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.

After San Francisco 49ers fans cordially feud with New York Giants fans, KQED's Todd Inoue sounds off on a lesser-known feud between San Francisco and another city

While recently sitting in the audience at Mezzanine in San Francisco for Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's live tour to promote their hit IFC sketch comedy show Portlandia, music critic and iTunes producer Todd Inoue got enraged, not because Armisen and Brownstein didn't recite the "Put a Bird on It" sketch word-for-word, but because when Armisen asked the crowd if San Jose is part of the Bay Area, tons of audience members booed San Jose.

Todd, a former co-worker of mine, proudly hails from the 408. (He's also a guy who once graciously lent me several of his comedy albums from his CD collection to cull clips from for the now-defunct 15-minute Fistful of Soundtracks stand-up comedy clip show Morning Becomes Dyspeptic.) In an amusing piece he wrote and recorded for KQED-FM, Todd defends the possible future home turf of the Niners and bashes the bougie way San Franciscans like the haters at Mezzanine belittle San Ho as if the capital of Silicon Valley, which he says wallops San Francisco in the ramen and taco departments, were their runty little brother. (Even people outside the Bay have taken notice of San Franciscan snobbiness. Donal Logue, the former star of my favorite cancelled 2010 show Terriers, once tweeted that San Francisco is "A beautiful, erudite, dirty and yet phenomenally snobby city in a provincial way--maybe mostly people who just moved there.")

Ironically, the snobby anti-SJ vitriol took place at the road show tie-in to a TV series that mocks that kind of snobby attitude through the smug foodies, merchants, intellectuals, technophiles, trend-seekers and hipsters Armisen and Brownstein portray each week.

"So all you hipster dorks who dump on the 408. I'm talking to you," Todd says. "Yes, you, sitting in your wi-fi-enabled shuttle commuting from Hayes Valley to your Silicon Valley tech job. The same job that pays your bills, that allows you to listen to this program, ironically, on your Cupertino-invented laptop or iPod."

Unlike Todd, I've had an often miserable time living in the South Bay, and I'm sometimes itching to leave, but I don't like all this smug hating on SJ either (heh, "your Cupertino-invented laptop"). SJ is like a family member whom you've had beefs with, but when you see outsiders start to gang up on Jose, you get pissed off and feel like leaping right to Jose's defense. It's like "Hey, you don't get to hate on Jose. Yeah, he's always stealing my cash and he always gives the shittiest Christmas gifts, but only people who have known Jose for a long time get to put him in his place, so fuck off."

Sometimes, I feel like neither city is superior to the other, and I like them both equally. To borrow an expression I once learned from Todd, all this elitism and beefing is so Fremont.

Time to ID another existing song that comedy nerds must be curious about (this time, it's the Portlandia theme)

Portlandia is the amusing and mostly improvised IFC sketch comedy show created by drummer-turned-SNL star Fred Armisen and former Sleater-Kinney frontwoman Carrie Brownstein and starring the duo as various characters in Brownstein's current hometown of Portland, Oregon, the tweeness capital of the world. The show returns this Friday for a second season full of more jabs at hipsters, more of Armisen and Brownstein's fellow musicians appearing in sketches a la first-season guest star Aimee Mann and more interesting-looking footage of Portland, where the show is filmed on location.

A gorgeously shot montage of the sights and real faces of Portland (none of those faces are Armisen's or Brownstein's during this part of the show), the Portlandia opening title sequence is one of TV's most evocative titles. That's not surprising--Portlandia is a Broadway Video joint, and Lorne Michaels' production company has a nasty habit of giving its sketch shows (from SNL to Kids in the Hall) the most stylish shot-in-the-streets opening titles. But what's that hypnotic tune during the Portlandia titles?

The Portlandia theme that viewers have been pestering IFC about since the show's first season is the 2009 track "Feel It All Around" by chillwave genre pioneer Washed Out, a.k.a. Ernest Greene.