Because today is the last day ever, I ain't going out like no sucka. Go ahead and cry in the shower. Meanwhile, I'm posting 30 of my favorite original score cues or songs on Spotify that accompany the end credits of feature films. None of them are re-recordings (I love me some Spotify, but it's befouled by the stench of terrible re-recordings of film and TV music). All of them are the originals.

The last playlist ever kicks off with the summer of 2012's best end title theme (Alan Silvestri's "The Avengers," from an art-house film called Anna Karenina), followed by perhaps my all-time favorite original end title theme (Willie Hutch's "Brother's Gonna Work It Out," from a Dean Jones family film called The Mack). Tron: Legacy and Superman: The Movie both had end credits that ran so long they had two or three end title themes instead of one. Most of the end title themes below can be heard on AFOS, but some of them aren't in rotation because I simply don't have them in my library (Silvestri's Who Framed Roger Rabbit score is an album I always wanted to have, but I was never able to nab the score because it went out of print again before I could do so). The playlist concludes with Earl Rose's end title theme from a fascinating doc that aired on PBS in 2012: Johnny Carson: King of Late Night.

Too bad Adele's theme for Skyfall isn't featured in the film's end credits (it's also not on Spotify). I wanted to include "Skyfall" in the playlist because its Jim Morrison-esque opening lyric happens to be "This is the end," which is also the name of this playlist. In another interesting tidbit, "Skyfall" is simultaneously one of the most emotional songs to open a Bond film (the song is written from the point of view of M and is one big spoiler, and no wonder Daniel Craig cried when he first heard it--without giving too much away, it must have brought him back emotionally to the scene the song is basically about) and one of the most wry (an apocalyptic song about mortality is ironically the theme for a film that's all about revitalizing the 50-year-old Bond film franchise and keeping it going, and Adele and her producing partner Paul Epworth seemed to have written "Skyfall" so that it could also be interpreted as a tune about the 2012 apocalypse).

Goodbye, cruel world!

"This Is the End" tracklist
1. Alan Silvestri, "The Avengers," Marvel's The Avengers
2. Willie Hutch, "Brother's Gonna Work It Out," The Mack
3. Curtis Mayfield, "Superfly," Superfly
4. k.d. lang, "Surrender,"Tomorrow Never Dies
5. Daft Punk, "TRON Legacy (End Titles)," Tron: Legacy
6. Daft Punk, "Solar Sailer," Tron: Legacy
7. Radiohead, "Exit Music (For a Film)," Romeo + Juliet
8. Dominic Cooper, "Jail-bait Jody," Tamara Drewe
9. Alan Silvestri, "End Title," Who Framed Roger Rabbit
10. John Williams, "The Rebel Fleet/End Title," The Empire Strikes Back
11. Alan Silvestri, "Captain America March,"Captain America: The First Avenger
12. Danny Elfman, "Batman Theme Reprise," Batman
13. Prince, "Scandalous," Batman
14. Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Face to Face," Batman Returns
15. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, "A Watchful Guardian," The Dark Knight
16. John Williams, "Finale and End Title March," Superman: The Movie
17. John Williams, "Love Theme from Superman," Superman: The Movie
18. Michael Giacchino, "The Incredits," The Incredibles
19. Michael Giacchino, "Up with End Credits," Up
20. Jerry Goldsmith, "End Title," Star Trek: The Motion Picture
21. Danny Elfman, "End Credits," Sleepy Hollow
22. John Williams, "End Credits," Jurassic Park
23. Bruce Broughton, "End Credits," The Rescuers Down Under
24. Gladys Knight & the Pips, "Make Yours a Happy Home,"Claudine
25. Mader, "Rhumba (End Credits)," The Wedding Banquet
26. Michael Giacchino, "End Creditouilles," Ratatouille
27. John Carpenter, "The Fog End Credits," The Fog
28. David Shire, "Finale and End Credits," The Conversation
29. John Williams, "Finale & End Credits," Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
30. Earl Rose, "End Credits," Johnny Carson: King of Late Night


BONUS TRACK: "Summer in America," DJ Blue & Chubb Rock's rousing original song from the end credits of the hilarious cult classic Wet Hot American Summer.

The helmeted villain with no name attempts to trim Mike's bangs.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. There will be no new columns this week and next week due to the holidays and the lack of first-run programming (only Tron: Uprising and Motorcity are first-run because Disney XD chose to burn off the rest of their episodes over the holidays). In a special year-end edition of "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," here are previous reviews of five of my favorite non-Adult Swim cable cartoon episodes from May to December 2012.

Motorcity, "Power Trip" (from May 11, 2012)

Motorcity, the only one out of the five cartoons this week that's not based on a superhero comic for a change, is only two episodes in, and this unlikely collabo between Disney and the not-so-family-friendly Titmouse animation studio (of Metalocalypse and Freaknik: The Musical fame) is already the most inventive and thrilling of the five. It's not a superhero show, yet it's dealing with questions about heroism (and even activism) more interestingly than most cartoons that are actual superhero shows.

In Motorcity's future setting, the socio-economical punching bag that is Detroit has been divided by greedy developer Abraham Kane (Batman: The Animated Series and Metalocalypse vocal MVP Mark Hamill) into two sections, the sparkling-clean, EPCOT-like Detroit Deluxe for the city's most affluent inhabitants and Motorcity, a subterranean ghetto that Kane is plotting to completely bulldoze. Teenage gearhead Mike Chilton (Reid Scott, currently appearing on HBO's Veep as the conceited douche on VP Selina Meyer's staff) has banded together with cowardly hacker and best friend Chuck (Nate Torrence), industrial spy Julie (Kate Micucci) and mechanics Dutch (Kel Mitchell), Texas (Jess Harnell) and Goat Jacob (Brian Doyle-Murray) to prevent Kane and his Shockbots from wiping out Motorcity. These tech-savvy rebels call themselves the Burners. If an older Phineas and Ferb joined Dominic Toretto's crew from the Fast and the Furious movies and then were all forced to live in a dystopic ghetto of the future, it would look something like the Burners.

To borrow a line from the infamous Super Bowl XLVI Chrysler ad where Clint Eastwood big-upped the Detroit auto industry, now Motorcity is fighting again. But will Kane succeed in turning the Burners and the people of Motorcity against Mike, who, like Jacob, used to work for KaneCo? Will the fog, division, discord and blame make it hard for the Burners to see what lies ahead?

Even though Motorcity must have been created by Titmouse honcho Chris Prynoski long before the Occupy movement began (and judging from how much work Titmouse put into making the show's visuals look amazing, it had have to been created that long ago) and Prynoski is more concerned with high-octane action than political allegory, it's hard to ignore how similar the Burners' opposition to Kane is to the struggles of us 99 Percenters. It's about time Occupy protesters got an animated show they can root for and embrace--and of course, watch while being camped out between protests, most likely through Burners-style illegal means that would make Disney's blood boil.

Speaking of Disney, how the hell did a show with a clear disdain for EPCOT-like things manage to get Disney's approval and make it on to a Disney-owned channel?

"When I asked Prynoski about this [satirical] aspect of Motorcity," wrote Jim Hill in his article about Motorcity, "all Chris could do in response was laugh and then say 'I don't think I'm allowed to comment on that. But I will say that you're a very perceptive fellow.'"

For a long time, I found it difficult to get over Cartoon Network's cancellation of the Titmouse-produced Megas XLR, which, like Motorcity, had a bunch of teenage gearheads as the heroes (instead of souped-up hot rods, their ride was a giant robot from the future). I think I'm finally over it. Motorcity is a great substitute, and in some ways, it's an even better show. Sure, there aren't as many amusing pop culture reference gags on Motorcity as there were on Megas XLR, which, for instance, regularly ridiculed MTV for cancelling the Titmouse cult favorite Downtown by destroying a "PopTV" sign in every episode (Roth, a robot named after car customizer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, and a shout-out to Admiral Ackbar's "It's a trap!" line from Hamill's Star Wars past are as reference-y as Motorcity gets). But the Burners are more interesting characters (I especially enjoyed the matter-of-fact way the "Battle for Motorcity" premiere episode revealed that Julie is Kane's daughter) and more fallible heroes than Megas XLR's Coop, who always triumphed over the Glorft at the end of each episode despite leveling most of New Jersey in the process. On Megas XLR, the destruction of Jersey was a running gag, but on Motorcity, the impact the Burners' battles against Kane have on the fragile ghetto they call home is treated a little more seriously.

This week's "Power Trip" episode, scripted by Megas XLR co-creator George Krstic, features a great scene where the Burners brainstorm how to break into the KaneCo Tower and realize why each of their ideas would suck donkey balls. In that comedic scene and in later moments where characters debate over weaponizing an unstable KaneCo energy source, "Power Trip" deals with how heroism sometimes requires compromise, but without getting preachy about it. Mike gets a KaneCo R&D scientist (Jim Cummings) to steal from Kane an energy core, which would result in Kane's evil empire being shut down once and for all. But even though the energy core is too unstable and dangerous for the Burners to keep around in Motorcity, Mike insists on using it as a weapon, and his stance is met with opposition by Chuck and the scientist. The series isn't afraid to show that while Mike is a great leader, he's also an adrenaline junkie, and his recklessness can be a liability for the people he wants to protect.

In "Battle for Motorcity," the constantly whiny Chuck, who's so squeamish he makes Shaggy from Scooby-Doo look macho, quickly became the show's most grating character. He's still a whiny crybaby in "Power Trip," but luckily, this second episode gives Chuck more to do than just whine, squeal and activate his ejector seat, and in the scenes where the characters express their hesitancy over handling the energy core, we see why Mike values Chuck as the conscience of the group and why Mike needs him to keep him in check (over on Tumblr, several Motorcity fans are already shipping Mike and Chuck as a gay couple, and I wouldn't be surprised if some female viewer somewhere is currently hard at work on her Mike/Chuck slashfic).

(Photo source: People of MotorCity)

I'm making Motorcity sound like a serious show, but it's far from it. It's as wild a ride as that rollercoaster Phineas and Ferb built in their backyard. Disney and Titmouse may turn out to be the most worthwhile partnership between The Mouse and another animation studio since Disney and some little computer graphics company from the Bay Area.


Motorcity, "Vendetta" (from June 19, 2012)

Motorcity introduces yet another adversary for the Burners during another solid episode of this finely crafted cartoon, "Vendetta." This time, it's a nameless, red muscle car-driving warrior (Eric Ladin, just recently killed off on The Killing) in a spiked helmet who looks like a rejected Tron: Uprising baddie and is referred to in the end credits only as "Red"--although this mystery man's beef is mainly with Burners leader Mike Chilton. On the one-year anniversary of the day Mike severed ties with Abraham Kane, Red emerges from out of nowhere to take revenge on Mike and eliminate him.

In juicy flashbacks that finally explain what Mike did when he was a KaneCo employee, we learn that he was a cadet in Kane's army of soldiers known as the Ultra Elites. The fact that a businessman assembled an army to guard him and do his dirty work shows how psychotic this particular businessman is.

At the height of Donald Trump's still-continuing racist nonsense about President Obama, Lewis Black did a hilarious Daily Show "Back in Black" segment where he joked that he wants Trump to be the next president because America needs to be run by someone as insane as Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong Il. Kane is like a mash-up of Trump's Third World dictator-style craziness and Steve Jobs' technological genius, his dickish treatment of his Apple colleagues and his love of the color white--in the wardrobe and burly body of a douchey gym manager.

Mike was one of Kane's most obedient cadets, and on the day the sinister Detroit Deluxe developer promoted him to lieutenant, he gave Mike his first mission to supervise: the demolition of a Motorcity tenement building. But when Mike discovered that Kane lied to him about the building being abandoned--it was actually still full of tenants inside--he realized Kane's evilness and walked away from his job. Mike was able to save the tenants' lives, but he wasn't able to save their home from the wrecking ball.

One of the residents who ended up homeless also happened to be Red, who blames Mike for the loss of his home. As a reminder to Mike of what he failed to save, Red has his armor emblazoned with the dual-triangle insignia that KaneCo marked on the building for demolition. "Vendetta" never really divulges Red's identity (Kane calls him "son" when he presents him with a job offer in the final scene, so I initially thought Red is Kane's son--and therefore, the brother of Burners member Julie--while another theory I had was that he's Mike's blond-haired cadet friend from the flashbacks, but his voice isn't the same as Red's).

Mike asks his new (and rather standoffish) underworld ally, the Duke of Detroit (Dee Snider), if he knows the whereabouts of Racer X. The Duke has no idea who this mystery man is either, but he's a little more helpful when it comes to the Burners' other current predicament, Kane's robomites, tiny robots that feed on metal and quickly multiply. Julie's father made cars illegal in both Detroit Deluxe and Motorcity, and now he's invented robomites to infest Motorcity and deprive the Burners of their cherished rides, as well as destroy the plumbing and housing in the subterranean city.

The Duke, who's worried that the mites will munch on the cars in his mansion and junkyards, supplies the Burners with a surplus of iron in the form of an inexplicably gigantic cube, which the team uses to lure the wafer-sized bots away from the Ambassador Bridge, old Detroit's biggest hunk of iron, and other parts of Motorcity. The Burners spray the block of iron with a corrosive oxidizing agent to poison the mites, which frighten the hell out of the Burners' squeaking robot assistant Roth, even though Roth is made mostly of polymer (copped from KaneCo robot parts by Burners tinkerer Dutch) rather than metal. But the mites are nowhere as frightening as the snack baked by older Burners member Jacob to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Mike's conversion to heroism: okra-mayonnaise muffins.

Texas has become Motorcity's breakout character because of his dumb-jock dialogue (he even refers to himself in the third person like many sports celebrities do), but he isn't always this Keanu-esque Asian jock whose solution for everything is sweet Muay Thai kicks, and he can be quite perceptive when his ego isn't in the way. In this episode, Texas gets to act as a voice of reason when Mike expresses to him his guilt over not having been more aware of Kane's evilness when he worked for him. He tells Mike that his late realization about his tyranny is understandable because a master manipulator like Kane makes it difficult for people to see his true agenda, and then he says, "You've got to stop thinking about what you didn't do and start thinking about what you're doing to save people now."

