homophobia, misogyny and racism that's still prevalent in showbiz. It's the rest of BuzzFeed--the .GIF-heavy listicles about pointless shit--that makes me want to punch out a millennial editor.)

The BuzzFeedification of writing has caused me to decide to never write another listicle again, whether I'm writing for my own blog or Word Is Bond or any place else. A few months ago, I wanted to write a Word Is Bond post that would have been a rundown of hip-hop videos that are filmed in one long take. But then I noticed other hip-hop sites are succumbing to the listicle format too, and that's also made me regret dragging Word Is Bond down with me during the two listicles I wrote.

Hip-hop videos that are filmed in a single take are a fun topic, and I still feel like writing about it, but there's got to be other ways to structure that topic and make the hed look attractive and tantalizing without making it all appear to be yet another pointless listicle or a parody of terrible listicle writing that would show up on the Onion's clever BuzzFeed and Upworthy parody site ClickHole. As I try to figure out those other ways, I'm swearing listicles off forever. You'll Never Believe The 9 Reasons Why I'm Swearing Them Off Forever.

Psych.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Black Dynamite, "How Honey Bee Got Her Groove Back or Night of the Living Dickheads," and The Simpsons, "Simpsorama" (tie)

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

Ian Edwards, a staff writer for Black Dynamite this season, is a solid stand-up whose most hilarious moment took place not during one of his sets or his TV writing credits but on a podcast. In episode 69 of WTF with Marc Maron, Edwards was one of several guest comedians Maron interviewed on stage at Portland's Bridgetown Comedy Festival. I've brought up this 2010 WTF episode before because it's my favorite of the live WTF episodes, but to keep it succinct, Maron's conversations on WTF with black guys who aren't Wyatt Cenac (who worked alongside Maron on one of his old Air America radio programs), Chris Rock or W. Kamau Bell tend to be on the awkward side, and Maron's exchanges with Edwards at the festival were no exception. He referred to Edwards' older stand-up routines about his Jamaican background as a phase where Edwards "leaned on the Jamaican thing," which led to Edwards retorting, "You don't lean on it. You're from there. How the fuck you lean on some shit you're from, man? I don't really understand that one, Marc, but hey... You're really leaning on this white thing. I hope one day it goes away, Marc."

Maron also confused Jamaica with Haiti while bringing up the then-recent subject of Haiti earthquake relief. Edwards corrected him and then joked, "You sure you didn't send [money] to Panama or some other island? How sure are you that you sent it to Haiti? 'Addressed from Marc Maron to Black Island...'" I always laugh my ass off whenever I play back Edwards' reactions to Maron transforming into Michael Scott at the Dunder-Mifflin racial sensitivity training session right in front of a live audience.

The Edwards-penned "How Honey Bee Got Her Groove Back" doesn't quite compare to the off-the-cuff hilarity of Edwards roasting Maron alive, but I love how thick and incomprehensible almost all the Jamaican accents in this Black Dynamite episode are--I wouldn't be surprised if Edwards himself had a hand in the voice direction--and the special guest stars in this Jamaican vacation episode are quite impressive as first-time animated show voice actors. You have Chance the Rapper portraying a so-polygamous-he-could-be-half-Mormon Bob Marley, who becomes enchanted with Honey Bee (Kym Whitley) while she and her judo-trained hoes take a long-overdue, How Stella Got Her Groove Back-esque vacation away from the Whorephanage. Chance nails Marley's voice, plus you have Erykah Badu stealing the episode and bringing to life an obese and laid-back Whorephanage employee who's straight out of Chris Rock's "Fat black women don't give a fuck what you think: she goin' out on Friday night!" bit from Bigger & Blacker.

But what's even more enjoyable than the guest voice work--or the episode's admirable ballsiness in regards to not adding subtitles so that the whitest of viewers can better understand the Jamaican male hoes' dialogue--is Black Dynamite once again fearlessly taking aim at a black figure who's revered by the show's viewers, but doing so without rehashing the same old jokes about that figure. "How Honey Bee Got Her Groove Back" could have trotted out the usual jokes about Marley's love of spliffs or his accent, which Honey Bee says she barely understands (by the way, one of my favorite "what an old white shithead this British or New Zealand newscaster is" videos on YouTube is a 1979 Marley interview where the patronizing Zealand interviewer opens with a disclaimer that warns viewers of a "patois which at times is difficult to understand"). But instead, "How Honey Bee Got Her Groove Back" takes aim at the married reggae legend's history of womanizing, a part of his life I wasn't really aware of until this episode made me Google Marley's polygamy. Who'd expect Black Dynamite to be educational in addition to being funny as hell?

