Inexplicable TV Review: The genius of Robot Chicken

Hey, did you realize that Robot Chicken is now in its fifth season? I didn't either really, until I was poking around for information about a specific skit on the Internetz.

I'm talking about "Table Be Round", a song that features a Sir Mix-A-Lot clone Sir Mix-A-Lot rapping about the reasons why King Arthur needed to switch from a conventional, rectangular table to a round table. In many ways, the song is an example of Robot Chicken at its best - A flippant merging of nerdy current junk pop culture (Sir Mix-A-Lot) and something "classic" nerdy pop culture (Sir Arthur).

Robot Chicken is pretty undecipherable unless you know something about 1970s to 2000s pop culture. Heck, they have two extra-long episodes devoted to just Star Wars, which makes the nerd in me rejoice. (My favorite part from those episodes? George Lucas trying to escape from ravenous fans.) Pretty much any significant comic or cartoon character from the 1980s and 1990s - Skeletor, Cobra Commander, the Smurfs, Thundercats, He-Man, Aquaman - has been on the show.

Also wonderful is the fact that Seth Green is the guy behind it all. Between his role as Chris on Family Guy and his heavy involvement in Robot Chicken, I guess he has quite the interest in animation. He obviously remains a popular guy with his former co-stars, since the voice talent they've used on the show is a vertifable who's who of 1990s stars - Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Rachel Leigh Cook and even stars with just two names have been on the show frequently. (My favorite from this category? Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper, of course.)

Note: My plan to queue up some Baggage posts ran into some unfortunate problems, so I'm doing this on the fly instead. Sorry! I'm actually typing this during the train ride to New York City, which is a pretty sweet usage of technology, if I do say so myself.

Random make-up linkage

I don't really know why my entries aren't posting properly lately. If I had to guess, I would say gremlins, since they ask pesky creatures. Ruining movie openings, eating after midnights, ripping up wings of airplanes... You just can't trust the filthy vermin.

Anyway, as a result, I'll just link to a WWTDD story about my gal Jennifer Love Hewitt. Now, if she was actually in Wonder Woman, it would be the first time I actually watched something with Jennifer Love Hewitt in it. I didn't watch Party of Five, I don't watch The Ghost Whisperer, and I've never seen any of her horrible movies or listened to any of her music.

But... Beyond the incredible looks, she just strikes me as a nice person. She's old enough that she seems to have missed the "hey let's become big huge sluts!" generation of Hollywood, and although I'm still upset that she let Jamie Kennedy toss it into her, it does show that she's not that hung up on looks.

Around The Dial: Archer gets good ratings, Gervais excels with the Globes and JLH has bedazzled junk

Back in the day, there was this show called Frisky Dingo. And by "back in the day," what I really mean is January 2009, when it and a spin-off show, The Xtacles, was formally canceled. Anyway, it was a wacky show that featured the evil villain Killface, who resembled a white-skinned standing crocodile, battling Xander Crews, a buffoonish billionaire with the alter-ego of... Awesome X!

Like most of the shows on Adult Swim, it was pretty wacky and funny. I considered it like a more over-the-top version of The Venture Bros., since both shows loved to lampoon the conventions of their genre. Dingo was by the same guys who did Sealab 2021, one of the four original shows on Adult Swim, and it features the same deadpan humor.

This brings me to present day, and the show Archer, which is done by the same guys. Actually, in many ways, it seems like a clone of Frisky Dingo. The main difference is the theme - It merely transposes Xander Crews from a superhero to Archer, a secret agent in an incompetent bureaucracy. Only two episodes have aired so far on FX - it is currently in the time slot of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - but they have shown incredible promise. I'm hoping the show has a good future, and the first articles out about it have noted that it has done surprisingly well in the ratings.

In other television news...

- I watched the Golden Globes last night, and I wasn't really that impressed, outside of all the older celebrities who are still foxy as all heck. I did think that Ricky Gervais did an incredible job hosting, and some of his jokes were just savage. He got in the obligatory shots at NBC and Jay Leno, but his best burn was definitely on Mel Gibson, making a reference to his drunken driving arrest right before he presented an award.

The other amusing part of the broadcast was how drunk some celebrities clearly were. I'm referring mostly to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who looked so drunk-red that it seemed like she was wearing a clown nose, and Felicity Huffman, who repeatedly stumbled over simple teleprompter lines. Also, I was really glad that Glee managed to take home an award, and the cast looked great, too. And as Billy Crystal would say, if you look great, then you must feel great.

- Jennifer Love Hewitt apparently has been into "vajazzeling" her vagine. I don't really think it adds anything to her, but hey, I'm still a fan. She was one of my earliest crushes, along with Melissa Joan Hart.

The Frisky Dingo picture at the top is from this blog. Jen is from this site.

Welcome (back) to the machine

The other day I wrote a post about some of the inside workings of journalism, because I figured I wouldn't ever get another journalism job again. Uh, whoops!

I recently interviewed for, auditioned for (wrote a few pieces) and got a 30-hour per week writing job with The Westerly Sun, a local daily. I'm pretty psyched about it, because the extra money will enable me to move out of my parent's house eventually, and they have seemed pretty cool about me working other jobs (driving range, Blast, Gamezebo) in order to make ends meet, since they're only part-time. As a result, I think I'll still have time to update this blog and what not.

And also, since I got this journalism job once I thought I wouldn't get another one and wrote it... Then I really think there is no chance I'll date Jennifer Love Hewitt. That ship has definitely sailed as well, and there is no way that she'll dump Jamie Kennedy and call me out of the blue.