(Photo source: Latia I. Am)

No one in cartoon voice acting does rage quite like Mark Hamill, and while he's terrific as Kane (he was downright menacing when Kane shook Julie around like a rag doll and barked at her in the "Battle for Motorcity" premiere episode), the character has tended to be a one-note villain who does nothing but sneer and rant and lash out at his underlings. (I bet Motorcity creator Chris Prynoski gave Kane's dumbass underling the name Tooley as a shout-out to both Harley Quinn from Hamill's Batman: The Animated Series days and the distinctive way Hamill would put the accent on "Har-LEEEY!!!" whenever The Joker would bark at her. I've noticed Hamill, who's been reunited with his Batman voice director Andrea Romano on this show, does that same accent thing when he yells "Too-LEEEY!!!")

But in the flashbacks in "Vendetta," Hamill gets to tone Kane down a bit and show a more subtle and fatherly side to him, which illustrates Texas' later point about Kane being such an effective enemy because of how he lured to his side good people like Mike, Jacob and the R&D scientist from "Power Trip." I also like how in the flashbacks, "Vendetta" writer John O'Bryan doesn't hold back in turning Kane into the cruelest Disney villain since Scar from The Lion King. Ordering the demolition of a tenement building with residents still inside and without even letting them know that they should evacuate? Wow, that's as vile as an okra-mayonnaise muffin.


Adventure Time, "Princess Cookie" (from June 26, 2012)

My favorite animation voice guest shot of the week belongs to Donald Faison as the title character in "Princess Cookie," Adventure Time's latest short. The former Scrubs star's enjoyable role as a misunderstood and orphaned cookie who wants to be a princess like Bubblegum (Hynden Walch) despite what society tells him out-weirds anything J.D.'s overactive imagination ever dreamed up about Turk, including even that half-J.D./half-Turk creature straight out of the glubbed-up transporter in the Fly movies.

I also got a kick out of hearing the normal speaking voice of Maria Bamford, who's a frequent vocal presence on Adventure Time, instead of one of her various other voices. Here, Bamford turns up as the voice of Princess Cookie's accomplice Chipolina. (The reactions on Tumblr to "Princess Cookie" have been fascinating. They've ranged from teens who praise the episode and interpret it as a metaphor for either transgender people's struggles or at-risk youth to LGBT viewers who bristle at the portrayal of Princess Cookie as a violent and suicidal LGBT character. And then there are viewers who don't see sexual orientation or gender or race in Faison's character. They just see a cookie.)

Because Adventure Time is such an unpredictable ride, what starts out as a spoof of hostage-movie tropes--with Jake (John DiMaggio), the most laid-back hostage negotiator in screen history, talking Princess Cookie out of holding the Candy Kingdom citizens hostage inside a convenience store--morphs quite smoothly into one of the show's most affecting installments. Without having Jake spell things out to the screen like Spidey constantly does in the latest anvillicious Ultimate Spider-Man episode, "Princess Cookie" conveys a subtle message to the misfits in the audience that even though it feels like they're alone in the world, they won't be--whether they're teenage children of immigrants who don't want to be handcuffed to the boring careers that their strict parents have assigned to them or LGBT teens who refuse to be ostracized or mistreated by bullies or homophobic parents. Somewhere, there's a place where their misfit nature will be celebrated and embraced.


Tron: Uprising, "Isolated" (from July 10, 2012)

Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Transformers Prime have been more satisfying than their much-maligned live-action counterparts, and Tron: Uprising has joined them as another example of an animated show that's superior to its live-action counterpart, thanks to its best episode yet, "Isolated." The story puts the spotlight on the animated Tron: Legacy prequel's most compelling creation so far: Paige, a lieutenant in evil General Tesler's army whom Tesler has assigned the task of hunting down Beck, a.k.a. the masked Renegade.

The straight-arrow Beck's evolution from mechanic to hero has been a less interesting arc than Paige's desperate bid for her ruthless general's respect, which has put her in competition with Tesler's supercilious right-hand man Pavel (Paul Reubens) ("Isolated"'s "previously on" segment amusingly counterpoints narrator Tricia Helfer's recap--"Tesler rewards Paige's hard work with praise"--with a montage of clips of Tesler and Pavel both belittling Paige). "Isolated" reveals why Paige chose to work for Tesler and ties her backstory to Quorra (Olivia Wilde, reprising the most interesting character from Tron: Legacy).

Trapped on a slowly disintegrating island with Beck and forced to work with her enemy (and if Tron: Uprising lasts past a season, inevitable love interest) to find a way out before the rock sinks into the sea, Paige flashes back to her time as a hospital medic. Back then, Paige dabbled in composing instrumental music, even though as another character told her, she's not "programmed" to be a musician.

Her instrument reminds me of the Tenori-on used by electro artist Little Boots in the viral video for her track "Stuck on Repeat":

(Someone on the Tron-Sector fansite forums noted that Paige's instrument is a variation on the Tonematrix, a sweet music-making tool that will prevent you from getting anything else done for a couple of hours.)

Paige was once encouraged to pursue music by Quorra, whom she briefly befriended when Quorra brought in to the medical center Ada (Meagan Holder), a friend of Quorra's who was injured while escaping the genocidal purge of the ISOs that was ordered by Grid dictator Clu. Introduced in Tron: Legacy, the ISOs were a race of advanced beings who were unique in The Grid for not being programs and were an accidental but miraculous creation by software genius Kevin Flynn.

Clu, Flynn's evil clone, resented his creator's attachment to the ISOs and considered their humanity an imperfection, so he derezzed all of them, except for a few ISOs who managed to survive Clu's attacks, including Ada and Quorra, who, to evade capture, hid ISO markings on her skin from the medics. Paige's greatest quality as a soldier--her loyalty to whoever is her superior--is also the reason for her tragic flaw: her inability to question anything that appears to be wrong, whether it's whatever lie Tesler tells her or the lies about the "crooked and dangerous" nature of the ISOs that Clu's forces have spread across The Grid.

Paige too easily accepted as truths those lies about the ISOs, so when she spotted Quorra's markings, she considered snitching on Quorra's whereabouts to the authorities. However, Paige didn't go through with the snitching. Her medical center co-workers did. Later, when Paige awoke from being knocked out by Quorra during her escape from Tesler's guards (she believes that Paige betrayed her, so I'm betting Wilde will resurface later in the season for Quorra's inevitable battle against Paige), she discovered her medical center staff was massacred.

The aftermath of the attack was where Paige first encountered Tesler, who told her that her co-workers were derezzed by Quorra and Ada and offered her a spot in his army as a way to seek her revenge. Paige doesn't know that Tesler lied to her and was the one who derezzed her co-workers right after they reported Quorra and Ada to him (he deemed any program who came into contact with ISOs to be too "contanimated" by them).

Wilde's guest shot is a treat for those of us who enjoyed her performance in Tron: Legacy. Quorra's love for the works of Jules Verne, her curiosity about the world outside The Grid and her wish to see an actual sunrise helped keep the film from becoming a way-too-chilly-and-dull sci-fi actioner, and even though those character touches bordered on Manic Pixie Dream Girl Syndrome, Wilde did a nice job bringing to life those aspects of her character. In "Isolated," Paige's music brings out in Quorra the same kind of curiosity she expressed about Verne and the Flynn family's non-digital world.

Olivia Wilde vamps it up as Jordan in the Disney remake of The Great Gatsby.

An even more surprising credit in "Isolated" than Wilde's name belongs to André Bormanis, who scripted the episode and whose name is familiar to those of us who pay attention to the credits of sci-fi/fantasy shows--he's a veteran of Legend of the Seeker and the Star Trek spinoffs. That era of Trek when Bormanis served as a writer and science consultant can be a chore to watch because of the later spinoffs' overreliance on the same kind of impenetrable technobabble that makes the first Tron film a chore to watch too.

Bormanis takes a crucial and less irritating element of the writing on those Trek shows since the '60s--incorporating past and present real-world issues into the Trek heroes' missions--and brings it to "Isolated." The racially tinged treatment of the ISOs parallels both the harsh treatment of illegal immigrants in Arizona and the persecution of Jews, right down to the ISOs' markings (although those are birthmarks instead of prisoner number tattoos imprinted by their captors).

If you derezzed the virtual setting of The Grid and the terms "program," "ISO" and "derezzed," the flashback portion of "Isolated" could easily be a story about a medic in a Nazi-occupied part of Europe who discovers the patient he's befriended is a Jewish refugee and is faced with the dilemma of turning the refugee in to the authorities. The episode's final scene poignantly shows Paige clinging to one of the few remnants of both her old life and her humanity, as she secretly reactivates the old melody that used to automatically play on her instrument. All this is pretty weighty stuff for a Disney XD show.

Both "Isolated" and last week's episode, "Identity," which deepened the previously boring character of Tron himself ("Tron isn't a character, he's an impossibly virtuous program," complained the A.V. Club about the 1982 movie's screenplay in 2010), have shown how far the Tron franchise has come from the flat writing and convoluted, barely-comprehensible-when-you-were-a-kid gibberish about programs and their "users" that characterized the first movie. Tron is evolving into a more relatable and mature--as well as far less technobabble-plagued and far less alienating--franchise. It's like the live-action Star Wars franchise in reverse.

Linda Cardellini

Gravity Falls, "The Inconveniencing" (from July 17, 2012)

Gravity Falls' "Inconveniencing" episode shows why getting former Freaks and Geeks star Linda Cardellini to voice the Pines twins' teen friend Wendy was brilliant casting, and it makes me wish Cardellini did more animation (other than this series and a recent Regular Show guest shot). On Paul Feig and Judd Apatow's classic show, Cardellini played Lindsay Weir, an unhappy math nerd who ditched the uptight and competitive mathlete crowd and found kindred spirits in her new friends, James Franco's underachieving burnout Daniel Desario and his pack of mischievous and much-maligned "freaks."

This time, Cardellini plays the charismatic Daniel figure who brings into her crowd a couple of newbies: Mabel and Dipper, who's got a crush on the older Wendy and lies about being 13 instead of his actual age of 12 to attempt to impress her. Because there are much less things for teens to do on Friday night in a small and secluded town like Gravity Falls, Oregon than there are in suburbs like the Detroit burb where Freaks and Geeks was set (and also because this is a TV-Y7-rated Disney Channel show, so the drugs and sex are kept off-screen), Wendy and her friends, including sullen musician/wanna-be artist Robbie (T.J. Miller), Thompson (episode co-writer Michael Rianda) and Tambry (Jessica DiCicco), break into the Dusk 2 Dawn, an abandoned convenience store that's rumored to be haunted. Dipper and Mabel tag along and discover the wonders of food fights and purloining junk food without paying for it and getting caught (even though it's 17-year-old junk food, which, judging from the kids' unperturbed reactions, doesn't taste like it's 17 years old).

(Photo source: Stuff I found on the internets)

The kids' fun at the Dusk 2 Dawn comes to an abrupt end when they realize the rumors about its history of corpses and ghosts are true. Chalk outlines of corpses are uncovered, and the haunted store traps the teens inside and attacks them one by one (Tambry gets sucked into the smartphone she won't stop texting into, while Thompson becomes trapped inside the screen of a "Dancy Pants Revolution" machine). The elderly couple (Ken Jenkins from Scrubs and April Winchell) that ran the Dusk 2 Dawn died 17 years ago inside the store from a simultaneous heart attack caused by their intense hatred of rowdy teen customers and their "newfangled rap music" (which contained offensive lyrics like "Homework's wack, and so are rules/Tuckin' in your shirt's for fools!"), so the owners' ghosts are retaliating against any teen who trespasses.

The highlights of "The Inconveniencing" include that amusing little parody of clean-cut '90s rap, the novel placement of Poltergeist-style gags in a 7-Eleven setting and the recurring acknowledgement of the crappy economy without directly referencing it in dialogue (Grunkle Stan's Mystery Shack gift shop doesn't seem to be attracting any customers). But I wish the end credits' hidden messages weren't merely snatches of earlier dialogue (by the way, this week's cryptogram, "rqzdugv drvklpd!," is "Onwards, Aoshima!," which Mabel said to her flying dolphin during her sugar-induced hallucination) and were actual clues about something--like that hot dog-shaped shadow hovering over Wendy's lawn chair on the Mystery Shack rooftop during "The Inconveniencing"'s cold open.

Does that noisy flying shadow have anything to do with that muffin-shaped explosion Robbie spray-painted on the town watertower? Did that explosion come from a UFO Robbie saw? And why aren't there more Disney cartoons that make their viewers think and play detective like this?


Time to evaluate the cartoons I've discussed from May to December 2012, based on all the episodes I've seen of each cartoon (using Entertainment Weekly-style letter grade averages and placed in order from worst to best).

23. Ultimate Spider-Man: C
22. Ben 10: Omniverse: C
21. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: C
20. Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness: C
19. The Amazing World of Gumball: C+
18. Iron Man: Armored Adventures: B-
17. ThunderCats: B-
16. Transformers Prime: B-
15. Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja: B-
14. Star Wars: The Clone Wars: B-
13. The Legend of Korra: B
12. Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters: B
11. The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: B
10. Dan Vs.: B
9. Green Lantern: The Animated Series: B+
8. Young Justice: Invasion: B+
7. Dragons: Riders of Berk: B+
6. Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated: B+
5. Tron: Uprising: B+
4. Gravity Falls: A-
3. Motorcity: A
2. Adventure Time: A
1. Regular Show: A

More reruns next Wednesday.

