5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (02/13/2013): Bravest Warriors, Archer, Bob's Burgers, Robot Chicken and American Dad

"If business wasn't so awful lately, I'd take us to the plastic surgeon and get ourselves chins."

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.

I loved Cheryl/Carol's blink-and-you'll-miss-hearing-it Blade Runner reference on Archer a couple of weeks ago, and now, another animated series references the 1982 cyberpunk classic in equally amusing ways. "Cereal Master," the latest webisode of Bravest Warriors, the Pendleton Ward-created sci-fi comedy series on Frederator Studios' Cartoon Hangover YouTube channel, spoofs the film's "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies!" blimp ad.

Also, the webisode takes place mostly at a gorgeously lit Martian cereal bar, which webisode writer/director Breehn Burns based on the noodle bar where Edward James Olmos memorably told Harrison Ford, "Lófaszt, nehogy már. Te vagy a Blade... Blade Runner." (Basically, he said, "Bullshit, Deckard. Now here's where I awkwardly insert the film's title into our conversation. You're the Blade... Blade Runner.")


Whatever happened to cereal bars anyway? I thought they were going to be the next big thing. In whatever century Bravest Warriors takes place in, cereal bars are found in more than just college cafeterias, animation studio cafeterias, fancy New York hotels or markets like Fresno and are apparently as commonplace as sushi bars. At the cereal bar in "Cereal Master," customers get to enjoy cereals from all over the universe, like a rare bowl of "Moon-Frosted Double Dolphin Smacks," which Bravest Warriors leader Chris (Alex Walsh) wants to surprise Beth (Liliana Mumy), the fellow Warrior he's been smitten with since childhood, with on the 10th "Jinx-iversary" of the first time Beth beat Chris at a game of Jinx. According to the Martian rules of Jinx, Chris isn't allowed to speak until he gets Beth whatever she wants, and 10 years ago, that something was a bowl of those Smacks. I take it that Beth's favorite cereal is the Fruit Brute of Bravest Warriors' future.

Chris requests to the Cereal Master (Maria Bamford) that she slip into his order some "seahorse dreams," an ingredient that the alien chef says she doesn't include in Smacks anymore and is literally a cloud full of G-rated sex dreams a male seahorse is having while asleep in a bottle (the seahorse is pining for a girl seahorse who, in his fantasies, can't get enough of his "brood pouch," much like how Chris pines for Beth). The Cereal Master is, of course, like the Soup Nazi and the Tony Shalhoub chef character from Big Night before her, a tortured artist. But instead of taking umbrage at Chris' insistence that Beth's cereal should come with seahorse dreams like how the Soup Nazi or the Shalhoub character would react if a customer tried to interfere with their culinary work of art, the Cereal Master weeps and assumes that her cooking has become substandard.

While the Cereal Master is looking away and too busy crying over her daddy issues, Chris, without completely realizing it, uses telekinesis to fine-tune his order. It's one of the powers he'll someday hone when he becomes a Jedi-like being known as an Emotion Lord, a callback to earlier webisodes where the Warriors were visited by Chris' future Emotion Lord self, who's voiced by Burns. (Why haven't those encounters between the two Chrises caused paradoxes like in the last Bravest Warriors episode, which was all about the danger of paradoxes? Are the Emotion Lords such powerful time-travelling beings that they're immune to the destructive effects of paradoxes?) Chris telekinetically opens the chef's bottle of seahorse dreams (which is perched on her shelf even though she doesn't use it anymore) and gets the bottle to pour its contents into Beth's cereal. The Cereal Master notices what Chris did and freaks out, and a chase through different Quantum Doorgate portals (haphazardly activated by an asleep Wallow) ensues.

If you think the 11-minute length of each Adventure Time short isn't enough time to be spent in a fully realized universe like the Land of Ooo, then the five minutes that Bravest Warriors has chosen for its webisode length can be frustrating. Due to those five minutes, this show rushes through its stories even more so than Adventure Time sometimes does, and in "Cereal Master," the solution Chris comes up with to pacify the chef is glossed over so quickly I immediately forgot how he got her to stop chasing him and I had to rewatch the chase the next day to jog my memory.