Memorable quotes:
* From Honey Bee's first encounter with Marley: "Well, I never heard of you. Must not be that good, but keep workin'. Who knows? One day you might be as famous as Marlon Jackson."

* Honey Bee, while she and Marley flee from assassins: "With all this damn weed, I thought this island would be way more peaceful!"
Marley: "Well, some parts are peaceful."
Honey Bee: "What parts, Bob?"
Marley: "Um, mostly the parts I'm... not in?"

* "Your cheeks togedder/Right in de palm of my hand/Don't need de rubber/Let's go raw, I know you understand/We gon' fuck/We gon' fuck/We gon' fuck/We gon' fuck/Can you feel it..."

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"Meanwhile," Futurama's this-time-for-real-it's-the-end series finale, was one of the classiest exits a long-running show has made. "Simpsorama," the Simpsons/Futurama crossover that brings back the Planet Express crew for one more on-screen adventure (while they've experienced an afterlife in print as stars of their own Bongo Comics titles), feels kind of unnecessary as an extra farewell to the Matt Groening/David X. Cohen creation on-screen. (This crossover might not even be the last farewell, if the rumors that Fox is now considering reviving Futurama for a fourth incarnation are true.) Let's put it this way: "Meanwhile" was Star Trek VI. "Simpsorama" is all the scenes with either Kirk, Scotty or Chekov during Star Trek: Generations.

But the scenes with Kirk, Scotty or Chekov were good, even though the material for Scotty and Chekov was a slightly clunky rewrite of material originally written for Spock and McCoy (the rest of Star Trek: Generations--except for the opening titles with the floating Dom Pérignon bottle and the surprisingly effective dramatic scene between Picard and Data on the Stellar Cartography deck--was atrocious). Though "Simpsorama," which was penned by J. Stewart Burns (the writer of my favorite 2010s Simpsons episode so far, "Holidays of Future Passed"), pales in comparison to "Meanwhile" or Futurama at its peak, I actually enjoyed it.

It's a far more satisfying crossover than the terrible Family Guy/Simpsons crossover (and it's non-canonical too, Simpsons fans who despise Futurama and Futurama fans who despise "Simpsorama," in case both of you camps forgot that the appearance of Kang and Kodos, the human-devouring aliens from the non-canonical "Treehouse of Horror" episodes, automatically makes "Simpsorama" a non-canonical Simpsons story). Homer (Dan Castellaneta) and Bender (John DiMaggio)--who's been sent by Professor Farnsworth (Billy West) to 21st-century Springfield to kill Homer but gets distracted from his mission because he and Homer have a lot in common--are a funnier pair than Homer and Peter Griffin, mainly because the two kindred spirits don't get into a tedious chicken fight. An even better comedic combo is Lisa (Yeardley Smith), Professor Frink (Hank Azaria) and Professor Farnsworth in the same room. The sight of an old genius like Farnsworth reverting to a jealous child over "the annoying girl" and her precociousness is a highlight of the crossover. His disdain for Lisa is so thick you could build a Parthenon with it.

Only one joke in the crossover made my eyes roll, and its wretchedness is typical of so many similar bits of fan service in post-season 8 Simpsons episodes. That would be the umpteenth reappearance of Seymour, the dead dog Fry (also West) was briefly reunited with in one of Futurama's most popular episodes, the heart-wrenching "Jurassic Bark" (and again in 2013's "Game of Tones," in which a dream-state version of Seymour, who was voiced by Seth MacFarlane, got to say one line to Fry: "Philip, have you lost weight?"). Seymour's first reappearance in the 2007 made-for-video feature film Bender's Big Score bugged me--as does his cameo in "Simpsorama"--because the film's retconning of "Jurassic Bark" felt like the Futurama writers were saying that they were ashamed of the episode's sad ending. They received hate mail from some viewers at the time of the airing of "Jurassic Bark" for ending that episode on a downbeat note, and I wish I could tell the writers, "Who gives a fuck what those viewers think? That ending was perfect." To borrow a catchphrase from a certain cantankerous Simpsons character, worst concession to irate viewers ever.