AFOS, which I finally upgraded from mono to stereo earlier this month, was occasionally mentioned on Twitter by other people in 2012, either to express their disappointment in iTunes dumping AFOS from its station list (another reason to dislike iTunes, but I can't really do anything about their decision to dump AFOS) or to praise my station for streaming movie themes they enjoyed hearing. Author Scott Pearson, a contributor to Simon & Schuster's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Myriad Universes anthologies, did both:



The AFOS blog's new "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" column received a few shout-outs and retweets on Twitter, mostly from staffers at Titmouse because I said a few nice things about the animation studio's collabos with Disney: Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja and the even more impressive--and anti-authoritarian--Motorcity. The latter action cartoon is a one-season wonder that looks remarkably like a big-budget animated feature film each week and is another unfortunate casualty in a TV landscape that hasn't been kind lately to true sci-fi like Motorcity. Alyssa Rosenberg posted a piece on ThinkProgress where she lamented the lack of true sci-fi shows on the currently-more-fantasy-oriented--and crap-oriented--Syfy. Motorcity, which was slept on by even the few TV critics out there who regularly cover animated shows, was exactly the kind of sci-fi show Rosenberg was clamoring for.

I favorited Motorcity writer George Krstic's tweet about my review of his "Power Trip" episode mainly because of the joke he cracked about himself and his colleagues:


Enough about me. What about the rest of 2012?

(Most year-end lists can make for boring and grueling reading. Reflecting on the past year by skimming through tweets I favorited is turning into an entertaining alternative from scrolling through endless year-end articles and think pieces.)

Quite a bit of fun resulted on Twitter from the much-hyped second season of Downton Abbey (I once tweeted, "Note to self: Don't forget to add #DowntonAbbey to the list of 'Shit White People Like That I Don't Understand the Appeal Of.'"):



Artists whom I've been giving heavy airplay to on AFOS got the chance to kick it with their idols:


There was 2 Broke Girls showrunner Michael Patrick King's stupid defense of the racist material that's being written for the Korean Long Duk Dong on the show, or as GQ writer Lauren Bans amusingly calls the openly gay King's brand of humor, "gaycism":


Ignorance came not just from sitcom joke writers but also from TV stars and, as usual, the far right:















There was Linsanity (and the inevitable and stupid racial slurs in response to the rise of the NBA's first Asian American star player):






There was also the fall of aging (and disappointinglyhomophobic) champ Manny Pacquiao:



There was the horrible death of Trayvon Martin, who was killed by a batshit crazy wannabe vigilante who frequently changes his looks as if he's a racist Latino Cher going through costume changes during a concert:




There were too many deaths of musicians whose work I dug, especially an MC whose rhymes I grew up listening to and reciting like they were a slightly stoned-sounding Pledge of Allegiance:



There was some movie called The Avengers:



There was also a tiny election:












































The senseless massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, the latest of too many gun-related tragedies, reignited the debate over gun control in America. It also pointed to ugly truths about race:


The Newtown massacre elicited from the right some absurd comments, which were promptly torn apart by comedians on Twitter:




Newtown was one of many instances in 2012 that made us want to just lie in bed for an entire week and pull the covers over our heads, but luckily, comedians on Twitter were always there when we needed a good laugh:

Alright, this tweet was actually posted by Wedding Band and Good Guys star Jenny Wade back in 2010, but I didn't favorite it until last week. She's still right. America could especially improve upon the last item.

This new version of Voltron sucks. (Photo source: Haunted Realm)

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired. There's no new column this week due to the holiday season and the lack of first-run programming (only Tron: Uprising and Motorcity are first-run because Disney XD chose to burn off the rest of their episodes over the holidays). The reruns continue with previous reviews of five more of my favorite non-Adult Swim cable cartoon episodes from May to December 2012.

Gravity Falls, "Irrational Treasure" (from August 21, 2012)

In "Irrational Treasure," Gravity Falls finally delves into a part of its mythology I've been looking forward to: the history of the strange title town where Dipper and Mabel have been forced by their parents to spend their summer vacation. Looking for a way to take mean girl Pacifica Northwest down a peg after she insults Mabel's tastes for quirky sweaters and nacho earrings and hurts her feelings during the town's Pioneer Day festivities, Dipper and Mabel find their ammo when they uncover evidence that Pacifica's great-great-grandfather Nathaniel Northwest, the supposed Gravity Falls founder, was a fraud. In doing so, the Pines twins stumble onto a government conspiracy revolving around the actual town founder, Quentin Trembley (series creator Alex Hirsch), whose achievements were erased from history because of his disastrous term as the eighth-and-a-half President of the United States.

"Irrational Treasure" writers Hirsch and Tim McKeon go crazy with their alternate history of America, which provides hilarious explanations for Abraham Lincoln's top hat (it concealed a giant head that was shaped like a hand), Mount Rushmore (it's in the Easter egg below) and the replacement of Trembley with William Henry Harrison. In the top-secret government film watched by Dipper and Mabel, the Chris Parnell-voiced narrator tells of an out-of-it leader whose nutso behavior--reminiscent of Parnell's Dr. Spaceman character and his non sequiturs on 30 Rock--earned him the moniker of "America's Silliest President" ("He waged war on pancakes, appointed six babies to the Supreme Court and issued the De-pants-ipation Proclamation").

The gags about silly presidential behavior and old town laws that allow citizens to marry woodpeckers dovetail nicely with a story about Mabel learning that it's okay to be herself and that weirdness has its advantages. Without her weirdness, Mabel wouldn't have uncovered all the evidence that she and Dipper would use to discredit the Northwests. And without all those absurdist gags and hidden messages (speaking of which, this week's cryptogram--"v. kofiryfh givnyovb"--is "E. Pluribus Trembley") or the entertaining way the show deploys those gags to explore the challenges of growing up as a misfit, Gravity Falls would just be a standard Disney Channel show, as forgettable as the '90s "TGIF"-style live-action sitcoms all over the channel's lineup.


Adventure Time, "Lady & Peebles" (from August 21, 2012)

The recent Adventure Time episodes "In Your Footsteps," "Princess Monster Wife" and "Goliad" seemed to indicate that there's a recurring theme of reproduction and procreation this season. The revelation that Jake's girlfriend Lady Rainicorn (Niki Yang) is pregnant with Jake's raini-pups at the end of the highly entertaining "Lady & Peebles" confirms it.

(Photo source: The Adventure Time Wiki)

As a new viewer of Adventure Time, I've been digging how I rarely know where a typical episode of this show is headed. Adventure Time's unpredictable nature, a huge factor in why "Lady & Peebles" and a series high point like "Thank You" are such great animated TV, brings to mind The Simpsons in its prime, back when the Simpsons writers started taking stories that would open with Homer and his family at a candy convention, for example, and zigzagged them so that they turned out to be about something else ("Homer Bad Man," that episode that initially took place at a candy con, appeared to be headed towards addressing sexual harassment, but then it morphed into a story mocking tabloid media circuses).

So I had no idea that the voice of George Takei would turn up halfway through "Lady & Peebles" in the form of a disembodied heart that's kidnapped Finn and Jake, whom Lady and Princess Bubblegum are trying to rescue. In this episode, Takei reprises his villainous Adventure Time role of Ricardio, the Ice King's talking heart (I haven't seen Ricardio's prior appearance on the show). Because I grew up watching Star Trek, Takei's distinctive voice is like an old friend. When I caught the 2007 Justin Lin mockumentary Finishing the Game on DVD and Takei's baritone made a surprise cameo in a clip of a fake '70s martial arts flick, my brain applauded, and it did the same thing when Ricardio emerged from the shadows with Takei's voice.

(Photo source: Captain Kabluey Loves You Too)

Takei is kind of underrated as a voice actor (it's no wonder his voice was third in prominence, after Majel Barrett and James Doohan, in terms of multiple speaking parts on Filmation's barely animated version of Star Trek in the '70s). He kills it as Ricardio, who's attempting to build himself a body with sinews he tore off from the body of the Ice King, his other captive. The mildly gross surgery imagery and Lady's unsubtitled Korean dialogue made me realize Adventure Time would never have been allowed to air in its present form on network TV or the Ren & Stimpy-censoring Nickelodeon 20 years ago (I can see a boardroom full of befuddled suits from the CBS daytime programming department saying, "She's speaking nothing but Japanese! Get Pendleton Ward on the line! Can't he give her more lines in English?"). The kind of older-skewing (but not TV-MA-rated) cartoon that Adventure Time is and the weirdness and sometimes disturbing imagery it gets away with could only have been possible on present-day cable.

I can also see broadcast network execs objecting to how PB kicks the shit out of Ricardio so badly he's left with bruises on his face. It's an amusing scene in which PB the gentle science nerd gets to unleash a warrior side as she literally stomps all over a heart, and it's not Finn's this time. The fact that PB fights dirty is yet another hint that this 19-year-old princess might take a turn towards evilness years from now. We've seen her bad temper and her demonic state when she was possessed by the Lich, who had coffee with her in Finn's nightmares in "King Worm" last week, and we've been made aware that her DNA begets evil offspring like Goliad. The show has chosen to have Finn age in real time--and now, it's turning Jake and Lady into parents--so I wouldn't be surprised if it allows PB to evolve into a villainous ruler.

Babies are usually the death knell for a show, but Adventure Time is so weird and so confident in its weirdness that the sight of a bunch of half-canine, half-rainicorn babies crawling around Ooo won't have such a ruinous effect on this show. It's like on The Simpsons. Apu and Manjula Nahasapeemapetilon had eight babies, and look what's happened since then. That cartoon hasn't jumped... no, wait.


Adventure Time, "I Remember You" (from October 17, 2012)

Someone in the A.V. Club comments section astutely noted that Adventure Time is basically "a bunch of fairy tales about mentally ill characters trying to find their way in the Land of Ooo." As a newcomer to Adventure Time this season, I've witnessed a buttload of material about mental illness since I first caught "Princess Monster Wife," the third Adventure Time episode I ever saw and the first one I wrote about. "Princess Monster Wife" had the Ice King behaving like a serial killer and cutting off body parts from princesses to create his new wife. In "BMO Noire," Finn and Jake's robot buddy BMO fabricated for himself a fantasy life straight out of a film noir to keep himself from being lonely. "Princess Cookie" centered on a Candy Kingdom citizen who lost his cool and held a bunch of convenience store customers hostage before finding peace in a mental institution with the guidance and help of Jake, while Princess Bubblegum similarly came to the aid of an equally unhinged character, the Earl of Lemongrab, and attempted to teach him how to improve his social skills in "You Made Me."

"I Remember You," Adventure Time's latest short, deals once again with the Ice King's mental instability. While there are funny bits of Ice King nuttiness like the ditty he sings to one of the Gunters to the tune of the "Daddy, why did you eat my fries?" song that Marceline the Vampire Queen (Olivia Olsen) created in "It Came from the Nightosphere," "I Remember You" also finds unexpected pathos in the old man's condition and presents a tragic side to these characters that the series somehow manages to pull off whenever it briefly hits pause on the kind of surreal comedy I've come to enjoy from Pendleton Ward's offbeat creation.

(Photo source: Adventure Time Wiki)

The lunatic king was once archaeologist Simon Petrikov, a human who gained immortality and various other powers from a magic crown that also made him forever mentally imbalanced. As part of his obsession with finding a princess to marry, the king turns to an initially reluctant Marceline for help in composing a song that will make him irresistible to all the honeys. Marceline kindly helps out the king with her usual composing brilliance, but the songwriting session is also a painful experience for her because she's saddened by the king's crown-induced amnesia about his friendship with her when she was a little girl vampire and he was pre-magical--and pre-selfish-and-psychotic-asshole--Simon (who looks a bit like David Strathairn as Dr. Rosen on Alphas, but with longer hair). In the closing flashback where Simon consoles a distraught Marceline with a teddy bear he grabs from the wreckage of a toy store, the episode gives a rare glimpse into the immediate aftermath of the Mushroom War that destroyed Earth, and that morsel of Ooo's murky backstory is also what makes this episode such a season highlight.

Simon's amnesia may hit close to home for adult viewers who know a loved one or elderly friend who's succumbing to Alzheimer's, particularly during the off-putting joyfulness he expresses while singing aloud passages from a letter he doesn't remember writing to Marceline back when the crown was beginning to ravage his mind. "This magic keeps me alive/But it's making me crazy," sings the king, who's joined by a teary Marceline, "And I need to save you/But who's going to save me?"

Damn, Adventure Time, how do you do it? How does your often farty ass morph from absurdist fun (dig John DiMaggio's terrific impression of his former Batman: The Brave and the Bold co-star Diedrich Bader when Jake channels Batman: "Your constant harassment of the female gender makes me sick!") to genuine tragedy so smoothly and without coming off tonally as schizophrenic like a certain bearded king?

And I haven't even gotten to how peripheral Finn and Jake are in this episode yet. Some of Adventure Time's strongest shorts contain very little of Finn and Jake ("Thank You" and now this episode) or don't involve the duo at all (the gender-swapping fan favorite "Fionna and Cake"). With minimal dialogue, "Thank You" followed an unlikely friendship between a Snow Golem and a Fire Wolf Pup that the golem enjoys having around as a pet despite the danger of melting from the pup's touch. That holiday short so captivated Cartoon Network execs (they're not always jackasses, "DC Nation" block fans) that they released "Thank You" theatrically before it aired to make it eligible for the Oscars' animated shorts category that year, although in the end, it didn't make the final list of 10 nominees. Like "Thank You," "I Remember You" is a surprisingly affecting story about friendship that's worthy of being honored with some bling--just as long as it's not a crown that makes its wearer go crazy.


Regular Show, "150 Piece Kit" (from October 31, 2012)

On a very bitchin' Regular Show, an unknown part of park manager Benson's past is unveiled when Hair to the Throne, a metal act that's legendary for featuring "the most epic drum solo in history" on their first album, comes to perform at the park. Because Mordecai and Rigby view their uptight and temperamental boss as a terminally uncool gumball machine, they don't buy a single word of Benson's insistence that he was the uncredited drummer who performed that famous solo, which required 150 pieces of percussion (including a gamelan) and is impossible to re-create. "I heard some guy in Denmark tried," says Rigby, "and his skeleton caught on fire!"

The scummy members of Hair to the Throne have instead given credit for the solo to a drum machine called the Drumotron VI, a move that--what else?--pisses off Benson and spurs him to challenge the Drumotron to a drumming duel on the night of their park concert. Benson could have taken the hair band to court, where many of these musician credit disputes are handled, but that doesn't usually make for engaging animation. When Mordecai and Rigby catch the musicians sabotaging Benson's drum kit, the duo changes their tune about these ex-colleagues of Benson's they once idolized.

