This holiday premiere season, there’s one question probably not on your mind: is It’s Complicated significantly less stupid than its title, trailer, posters and tagline (“Divorced… with benefits”)? The answer, I barely care to inform you, is yes, thanks to careful direction and a cast more full of ringers than a United States Olympic basketball team. Writer-director Nancy Meyers, also of Something’s Gotta Give, acquits herself admirably in her apparent specialty of deconstructing ’70s movie stars by way of old-people romance. But it’s doubtful that she would have succeeded without the fine work of Alec Baldwin, Meryl Streep and Steve Martin, who play out a romance not only more convincing, not only funnier, but actually sexier than the young couples we’re supposed to enjoy watching generally manage. Unfortunately, Meyers never pushes the story far enough to make the strong statement about post-modern love that she clearly wanted to make.

It just looks so stupid, just so unbelievably stupid.

It shouldn’t be a spoiler that It’s Complicated has a happy ending, which in Hollywood means that the characters arrange themselves algorithmically into a neat grid of mutual obligation that takes into account strict monogamy, absolute no-homo for anyone in a leading role, loyalty to biological offspring, and devotion to True Love. In other words, by the end Meyers takes care to banish everything that the phrase “it’s complicated” implies. And the beginning involves no romance or comedy to speak of, establishing character and setting at the sluggish pace of a writer without faith in the audience or in her own abilities. But the middle zips, it crackles, it sizzles, it follows all the clichés about stories that don’t follow clichés. The middle section is so exciting, the MPAA gave it an R rating, for a couple of tame sex-having and pot-smoking scenes with no swearing and no violence. It’s obvious what disturbed the MPAA: this movie makes love and sex (and drugs) seem fun. Also dirty, illicit, confusing. Complicated, even. Hell, people enjoy food in this movie more than they enjoy love in most “romantic comedies,” which gives it real comic and romantic stakes.

Meryl Streep is seriously a witch, she has no wrinkles in this movie.

Most of the credit belongs to Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep. It’s Complicated is really a romantic comedy between the two of them, with Steve Martin getting far less screen time than he deserves. Baldwin and Streep play a long-divorced couple who hook up without telling their kids or Baldwin’s new young wife. They play out a naughty but surprisingly tender affair, expertly portraying a couple unsure of how they feel or what they want from each other. Baldwin plays a slightly warmer variation of his character from 30Rock, at once too smug and too needy for his own good. He has an inimitable way of playing characters who always act like they know what they’re doing despite being at the mercy of emotions they don’t understand. Streep, though she arguably doesn’t need to star in any more movies named after Facebook statuses, proves herself once again a master of comedy. At several points in this movie she summons a laugh by an infinitesimal movement of one or two cheek muscles. She seems to only pronounce her lines as a courtesy to the other actors. Maybe it doesn’t matter that she’s not doing Shakespeare, since this woman could make Shakespeare out of garbage. Seriously, though, I don’t know what Meryl Streep’s doing in this movie.

I do know exactly what Steve Martin’s doing in this movie: penance. After a decade of mostly depressing career choices, Steve Martin’s landed his first half-decent role in years: a nebbishy architect who competes for Streep’s affections. He appears too late in the movie, and fights too halfheartedly for Streep, to make his role really worthy of his talent, but that’s mostly the script’s fault. He does creak at the joints, fidgeting as if he not only hadn’t starred in, but hadn’t seen a decent comedy in years. But every so often he seems to discover where he is and why he’s there, and deliver a line with the timing and flair that used to seem effortless for him. For the first time since Shopgirl, Steve Martin has a clear chance at a comeback, and a clear chance to blow it.

Will you be my It's Complicated, Johnny Office?

The real scene-stealer in this movie is Jon Krasinski, whose non-The Office career is one of the most interesting mixes of mainstream ambition and indie pretension in Hollywood today. His character, the boyfriend of one of Baldwin and Streep’s three daughters, has no real reason to be anywhere in this movie, but he shows up everywhere. He seems to have no problem with playing support, while exuding enough charm to be a star. He livens up the otherwise flat performances of the kids (including Weeds’s Hunter Parrish), serves as a straight man to the old-timers (whose performances are much less self-aware) and brings the action to a halt whenever he senses that the audience needs a break. Not only does Krasinski demonstrate his skill, honed by years on The Office, at ensemble playing, he also makes the best case yet that he should be a star.

