Seth Green

While the idea behind Robot Chicken sounds like a no-brainer - take a bunch of vintage toys from the 80s and 90s, animate them in stop-motion and use them to act out wildly racy, violent, morbid and, oh yes, raucously funny sketch comedy - it took the show’s creators, Seth Green and Matthew Senreich several stages of evolution before this wonderfully clever show would reach the culmination of its creative promise.

Seinreich had been responsible for a similarly themed regular feature in Wizard magazine titled “Twisted Toyfare Theater.” Upon meeting Green in an interview, the two conceived a series of little-known shorts known as Sweet J Presents. This collaboration, made up primarily of action figures killing and/or vomiting on one another, would become the foundation for Robot Chicken, which would take the ideas put forth in Sweet J to new heights, thanks to a greatly expanded format and budget.

If there’s an overarching story to Robot Chicken, and no one’s saying there needs to be, it’s this: a mad scientist has utilized machine parts to resurrect a chicken that failed to make it to the other side of the road. Upon its rebirth, the poor creature gets the Clockwork Orange treatment as it is forced to watch all manner of disturbing imagery on the television screens set before it. And all this takes place in the opening credits.

What sort of effect the mad scientist hopes to elicit is unknown and utterly unimportant. It’s the twisted sketches on the screens that make up the show, and twisted they are. Whether it’s a public service announcement about prostate cancer by Optimus Prime, or a shot-for-shot parody of the Kill Bill trailer featuring a vengeful Jesus bent on assassinating a giant bunny, no topic is off limits and no pop-culture icons are sacred.

The miraculously consistent quality of the gags, combined with Seth Green’s broad Hollywood-friend base, has bought Robot Chicken contributions from more celebs than you’d find in an anthology of Star magazine, including Macaulay Culkin, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dom DeLuise, Topher Grace, Ashton Kutcher, Burt Reynolds, Mark Hamill, Ryan Seacrest, Scarlett Johansson, Joey Fatone, Pat Morita, Conan O’Brien, Don Knotts, Freddie Prinze Jr., Phyllis Diller, and Robert England, to name just a small portion of those attached to the project. This is not to say that it’s ever important to know who is who, since the comedy doesn’t remotely rely on star power. It is, however, a lot of fun to think of all those names working on the same show for little or no money.

The unique blend of shameless debauchery, high-level witticisms and smart social critiques made Robot Chicken an instant hit with fans of the adult animation genre (the funny American kind, not the unrated Anime variety), but if such fare just isn’t your cup of tea, Robot Chicken probably won’t change your mind, and that’s really too bad.

As with all stop-motion, the enormous amount of effort required to animate a single scene is often easy to overlook. Thankfully, this two-disc set features tons of special features including commentary on every single episode, deleted scenes, recorded animations meetings, a behind-the-scenes documentary, some of the original Sweet J Presents shorts, and much, much more. As if all this weren’t enough fancy wrapping for an already pretty package, the DVD is set up beautifully. No matter what selection you make, the main root menus always remain directly accessible from every screen. It begs the question: why can’t all DVDs be this simple to navigate? A- (Movie) A+ (Disc)