Memorable quotes:
* Mayor Quimby (Castellaneta), referring to Lisa's jazz concert in the park getting disrupted by stormy weather: "Even God hates jazz."

* Homer: "Oh... my... God... He's telling the truth. I have to take you to our civic leaders." Cut to Homer and Bender at Moe's.

* Homer: "Hey, uh, what's the robot version of bromance?"
Bender: "Ro-mance."
Homer: "You future guys have a word for everything... pal."

* Marge (Julie Kavner), thinking to herself: "Oh, don't mention her eye. Don't mention her eye."
Leela (Katey Sagal), thinking to herself: "Don't mention her hair. Don't mention her hair."

* Marge: "Can you please just get us out of this lousy future?"
Farnsworth: "Actually, of all probable futures, this is the worst."
Marge: "It is, 'cause my baby's not in it."
Farnsworth: "Motherly love--why did we outlaw that?"

* Farnsworth: "The only way to handle the creatures is to do what we do to each year's Super Bowl losers: shoot them into space."

* Omicronian emperor Lrrr (Maurice LaMarche) to Kang (Harry Shearer) and Kodos (Castellaneta), regarding his upset wife Ndnd (Tress MacNeille): "Uh, perhaps the one of you that is female should go console her." Both Kang and Kodos go console Ndnd, which has to be the funniest button on a concluding Simpsons scene in years.

Why Grimm's recent glimpse into Sgt. Wu's Filipino heritage is a big deal, especially during both Filipino Heritage Month and Halloween

(Photo source: Prometheus Brown)

There's a great line early on in last weekend's Black Dynamite season premiere, where the titular '70s kung fu fighter tells his sidekicks he refuses to join them in observing the first official Black History Month ever because he "ain't celebrating his blackness on any month that the white man tells him to." Black Dynamite has a point there about history months for people of color.

Even though it's cool to have a Filipino American Heritage Month, it's also kind of silly in concept because I don't celebrate my Filipino heritage only in October--I celebrate it on the regular. I wish I could be like Black Dynamite and tell the white man that he'll never be the boss of me or my heritage. But Yakoo chose to place Filipino Heritage Month on the same month as Halloween, which is actually kind of badass. On second thought, sorry, Black Dynamite. When the haoles give us October, I can't get mad at that.

Every Halloween, or as I like to call it these days, Racists' Coming Out Day--or as Hari Kondabolu calls it, "Racist Christmas"--AFOS celebrates the holiday with "Buckets of Score," a six-hour block of original score cues from horror flicks, thrillers and supernatural procedurals, starting at 5pm Pacific. "Buckets of Score" will include highlights of Six Feet Under composer Richard Marvin's score music from the first two seasons of the Portland-based supernatural procedural Grimm, which will continue to keep Portland weird with the arrival of its fourth season this Friday on NBC.

I went from mildly liking Grimm, a show where the cast members' behind-the-scenes tweets are sometimes as entertaining as the show itself, to straight-up loving it, ever since the March airing of "Mommy Dearest." That's the episode from last season where Sgt. Wu--a reliable source of Detective Munch-style gallows humor and a colleague of the show's titular hunter of monstrous menaces, Portland cop Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli)--was revealed to be Pinoy, just like the actor who portrays him, Reggie Lee (I had no idea Lee was Filipino until the press coverage for "Mommy Dearest" because the surname Lee doesn't exactly scream out Filipino).

Grimm's third season is the first season where I started to watch Grimm regularly on Hulu, after a lady at an after-party for v3con in L.A. recommended to me that I check out more of Grimm. I only caught a few Grimm episodes before season 3: the pilot; an episode featuring serial guest star Jaime Ray Newman as the Blutbad (a.k.a. wolf-y) ex-girlfriend of Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell), Nick's Blutbad guide into the complicated and multifaceted world of Wesen (pronounced "veh-sen") creatures; and the arc that introduced Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Nick's elusive and badass mom Kelly, who's a Grimm just like Nick. In most of those episodes, Sgt. Wu would show up with a quip or two about some violent crime in Portland--which he's unaware is Wesen-related--and prove to be the most likable cop character on Grimm. But Wu never had a backstory, until "Mommy Dearest," that is (Wu, who was named after Grace Wu, the head of casting at NBC, never even had a first name before the episode, which revealed it to be Drew, so that means he's Drew Wu--I take it the Grimm writers are fans of Sheng Wang).