It’s refreshing to see a rom-com that’s not a successful nullity but a failed classic. But It’s Complicated fails all too clearly: at pacing, at balance among the cast, at making a statement, and sometimes just at humor. Still, anyone who’s ever seen a good romantic comedy should welcome a challenge to the stilted and pseudo-pornographic state of the industry. For a movie I expected not to like at all, It’s Complicated is a wonder.

Hey, I don’t know if the culture at large has waved this fact in your face like a greasy towel or anything, but it’s pretty close to Christmas. So instead of making the usual lame jokes about consumerism being equated with patriotism or Santa Claus indulging in some uncharacteristic vice or some such thing, I thought I’d offer something practical and theme-appropriate. I proudly present the Cartoon Graveyard Guide to Christmas Cartoons That Won’t Waste Your Time.

Keep in mind, I’ll be working under the conceit that you’re marathoning all these shows at once, because hey, you’re reading the Sqlog, it’s not like you have serious demands on your time. So continue isolating yourself from friends and family with a misplaced sense of intellectual superiority and let the Christmas spirit fill your heart instead of distilled spirits filling your stomach.

Now, you’re going to want to ease yourself into this. Presumably you’ve had enough Christmas stuffed down your craw for the past month, and you’ll need to trick your brain into actually wanting to see something Yuletidey. So I’d start with the Justice League Christmas Special. Superhero action is the perfect way to distract yourself from the Christmas stuff, and this one has plenty of variety: bar brawls, Martian carols, and best of all, the Ultra-Humanite. Because in my book, everything’s better with huge, superintelligent albino gorillas who act like Sideshow Bob. Oh, who am I kidding, I just want to talk about how much that show ruled.

Next, a double feature from one of the most reliable laugh delivery devices of the last decade: both Futurama Xmas episodes, back to back. The first establishes one of the show’s masterstrokes and the first truly original Christmas story in years: Santa Claus as unstoppable killing machine. The second ups the ante considerably, with almost none of the sentimentality and much more carnage, and adding a cheery Xmas song about Fry, Bender and Leela exploiting the hell out of a bunch of elves. Cynical humor about the depressing logical endpoint of the Christmas tradition takes the edge off the season nicely. Plus there’s Kwanzaabot!

(Incidentally, in the course of finding this song I discovered that there appear to be numerous videos on YouTube of the genre “combine Futurama song with anime characters.” This is what the Internet has done to us.)

Now that you’re thinking that Christmas maybe isn’t so annoying after all, why not go traditional and pop in a Rankin-Bass Christmas special. Any one will do, but I’d stop with one unless you’re a huge fan of the studio. Hokey old stop-motion is charming as hell, but seeing several in quick succession does the series no favors. A warning: stick to the classics on this one. Sure, picking the obscurer entries might give you some kind of weird Christmas version of hipster cred, and everyone loves the Heat Miser in theory, but can you even name the cartoon he was in? Didn’t think so. The Rankin-Bass classics are classics for a reason. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is the most famous (and apparently the very first TV Christmas cartoon), but I’d go with Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town for sheer nuttiness. Plus, the name “Burgermeister Meisterburger” will never not be funny.

Of course, the best way to follow charming, poorly done stop-motion is with macabre, awesomely done stop-motion. So get yourself something to eat and settle in for the entirety of The Nightmare Before Christmas. The Hot Topic mobs may have overexposed it and made it anathema to you dedicated contrarians, but that doesn’t make Tim Burton and Henry Selick’s holiday mishmash any less fun. C’mon, let your guard down for an hour and a half and let a little whimsy in.