(Photo source: Regular Show Wiki)

Mordecai and Rigby will always view Benson as a dweeb, but like on any live-action workplace comedy where a circle of friends sees an insufferable co-worker getting mistreated by outsiders, they think of Benson as their dweeb and leap to his defense. The duo and the other park workers help Benson to defeat the Drumotron, which, at one point, unleashes spider legs like an evil robot from the 1984 Tom Selleck sci-fi turkey Runaway and leaps onto Benson to try to screw up his solo. Benson's attempt to prove to the concertgoers and the world that the legendary solo was all him, is, of course, the centerpiece of "150 Piece Kit" (why isn't there a hyphen in the episode title?). Mark Mothersbaugh and his able staff of Regular Show composers are the MVPs of "150 Piece Kit," which is filled with enjoyable but not-too-celeb-specific rock industry in-jokes like Mordecai and Rigby's ability to remember the names of everyone in their favorite metal band--except for the bass player's name.

Benson's solo is amusingly absurd ("360-degree ascending sky cage?!," says the Hair to the Throne frontman in disbelief as Benson continues soloing in that very cage) and cosmic in scope. It concludes, of course, with a giant cymbal strike emanating a Star Trek VI Praxis explosion-style shockwave that sweeps through the park and knocks the toupees off the heads of the Hair to the Throne bandmates.

Too bad John Henry didn't have any six-foot-tall bluejays, raccoons or albino Yetis as his friends because they would have totally had his back when he was trying to beat that steel-driving machine.

"Coca-Cola tastes like donkey piss, bitch!," says Pops. (Photo source: Regular Show Wiki)

Regular Show, "The Christmas Special" (from December 5, 2012)

Regular Show's enormously entertaining half-hour Christmas special, creatively titled "The Christmas Special," ranks somewhere below South Park's introduction of Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo, John Goodman's controversial Futurama guest shot as the psychotic Robot Santa, NewsRadio's Christmas episode about Bill McNeal's Santa-suited stalker and Lee Majors' The Night the Reindeer Died as a great piece of unsentimental and irreverent alt-Yuletide TV. Okay, The Night the Reindeer Died wasn't an actual Christmas special, but those two minutes that poked fun at Christmas special excess right at the start of the otherwise not-so-great Scrooged were glorious.

I'm not sure if the Regular Show writers/storyboarders have ever seen Scrooged, but their Christmas special feels like the result of them asking each other, "What if we made a silly, over-the-top Christmas action movie like The Night the Reindeer Died?" As someone who finds the sentimental tone of most holiday TV shows and commercials to be overbearing and lame (and prefers either The Ref, the original Die Hard or any Shane Black-written holiday movie--especially Kiss Kiss Bang Bang--over It's a Wonderful Life as holiday viewing), the unsentimental Regular Show Christmas special is right up my alley. And luckily, the one moment where "The Christmas Special" gets heartfelt is played understatedly: Benson's rival Gene (Kurtwood Smith) glances at a Christmas portrait of himself with his wife and kid--aw, so the ruthless bastard does have a heart after all--while trying to decide whether or not to put aside his differences with Benson and his employees to save both them and Christmas from Quillgin (Thomas Haden Church!), the episode's villain.

(Photo source: Regular Show Wiki)

In addition to bringing back Smith as Gene, the anthropomorphic vending machine who manages East Pines Park and waged a prank war against Benson and his park in "Prankless," "The Christmas Special" features Ed Asner reprising his role from the Will Ferrell vehicle Elf as Santa, but here, he plays Kringle as a hoverboard-riding action hero. It's not exactly a new riff on Santa, but Asner, an animation veteran who especially shined during his villainous Superman: The Animated Series and Boondocks guest shots and his starring role in Up, kills it.

The "Christmas Special" plot has an injured Santa turning to Mordecai and Rigby for help after he and an important item he's been carrying both fall from the sky and crash through their garage. St. Nick has been trying to stop Quillgin, a disgruntled elf who used to design toys for his workshop, from getting his hands on the item, an invention Quillgin created and Santa rejected for being too unsafe. It's an empty red gift box that can conjure up anything that's desired most by whoever opens the box, and Quillgin invented it to eliminate the need for Santa and destroy Christmas forever. He used dark magic to build the box, which turns whoever opens it evil, and in a plot point straight out of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Santa entrusts Mordecai and Rigby with the task of destroying the evil box once and for all. Skips tells the duo that the only way to destroy the impervious box is to throw it into a lava pit that happens to be located inside an abandoned mine shaft on the other side of East Pines Park (I've always wondered which big city Regular Show takes place in, and the amount of snow that covers both parks during this episode automatically disqualifies it from being a coastal California city).

(Photo source: Regular Show Wiki)

The gang's quest for the lava pit allows Regular Show to riff on Inception's snow-based action sequences (which, in turn, were riffs on the ski chases in On Her Majesty's Secret Service) and the climactic tests of wisdom in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. When Pops volunteers to wrestle a bear as part of the series of booby traps the gang must conquer to reach the lava pit, that's where you know this Christmas special is a keeper. I also like Mordecai's growing frustration with the Last Crusade-style obstacles as he groans, "Aw, what? Another slide?"

The amount of Indy and Back to the Future references that series creator and "Christmas Special" co-director J.G. Quintel and his crew inserted into the episode signifies their love for '80s Spielberg--but not the usual highlights of that era of Spielberg. The quest for the lava pit marks the second time Quintel's crew has referenced the Last Crusade climax. As the Topless Robot blog noted in their "11 Nerdiest References in Regular Show" list while praising the show's Last Crusade-inspired gags during the "Eggscellent" episode, "As far as Indiana Jones parodies go, most writers have the tendency to parody the opening from Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy is running away from the boulder, as comedically hackneyed as it is... But it takes a real nerd to find humor in the last scene of The Last Crusade when Indy must choose and drink from the true Holy Grail."

(Photo source: Regular Show Wiki)

Regular Show is rated TV-PG--that's like between a PG-13 and an R during the hours of Cartoon Network programming before Adult Swim takes over--so the Regular Show crew often toys with the censors, trying to see how far they can go in terms of cartoon violence and references in the dialogue to sexuality. At one point in "The Christmas Special," you can sense the crew's delight at toying with Standards and Practices when Rigby considers pulling a prank on East Pines where he would mess around with the carrot nose of one of the rival park's snowmen. Rigby's prank is disrupted by the alarm he tripped by grabbing the carrot, but we all know where he was about to place that carrot. So "The Christmas Special" isn't quite as filthy as South Park's Mr. Hankey episodes or as dark as Futurama's Robot Santa stories, but it's a lot of fun. All that's missing is the presence of a certain action icon who's become a favorite go-to guest star in recent years on shows ranging from Community to Human Target: The Night the Reindeer Died star Lee Majors. Otherwise, to borrow the words of The Night the Reindeer Died's network promos, Yule love it.

On December 11, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released its list of 75 original songs that are eligible for the Oscars' Best Original Song category. Only 32 percent of these potential nominees are on Spotify. Adele's "Skyfall," a song I've been streaming on AFOS and a Bond theme I've grown to better appreciate after realizing how well its lyrics tie into two of the film's key scenes involving Judi Dench's M, and the original songs from Django Unchained and Will Ferrell's all-Español Casa de Mi Padre are among the 68 percent that are inexplicably absent from Spotify.

Of the 32 percent, the following 10 tracks are the only potential nominees on Spotify that I like, which means neither of them will turn up in tomorrow morning's Oscar nod announcements because "Lose Yourself" from 8 Mile aside, the Academy never nominates any original tunes I like. I must be the only film geek who doesn't care for the Oscars and is more interested in IFC's Spirit Awards, a far less up-its-own-ass and tedious movie award show. I really hope the NBA All-Star Game takes place during Oscar Weekend again this year. The All-Star Game festivities made for great Oscar counter-programming.

1. The Black Keys and RZA, "The Baddest Man Alive," The Man with the Iron Fists
2. Julie Fowlis, "Touch the Sky," Brave
3. Sunny Levine featuring Young Dad, "No Other Plans," Celeste & Jesse Forever
4. The Arcade Fire, "Abraham's Daughter," The Hunger Games
5. Beck, "Looking for a Sign," Jeff, Who Lives at Home
6. The Bootleggers featuring Emmylou Harris, "Cosmonaut," Lawless
7. Mychael Danna featuring Bombay Jayashri, "Pi's Lullaby," Life of Pi
8. The Crystal Method featuring Martha Reeves and The Funk Brothers, “I’m Not Leaving,” Re:Generation
9. Florence + the Machine, "Breath of Life," Snow White & the Huntsman
10. Jordin Sparks, "One Wing," Sparkle


Except for Life of Pi, I've seen neither of the films these songs hail from. That biopic starring Jessica Chastain as Lucy Lawless looks interesting.

Cyndi Lauper looks a lot different ever since she started taking up Krav Maga.

"5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" originally started out as a post about the rivalry between Cartoon Network's "DC Nation" block and Disney XD's "Marvel Universe" block. Named after the Paul's Boutique instrumental "5-Piece Chicken Dinner" as a shout to the late Adam Yauch, "Din" turned into both a way to keep the AFOS blog from looking fallow and a writing exercise/endurance test to see if I would break while I made myself write about animated shows I don't usually watch because they're outside my Adult Swim/Boondocks/Venture Bros. comfort zone.

I did end up breaking halfway through the first season of Ultimate Spider-Man on "Marvel Universe" (it's nicely animated by Film Roman, but its juvenile scripts, except for the one for the Spidey/Iron Fist/Doctor Strange team-up "Strange," have paled in comparison to the writing in the Brian Michael Bendis comic it's loosely based on). I found myself busting out my best Danny Glover and grumbling, "I'm too old for this shit," and I gave up recapping USM. (There's a way to bring out the comedic side of Spidey's adventures without coming off as too juvenile. Unlike USM, Christopher Yost managed to do it during the Spidey guest shots he wrote for The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.)

"I'm too old for this shit" was something I frequently thought while catching for the first time shows like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot and Ben 10: Special Victims Unit, so that's why those cartoons and a few others received Cs from me two weeks ago (and I don't think I'll ever have the patience to sit through The Hub's revivals of My Little Pony, Pound Puppies and Care Bears). But I also discovered cartoons that aren't made with just kids in mind and are equal to high-quality works like two of my favorite shows from the late '80s/early '90s animation renaissance, Batman: The Animated Series and The Simpsons (more specifically, seasons two through eight), the aforementioned Adult Swim half-hour hits The Venture Bros. and The Boondocks and the short-lived Cartoon Network gems Megas XLR and Sym-Bionic Titan.

Before "Din," I was already acquainted with the beautifully animated Young Justice, but "Din" has turned me into a Regular Show fan, and I've started to enjoy the Fleischer Brothers-style, "actually made for older viewers and potheads, but kids, you're welcome to take a toke too" vibe of Adventure Time. And I don't think I've ever seen an action cartoon outside of B:TAS that basically says to young viewers, "It's okay to question corporate America," which is one of the reasons why I fell in love with Motorcity. I initially thought, "There's no way this anti-corporate-world cartoon is going to last on Disney XD," and I was right. Disney canned Motorcity after one season.

"Din" is also a chance to bring an adult, "not every other word in the review is the word 'awesome'" perspective to these kids' cartoons (the A.V. Club has been the only site I regularly read that takes animation seriously and assigns writers who are around my age to discuss these shows in posts that, unlike most other online reviews, have been spellchecked, although in the cases of plucked-from-the-blogosphere AVC writers like Phil Dyess-Nugent of the intriguing Phil Dyess-Nugent Experience blog, you can take the blogger out of the misspelling-riddled blogosphere, but you can't take the misspelling-riddled blogosphere out of the blogger). But as early as the first week, I already complained about having to sit through the annoying commercials on kids' networks (my remote was broken at the time, so I couldn't fast-forward through them).

In addition to the aggravating kids' network ads for nightlights and juice pouches, I've started to grow tired of the kids' networks' haphazard episode schedules. Neither HBO nor FX would yank a 13-episode original series in the middle of its run without warning like Cartoon Network did with its serialized "DC Nation" shows about three weeks into their new seasons. That's because HBO and FX are run by grown-ups, and a grown-up way of relating to viewers is to warn them about the preemption beforehand, not afterward. Also, on some weeks, I've found my Adult Swim/HBO/FX-watching self saying, "Can somebody please swear or actually kill somebody? I think I'm going to fucking lose it."

So the first new "Din" column in 2013 means one major modification. I'm changing the "non-Adult Swim cable cartoon" rule and adding to the always-changing "Din" roster the cartoons I watch more frequently: adult cartoons, whether for the broadcast networks or cable (Archer will return to FX on January 17 and IFC will sneak-preview an interesting-looking new one called Out Thereon January 22 this week).

Whattup, cursing, sex and grown-up problems.


It took me about a few episodes of Bob's Burgers to get used to the weirdness of female characters being voiced by male comedians (kind of like how a viewer who's never seen The Venture Bros. before catches TVB for the first time and keeps wondering, "Why does that brunette chick sound like a dude?"), but now that I'm no longer distracted by that casting quirk, I consider Bob's Burgers to be the current crown jewel of the Fox "Animation Domination" block. Bob's Burgers creator Loren Bouchard has taken the best elements of his Squigglevision cartoons Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist and Home Movies--overlapping dialogue, great comedic voice acting by performers who weren't previously associated with animation, nicely written kid characters--and put them into a show with top-shelf animation (no off-putting squiggling during this one).

Add to those elements a recurring and interesting art-vs.-commerce conflict between Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) and his business rivals that Bouchard has said was inspired by the 1996 Italian restaurant movie Big Night--plus timeless storylines that deal with the unspoken affection the family members have for each other without getting too goopy--and you have a cartoon that's outlasted the Allen Gregorys and Napoleon Dynamites of the world and, due to its timeless writing, has the potential to age better in reruns than Family Guy's random pop-culture reference gags and the equally reference-heavy and spotty later seasons of The Simpsons. "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" is a great example of the Bouchard show's exploration of the bonds between the Belchers without resorting to those sitcom hugging scenes that made '80s studio audiences go "Awww" and made me want to go shoot myself.