Now this backstory for Wu is where "Mommy Dearest" takes on significance, especially during Filipino Heritage Month: as a piece of hour-long American TV that's full of Filipino American characters, it's non-stereotypical and, as someone who wishes Filipinos were better represented on American network TV and were given roles other than mail-order brides or some other subservient horseshit, I view the episode as quite a well-written breakthrough for a Filipino American regular on a TV show. Wu's backstory cleverly involves a certain part of Filipino culture that makes the synergy between Filipino Heritage Month and Halloween especially terrific: monster folklore.

When Wu was a boy, his grandma used to tell him stories about the aswang (pronounced "ass-wong"), a monster from the Philippines with a name that sounds like an Asian American male porn star but is known for an appetite that's not sexy at all: it likes to snack on the unborn babies of pregnant women. As I've said before, Wu is the only regular character on the show who's unaware that Wesen like Aswangs are real, and when his ex-girlfriend Dana (Tess Paras)--who's now married to another friend of his (Alain Uy) and is expecting a baby--is attacked at night by a creature who sounds an awful lot like an Aswang, the assault ignites Wu's suspicions that this childhood monster with the appetite of Fat Bastard from Austin Powers and the tongue of Miley Cyrus is more than just a myth.

"Mommy Dearest" episode writer Brenna Kouf, the daughter of Grimm co-creator Jim Kouf, was assigned to work a Filipino monster into an arc that would sow the seeds for Wu's discovery of Nick's secret life as a Grimm at the end of the third season, and she turned to Lee for Filipino monster myths. He suggested to her and the Grimm writing staff four monsters: the kapre, a tree demon that's fond of punking humans; the duwende, a gnome that's also a prankster; the tikbalang, a shape-shifting horse creature; and the aswang, the most lurid of the four and, of course, the monster the writing staff ultimately went with. Grimm is rarely a disturbing supernatural show--compared to something like The Walking Dead, it's actually one of the least graphic horror shows currently on the air--but when that Aswang tries to go to town on Dana's fetus in the cold open of "Mommy Dearest," man, that has to rank as one of Grimm's most disturbing monster attacks.

Grimm's aswang episode isn't just great as made-for-TV horror--it's also unexpectedly educational. What's made me enthusiastic about "Mommy Dearest," other than the juicy dramatic material for Lee and his character, is that it introduces Filipino monster folklore to American viewers, as well as Filipino American viewers who are unaware of their own culture's monster myths. In fact, I myself was never exposed to Filipino monster stories until I started reading about them on blogs like my friend Grace-Sonia Melanio's (my parents aren't exactly fans of the horror genre--and I'm not much of a fan of the genre either--so they never tried to give me nightmares with stories about tree demons or foodies with a thing for artisanal amniotic fluid).

Think of that Filipino American kid somewhere who didn't know about Filipino monsters until he or she watched "Mommy Dearest." Thanks to Grimm, that kid gets to learn about his or her culture's rich folklore--and then will probably need therapy later. But that kid is at least learning something about his or her culture. It's interesting that "Mommy Dearest"--which is worth checking out during both Filipino Heritage Month and Halloween season (Grimm isn't streamable on Netflix, but the third-season Blu-rays are available to rent there)--has aired during a year when the broadcast networks have made significant strides in fixing their previously lousy track record with diversity (please be dope, Fresh Off the Boat), and even though it's just a Pinoy battling a Filipino monster, it's progress, man.

Selections from Grimm's first-and-second-season score album will be featured during "Buckets of Score" at 5pm Pacific on October 31 on AFOS.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "Lovers Are Trendy, 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.

Kimiko Ueno is a writer to watch. She's responsible for two of Space Dandy's funniest episodes, "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby," a frenetic half-hour that's grown on me since its airing in July, and last season's "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," a riff on the zombie genre that features the show's most sublime use of its Douglas Adams-style narrator (his matter-of-fact narration is an element of Space Dandy that plays better in subtitled Japanese than in English because matter-of-fact foreign narration, whether it's delivered by a Japanese announcer or a British documentarian, is just funnier, and not for xenophobic reasons).