Guard back up? Okay then, it’s time for a cartoon whose first three quarters is practically a celebration of Christmas-hating badassery. Yes, I’m talking about How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Do I even have to explain why this one rules? Seuss. Jones. Karloff. Thurl Ranvenscroft, the world’s deepest-voiced and coolest-named man. Sure, maybe the Grinch does wuss out and bring all the presents back at the end, but until that point you’ve got beautiful animation, catchy songs by the best fake-wordsmith in the business, the glorious voice of Karloff, and a delightful counter-consumerist message to warm your pinko souls. It’s all roast beast, baby. (Apologies for the excessive amounts of Jim Carrey in the video. Best I could do.)

And finally, I would be remiss if I did not include the créme de la créme of Christmas specials, the only one ever to pull off the remarkable feat of talking about Jesus and not being insufferable, the one, the only, Charlie Brown Christmas Special. No one makes melancholy more fun than the Peanuts kids, and this one pretty much nails how it feels to feel left out of a season when everyone seems to have smiles attached to their faces with rivet guns. And Linus’ final speech, sweet Jesus! Look, we all know the facts around Christmas: it’s a co-optation of Saturnalia, it incorporates elements of Celtic and German ritual, our modern traditions date back only to the reign of Queen Victoria, Santa Claus’s suit was designed to match the Coca-Cola logo, and so on and so on. It’s understandable to feel dubious about the whole enterprise, especially with the aforementioned consumerist drive that’s been tacked on. But Linus’ speech reminds Charlie Brown and everyone else of something important: that whole Nativity story? It’s a really fucking good story. You think people put on Christmas pageants just because they like sheep puppets? I may be neither Christian nor much of a sentimentalist, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let all the baggage Christmas has picked up keep me from appreciating a good yarn. And that’s the lesson I hope to impart with this imaginary marathon: Christmas can be obnoxious, oversaturated, and claimed by windbag pundits who wouldn’t know goodwill toward men if it came down their chimney, but none of that is the fault of a little magic kid in a manger. Grinch about if you must, but surely you can still enjoy a good story or two.

Final Judgment: Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Hey everyone!

I’m not going to address my absence at all.  Have some videos!!!

Usher, ft. G.Y.L.A.M. – Papers

TOO MUCH OWNAGE FOR AN EMBED, CLICK THE LINK CHOCHACHOS

WOOP WOOP

————————————————–

It’s Christmas!

Oh my God, look at this kid.  This kid has it figured out.  I don’t even know what it is he has figured out but whatever it is it is the fuel that my blackened heart needs to make me remember that there is love.

————————————————–

Tiger Woods Defends Wife

How are these people real.  How did I not come up with this after a bite from a chubby hipster turned me into a Were-Eric Wareheim.  Were-Heim?  I should write all this down.

————————————————–

Egg Shaped Face Probably Says Dumb Things

Dude look like he got a bad Perfect Dark face texture wrapped around that egg-ass head of his.

————————————————–

United 93 as retold with GTA: San Andreas

Hey Khalikh Sheikh Mohammed you lookin a lil thin, man.

————————————————–

That’s it see you next week I Love You!

Some unfortunate soul out there must remember my write-up of The Spectacular Spider-Man , in which I discoursed upon the cyclical nature of TV cartoons, and superhero shows in particular. In the course of that now-legendary post, I presented the history of animated Spider-Men as an introduction to the most recent, actually pretty kickass incarnation. Today I propose to repeat the format using the X-Men, with special attention to how repeated shows about the same people are under continuous pressure to, if not top, at least distinguish themselves from the previous series. So bring on the merry mutants!

Title: Wolverine and the X-Men
Network: Nicktoons Network
Premise: C’mon, it’s the X-Men, you should know what to expect.

Unlike their arachnoid colleague, the X-Men’s history in animation is comparatively short. The group was only popular starting in the mid-seventies, when they brought in Wolverine and all the other non-American characters (for the last time, yes, he’s Canadian). So the earliest attempt at an animated version was a failed pilot narrated by Stan Lee, bearing the episode title “Pryde of the X-Men.”It’s notable mostly for the bizarre decision to give Wolverine an exaggerated Australian accent for no apparent reason other than that it was the eighties, and people were into Crocodile Dundee I guess.

