Tuesday 23 January 2018

Robot Chicken, Season 5 (2010)



The crude, anarchic and rapid-fire sketch format of Robot Chicken inevitably means that there will be some segments that don't work for the audience.  Which those segments are will of course vary from viewer to viewer.  I for instance don't find scatological humour all that amusing but from how often the show goes there, I can only assume that a significant portion of their audience considers poop to be seriously funny stuff.

More problematic than the toilet humour, though, are the show's occasional slips into treating homosexuality or transgender people as intrinsically laughable.  Yes, you can argue that the show lampoons everyone, but I much prefer it when they are taking swings at the privileged and powerful, you know?

Or punching the fictional, since this is Robot Chicken, and that means a lot of gags at the expense of early 80s cartoons, comic books, and other media properties.  In this season, for instance, you'll get to see what happens when financial troubles force Skeletor to sublet part of Snake Mountain, or what happens when you mash together Avatar and The Smurfs (it's ten times as entertaining as the James Cameron movie, that's for sure).  You'll also get an uncommonly long sketch that answers a question 100 episodes in the making: "what happens if the titular chicken ever gets free?"

Robot Chicken is an imperfect show, sometimes taking the easy way out on its gags.  And other times, it's so hilariously inappropriate and off the wall, that you'll wonder how an idea that crazy and wrong ever even occurred to them, and what kind of person it makes you that you're laughing like a drain at it.

Or is that just me?

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