Despite the show's pacing issues, the Bravest Warriors universe looks to be as interesting and rich as Adventure Time's, and I'm eager to see more material about the Warriors' connections to the Emotion Lords. Elderly Chris' mentorship of his teen self reminds me of the Crewman Daniels nonsense from Enterprise, except it doesn't cause me to change the channel. On the comedic side, Bravest Warriors has fun with running gags like the uglification of Beth, which "Cereal Master" revisits with a goofy variation on the joke from "Gas Powered Stick" that Chris loves her no matter how janky she may look. This time, the show briefly imagines Beth as a walrus. Sometimes, a bowl of Moon-Frosted Double Dolphin Smacks with seahorse dreams is worth going through hell for just to put a smile on the puffy face of your walrus.

***

"Midnight Ron" may not be the cleverest Archer installment, and the show's terrific ensemble of ISIS characters outside of Archer and Malory may have a lot less screen time in this story, but the episode proves that the hiring of Ron Leibman as Archer's car dealership magnate stepdad is as great a casting move as last season's hiring of Burt Reynolds, Archer's favorite movie star, as himself. The veteran character actor (and husband of Archer regular Jessica Walter) excels at playing live wires, whether they're ornery and excitable like the D.A. in Night Falls on Manhattan or laid-back and a little less spry like Ron Cadillac, née Ron Kazinsky ("C'mon, run like you're younger!," barks Archer to Ron during a chase scene).

Archer and Ron are forced to rely on each other to fend off both gangsters and cross-dressing redneck truckers and find their way back from Montreal to Manhattan. During the course of their road movie-style hijinks, Ron unveils his backstory to Archer, and of course, he turns out to have been mob-connected. But instead of a reference to The Hot Rock like I had hoped, "Midnight Ron" does a brief riff on Once Upon a Time in America, which Leibman didn't star in, though it's nice to see that particular Sergio Leone movie get referenced instead of the same two Leone movies that always get referenced (Leone wasn't just Eastwood westerns, y'all).

"Midnight Ron" also highlights something I love about Archer: the incongruity of referencing Master P (or The Human Centipede) in a universe where the ISIS employees rock mid-'60s hairdos, mid-'80s Mac XLs are their office computers and the Cold War still rages on. (Archer creator Adam Reed once described the show's universe as "sort of intentionally ill-defined.") I get a kick out of every time Archer brings up the No Limit rapper/entrepreneur in this episode because he's such an unlikely artist for a '60s Bond-style spy to be aware of (like when Ron finds out from Archer that Malory thinks he's a boring husband, and Archer says, "Well, not after you tell her you stole a Sherman tank, Master P"). Secret agents may not be Beatles fans, but they love them some N'awlins rap.

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.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (12/26/2012): The best episodes of 2012 (part 1)

The helmeted villain with no name attempts to trim Mike's bangs.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. There will be no new columns this week and next week due to the holidays and the lack of first-run programming (only Tron: Uprising and Motorcity are first-run because Disney XD chose to burn off the rest of their episodes over the holidays). In a special year-end edition of "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," here are previous reviews of five of my favorite non-Adult Swim cable cartoon episodes from May to December 2012.

Motorcity, "Power Trip" (from May 11, 2012)

Motorcity, the only one out of the five cartoons this week that's not based on a superhero comic for a change, is only two episodes in, and this unlikely collabo between Disney and the not-so-family-friendly Titmouse animation studio (of Metalocalypse and Freaknik: The Musical fame) is already the most inventive and thrilling of the five. It's not a superhero show, yet it's dealing with questions about heroism (and even activism) more interestingly than most cartoons that are actual superhero shows.

In Motorcity's future setting, the socio-economical punching bag that is Detroit has been divided by greedy developer Abraham Kane (Batman: The Animated Series and Metalocalypse vocal MVP Mark Hamill) into two sections, the sparkling-clean, EPCOT-like Detroit Deluxe for the city's most affluent inhabitants and Motorcity, a subterranean ghetto that Kane is plotting to completely bulldoze. Teenage gearhead Mike Chilton (Reid Scott, currently appearing on HBO's Veep as the conceited douche on VP Selina Meyer's staff) has banded together with cowardly hacker and best friend Chuck (Nate Torrence), industrial spy Julie (Kate Micucci) and mechanics Dutch (Kel Mitchell), Texas (Jess Harnell) and Goat Jacob (Brian Doyle-Murray) to prevent Kane and his Shockbots from wiping out Motorcity. These tech-savvy rebels call themselves the Burners. If an older Phineas and Ferb joined Dominic Toretto's crew from the Fast and the Furious movies and then were all forced to live in a dystopic ghetto of the future, it would look something like the Burners.