Animated X-Men finally saw the light of day with, appropriately, X-Men on FOX, paired with Spider-Man. Solid storytelling combined with good-for-the-nineties animation made the show a big hit, although its willingness to take the contemporary comics continuity for granted made for some confusing storylines (hey look, it’s a character we’ve never seen but every other character already knows! Yaaay!).  You’ve probably seen it in some form, so I include the unrepresentative opening made for Japanese syndication just because it’s so absolutely hilarious. Cry to the moon!

The downside to the popularity of this show is that it became most people’s default conception of the X-Men. So when the cycle rolls around for a new X-Men show, the question becomes how to avoid simply repeating the old one. X-Men: Evolution decided to make most of the characters teenagers, leaving Professor X, Storm, and Wolverine as adults teaching them how to use their powers and go to high school at the same time. It sounds gimmicky, but it worked pretty well, using mutation as a metaphor for adolescence as well as the usual prejudice theme. And they managed to keep Cyclops and Jean Grey a non-couple for two seasons, which is quite a feat for these kinds of things. People interested in such things should be happy to learn that apparently the whole series is actually on YouTube and Hulu with Marvel’s blessing, so go ahead and check it out.

So now it’s the time for a new series, and something must be done to keep the franchise, um, evolving. You could try following the comics continuity, but it’s kind of grim what with all of Marvel’s Civil Wars and Dark Reigns and whatnot. You could try to lighten the tone, a la Batman: The Brave And The Bold. You could try to draw in fans of the movies, but those have gotten… I don’t want to say “bugnuts,” but not exactly models of storytelling. Instead, Wolverine and the X-Men jumps into high-conceptville (not that a team of superhero mutants serving as metaphors for racism and homophobia is low-concept, but you get what I mean). The setup: it’s a typical day at the X-mansion, when suddenly EVERYTHING BLOWS UP. No one dies, but Professor X and Jean Grey are missing, and everyone is so shaken up that they scatter. A year later, Wolverine and Beast decide to reform the team, at the prompting of a telepathic message from Professor X… FROM THE FUTURE! What’s going on? Hell if I know, and after a full season it doesn’t seem as if the actual characters know either. The point is, now we’ve got a dramatic hook on which to hang good old-fashioned X-Men craziness. The new team (including for the first time Emma Frost, showing more boob than I’ve come to expect from TV cartoons ostensibly aimed at kids) sets about investigating the disaster and preventing the dystopian future predicted by ol’ baldy.

Although considering her look in the comics, this is pretty tame.

This show is made by many of the same people as X-Men: Evolution, so it looks pretty similar. That unfortunately entails a fair amount of returning to well-worn plotlines. Wolverine searches for clues to his past, some idiot makes a bunch of Sentinels, and so on and so forth. For the most part, though, there’s plenty of freshness to the stories, as well as a lot of “hey look, it’s that character I recognize from the comics” fun for nerds like myself. The only real trouble to my mind is that they haven’t really nailed writing for an ensemble cast yet. Wolverine gets top billing and accordingly gets the most screen time, but some of his teammates seem to be getting the shaft. Iceman and Shadowcat, for instance, are usually relegated to some mild comic relief, and Storm often barely gets a speaking role. But presumably the show will find its feet and figure out how to balance all their characters. And I can’t really find fault with an X-Men cartoon that’s found time in its first season for two Nightcrawler epidsodes, including one in which he swordfights with honest-to-god pirates. Pirates! That’s just pure joy right there, not gonna lie.

Final Judgment: A fine new iteration, but it unfortunately continues the tradition of making it hard for me to convince people Professor X isn’t British. He’s from upstate New York, dammit, quit making him sound like Patrick Stewart all the time!

Hey, so we finished the magazine last night at eleven, thus beating our deadline by TWENTY-FIVE HOURS FLAT. Top that, entire history and future of Squelch! Now we’ve scattered to the four winds to gorge upon bird meat. But before I sign off to hang out with my awesome cousins, I invite you watch that rarest of animals, a not-shitty Thanksgiving special.

Title: The Mouse on the Mayflower

Network: NBC

Premise: The Courtship of Miles Standish, but with songs and evil Cockneys.