In "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby," the pulling of "cosmic pubes" caused Dandy, Meow and QT to ping-pong back and forth between other dimensions. In those other realities, they had awkward and often argumentative encounters with their parallel counterparts, who were completely different from all the other much more identical parallel counterparts we saw in previous and subsequent episodes, that is if Space Dandy viewers' theory that each episode takes place in a different reality is a correct one (the counterparts Dandy, Meow and QT met in "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" more closely resembled the stars of animated shows that are way more popular in Japan than Space Dandy, which has failed to catch on with the Japanese public and is a more popular show over here in America). For instance, in one reality, Meow was a sexy woman in a dance leotard instead of a male cat, while in a much more emo reality, he was a terrifying-looking cyborg with a frozen smile who spoke only in creepy-sounding electronic meows that would constantly drive his morose shipmate Emo Dandy to want to kill himself. And like "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" made sublime use of the narrator at one point and had him bickering with his parallel counterparts as well.

Ueno also wrote "Rock 'n' Roll Dandy, Baby," a Behind the Music-like rockumentary parody where would-be rocker Dandy spent more time bickering with his bandmate over what to name their band and how their merch should look than actually creating music. "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby"--in which Scarlet (Houko Kuwashima), the prim Alien Registration Center clerk who always rejects the unregisterable creatures that Dandy brings to her, pays the pompadoured alien hunter to pose as her boyfriend in order to ward off her stalker ex-boyfriend Dolph (Kazuya Nakai)--isn't quite as funny as those three previous Ueno episodes, but it reteams Ueno with director Masahiro Mukai, who helmed the chaos of "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby."

Mukai brings much of his visual panache from the cosmic pubes episode to this one as well, especially in any scene involving the machine gun-wielding silver and red mecha from the show's opening titles, which finally makes an appearance here and turns out to be piloted by Dolph. Because this is a sci-fi comedy show full of spaceships and giant mechs, instead of stalking Scarlet in a tourist disguise or in a Spider-Man costume, Dolph spies on her from the cockpit of his floating mecha, the winner of the least conspicuous stalker vehicle of the year.

You keep expecting Mukai to stage a battle between Dolph's mecha and Dandy's Hawaii Yankee, a Hawaiian shirt-wearing mecha that's been absent this season, but they never get to the fireworks factory, and "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby" is the lesser for it. However, "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby" scores points for getting a man and a woman who's constantly repulsed by him to bond over the film and TV work of Chuck Norris, action genre veteran, famously wooden actor, ubiquitous Internet meme and right-wing nutjob.

For most of the episode, Dandy and Scarlet have nothing in common, and Dandy is constantly at his worst behavior during their pretend dates on the romantic getaway planet known as Trendy. He spits game at some other hottie in the middle of his beach date with Scarlet, which sends her unleashing her fury at him, while my favorite running gag has Scarlet frequently apologizing to little kids for Dandy snatching their belongings from them and making them cry.

But then Dandy unearths Scarlet's DVD copy of Missing in Action from the mess he's made of her house after he tries to protect her from a man-faced spider straight out of John Carpenter's The Thing (if that house is a vacation rental, I can't wait to see the discussion she'll have with the constantly broke Dandy over how to cover the damages), and their adoration of the Missing in Action star begins to bring them closer together and raises the possibility that this fake couple could turn into a real one. Dandy and Scarlet also out themselves as fans of the short-lived Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, an actual kids' cartoon and one of many inspirations for Adult Swim's upcoming '80s cartoon spoof Mike Tyson Mysteries, which will star the voices of Mike Tyson and Norm Macdonald.



For some reason, I'm having flashbacks to Chris Rock's old "Terry Armstrong" bit about athletes who always refer to themselves in the third person. Chuck Norris' intro for Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos makes Chuck Norris' show look like a fake Chuck Norris cartoon from Robert Smigel, but it's not a Smigel TV Funhouse segment about the Chuck Norris-ness of Chuck Norris. Karate Kommandos was an actual half-hour piece of shit from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, whose Ruby-Spears studio also produced the inexplicable Rambo cartoon, which was a 30-minute commercial for a Rambo action figure line, and the occasional TV Funhouse target Mister T, which starred the A-Team scene-stealer as the coach of a multiracial team of mystery-solving gymnast kids (Mister T makes the Brady Kids Saturday morning cartoon look like Shakespeare).