To borrow a line from the infamous Super Bowl XLVI Chrysler ad where Clint Eastwood big-upped the Detroit auto industry, now Motorcity is fighting again. But will Kane succeed in turning the Burners and the people of Motorcity against Mike, who, like Jacob, used to work for KaneCo? Will the fog, division, discord and blame make it hard for the Burners to see what lies ahead?

Even though Motorcity must have been created by Titmouse honcho Chris Prynoski long before the Occupy movement began (and judging from how much work Titmouse put into making the show's visuals look amazing, it had have to been created that long ago) and Prynoski is more concerned with high-octane action than political allegory, it's hard to ignore how similar the Burners' opposition to Kane is to the struggles of us 99 Percenters. It's about time Occupy protesters got an animated show they can root for and embrace--and of course, watch while being camped out between protests, most likely through Burners-style illegal means that would make Disney's blood boil.

Speaking of Disney, how the hell did a show with a clear disdain for EPCOT-like things manage to get Disney's approval and make it on to a Disney-owned channel?

"When I asked Prynoski about this [satirical] aspect of Motorcity," wrote Jim Hill in his article about Motorcity, "all Chris could do in response was laugh and then say 'I don't think I'm allowed to comment on that. But I will say that you're a very perceptive fellow.'"

For a long time, I found it difficult to get over Cartoon Network's cancellation of the Titmouse-produced Megas XLR, which, like Motorcity, had a bunch of teenage gearheads as the heroes (instead of souped-up hot rods, their ride was a giant robot from the future). I think I'm finally over it. Motorcity is a great substitute, and in some ways, it's an even better show. Sure, there aren't as many amusing pop culture reference gags on Motorcity as there were on Megas XLR, which, for instance, regularly ridiculed MTV for cancelling the Titmouse cult favorite Downtown by destroying a "PopTV" sign in every episode (Roth, a robot named after car customizer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, and a shout-out to Admiral Ackbar's "It's a trap!" line from Hamill's Star Wars past are as reference-y as Motorcity gets). But the Burners are more interesting characters (I especially enjoyed the matter-of-fact way the "Battle for Motorcity" premiere episode revealed that Julie is Kane's daughter) and more fallible heroes than Megas XLR's Coop, who always triumphed over the Glorft at the end of each episode despite leveling most of New Jersey in the process. On Megas XLR, the destruction of Jersey was a running gag, but on Motorcity, the impact the Burners' battles against Kane have on the fragile ghetto they call home is treated a little more seriously.

This week's "Power Trip" episode, scripted by Megas XLR co-creator George Krstic, features a great scene where the Burners brainstorm how to break into the KaneCo Tower and realize why each of their ideas would suck donkey balls. In that comedic scene and in later moments where characters debate over weaponizing an unstable KaneCo energy source, "Power Trip" deals with how heroism sometimes requires compromise, but without getting preachy about it. Mike gets a KaneCo R&D scientist (Jim Cummings) to steal from Kane an energy core, which would result in Kane's evil empire being shut down once and for all. But even though the energy core is too unstable and dangerous for the Burners to keep around in Motorcity, Mike insists on using it as a weapon, and his stance is met with opposition by Chuck and the scientist. The series isn't afraid to show that while Mike is a great leader, he's also an adrenaline junkie, and his recklessness can be a liability for the people he wants to protect.

In "Battle for Motorcity," the constantly whiny Chuck, who's so squeamish he makes Shaggy from Scooby-Doo look macho, quickly became the show's most grating character. He's still a whiny crybaby in "Power Trip," but luckily, this second episode gives Chuck more to do than just whine, squeal and activate his ejector seat, and in the scenes where the characters express their hesitancy over handling the energy core, we see why Mike values Chuck as the conscience of the group and why Mike needs him to keep him in check (over on Tumblr, several Motorcity fans are already shipping Mike and Chuck as a gay couple, and I wouldn't be surprised if some female viewer somewhere is currently hard at work on her Mike/Chuck slashfic).

(Photo source: People of MotorCity)

I'm making Motorcity sound like a serious show, but it's far from it. It's as wild a ride as that rollercoaster Phineas and Ferb built in their backyard. Disney and Titmouse may turn out to be the most worthwhile partnership between The Mouse and another animation studio since Disney and some little computer graphics company from the Bay Area.