Written by Nora Smith, "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" pairs off two characters who don't share a lot of scenes together--nine-year-old sociopath Louise (Kristen Schaal) and the parent she doesn't favor, the overly perky Linda (John Roberts, one of two male cast members on this show who voices females)--while continuing to explore how Louise's older sister Tina (Dan Mintz, the other actor playing female) seems to have inherited everything from Bob. Those attributes include a lonely and largely friendless childhood similar to the one we saw young Bob experience in "Bob Fires the Kids," Bob's calm demeanor and now, his hairiness.

At Dad's restaurant, Tina overhears a couple of popular classmates gossiping about another girl's hairy legs and realizes her own legs are equally hairy and susceptible to ridicule, so she asks Bob to take her to get her legs waxed after a couple of failed attempts to have them sheared. Lin was supposed to shave Tina's legs, but Lin, who's been fuming over Louise's frequent hostility towards her, is too distracted and angry to be entrusted with a razor, and as resident weirdo sibling Gene (Eugene Mirman) notes in one of the few observations of his that make any sense, "I don't think you should shave angry."

Lin's misguided solution to getting Louise to like her better is to trick her into taking part in a mother-daughter bonding seminar run by Lin's current favorite mommy blogger, "the Phenomimom," who turns out to be a creepy man named Dakota (Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) who holds his seminars next door to a laser-tag fun zone that's more to Louise's liking. Dakota's "Modo Time" methods of getting disgruntled kids to bond with their moms are, of course, pointless and ineffective. They range from lame role-reversal improv games to forcing the kids to re-experience their days as fetuses while trapped inside "vagi-sacks," a.k.a. sleeping bags.

Because Bob's Burgers is a very good cartoon as opposed to a sloppy one like The Simpsons' fake Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show that sets up the presence of a fireworks factory and then fails to utilize it as a gag, "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" makes it to the fireworks factory when Louise frees herself and the other kids from their hellish seminar experience and leads them to escape to the laser-tag fun zone, where Louise and Lin finally end up bonding over laser guns aimed at an enraged Dakota. If this were The Young Ones, the anarchic Louise's love of destruction and criminal activity would make her Vyvyan. Between the attraction to laser-tag and her enjoyment of Bob's favorite spaghetti westerns in "Spaghetti Western and Meatballs," I wouldn't be surprised if this mini-Vyv grows up to become an action movie director, just like how Gene is bound to become either a hacky morning zoo DJ or a hacky stand-up and Tina is headed towards becoming either a chef like her dad or an essayist penning Paul Feig-esque best-sellers about her awkward adolescent experiences.

The kid characters are the best part of Bob's Burgers. That's mainly because they--particularly the nutty and over-enthusiastic Gene--talk and behave more like real kids who don't really know much about the world outside the restaurant and the playground and less like precocious Huey Freeman-style stand-ins or Mary Sues for their adult creators (although Aaron McGruder's use of Huey as the voice for his politics on the Boondocks cartoon works quite well for that show).

My favorite example in this episode of the Belcher kids being such kids--other than Gene's desire to get a scrotal wax despite not fully grasping how painful it likely is--is a quick gag that's easy to miss, and a lot of them can be easily missed due to the overlapping dialogue that's distinguished Bob's Burgers from The Simpsons and the Seth MacFarlane cartoons. When Louise tries to back out of mother-daughter time, she communicates to Lin her reluctance to spend time with her by using break-up lines she's overheard from either dozens of break-up conversations between couples at the restaurant or break-up scenes in rom-coms: "Look, I think we should spend some time apart. I'm just not really looking for something serious right now. You understand--I mean, yeah, it's gonna be a little awkward, you've got some of your stuff at my place, we live together..." "I think we should spend some time apart" are words I hope I'll never have to say to Bob's Burgers.


I prefer the MacFarlane-produced American Dad (which isn't run by MacFarlane but by co-creators Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman) over the show MacFarlane is better known for and has been more creatively involved in, Family Guy, for several reasons. One of them is because Family Guy doesn't have Patrick Stewart entertainingly pissing all over his fatherly, buttoned-up image as Captain Picard and Professor Xavier almost every week as the voice of Avery Bullock, the batshit crazy boss of CIA agent Stan Smith (MacFarlane, who also voices Roger the alien), like in the latest American Dad episode, the enjoyable "Finger Lenting Good."

Avery presides over a Lenten pact where the Smiths must rid themselves of their worst vices for all of Lent. For instance, Francine (Wendy Schaal) has to give up smoking, while wimpy teen Steve (Scott Grimes) has to avoid weeping, which Steve can barely keep himself from doing when, in the funniest non-Avery-or-Roger-related gag, Hayley (Rachael MacFarlane, Seth's sister) and Stan sing aloud "Nothing Compares 2 U" to make Steve crack. The first Smith who succumbs to his or her vice has to sacrifice a finger to Avery, who reveals that he wears a bracelet made of severed fingers ("I started collecting when I was in Vietnam. Two summers ago. I was on a sex tour. Did not get laid, had zero game. Just kept... cutting off fingers."). Between Avery episodes like this one and Kate Mulgrew's frequent scene-stealing on NTSF:SD:SUV:: as Kove, Paul Scheer's eyepatch-wearing boss/ex-wife, I've gotten a kick out of seeing post-Kirk Star Trek captains make the space-time leap to absurdist comedy. Your move, Sisko.

(Photo source: unseendaydream)

Like the best final episodes of shows that were taken from us too early, "A Better Tomorrow," the dramatic conclusion of a two-part season finale that's ended up being Motorcity's series finale, functions as a fine summation of what the show wanted to do (in Motorcity's case, it's to blow stuff up) and say (any time corporate America offers you utopia, never be afraid to question it) while also trying not to leave too many threads hanging. Otherwise, we would have been left with a colossal, Heroes season 1 finale-style letdown. However, one thread is left hanging, and it's my only disappointment with "A Better Tomorrow": after the show made such a big deal about Burners leader Mike's connection to his helmeted nemesis Red (Eric Ladin) in "Vendetta," we never learn Red's identity.

I'm sure Motorcity creator Chris Prynoski and his Titmouse studio would have loved to have had a second season where I assume Red would have been unmasked (and the writers already had tons of story ideas for season 2, as Prynoski and writer George Krstic revealed when they posted photos of writers' room index cards with story ideas written on them). But after being burned--no pun intended--by MTV's cancellation of Downtown and Cartoon Network's cancellation of Megas XLR, Prynoski and Titmouse were already prepared for the worst. So they devised "A Better Tomorrow" so that it could double as a series finale, in case Disney--which never really understood how to market and promote the kind of older-skewing animated gem it had in Motorcity---chose to Old Yeller the show.

In "A Better Tomorrow" (that title's an '80s John Woo shout-out, which tells you how great the Titmouse staffers' tastes in Hong Kong cinema are), Kane gets his just desserts and is defeated by the Burners and the various gangs of Motorcity, who put aside their differences to save their hometown from Kane's Genesis Pod detonation device. Also, Kane's daughter Julie heeds her dad's advice about how leadership requires making hard decisions and makes the hard decision of rejecting her dad's empire once and for all. Then Mike and the Burners meet at Antonio's, order a platter of onion rings to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" and are disrupted by an abrupt cut to black.

Okay, that last bit didn't happen, but Red letdown aside, Motorcity leaves the airwaves the same way it entered them: kicking and screaming and blowing terrifically animated stuff up while subversively biting the corporate hand that fed it.

(Photo source: unseendaydream)

"Jake the Dad," Adventure Time's introduction of Lady Rainicorn and Jake's new (and rapidly maturing) puppies, Charlie, T.V., Viola, Kim Kil Whan and Jake Jr., is mostly filler--too many birth episodes of comedy shows basically are--but it's not without Adventure Time's typical offbeat touches. They range from whatever the hell BMO is doing to Finn at the end of the episode (it looks like Finn is being joystick-boarded) to amusing side characters like a befuddled fox in the forest who mistakes Jake Sr. for a baby (and is voiced by episode co-writer/storyboarder Tom Herpich) and of course, Jake Jr., a female pup with a guy's name, an ass-face, a knack for juggling both English and Korean and the unmistakable pipes of special guest star Kristen Schaal.

(Photo source: Adventure Time Wiki)

The episode also contains nicely subversive messages about parenting: overprotectiveness, paranoia and fear amount to nothing; most parenting manuals are bullshit; and it's better to let kids figure some things out for themselves than to be all up in their grill 24/7. While overprotective dad Jake underestimates the intelligence of his kids for most of "Jake the Dad," the episode itself entrusts viewers to figure out its messages about parenting rather than preaching those messages to them like the worst '80s cartoons used to always do.


Nobody listens to terrestrial radio anymore, so TV shows with existing song-heavy soundtracks like Regular Show have supplanted the oldies stations on terrestrial radio as the place to be first exposed to certain classic rock or rap tracks. Some critic said Regular Show was where his kids first took notice of Mountain's "Mississippi Queen" when the "Weekend at Benson's" episode used it in a montage. One of Regular Show's many charms is how its music montages have been introducing to a new generation of viewers some great older tunes ("Mississippi Queen") and others that are not-so-great (last season's Emmy-winning "Eggscellent" went with Bonnie Tyler's overplayed Footloose anthem "Holding Out for a Hero"). These aren't wack Kidz Bop cover versions. These are the actual tunes, which must have cost J.G. Quintel and his crew a Skips-size arm and a leg.

(Photo source: Calvin Wong)

The latest Regular Show short, "TGI Tuesday," picks a great oldie for its big dance montage: "The Ballroom Blitz," the infectious glam rock classic by Sweet. I'm glad Regular Show opted for Sweet instead of Footloose again. As Secret Six and Batgirl comics writer Gail Simone once said on Twitter, "Has there EVER been a movie that is as much of a love letter to whiteness as the original Footloose? Holy crap. WHITE."

"Let's Hear It for the Boy" or some other toothless Reagan-era dance track from Footloose wouldn't have suited an episode that has Jaleel White guest-starring as the ghost of Daryl, a breakdancer with a Kid from Kid 'n Play hairdo who died in 1985 (the hairdo is more 1990 than 1985, but who cares?) and whose crew challenges Mordecai, Rigby and Eileen to a dance-off. The duel requires a track with a sound that's a little harder than Footloose, like either "Apache," Sheila E.'s "A Love Bizarre," an actual song from 1985 and one of my favorite Prince-produced joints, or "The Ballroom Blitz."


The prize is control of the Parkside Lux, the park's abandoned ballroom, which Daryl and the ballroom ghosts' leader, a Prince lookalike named Johnny Emp'r'r, won't relinquish to Mordecai, Rigby and Eileen (who, by the way, gets to deliver the episode's best line: "*SIGH* These burritos taste like failure") unless they win the dance-off. Mordecai and his friends need to use the Parkside Lux in order to throw Margaret a last-minute going-away party on her last night of freedom before she concentrates on her studies and transfers to a new college. Her last free night falls on a Tuesday, which means all the clubs in town are either reserved for Tuesday night shindigs like shuffleboard and women's bridge night or closed on a night that's not exactly known for awesome things going down. The only venue that's left is the Parkside Lux.

Usually on Regular Show, confrontations between the park workers and supernatural forces end in TV-PG-level comedic violence, but the confrontation in "TGI Tuesday" ends on a gentle and wistful note that's pretty rare on this show. Back in 1985, Johnny and the breakers got distracted and partied so hard while trying to put together a rad party for their equivalent of Margaret that they ended up dead (the reason for their deaths is left unexplained for what I presume are TV-PG-related reasons, but Alex, I'm gonna go with "What is too much nose candy?"). The ghosts realize how deeply Mordecai cares about Margaret and that he shouldn't be forced to repeat the mistake they made--missing out on the best party ever--so they grant Mordecai and his friends permission to use the Parkside Lux. "TGI Tuesday" is more of a dancey and heartwarming episode than a hilarious one, but once in a while, a break from anarchy and mayhem is welcome on Regular Show, especially if it calls for younger viewers to get schooled in some killer older music along the way.

"Oh God, the ship's computer put Pluto Nash on a loop! Yellow alert!"

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

Over on the YouTube (this must be how Mr. Burns refers to YouTube--as "the YouTube"--like when he tries to relate to his employees by talking about something he watched on "the DuMont" the other day), the Cartoon Hangover channel has been posting since November five-minute webisodes of Bravest Warriors, a terrific new sci-fi cartoon created by Adventure Time mastermind Pendleton Ward. The series follows the adventures--some action-y, others not-so-action-y--of 16-year-old space heroes Beth (Liliana Mumy, which is inspired casting because she's the daughter of Lost in Space's Bill Mumy), Chris (Alex Walsh), Danny (John Omohundro) and Wallow (Ian Jones-Quartey), who's someone we've never seen on Star Trek: a Samoan crew member.

Though Ward isn't as creatively involved with Bravest Warriors as he is on Adventure Time--showrunner Breehn Burns, who's written and directed every webisode so far, is really the main creative force here--the Cartoon Hangover series is full of many of the same elements that make Adventure Time a standout cartoon. Maria Bamford steals the show voicing a side character or two like she does over on Adventure Time, everyone has button eyes and speaks in slangy and bizarre dialogue like the denizens of Ooo do (although it's less stoned-sounding here) and the surreal, rubbery and brightly colored visuals are a feast for the eyes, just like on the other show. The surreal vibe distinguishes Bravest Warriors from slightly more straightforward sci-fi comedy shows like Futurama and Red Dwarf.

"Butter Lettuce," the funniest and most inventive Bravest Warriors installment so far, takes place entirely in a Holo-John, a futuristic bathroom that allows people to play 3-D video games while they're doing their biz. Because they're horny teens, Danny and Wallow mess around with the Holo-John to see what Beth (whose last name, by the way, is Tezuka, clearly a shout-out to Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion creator Osamu Tezuka) would be like if she were more sexed-up. They try to get Chris, who's too shy to act on his feelings for Beth, to join in on their type of fun, but the holo-fantasizing about Beth wearing Barbara Eden's I Dream of Jeannie outfit and Princess Leia's metal bikini weirds him out.