If Dandy and Scarlet bonded over the much more revered Bruce Lee, whom Spike Spiegel idolized and emulated during Space Dandy general director Shinichiro Watanabe's more serious Cowboy Bebop (and is far less problematic to Asian Americans as a martial arts hero than his white Way of the Dragon nemesis), it wouldn't be as amusing. Because Dandy the bumbling lout and Scarlet the lonely office drone are kitschy Watanabe characters, as opposed to badass Watanabe characters like Spike and his femme fatale love interest Julia (although Scarlet has a badass side that she expresses in her Jeet Kune Do skills), it makes more comedic sense for Scarlet and Dandy, who's delusional about his prowess with the ladies, to idolize the similarly delusional Norris than to idolize Bruce. The star of both Karate Kommandos and the frequently ridiculed Walker, Texas Ranger was under the delusion that America would take seriously his warning that re-electing President Obama would bring about "1,000 years of darkness." (Dandy's also delusional about being an intergalactic celebrity, just like how Peter Quill thinks "Star-Lord" is a name everyone in space is familiar with during Guardians of the Galaxy. Junichi Suwabe, the Chris Parnell-esque voice of Dandy in Japan, is great at portraying this delusional and self-absorbed side of Dandy, so it's fitting that Suwabe was chosen to dub for Chris Pratt in the Japanese release of Guardians that's opening over there tomorrow.)

The references to a real-life obscure cartoon instead of a made-up one with a dumb-sounding and unconvincing fake title are a nice touch in Ueno's script, as are Scarlet's evident fetish for '80s action stars (it's not surprising that one of her exes is a blond jerk named after Dolph Lundgren) and the episode's open ending, which was clearly influenced by Watanabe's love of ambiguity. For anybody in the audience who might be a shipper of Dandy and Scarlet (and I keep coming back to this, but God, the word--and very concept of--"shippers" make me wish they never existed), the ending is pure torture, but for the rest of us, it's one of many reasons why Watanabe, whose work has proven that he's as far from the dark ages of Ruby-Spears as one can get, makes several of the best animated shows to come out of Japan.

According to Space Dandy's alien alphabet, the logo on Scarlet's bikini says "Elle."

"Tipi Ti on My Cappi Town" will never be added to "Whitest Block Ever" rotation on AFOS, but I sure wish it could be

Pootie Tang, a Chris Rock Show spinoff movie featuring Lance Crouther's mostly unintelligible character from the late '90s HBO show, first played to empty theaters and negative reviews in 2001, but it turned out to be a lot funnier than expected and it gets referenced by rappers on the regular (Kanye West quoted Pootie during The College Dropout). Back in February, Prince Paul, the legendary producer of so many hip-hop albums I like, including De La Soul Is Dead and A Prince Among Thieves, posted on his SoundCloud an original song from Pootie Tang I had no idea he produced, the "Tipi Ti on My Cappi Town" duet between Pootie and Missy Elliott.

At least once every month, I try to update an AFOS playlist like "The Whitest Block Ever" with new tracks, and I wish I could add "Tipi Ti on My Cappi Town" to "The Whitest Block Ever." But no physical copies of "Tipi Ti on My Cappi Town" exist (outside of I assume Prince Paul's studio). It's not even included on the out-of-print Pootie Tang soundtrack from Hollywood Records. Pootie Tang was written and directed by--and this still surprises people who aren't comedy nerds--Louis C.K., who wrote for The Chris Rock Show. The star/writer/showrunner/director/caterer of FX's Louie doesn't think much of Pootie Tang's final cut because Paramount wrested the movie away from him during post-production (and you can tell which parts of the movie were meddled with by the studio), but it's still a funny flick, thanks to moments like Prince Paul's dead-on parody of the slow jam genre.



"The Whitest Block Ever," a block of original themes or score cues from films written or directed by filmmakers of color, airs every weekday at 10am-noon on AFOS. Here's a sampler of "The Whitest Block Ever."

"The Whitest Block Ever" sampler tracklist
OPENING TITLES
1. Public Enemy, "Fight the Power" (from Do the Right Thing)
2. The Roots featuring Jaguar, "What You Want" (from The Best Man)
3. Eric B. & Rakim, "Juice (Know the Ledge)" (from Juice)
4. Adrian Younge featuring LaVan Davis, "Black Dynamite Theme"
5. Curtis Mayfield, "Freddie's Dead (instrumental version)" (from Superfly)
6. 2 Chainz and Wiz Khalifa, "We Own It (Fast & Furious)" (from Furious 6)

Car Wash
(Photo source: Rated X - Blaxploitation & Black Cinema)