***

Motorcity, "Vendetta" (from June 19, 2012)

Motorcity introduces yet another adversary for the Burners during another solid episode of this finely crafted cartoon, "Vendetta." This time, it's a nameless, red muscle car-driving warrior (Eric Ladin, just recently killed off on The Killing) in a spiked helmet who looks like a rejected Tron: Uprising baddie and is referred to in the end credits only as "Red"--although this mystery man's beef is mainly with Burners leader Mike Chilton. On the one-year anniversary of the day Mike severed ties with Abraham Kane, Red emerges from out of nowhere to take revenge on Mike and eliminate him.

In juicy flashbacks that finally explain what Mike did when he was a KaneCo employee, we learn that he was a cadet in Kane's army of soldiers known as the Ultra Elites. The fact that a businessman assembled an army to guard him and do his dirty work shows how psychotic this particular businessman is.

At the height of Donald Trump's still-continuing racist nonsense about President Obama, Lewis Black did a hilarious Daily Show "Back in Black" segment where he joked that he wants Trump to be the next president because America needs to be run by someone as insane as Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong Il. Kane is like a mash-up of Trump's Third World dictator-style craziness and Steve Jobs' technological genius, his dickish treatment of his Apple colleagues and his love of the color white--in the wardrobe and burly body of a douchey gym manager.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (06/26/2012): Motorcity, The Legend of Korra, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Avengers and Adventure Time

"Oh please, Mike, don't drag me to see The Expendables 2! Stallone's plastic surgery scares me!" (Photo source: wait, was that slutty?)

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim/Boondocks/Venture Bros. comfort zone. I've never seen most of these shows before. Nine or 10 weeks ago, before I started "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," if I were asked if I watched The Legend of Korra, I would have said, "What's that? A reality show about Cat Cora?" The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

Two weeks ago, Disney XD accidentally leaked on iTunes a different Motorcity episode from the one that premiered that week ("Vendetta"). The channel corrected its mistake and immediately deleted from iTunes the incorrect episode, which I bought and before its removal, I had watched, thinking it was the episode that premiered on Disney XD the night before because DirecTV was temporarily inaccessible at my apartment that week. "Fearless" centers on the cowardice of Chuck, the conscience of the Burners team, as well as Mike's constantly whimpering hacker best friend, and I won't fully discuss "Fearless" until after Disney XD airs it, out of respect for the Disney/Titmouse show's staff, who have been reading this blog (thanks for the retweets!). Motorcity fans on Tumblr who caught "Fearless" on iTunes are also refraining from spoiling the episode for the same reason.

Disney XD is apparently airing episodes out of order on broadcast TV as well. Motorcity isn't a serialized show, but sometimes, the reshuffled episode order results in inconsistencies in character development like in the latest episode, "Blond Thunder." It was clearly produced before "Vendetta" because Mike is far less familiar with--and a little more irritated about--the quirks of the Duke of Detroit in "Blond Thunder" than in "Vendetta." Mike accidentally pisses off the Duke again, and this time, it's over car parts the Duke won't allow Mike to take from his junkyards without his permission.

(Photo source: wait, was that slutty?)

Chuck makes a remark in front of the Duke where he obliquely refers to his own lousy driving--without spilling to the rest of the team that he doesn't know how to drive at all, which he's been trying to keep secret--and the remark gets misinterpreted by the vain Duke as an insult about him. Mike sticks up for his best friend when it appears as if the Duke is about to threaten the cowardly hacker and boasts that Chuck can outrace any of the Duke's limo drivers, and the dick-measuring contest between Mike and the Duke ends up becoming a best-of-three racing competition between Chuck and the Duke's drivers on the gangster's raceway.

If Chuck loses, Mike will hand over his cherished car Mutt to the Duke. If Chuck wins, the Burners get unlimited access to the Duke's junkyards. There's one problem: Chuck doesn't know how to drive, which he finally reveals to Mike, who promises to keep it a secret from the other Burners, and Chuck has only three days until the race to brush up on his driving.

Cars are outlawed in future Detroit, so Chuck's inability to drive is a common thing in the city, but he'd rather keep it a secret from his racer friends because he doesn't want to be ridiculed and ostracized by them, especially Texas, whom Chuck doesn't specifically mention. The jumpsuited and cocky Burner doesn't think much of Chuck, as we've seen in one of Texas' amusing fantasy sequences early in the show's run, and he'd probably want Chuck thrown off the team if he found out.

Texas' dislike of Chuck is understandable. He can be a grating character when his Cringer-from-He-Man-style mewling is turned up to 11 like in "Blond Thunder." At one point while training Chuck for the race, Mike asks him, "Is screaming really necessary?," and he responds with "It's my process!!" ("Fearless" also deals with Chuck's confidence issues but is a little more enjoyable than "Blond Thunder" because his whimpering is kept to a minimum, for reasons I can't wait to discuss when "Fearless" finally airs.)