The guys aren't aware that Beth is just like them and has fantasies of her own that she's obsessed with too. So after trying not to get caught by an amusingly disheveled and barely awake Beth when she enters the Holo-John to brush her teeth, they wind up trapped inside her favorite holo-fantasy, a hilarious scenario that involves a spa full of sweaty male unicorn strippers, and are unprepared for the, uh, sweatiness of it all (although the perpetually laid-back Wallow seems to have no problem with it). During "Butter Lettuce," I couldn't help but notice that someone on the cartoon's staff must have remembered how creepy and pathetic most of the Star Trek: The Next Generation holodeck episodes were and decided to humorously comment on the creepiness of those episodes. ("Booby Trap," the one where LaForge seeks engineering advice from a holodeck version of a respected female scientist who dresses like the sister wife from Shameless and ends up wanting to bang her, is especially creepy. That episode is also proof that some of the TNG staff writers had some really fucked-up issues about men of color. The fact that the TNG cast is aware of that, like whenever they mention whyTNG's "Code of Honor" planet-of-the-Africans episode was such an epic fail, is one reason to love that cast.)

Cartoon Hangover touts itself as "the home for cartoons that are too weird, wild and crazy for television," and without a prudish bunch of execs like the suits in charge of the non-Adult Swim half of Cartoon Network breathing down the animators' necks, Bravest Warriors gets to go places Adventure Time attempted to dip its toe in but got in trouble with CN for doing so (like when it hinted that Princess Bubblegum and Marceline were once more than just friends). The title characters are a little older than 14-year-old Finn, so sexuality is a huge part of their lives, and Bravest Warriors doesn't shy away from that, like in the latest webisode, "Gas Powered Stick," in which Danny and Wallow vie for the attention of Beth's hot best friend Plum (Tara Strong), but she's setting her sights on Chris, who would rather hook up with Beth.




"Gas Powered Stick" isn't as sharp as "Butter Lettuce" because it's a little more focused on teen drama, as Burns put it in the webisode's behind-the-scenes featurette. But fortunately, because this is a Pendleton Ward creation, the teen drama is leavened by offbeat humor that, in this case, involves a little teddy bear who speaks like a baritone-voiced Boondocks character (Michael Leon Wooley) and an X-ray vision superpower that Chris--and anyone else who's a 16-year-old kid--is eager to make use of, until it subjects him to unsexy sights he wasn't expecting to witness, like Beth shaving her armpits. I love how Bravest Warriors continually tries to ruin Chris' view of Beth as this perfect, idealized object of affection. It reminds me of a similar thing Ward has said he's been trying to do with the equally flawed Princess Bubblegum over on Adventure Time. He told io9 that "there's so many stereotypical girl characters, and the easiest thing to do is the opposite: girl power, making them extremely intelligent or extremely tough. I just want to make girls that are normal, just like Finn is normal."

I can't wait to see what else is normal about Beth on this show. For instance, what does her face look like when she drops the kids off at the pool?


The character design of IFC's Out There, which officially premieres on February 22, is completely--what else?--out-there. (A family of Totoro-faced humans? Button noses on everyone else?) But the show's themes of awkward adolescence and small-town boredom aren't so new and different, and while I wish "A Chris by Any Other Name," the school dance episode that IFC sneak-previewed after Portlandia last Friday, had more than just one or two genuinely funny scenes, there's enough interesting material in Out There's low-key, not-so-broadly-played and nearly melancholy take on coming-of-age humor to make the cartoon worth checking out each week when it begins in February.

Longtime South Park director and Out There creator Ryan Quincy voices Chad Stevens, an unassuming high-schooler in the small town of Holford and the eldest kid in the aforementioned Totoro-ish family. He's loyal to his new best friend Chris (Justin Roiland, a.k.a. the Earl of Lemongrab from Adventure Time), the class prankster, but he also might be starting to outgrow Chris' antics now that he's getting to know Sharla (Linda Cardellini), whom he has a crush on and is the opposite of Chris: well-behaved, respectful of authority and never getting into run-ins with bullies. Chad's younger brother Jay (Kate Micucci) is even more worshipful of Chris and constantly wants to join in on Chris' pranks and daredevil stunts (speaking of stunts, Chris has an Evel Knievel poster up on his bedroom wall, and both that and the famous Farrah Fawcett poster next to it are hints that this show is a '70s or '80s period piece).

The show is narrated by Chad, presumably when he's several years older, and while the voiceover narration isn't necessary, it's not as overbearing as Peter Parker's narration on Ultimate Spider-Man. There are a couple of left-field casting choices here that I find amusing: John DiMaggio takes a break from his usual party-animal voices (Bender, Jake, Tracy Morgan...) to play Chad and Jay's meek dad, while Micucci is voicing a little boy (and is great at it, like another Out There cast member, Pamela Adlon, was when she voiced Bobby on King of the Hill). The brief glimpse into her character Jay's silly imagination during "A Chris by Any Other Name" (which is the third episode, by the way, not the first) is one of the episode's few genuinely funny bits, and the peeks at his daydreams are something Out There will hopefully make more use of.


I don't usually go for tall women with man-hands, but holy shit, did Lana Kane from Archer look smokin' in a Honey Ryder-esque white bikini while co-hosting the Fox "Animation Domination" block this week or what? I will now permanently affix to my brain the image of Lana in the bikini to make the experience of recalling the nude beach scenes in Bob's Burgers' "Nude Beach" episode much more pleasant for me.

Fred Armisen, who drummed for the punk band Trenchmouth before he made comedic, pre-YouTube video shorts and joined SNL, seems to live for playing characters who are awful musicians. Remember Armisen's senile drummer Mackey and his badly timed rimshots ("Mackey on drums, everybody!") or his procrastinating songwriter Garth, half of Weekend Update's Garth and Kat (a bit that Kristen Wiig, a.k.a. Kat, channeled while hilariously presenting with Will Ferrell, in front of a genuinely unamused, grumpy and past-his-bedtime Tommy Lee Jones, at the Golden Globes on Sunday)? In "Nude Beach," the Portlandia star adds another shitty musician to his repertoire: Tommy, a health inspector whom Bob quickly regrets bargaining with after he agrees to allow Tommy to perform his amateur singer/songwriter act at his restaurant. Tommy's tunes drive out Bob's customers, who can't stand being subjected to lyrics like "I’m good at sex, you’re bad at sex!" and "The Itsy Bitsy Stripper climbed up the brassy pole/Down came her legs and wrapped around my soul."

Tommy isn't the only health inspector in "Nude Beach" whose comfort with baring his soul makes people uncomfortable. There's also Hugo (Sam Seder), the rigid inspector Tommy has replaced. Hugo has ditched his inspector job and found happiness baring his soul and more as a nudist in the town's nude beach, a new part of town Bob must brave when he has to save the restaurant by begging the newly liberated, always-unclothed Hugo to become an inspector again. Meanwhile, in a subplot bolstered by Aziz Ansari's welcome return as Darryl (the gamer kid Bob befriended in "Burgerboss") and the Belcher kids' amusing reactions to certain sides of their dad they've never seen before and will never want to revisit, the kids host "nudity tours" in which they sucker classmates into paying for watching the nudists and their floppy wieners through Darryl's telescope.

I'm not much of a fan of Hugo as a character or a nudist, but having him sing "You're the Best" from the original Karate Kid off-screen and off-key during the episode's climactic Nudecathalon montage is an inspired touch. (Between the Nudecathalon montage and Happy Endings' long-delayed "Kickball 2: The Kickening" episode, Sunday night was a grand night for '80s sports movie sendups.)


In "Nude Beach," the kids receive less screen time than I usually prefer on Bob's Burgers. But the episode makes up for their reduced screen time with gags like a strange restaurant worker hygiene video hosted by The Wire's Andre Royo, who voices himself, and Bob's resigned and horrified reactions. Those reactions of his are always a reliable source of laughs, whether it's from being forced to hang out with the insane Tommy or having to compete in the increasingly awkward-for-Bob Nudecathalon during a sequence that made me realize, "Hey, 'You're the Best' works quite well when it's paired with the horror genre."


Over at the A.V. Club, the American Dad recapper noted that Francine's discomfort with Roger's schemes and his enjoyment of cheating his way through life during "The Adventures of Twill Ongenbone and His Boy Jabari" is a little hard to swallow, especially because the show is in its eighth season, and by now, Francine should be used to his schemes or not so gullible about them (I think the fact that she's never seen him create rainbows made out of his own piss until now is more hard to buy). As someone whose exposure to American Dad has been limited to its standout Christmas episodes, an Avery story or two, a rerun of a Spring Break episode that a Twitter friend worked on, a rerun of a Mexico-based episode that's made me stay away from horchata and the last couple of weeks of first-run episodes, I'm not so familiar with Francine's frustrations with Roger.

So I enjoyed "Twill Ongenbone," in which the alien schemer attempts to show Francine that he's starting to understand her point of view about the value of hard work in the only way he knows: by faking the discovery of a Third World tribe that's actually being played by a bunch of black Hollywood actors he's hired to help maintain the ruse. One of those actors turns out to be Cuba Gooding Jr., who's voiced by a surprisingly game Wayne Brady.

However, the B-story in "Twill Ongenbone" ends up being funnier than the Francine/Roger stuff. Steve has to interview Stan for a history class assignment, and his dad's nonchalance as he gets overly detailed on his cell to Steve about having sex with Francine, killing people and being depressed is an inspired bit of dark humor. (Between Stan's descriptions of Francine in the sack and the ass tattoo that she angrily flashes to Steve at the breakfast table, Steve has seriously been scarred for life. He and Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts' home-schooled teen son in Movie 43 have a lot to talk about.) I especially like how every time Stan's monologuing to Steve, he's in the middle of lunch and is so blasé about his disturbing thoughts, as if he's Jennifer Jason Leigh in Short Cuts, totally expressionless and changing diapers while talking dirty to pervy phone-sex customers.

I took drama class in high school, and I had to frequently leaf through paperback collections of comedic and dramatic monologues from movie scripts (almost all of those monologues were from Neil Simon comedies or, of course, Sidney Lumet flicks). Do book companies still do those kinds of books? Because there are a couple of batshit crazy monologues from Steve's psycho dad during "Twill Ongenbone" that I would love to see turn up in one of those books.


On Adventure Time, Finn creates a disguise--bald, mustached "Davey Johnson"--by shaving off most of his hair, dyeing the rest of it with molasses and changing his voice, in order to hide from the spotlight that comes with being a hero and celebrity to the Candy Kingdom. But this new self ends up being a bigger problem than the loss of privacy when "Davey" takes over Finn's personality and mistakes Jake for a robber and sends him to jail.

Did the Mushroom War wipe out therapists in addition to mankind? This episode would be six minutes shorter and Jake would be spared from prison if Finn just spoke to a shrink. I'm surprised that the Candy Kingdom doesn't seem to have any shrinks, because someone--maybe a cupcake or lollipop with a degree in psychiatry--needs to deal with the angst or trauma the candy people experience every time they're under attack, whether it's by the dragon that Finn saves them from at the beginning of the episode, a pissed-off cookie, the Lich or the American Dental Association.

"Davey" isn't really a standout Adventure Time installment--"BMO Noire" is a more imaginative short that also involves split personalities--but BMO's teary sorrow over Finn shaving off his blond locks is amusing, as is the throwaway gag of one of Finn's fanboys falling for his disguise, despite nitpicking (in front of another fanboy who's cosplaying as Finn, in what has to be a reference to the show's fans at Comic-Con) over the flimsiness of the disguise ("Thought it was Finn, on account he's wearing Finn's exact clothes"). That is such a nerd, man.

Lana's body was modeled after an Atlanta-based flight attendant's, while her bad temper was modeled after Steven Slater's.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

Episodes like "Fugue and Riffs," Archer's wildly funny and violent fourth-season premiere, are exactly why I wanted to expand "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" to include adult cartoons at the end of last year. "When the new year approaches," I asked myself, "do you want another year of sitting through Ben 10 reboots that cause your attention to wander or awfully written Ultimate Spider-Man episodes, or do you want to put that part of your time to better use, like covering adult cartoons that are more up your alley and are worthier of discussion and analysis?"

"Fugue and Riffs" is the kind of adult cartoon episode I should have been focusing on in the first place. It's another sharply written story involving ISIS agent Sterling Archer's ongoing conflict with his mother/boss Malory (Jessica Walter), and it contains a brilliant crossover with lead voice actor H. Jon Benjamin's other current cartoon, more semi-nudity from Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) and esoteric references that are funny simply because they're so damn esoteric (British spy hero Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon! Manning Coles, the duo that created Hambledon! The star of Shazam!Émile Zola!). You won't see Spidey cracking a joke that's a nod to Zola's "J'accuse" letter during Ultimate Spider-Man, that's for damn sure.

(Photo source: Brain Explosion)

The season premiere opens with Archer tending the grill at the exact same title restaurant from Bob's Burgers, Benjamin's other show, while surrounded by the Belcher kids and Linda (John Roberts, the only Bob's Burgers voice actor reprising his role), who gets to berate Archer with one of the various insulting nicknames that have become one of the Adam Reed cartoon's trademarks ("Well, excuse me, Ike Turner!"). Instead of appearing in their more familiar character designs from Bob's Burgers, Tina, Gene, Louise and Linda are awesomely redesigned to blend in with Archer's '60s comic book aesthetic.

I like how the cold open strings us along into thinking Archer is undercover as a burger joint owner as part of some ISIS op, until it becomes clear that it's no op and he has no memory of his life as an ISIS agent, although a few pieces of that life remain. They include fighting skills, which Archer puts to use during a badass and extremely gory restaurant confrontation with KGB assassins straight out of A History of Violence, his literary tastes (he dubs the restaurant's newest burger "a Thomas Elphinstone Hambledurger with Manning Coleslaw") and his metrosexual side ("What I am gonna do is find out who this Archer jerk is... I'm also probably gonna do a spa weekend").