This oddity from Rankin-Bass, which I’ve seen about a dozen times because I was a weird kid, follows a churchmouse who tags along with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. Historical detail about ocean crossings and starvation follows, as well as less-historical subplots such as acting out the aforementioned Tennyson poem and the efforts of three jerks – two English, one American – to spark a war between their respective peoples. No Thanksgiving special for kids can ever really get into the violence that eventually followed the First Thanksgiving hugfest, but at least this one gives you a hint at the distrust and prejudice between the two groups that would lead to it. Also, it has Tennessee Ernie Ford. Let me repeat that. TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD IS IN THIS CARTOON. That alone is why The Mouse On The Mayflower gets my vote for Best Thanksgiving Special Ever. Sure, Charlie Brown is sweet and all, but he ain’t got no Ford. And now, in closing, I’ll let the man himself pummel history into your soft, mushy noggins.

Childhood nostalgia has its limits. Sure, people are making big money off of movies based on cartoons based on toys, but that’s partly because no one has any original ideas for movies anymore. We remember with fondness our old Saturday morning fare and children’s books, sometime with cause, sometimes not. But some stuff just slips past until years later we see it and say “Hey, didn’t I love that at some point?” To wit: does anyone remember why they liked Busytown? You remember, those Richard Scarry books about the city populated by anthropomorphic animals that taught you what people did all day and that worms wear shoes and Tyrolean hats. Those. I, for one, had not only several Scarry books but also a CD-ROM in which you helped the town’s residents build houses and steal bananas. Yet for the life of me I can’t recall what the appeal was. So you can imagine my confusion upon discovering that this weird franchise still exists, in the form of Busytown Mysteries. What? Exactly.

See, I didn't make this up.

Title: Busytown Mysteries

Network: CBS

Premise: Animal kids pursue the answers to life’s most trivial questions.

For those of you without vague childhood recollections to draw upon, here’s the setup: several of Busytown’s more recognizable residents, including lederhosen-wearing cat Huckle, his indistinguishable-but-for-different-clothes sister Sally, and hopping worm Lowly, encounter various odd circumstances, dub them mysteries, and set out to discover their explanations. The titular Busytown is indeed a busy town, as various citizens and vehicles whiz by in the background of every scene. And speaking of vehicles, I can’t say anything bad about a city in which kids are legally allowed to drive cars.

My papa said son you're gonna drive me to drinkin' if you don't stop drivin' that Hot Rod Lincoln!

For some reason, Huckle gets the star treatment. The theme song explicitly instructs you to “solve a mystery with Huckle.” After every successful case, everyone in the vicinity yells “Hooray for Huckle!” which seems like more of an ego boost than the kid needs for figuring out how straw got tracked all over the house. Formula plays a big role here. Every time a “mystery” is declared or solved, Goldbug (literally, a gold bug) shows up in a tiny news van to interview Huckle for what must be the most boring TV news program on the planet other than CNN. Each interview is then followed by its assigned brief musical number about solving mysteries. When the solution is reached, Huckle explains his chain of reasoning via flashbacks to earlier scenes in the fifteen-minute segment we’ve just watched. It seems like an awful lot of filler to me, but hey, it’s on at seven in the morning, and maybe little kids like repetition, I don’t know.

Of course, the elephant in the room has to be addressed: why do these characters need to be solving mysteries, anyway? Couldn’t they just have light-hearted, cheaply animated comic adventures like the rest of their Saturday-morning brethren, using the colorful background of Busytown? That would cut out a lot of the repetitive “Hey gang, we’ve got a mystery on our hands!” chatter. The only explanation I can come up with is that they somehow ran out of regular Busytown stories to tell. History tells us that if a TV show runs out of gas, the logical next step is either to quit or start solving mysteries. Observe!

And let’s not forget this little gem.