After the Warriors-style hijinks of "The Duke of Detroit" and the intriguing pathos of "Vendetta," not much is at stake in "Blond Thunder," other than Mutt. But even when it's a low-stakes episode of Motorcity, the series never stops being visually inventive. "Blond Thunder" opens with a wonderful visual gag where a race that appears to be taking place on the Burners' test track turns out to be an R/C car race inside Jacob's kitchen. The competitions against the Duke's drivers may be a nightmare for Chuck, but for the rest of us, they're a stunningly animated feast for the eyes, like all the other action sequences on this show (they're not really as incomprehensible as some viewers have complained). Every cel on Motorcity is such a gorgeous work of art that I like to stare at one for a minute or two, via vidcap or freeze-frame. Let's do that now. I'll wait.

(Photo source: wait, was that slutty?)

(Photo source: Clarke Snyder)

(Photo source: wait, was that slutty?)

***

I never understood why Racebending.com, a group of Asian American fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender that I first encountered face-to-face while attending a convention to take part in promoting the first Secret Identities graphic novel, was so protective of the original show during its protest of M. Night Shyamalan's much-maligned live-action adaptation and its whitewashed cast of heroes. The animated saga about superpowered martial arts dynamos who can control or "bend" either water, earth, fire, or air--the most powerful of these "benders" is known as the Avatar--always looked to me like another Firefly. In other words, it's another sci-fi or fantasy show set in an Asian milieu but with no major Asian characters, which makes about as much sense as Woody Allen's frequently black people-free vision of New York. So I never cared for the A:TLA franchise, which has been scoring huge ratings on Nickelodeon in its current incarnation, the sequel series The Legend of Korra.

Because of Korra's popularity, I've decided to cover its two-part season finale, "Skeletons in the Closet/Endgame," which meant I had to acquaint myself with the show. I went back and caught Korra's ninth and 10th episodes before viewing the finale and was surprised to discover that Dante Basco was voicing a descendant of a heroic character he played on A:TLA and a Korra character was named after Mako as a shout-out by creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko to the legendary actor, who worked on A:TLA before he died. So both A:TLA and Korra aren't completely colorless, although it's too bad the pro-bending athlete character who inherited Mako's name (and is voiced by Bud Bundy, of all people) is such an uninteresting douche. The title character (Janet Varney), a hotheaded and immature yet somehow still-likable heroine, deserves a better love interest.

(Photo source: lagunamov)

In Korra's least interesting storyline, Mako is dating Asami Sato (Seychelle Gabriel from Shyamalan's Last Airbender), a non-bender who's defied her anti-bender industrialist father (Daniel Dae Kim) and allied herself with benders like Mako and Korra, but the jock is really in love with Korra and doing a crappy job hiding his feelings for the current Avatar. A Motorcity fan on Tumblr praised the Disney/Titmouse cartoon (which also happens to have Korra voice director Andrea Romano on its crew) because "it’s an action/adventure series that does not go for cheap shipping drama. *coughcoughKorracoughcoughThundercatscoughcough*" The Korra/Mako/Asami triangle and the rushed last few minutes are the only flaws in an otherwise thrilling finale. "Skeletons in the Closet/Endgame" has Korra and Mako going after Amon (Steve Blum), the masked leader of the Equalists, a group of anti-bender extremists who are violently occupying Republic City, the home of Korra's airbending teacher Tenzin (J.K. Simmons, in a huge departure from his swastika days as Schillinger on Oz).

One of the most enjoyable touches that DiMartino and Konietzko have added to Korra to distinguish it from A:TLA is the 1920s steampunk setting, which has resulted in rousing action sequences that pit the benders against machines, like the "Endgame" sequence in which Basco's General Iroh faces off against the Equalists' biplanes. Iroh's takedown of the pilots is badass even though it rehashes the old '80s G.I. Joe copout of showing defeated pilots parachuting to safety instead of falling or crashing to their deaths. (In the early '90s, Batman: The Animated Series temporarily carried on G.I. Joe's tradition of avoiding death with its scenes of thugs falling from Gotham City architecture and landing safely in the sea or on some sort of cushion, although by the time of B:TAS' "Off Balance" episode, the producers must have stopped caring about pleasing Fox's Standards & Practices and snuck in a terrorist double-suicide in "Off Balance.")