It turns out that two months ago, Archer developed amnesia due to a moment of extreme stress and ran away to a new life as a seaside fry cook named Bob. He married Linda and apparently became her second husband, which makes me wonder what happened to the original Bob in this universe (Alex, I'm gonna go with "What is dead?," and because much of this show's humor thrives on kinky or freaky behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if Linda has been remolding Archer Vertigo-style to look more like Bob). Both ISIS and the KGB are after Archer for different reasons: Malory assigns Lana, Cyril (Chris Parnell) and Ray (Reed) to stage a fake run-in with the KGB in front of Archer to try to jog his memory and get him back to the agency, while bionic villain Barry Dylan (Dave Willis) sends more KGB assassins to eliminate Archer.

Part of the fun of "Fugue and Riffs" is trying to figure out the stressful moment that triggered Archer's amnesia. We're given a clue early on when Malory complains that her son hates seeing her be happy, and when the catalyst is revealed at the end to be neither a bomb explosion nor a Bourne Identity-style, ISIS-sanctioned attempt on his life, but something far less action-y--Malory's wedding to Ron Cadillac, the most successful Cadillac dealer in the Tri-State Area--it makes perfect sense within the neurotic, wracked-by-mommy-issues world of Archer. In a great bit of stunt-casting, the show has recruited Ron Leibman from The Hot Rock and Friends, as well as Walter's real-life husband, to voice Malory's new hubby, who's won over everyone at ISIS during Archer's two-month absence and whose presence this season is bound to reignite an old thread from a couple of seasons ago: Archer's search for his biological father. (Archer reportedly begins to form a bond with Ron in the new season's fourth episode. I can't wait to see if Reed, who's obsessed with the movies of one-time Archer guest star Burt Reynolds, will toss into that episode a reference to The Hot Rock or Leibman's other '70s crime-genre cult favorite, The Super Cops.)

The rest of the fun of "Fugue and Riffs" involves being reacquainted with the elements that make Archer such an entertaining adult cartoon, from the batshit crazy behavior of Dr. Krieger (Lucky Yates) and office subordinates Pam (Amber Nash) and Cheryl/Carol (Judy Greer) to the self-satisfaction Archer gets from anything he does or says, particularly his esoteric jokes, as if he's a boy who just discovered cursing. Archer may be a competent, book-smart, sharply dressed and jet-setting spy with a sex life many of us Archer viewers would kill for, but deep down, he's really just a kid who never grew up and knows only how to be a narcissistic asshole, thanks to screwed-up parenting from an asshole of a parent. "Fugue and Riffs" reinforces Archer's childishness when he woo-hoos like a kid over the Molotov cocktails he and Lana lob at the assassins, or when one of Lana's attempts to get him to remember ISIS tanks and causes him to go off on a tangent about his love for Shazam!, which sometimes crossed over with the superheroine show The Secrets of Isis in the '70s--a nod to how this episode crosses over with Bob's Burgers.

No wonder Archer identifies so much with Shazam, née Captain Marvel, even in his fugue state. Shazam is a boy in a grown man's body, just like Archer.


Dan Vs. is an oasis of '40s/'50s Warner Bros. cartoon-style anarchy and revenge in The Hub's original series fantasyland of cloying ponies and overly stoic superheroes. But compared to Archer's twisted vision of spies who have their babies tattooed ("You can't tattoo a frickin' baby!") or delight in too-naughty-for-Harry-Saltzman threesomes and drug-loving agency secretaries with a fetish for getting strangled during sex, the espionage scenes on Dan Vs. look like a Spy Kids sequel. Despite the best efforts of the always-game Paget Brewster as Elise (Andy Gibb-ish code name: Dancing Shadow), her missions, like in this week's "Dan vs. the Common Cold," are nothing we haven't seen before in some Flintstones episode about spies that Hanna-Barbera gag writers came up with to cash in on the then-cutting-edge 007 movies back then.

The spyjinks in "Dan vs. the Common Cold" may not be all that original comedic-wise, but Elise's indifference to the possible death of Dan, whom she's constantly annoyed with, is a great gag that lets you know you're far from the caring and sharing of The Hub's My Little Pony and Care Bears revivals. I also enjoy hearing Brewster basically talk to herself and kick her own ass while voicing both Elise and her French-accented nemesis Gisele Montgomery, a supermodel-turned-industrial spy (I'm always wondering what those recording sessions where Brewster or some Simpsons regular like Harry Shearer has to juggle two or more characters at the same time must look like in the booth: they probably look cray-cray). The slightly more interesting A-story--and it's a story those of us who fret about falling prey to the current flu epidemic are especially interested in--saddles the previously immune Dan with a bad cold his usually live-wire self is too weak and powerless to fight off, so his body's battalion of anthropomorphic antibodies, who all speak in Dan's voice, does the fighting for him. "This cold is the worst thing ever to happen to me," complains Dan during my one favorite line in this episode, "and I've been at a country music concert."


I'm not surprised that Tron: Uprising killed off Able--the moment he told Beck he knew he's actually the current Renegade and would keep it a secret, Carl Winslow was toast--but I'm surprised it took him this long to stay alive on this show after he correctly guessed the Renegade's identity. Seven more episodes on a superhero drama after he discovered the hero's identity? It reminds me of that joke Norm Macdonald told on The Daily Show about being informed by friends about the Crocodile Hunter's death. "They were like, 'He was 44 years old,'" said Macdonald. "I'm like, 'That's a ripe old age for a crocodile hunter.'"

(Photo source: SciFiEmpire.net)

Tron: Uprising's season finale is next week on Disney XD, and at this point in the game, Disney hasn't yet made a decision on the show's future, so I'm putting my money on "derezzed." If this weren't a Disney show and Tron had been on a much angstier network, Beck would probably feel like derezzing himself at the end of "No Bounds." After the crazed Cyrus, the first Renegade, forces Beck into a Dark Knight-style predicament where he must choose between saving his friends from the garage or Tron from detonation, Able isn't all that Beck loses. He's without his garage job and he loses the support of the public after he's wrongfully accused of killing Able--not by Zed, a longtime Renegade hater, but Mara. Zed's become a more likable character ever since the events of "State of Mind" made him slightly less skeptical of the Renegade, and at the end of "No Bounds," he believes in the Renegade's innocence, although you kind of wish the moptopped dweeb would exert himself a little more and lift a finger to help out the Renegade and come to his defense.

With only Tron by his side, Beck chooses to keep on fighting, but where did his other adversaries go? Tesler, Pavel and Paige are nowhere to be seen during "No Bounds." Cyrus is the only Uprising character who's more of a threat to Argon City than Tesler, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Renegade ends up temporarily teaming up with Tesler's forces to take down Cyrus--not exactly a new twist on a show like this, but I don't see how else this season could end, other than the Renegade recoloring his white suit from head to toe with Bruce Boxleitner's Toppik hair loss concealer and ambushing Cyrus while completely camouflaged in that stuff.


The big casting coups on Robot Chicken this week are Christopher Lloyd reprising his Doc Brown role and 50 Cent as himself, adding a new member to G-Unit: PaRappa the Rapper. But I got much more of a kick out of a silly Lego version of the somber, shot-in-one-take climax of Children of Men, a great dystopic sci-fi film that always deserved the parody/homage treatment it finally receives on Robot Chicken, even though the film is now seven years old. The actor enlisted by Seth Green and his Robot Chicken crew to voice Clive Owen during the Lego Children of Men is no small potatoes: he's none other than Hustle star Adrian Lester, best known here in America for Primary Colors. Kathy Bates' earthy-humored fixer character from Primary Colors would have howled with laughter over Lester's description of a Lego vagina during the baby delivery scene.

I only check out Robot Chicken once in a while, so I was surprised to see that its opening title sequence has been updated after five seasons. Instead of a dead chicken subjected to experiments by a mad scientist, the new titles flipped the script so that the scientist is now the robot chicken's guinea pig. The title of this Lloyd/Fitty/Lester episode is "Eaten by Cats," in keeping with the show's sixth-season decision to switch to causes of death as episode titles, and because it's season six, they're Six Feet Under-style demises (another episode title this season is "Crushed by a Steamroller on My 53rd Birthday"). It's the most inspired episode titling pattern since the Comedy Bang! Bang! TV series' succinct method of "Amy Poehler Wears a Black Jacket & Grey Pants" and "Jon Hamm Wears a Light Blue Shirt & Silver Watch."


Sometimes, the restrictions laid down by Standards & Practices can result in comedy that's funnier than what would have resulted from loosened restrictions, and Regular Show's "The Longest Weekend" short is an example of that. In "The Longest Weekend," a fake art-house movie of the same name--some Notebook-ish tearjerker about an angsty Romeo who can't bear to be away from his girlfriend for too long--inspires Starla (Courtenay Taylor) to talk her boyfriend Muscle Man into spending the entire weekend apart from her to test the strength of their love (if either of them runs off to see the other before the end of Sunday night, they'll have to break up). So during this two-day period of Starla withdrawal that he agrees to subject himself to (with his friends making sure he doesn't try to call her), the park's resident toughie reveals himself to be, of course, a real softie and turns into a basket case, while Starla is equally upset and inconsolable. When both of them finally break and defy their friends' attempts to restrain them by racing into each other's arms at super-speeds that make the Flash look slow, the episode cuts away to clips of golfers being struck by lightning and watermelons being crushed by mallets. Yep, that is indeed a consummation montage we're seeing on a TV-PG cartoon, covering up whatever Muscle Man and Starla are doing to each other, but this parody of consummation montages is made funnier by the fact that the metaphorical visuals are random bits of nonsense (at one point, a man is seen running into a portapotty that explodes) rather than slightly more explicit images like trains penetrating tunnels or geysers spewing.

"The Longest Weekend" is written and storyboarded by Hellen Jo and Ivy author Sarah Oleksyk, who previously worked together on "Pie Contest" and "One Pull Up." Jo and Oleksyk both hail from the indie comics scene, which explains the indie comic sensibility that permeates some of the best Regular Show shorts. "The Longest Weekend" is particularly dead-on about the dumb things young couples like Muscle Man and Starla do for love and the reactions young guys and girls have to chick flicks. Mordecai and Rigby haven't yet reached the age where they realize that during the weepies that their attractive female friends have dragged them to see, comforting the ladies when they're in tears is what gets them to like them, not expressing snarky disdain for what they're seeing. So Mordecai, Rigby and Muscle Man snicker over the clichés and pretentiousness of the movie that Margaret, Eileen and Starla dragged them to, while the girls are totally enthralled and moved by The Longest Weekend, although Margaret admits afterward that the movie is pretty terrible (or maybe she's just saying that to look cool in front of Mordecai).

The movie itself is a typical sitcom version of art-house Eurotrash. There's always a pretentious montage in these fake artsy-fartsy films, and here, The Longest Weekend's montage is full of random shots of a piano player's hands and a kite being released into the sky. I would have liked to have seen some effort to make the all-English (but French-made, according to the closed captions) movie look badly dubbed, like in SNL's much-maligned but totally accurate "Danielle" Italian sexploitation flick spoof with Jennifer Lawrence last Saturday. A far better bit of attention to detail during the theater scene is the guy in the backwards baseball cap getting up from the empty front row in the middle of The Longest Weekend (he was probably waiting to see some titties) and quietly leaving for good. That shit always happens whenever a theater shows a divisive three-hour movie like The Longest Weekend. There's always some moviegoer with his date or by himself who loses his patience with the feature and walks out on it long before it's over. The relationship between your ass and an interminable chick flick will never be as strong as Muscle Man and Starla's.

Archer's latest episode recaptures the most exciting part of Skyfall: the scenes where they filled out paperwork.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

After Archer's entertaining crossover with Bob's Burgers, the FX cartoon sort of crosses over with another show I love, FX's Justified, by borrowing its star (Timothy Olyphant) and one of its staff writers (Chris Provenzano) for "The Wind Cries Mary." Olyphant, whose comedic chops on Justified are frequently overlooked (even at the A.V. Club, of all places), blends in quite well with the twisted Archer universe while voicing eternal frat-boy Lucas Troy, Archer's previously unmentioned best friend and an operative from ISIS' rival agency ODIN who may not be as trustworthy--or as straight--as Archer deems him to be.

I love it when a show suddenly introduces some important buddy from the main character's past who's never been brought up by the lead before, and then after one episode or, in the case of Steve Buscemi's Tony Blundetto on The Sopranos, an entire season, we never see his ass again. The original Star Trek did it all the time, Jim Rockford would be frequently visited by war buddies we'd never hear from again (and not even on that answering machine of his), that beloved teammate of Sam Malone's who came out of the closet in a tell-all book he promoted at Cheers never dropped by the bar again for another beer and so on. I wish "The Wind Cries Mary" would have poked a little more fun at this old trope of the previously unmentioned BFF, besides making this bestie turn out to be gay for Archer (and no one else). But as usual on Archer, there are so many killer lines from cold open to finish (and also, welcome back, workplace humor that's been absent for a couple of episodes) that whatever gripes I have about the episode end up--like "the life that lived" in the Jimi Hendrix tune this episode cops its title from--dead.

Stray observations:
* Ringtone gags in sitcoms always suck, but somehow, only Archer manages to make them work. Archer's choice of "Danger Zone" as his ringtone is as predictable as his frequently ridiculed choice of sidearm.

* I enjoyed this line Archer utters to himself because I once considered enrolling in the two-year Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont and then Googled small-town Vermont and thought, nah, that hood's not for me: "Vermont has liquor stores, right? Yeah, they have to. It sucks there."

* Pam: "So why are these damn peer reviews so hard?! Only like 10 people work in this whole goddamn chickenshit outfit!" That'd be dope if Pam punctuated one or two other lines this season with mic drops, using the same battered-looking mic she dropped at the end of that "chickenshit outfit" line.

* Archer: "There's, uh, there's kind of a lot of blood down there." A dying Lucas: "Said your mom."

* Lucas: "I only did it because I wanted us to be together. Forever." Lana, off-screen: "Called it!" Off-screen, two-to-three-word asides about someone's sex life have been a favorite comedic device of mine ever since NewsRadio once built a great running gag out of Catherine thinking Lisa was trying to seduce Dave for new office supplies, so she continually goaded Lisa on to shake her stuff for Dave.