7. Stanley Clarke, "Passenger 57 Main Title"
8. Robert Rodriguez's Chingon featuring Tito & Tarantula, "Machete Theme"
9. The Gap Band, "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka"
10. The Staple Singers, "Let's Do It Again"
11. Mychael Danna, "Baraat" (from Monsoon Wedding)
12. Mychael Danna featuring Bombay Jayashri, "Pi's Lullaby" (from Life of Pi)
ACT 1
13. Brian Tyler, "Ready or Not" (from Finishing the Game)
14. E.U., "Da Butt" (from School Daze)
15. Curtis Mayfield, "Give Me Your Love (Love Song)" (from Superfly)
16. Rose Royce, "I Wanna Get Next to You" (from Car Wash)
17. Adrian Younge featuring Dionne Gipson, "Shine" (from Black Dynamite)
ACT 2
18. Guy, "New Jack City"
19. Brian Tyler, "Fists of Führer" (from Finishing the Game)

Better Luck Tomorrow (Photo source: RECO CHARGES)

20. Semiautomatic, "Eat with Your Eyes" (from Better Luck Tomorrow)
21. George Shaw, "Date Chase" (from Agents of Secret Stuff)
22. Mychael Danna, "Set Your House in Order" (from Life of Pi)
23. Branford Marsalis Quartet, "Mo' Better Blues"
ACT 3
24. Ramin Djawadi, "Canceling the Apocalypse" (from Pacific Rim)
25. Bill Lee, "Wake Up Finale" (from Do the Right Thing)
26. Bill Lee, "Malcolm and Martin" (from Do the Right Thing)
END TITLES
27. Sukhwinder Singh, "Aaj Mera Jee Kardaa (Today my heart desires)" (from Monsoon Wedding)
28. Mader, "Rhumba (End Credits)" (from The Wedding Banquet)
29. Curtis Mayfield, "Superfly"
30. Blake Perlman featuring RZA, "Drift" (from Pacific Rim)
31. The Crooklyn Dodgers featuring Special Ed, Buckshot and Masta Ace, "Crooklyn"

Five reasons why IFC's Film Independent Spirit Awards are more enjoyable than the Oscars (even though this year's telecast was more tedious than previous ones)

At the 2012 Spirit Awards, the coming-of-age film Pariah, directed by Dee Rees (left) and starring Adepero Oduye (right), won the John Cassavetes Award. I haven't seen that film or The Help, but unlike The Help, at least Pariah doesn't look like Driving Miss Daisy II.

5. The booze
Without it, Patricia Clarkson's classy and terse toast to the late Bingham Ray, a champion of indie movies and a co-founder of October Films (now Focus Features), wouldn't have been possible.

4. The cursing
When someone at the Oscars curses, it's an international scandal. When someone does it at the Spirit Awards, it's just another adjective.

2012 Spirit Awards presenters Kirsten Dunst,
star of Melancholia, and Jonah Hill, star of the
thought-provoking indie movie 21 Jump Street

3. The humor
The comedic material is sharper. Examples include 2012 Spirit Awards host Seth Rogen's swipes at Brett Ratner and Chris Brown ("At the Grammys, you can literally beat the shit out of a nominee and be asked to perform twice") and Garfunkel and Oates' musical number about the downbeat material in most of the nominated films. Sure, John Waters doesn't skew younger than the 50/50 star does, but he should really be the host of these things every year. Waters killed as the Spirit Awards announcer, delivering fake teasers for segments like an "In Memoriam" tribute to people whose careers died in 2011.

2. The pompousless-ness
Unlike the audience inside the Dulcolax Theater or whatever it'll be called next year, the audience inside the Spirit Awards tent gets the jokes.

At the Oscars, why is Chris Rock a frequent humorlessness magnet? A few years before Sean Penn didn't understand Rock's joke about Jude Law, there was this:

There's Fran Lebowitz, inhaling deeply, working her way, with ironic disdain, through a carton of cigarettes, while we chat up Chris Rock.

"Chris, loved it when you called Elia Kazan a rat!"

Long stare from Mister Rock.

Finally, he explains, "It was just a joke."

Exactly!

1. The pacing
It's paced like the NBA All-Star Game (and cut together frantically too--even the obligatory "cut to a black audience member when someone's joke references a black person" shot is faster-paced). Speaking of the All-Star Game, it aired against the Oscars and was a nice sanctuary from endless Chuck Workman montages. I don't get why those montages are so beloved by Oscar telecast producers. They're basically the opening credits of every That's Hollywood! episode.