To be fair, Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries kind of ruled, but that’s beside the point. Someone apparently decided that Busytown just didn’t offer the kind of vibrant story possibilities offered by the mystery format’s ironclad formula and script constraints. But you know what? I’m going to assume the best. Let’s drop the cynicism for a moment and assume Busytown Mysteries is not an attempt to revive an old children’s book franchise that’s long past its prime, but instead an earnest educational show urging children to think inquisitively about their world. Most of the “mysteries” Huckle and company encounter could be resolved simply by people taking the time to think seriously about possible causes and effects. We joke, but it’s actually kind of nice to see a show that encourages kids not to jump to conclusions, to painstakingly examine facts and follow logical trains of reasoning. We’re living with an age in which thousands of people march on Washington to call the President an Islamic Terrorist Communist because they’re told to do so by millionaire talk show hosts. Anything that teaches kids an ounce of critical thinking, even something as silly as Busytown Mysteries, is all right by me.

Final Judgment: Nothing special, but it’s seven in the morning, so what do you care?

I know it’s been literally an entire semester since I’ve posted a Weeaboo Wednesday, but look, I actually don’t know that much about Japan. I guess I could have kept reviewing weird hentai that I “accidentally” came upon, but I am pretty tired of getting hits from search terms like “world of warcraft tentacle” and “kkids fucking”.

In any case, I HAVE SOMETHING TO SHARE WITH YOU, SOMETHING ABOUT ANIMES!!

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE HARUHI DANCE!

The Haruhi dance is the dance performed by the cast of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in the above clip, which apparently comes with the end credits to episodes. Youtube is trying to tell me that there is a season 2, but I refuse to believe it, mostly because the thought of watching a shrill, unlovable, authoritarian teenage girl prance around and sexually abuse less shrill, less unlovable teenage girls any more than I already have is unappetizing, to say the least.

feminism died a merciful death, a long, long time ago

Other than the inverse/reverse/anti-bro-rape (sis-rape?) and the ESPers and the time travelers and the alien robots going pew pew pew with their lasers and the bizarre order in which episodes were originally broadcast, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is actually an incredibly boring exemplar of the “slice of life”/”school life” genre. For those who do not begin the morning by refreshing the “Recent Updates” page on onemanga.com, any manga or anime falling into this category pretty much always begins with some sort of a classroom scene depicting daily life at school, then goes on to show how two or three or several students become friend, and then moves on to club activities and so on, and climaxes with a very exciting school festival. Haruhi is no different, except there are fewer transvestites, homosexuals, secret homosexuals, secret transvestites, and talking animals, and instead focuses on the domineering personality of the title character, and how she might be God.

Oh, sorry. Spoiler alert.

Sqlog writer Kyle Smith, cosplaying as God

I suppose the series is admirable in a way, especially since the broadcast order (known as the Kyon order), as well as the DVD order, begins with the episode “The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina Episode 00″. This episode is comprised chiefly of a film that the SOS Brigade club (Haruhi and her friends) create for the school festival. Every aspect of it is terrible, from the acting to the script to the “production quality”. The plot is one of a
“magical girls” shoujo, where a(n) (attractive, female) time traveler is sent to protect some dude and also fight against this (attractive, female) alien witch character and then everyone ends up pretending to be normal human teenagers and going to the high school of said dude, etc. Also, the dude has ESP.

So the anime begins by lambasting a particular genre of anime, and then ends up mimicking it to some extent. The girl who plays the time traveler character in the festival film is, actually, a time traveler. The girl playing the alien witch character is actually an alien robot, and the boy playing the guy with ESP is indeed an ESPer. The film’s narrator, Kyon, will the narrator for the rest of the series, and the director, Haruhi, turns out to be God.

Oops, spoiler alert.

OK, so Haruhi does merit some acknowledgement on an artistic level, but for fuck’s sake, it’s so shrill.

The one thing that the show has offer that is beyond reproach is this ultrafuckingcute dance!

Here it is, being done by some pop stars or some such while lots of Japanese people kyaaaaaa~

Here it is, in a Haruhi themed dance game on the Wii I am not fucking kidding!

Here it is, being danced by prison inmates in the Philippines!

Welp, that’s all! See you in another semester or two!

