Whoever said dolls are only for little kids clearly has not pulled them out again recently and put them into all sorts of horrible and ‘grown-up’ situations. At least some people, like Seth Green and Matthew Senreich, know what fun their past toys can be. They made a whole show about it.

‘Robot Chicken,’ a show on Adult Swim, a late-night collection of animated programs on Cartoon Network, combines a mixture of stop-animation and claymation to produce one of the more disturbing things on television today. The show, having begun early last year, has quickly become a favorite among the Adult Swim lineup, and the Season One DVD is available for purchase today.

In ‘Robot Chicken,’ Green and Senreich use the power of animation to take parodies of pop culture to a level where live action never can. The pair has no qualms about pushing the boundary, crossing it and then setting it on fire. ‘Robot Chicken’ makes fun of everything from President George W. Bush, to the Smurfs to the Holocaust and trashes each of them accordingly.

Every episode is short, only 15 minutes long, but it’s not uncommon to see more than 20 difference skits take place within. Some sections last only an instant, like a little girl and her mother walking down the street when the girl jumps on a crack and her mother’s backbone breaks as she falls to the sidewalk dead. Other parts of the show are running gags that will last an episode, like a version of the show ‘Big Brother,’ where the entire cast is made up of horror movie monsters.

There really is no end to the pop culture references in ‘Robot Chicken,’ and sometimes they are so thickly layered it’s hard not to laugh at the stupidity. For example, how does the ‘Big Brother’ spoof end? Michael Myers, from the ‘Halloween’ movies, pulls off his trademark white mask to reveal none other than Austin Powers.

But not all the material is well-known. Oftentimes, ‘Robot Chicken’ spoofs things long forgotten or dated, and it’s easy to get confused if you don’t know what they are parodying. But don’t worry; wait exactly 30 seconds and the show will move to something else.

The only real problem with ‘Robot Chicken’ is that it’s often quite juvenile. At least once an episode there is a fart or poop joke; many times whole sections of it can be devoted to this type of humor. Still, it’s hard not to laugh at the immature jokes, and you can’t really blame two people who play with toys for being childish.

The DVD is made up of two discs that give all 20 episodes with commentary from both Green and Senreich. It also provides some amusing deleted scenes and animatics, including things like a parody of ‘Citizen Cane’ done with Britney Spears. There are extras like a photo gallery of the crew working, audio information and animation meetings where you get to see the creators’ thought process on how they made some of the sketches.

Some of the behind-the-scenes stuff is very interesting, like watching people make giant sets out of foam to put into tiny claymation studios. But a lot of it, like most DVD extras, are extra for a reason. Still, Green and Senreich know that the attention span of their viewers is not that long, and keep everything on the DVD short and sweet.

Overall ‘Robot Chicken’ is an amusing piece of entertainment. The DVD is worth picking up if you are a fan of pop culture, juvenile humor or if you just wanted to see what all your favorite toys are really capable of. Trust me, once watching it, you’ll never be able to look at Barbie or G.I. Joe in an innocent way again.

Published on March 26, 2006 at 12:00 pm