Confession time: I’m a total geek for stop-motion animation. The very idea of someone going to the trouble of building tiny detailed figures, props, and sets, putting them into dioramas, and then carefully arranging them so as to create the illusion of motion, and telling a story that way, is awesome. It has to be the most labor-intensive animation method on the planet, and it’s worth it because the end product looks so goddamned cool. So naturally I’m impressed by people like Nick Park and Henry Selick that make a living out of it. Hell, Wes Anderson reportedly directed Fantastic Mister Fox from thousands of miles away, just to show off (then again, it’s not like he’s the only acclaimed filmmaker with super powers. You know the real reason Scorsese wears those glasses? That’s right, heat vision). Making a stop-motion film tells me that the director cares enough about his or her story to put a great deal of time and effort into telling it. At least, it should. Unfortunately, sometimes it means that they think the effect will be cool enough that no one will notice if they just dick around for a while. And that, alas, is what we’re dealing with.

I'd like to think they're watching their own show in this shot.

Title: Titan Maximum

Network: Adult Swim (Cartoon Network)

Premise: Two words: shitty Voltron.

How you feel about this show will probably depend on how you feel about Robot Chicken because, well, it’s made by the same people as Robot Chicken. Tom Root and Matthew Seinreich, two of the brai- er, the mastermi- um, the writers of the aforementioned stoner anthology show created Titan Maximum, and it shows. So since Robot Chicken tends to be a love-it-or-find-it-unspeakably-boring proposition, you should know already how you would react. But just in case you don’t, I’ll write about it some more! Yaaaaay!

Titan Maximum sets itself up as a parody of Voltron and its many imitators. The titular behemoth is a humanoid robot in the future piloted by alpha male Palmer, his nerdy but eager kid brother Willie, good-hearted blonde Jodi, sarcastic jerk Sasha, and a pissed-off looking monkey named Leon. They battle the evil machinations of Gibbs, a former Titan pilot and Jodi’s ex-boyfriend. On the surface, it seems like a good premise. ‘80s nostalgia for toy commercials disguised as TV cartoons is hot right now, thanks it part to Robot Chicken’s endless mining of that vein, and Voltron is a genuinely ridiculous concept. So there should some rich comic material here, no?

Well, no, actually. True to form, Root and Seinreich have apparently decided that the premise is hilarious enough for them to just coast along writing-wise. In place of the hoped-for satire of the very concept of giant crime-fighting robots, we get a parade of easy stereotypes (the hillbilly planet! The old people planet!) and nonstop sex talk. And by no means are these writers masters of vocabulary. Let me put it like this: watching The Wire gave me the impression that everyone in Baltimore swears like a sailor with a stubbed toe during every conversation, be it with loved ones, coworkers, or supervisors (and, having never been to Baltimore, I can only assume it’s true). Watching Titan Maximum, on the other hand, has led me to believe that in the future everyone talks like a 7^th grader trying to show his friends how edgy he is. Allow me to demonstrate: nutsack. Are you now rolling on the floor in helpless mirth? Then you, sir or madam, will thoroughly enjoy this show. Having one character mix juvenile sex talk into serious conversation would be a good comic conceit; having everyone do it is just lame.

Cool-looking robot, right? Yeah, guess what doesn't get much screen time.

The show keeps Robot Chicken’s characteristic fifteen-minute running time, with commercials, which is really a handicap for a serialized action story. Every episode can get in about two plot points at most, then leaves the rest of the time for wheel-spinning comic business. It’s just not enough time to establish any kind of story, but I get the feeling no one’s trying to do that. In fact, “not trying” would be as good a way as any to characterize Titan Maximum. They’ve got a great premise, good animation, and… nothing else. Root and Seinreich occasionally hit on a good joke, such as hip-hop being the culture of old people in the future, and they have a gift for escalation, such as a scene in which an arm-wrestling champ (voiced by the illustrious H. Jon Benjamin, no less) demonstrates his nimble fingers via a series of increasingly absurd shadow puppets. But in between is a vast wasteland of dick jokes and recycled gags. It’s not a good sign when, midway through a fifteen-minute episode, I find myself waiting for the end.

Final Judgment: Twice the puppet sex of Team America: World Police, less than half the satire.

Oh boy!  It’s the latest issue of the Squelch that came out a few weeks ago, finally available on the Internet.  Read it! It’s pretty good!

Vol 19, Issue 2: Gangbusters

It should be noted that this is probably my favorite cover, ever.  Good work, us!  Hooray!