* Whoever drew Lana's expression during the episode-closing awkward ride home after Luke's half-finished deathbed confession deserves some sort of nod for Outstanding Achievement in Animating Appalled Expressions.



"My god... My 11 year-old daughter watched it when it first came on, on Saturday... Her face was all blotchy with pink/red spots, indicative that she had been crying."

"OMG I ACTUALLY CRIED WATCHING GREEN LANTERN: THE ANIMATED SERIES"

"oh my god. HOW THE FUCK IS THAT EPISODE OKAY?! NEWS FLASH, IT’S SOOOOO NOT!"

"and this is when i lost every last bit of emotional control i never had."

Are girls on Tumblr really that upset about Aya's demise at the hands of the Anti-Monitor, a machine gone mad, in Green Lantern: The Animated Series' "Loss" episode? Those are just some of the Tumblr reactions to the conclusion of "Loss" that I scrolled through during a Tumblr search for "green lantern: the animated series" (after I first caught "Loss" when Cartoon Network repeated the episode), just to see how Tumblr overreacted the previous morning.

That's how young much of Green Lantern's audience is. Their lower-case-letter-averse reactions are both adorable and, unless they're that 11-year-old girl, snicker-worthy. They haven't watched enough TV to be aware that when a beloved robotic main character is killed off to shock the audience, the AI doesn't stay dead (okay, Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Offspring" episode did kill off an android we grew to care about, but Data's daughter wasn't part of the TNG series cast). That type of temporary shake-up of the status quo before it's maintained again happened as recently as Sym-Bionic Titan, which killed off Octus towards the end of its run, only to bring him back just in time to reunite with Lance and Princess Ilana to save Earth for the finale.

In "Loss," Aya sacrifices herself to protect Razer, the self-hating, reformed Red Lantern she's fallen in love with while somehow gradually developing emotions, like when she shed a tear after the Red Lanterns reprogrammed her to betray the Guardians last season or when she attempted to hold Razer's hand in "Prisoner of Sinestro" and he refused to reciprocate. But Aya's emotions haven't fully developed to the point where she'd always be capable of expressing them to Razer (props to GL:TAS showrunner Giancarlo Volpe, by the way, for not having Aya say, "What is 'kiss'?"), so she dies before she gets to kiss him. (Early on in "Loss," a no-longer-hesitant Razer finally makes his move and Aya almost does kiss him, but they're interrupted by an unaware Hal. Speaking of Hal, in the next episode, he's bound to react to Aya's death in nearly as angry a way as Razer will because unlike the reticent-until-recently Razer, Hal always treated Aya like a human being, ever since the very first episode, when he briefly flirted with her back when she existed only in faceless computer form to talk her into allowing him to pilot the Interceptor.)

(Photo source: ahlistenalison)

Some of the impact of Aya's death scene is robbed by both the fact that there's no way a kids' show will allow its breakout character to remain dead for a while and the inevitability of Aya being rebooted and restored at some point later in this second and final season. But the scene remains a powerful moment, thanks to effective score music by series composer Frederik Wiedmann, "Loss" writer Michael F. Ryan's decision to make Razer's sorrow subdued and silent and the matter-of-fact way Jason Spisak has Razer say "No!" when Kilowog's grappling hook construct separates Razer from Aya's remains to rescue him from the Anti-Monitor. That matter-of-fact delivery is such a nice departure from either having Razer shake his fists at the stars and yell "Noooooooooo!" or having him quietly and slowly draw out the vowels of "No" in an unintentionally funny, Keanu-esque way, which wrecked an otherwise well-played dramatic scene for Kevin Conroy when Batman glimpsed the grisly off-screen aftermath of the explosion that took away half of Harvey Dent's face and most of his dwindling sanity on GL:TAS producer Bruce Timm's Batman: The Animated Series.

Other than the tragedy-tinged scenes centering on Aya and Razer (who, at the start of the episode, makes a return visit to the home he once shared with his murdered wife Ilana and seems to have finally gotten over Aya assuming Ilana's form, which must have creeped him out for so long), "Loss" is far from somber, due to Hal's cop movie-style defiance of the Guardians' uptight Science Director (Sarah Douglas from Superman II) and the mostly comedic re-appearance of the supercilious (and for a way-too-long amount of time in this episode, naked) Zilius Zox (Tom Kenny). Now the Red Lanterns' Prime Magistrate, the Reince Priebus-y dickweed returns to Guardian space to make the Green Lanterns' lives difficult again, but this time, diplomacy-wise. The largely business-as-usual tone of "Loss" doesn't prepare us for the sacrifice that takes place at the end, which makes the shock of Aya's death that much more effective, because in intergalactic war, just like in life, nobody's promised tomorrow.


"Broadcast Wagstaff School News" contains Gene's greatest moment to date as an unhinged Belcher on Bob's Burgers, and it's not even the A-story. Linda's observation that Gene resembles Bob when he was a boy sparks Gene to transform himself into Bob, with the help of a fake mustache, a pair of scissors handled by Louise and clumps of his own shorn hair Louise glues onto his neck and arms ("I don't know how I got that arm hair to look so sad, but I did it!").

The other Belchers' first encounter with travel-size Bob in the bathroom is the funniest rapid-fire exchange this series has ever done. Bob gets creeped out by Gene's extreme makeover; Linda plays along with Gene when he calls her "Lin," which especially makes Bob flustered (while he speaks for most of the sequence in that low-energy delivery of his that distinguishes him from the more excitable "Animation Domination" dads on Fox); Tina becomes confused by the two Bobs; and Gene copies everything Bob says, which sends a now-shouty Bob past the breaking point and this sequence into a series high point.

The hilarity of the two Bobs easily makes the B-story funnier than the A-story--Tina takes up investigative journalism and follows the poopy trail of an excrement-planting prankster known as "the Mad Pooper"--although the A-story is far from a turd, especially with a guest cast that includes Will Forte and Jenny Slate (reprising her entertaining role as Tina's frenemy Tammy from "Bad Tina") and trenchant jabs at vapid journalism in the age of TMZ. The episode beautifully intertwines the A-story with mini-Bob, like when Tammy pitches a story to Forte's Mr. Grant about "a 45-year-old fourth-grader with a mustache walking around school."

(Photo source: Bob's Burgers Wiki)

Tina, Gene and Louise are such enjoyable characters because they talk like real kids and less like precocious stand-ins or Mary Sues for their adult creators, so you don't often see them name-drop celebrities or movies that the writers grew up on and Tina, Gene and Louise are too young to be familiar with. But in "Broadcast Wagstaff School News," Tina cites the Holly Hunter character in Broadcast News as her journalistic role model (whereas I didn't see Broadcast News until I was 30, and that was just a few years ago), while Gene compares tween Bob to Judd Nelson and Louise nicknames Tina "Cronkite."

Now Tina's awareness of Broadcast News can be rationalized as being part of her weird pop-cultural tastes, as exemplified by her hobby of writing porny fanfics like "Erotic Law & Order," "Erotic Good Wife" and "Sexy 60 Minutes." But as for Gene's awareness of Judd Nelson and Louise's knowledge of a deceased anchorman who retired from anchoring when Bob was in high school, I was initially put off by those lines, but who cares? They're amusing lines anyway.

Stray observations:
* Gene's impersonation of Bob makes the similarities between H. Jon Benjamin and Eugene Mirman's voices much more noticeable. Occasionally during "Broadcast Wagstaff School News," even I became confused like Tina and started to think Benjamin was voicing travel-size Bob.

* I love the funky, early '70s Motown-ish "Mad Pooper! Eww!" score cue series creator Loren Bouchard and composer John Dylan Keith wrote for the Mad Pooper montage. A lot of TV composers like to rip off David Holmes, but Bouchard and Keith are the first to come up with a cross between Holmes and Sam Cooke's 1960 hit "Chain Gang."

* I just remembered that Laura Silverman's first big role was in animation, as the voice of Laura, Dr. Katz's April Ludgate-ish receptionist on Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, which was where Bouchard also got his start. (Dr. Katz deserves to be remastered and un-Squiggled.) In "Broadcast Wagstaff School News" and other Wagstaff School-related episodes of Bob's Burgers, Silverman voices Andy, while her more famous sister Sarah plays Andy's twin brother Ollie.

* Here's more proof that Louise will grow up to be an action movie director: her ease with operating the camcorder while recording Tina for her first investigative video about the Mad Pooper, although Louise isn't quite Kathryn Bigelow yet and has a lot to learn about the pause button ("And we're clear. I lied. We're not clear. Okay, now we're clear! I'll just edit that part out.").

* Thanks to the Charlie Rose-ish "Tina Table" segment that Tina earns on Wagstaff's student news channel after her big Mad Pooper scoop, I now can't watch Charlie Rose without thinking that the reason for Rose's all-black set could be because he's actually making Tina's mistake of wearing a green blazer in front of a green screen.

* "Me. Tina. Are. Mad. Pooper."

(Photo source: Bob's Burger of the Day)

Tron: Uprising, which recently dropped a score album by series composer Joseph Trapanese that contains cues that can now be heard on A Fistful of Soundtracks, has been a good example of how to improve upon a sci-fi action franchise that's a corker in the visuals department but is hardly as stimulating narrative-wise. In 19 episodes, we learned more about the title character--now mentoring a freedom fighter named Beck, a reference to the Cyrus-Beck algorithm, not the Scientologist singer/songwriter--and what makes him tick than we did in two feature films where he looked like a guest star in his own films (much like pre-Christopher Nolan Batman on the big screen). This animated prequel to Tron: Legacy hasn't always been perfect--for a while, I cared more about Paige, one of Beck's antagonists, and her feud with another of Beck's antagonists, Pavel, than I did about Beck--but the Tron: Uprising crew seemed to have heeded the criticisms about the writing in the two films, so they've surrounded the lightbike chases and disc fu action with involving and mature stories about such popular Disney XD topics as post-traumatic stress and ethnic cleansing.

And now, it's over. Like I've said before, Tron: Uprising didn't belong on Disney XD, and it would have found a bigger audience and not be trapped in the strange limbo it's currently mired in had Disney aired it on a special Touchstone Pictures-style channel for viewers who have outgrown Phineas and Ferb or Dog with a Blog (Beth Littleford, why?) and are ready to move on to Stakeout and a pre-Revenge Madeleine Stowe stepping butt-nekkid out of a shower.

"Terminal," the Tron: Uprising series finale, annoyingly ends on a cliffhanger (Clu and Dyson prepare to snatch Argon City from Tesler), but otherwise, it satisfies in the action department (aerial dogfights galore) and reaches a high point in the title uprising. Tired of relying on the Renegade (and currently unsure of the innocence of the freedom fighter/murder suspect, who's too busy trying to save a dying Tron's life and defeat a repurposed and now-evil Cutler), Mara, Zed (the only mechanic who believes the Renegade's innocent) and the rest of the garage take matters into their own hands and stand up to Pavel when he threatens them again.

In a moment we've been waiting to see all season, each mechanic powers up his or her lightdisc one by one, and Pavel retreats. Unfortunately, the mechanics don't get to lift a finger against Pavel and his guards. And they'll never get to now that a second season is becoming less likely.



"Blood Crieth Unto Heaven," American Dad's August: Osage County-inspired experiment with presenting a story about Stan's issues with his divorced parents Jack (Daran Norris) and Betty (Swoosie Kurtz) as a non-musical stage play set during the Depression, is more clever and amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. That's mostly due to the series' typically rapid-fire pacing being muted to fully commit to both the melodramatic genre it's gently parodying and the episode's experiment of recapturing certain aspects of the experience of watching a play with a theater audience, particularly the slightly lengthy scene transitions that stage productions do in order to accommodate the set changes the techies have to make behind the actors (a techie even appears during the episode to quickly sweep away fake trash, but he's unlit, of course).

But the slightly slowed-down pacing is more often a plus than a minus, and if it weren't for that slowed-down pacing, the episode would be missing nice touches like the hydraulic grinding sound the stage makes as it's being raised to unveil scenes that take place in the Smiths' basement (one particular theatrical touch I chuckled over was Stan briefly wheezing from having to hurry back from a flashback to a present-day scene on the other side of the stage). The immersive feel of "Blood Crieth Unto Heaven" makes it a great episode to watch with headphones on. The show's sound designers deserve an Emmy nomination for nailing theatrical sounds like the stage hydraulics and reverbing the Smiths to sound like actors performing within a large theater. Gasps of "Oh God!" can even be heard from an audience member or two during the episode's grimmest plot twist (somewhere, the Avery/Hayley/Roger-as-a-black-maid love triangle must be giving one of Shonda Rhimes' staff writers storyline ideas for Scandal).

Now how does the non-canonical "Blood Crieth Unto Heaven"--written by Brian Boyle and referred to in the episode's live-action intros as an American Dad fanfic scripted by a coked-up playwright and possible sex offender before he croaked--hold up as a story without the theatrical devices? Pretty quite well actually, although on-screen host Patrick Stewart, a.k.a. Avery, would disagree (during his hosting segments, he openly admits that he's confused over whether to view the play as a comedy or tragedy and is later caught napping in his seat). Stan and Avery's lurid pasts would make for satisfying stage dramas if they weren't suffused with buttered crab binges and sex with clowns.

Tonight marks the end of a series that wasn't supposed to survive when it premiered and was predicted by some in the press to be the NBC show about sketch comedians that was going to fail. NBC's other show about sketch comedians, the high-minded Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, was going to take off and become the next West Wing, right?

Seven years later, Studio 60 is a low point in Aaron Sorkin's career that's largely forgotten (except for Sarah Paulson's genuinely funny Holly Hunter impression and that unintentionally funny line that was hurled at Nate Corddry, "Your little brother is standing in the middle of Afghanistan!!!"); 30 Rock reruns are all over both syndication and Comedy Central; and the lunacy and sharply written bits of TV-industry satire delivered by Tina Fey, Robert Carlock, the other 30 Rock writers and Fey's co-stars have been dissected and analyzed in so many think pieces and effusive (and not-so-effusive) blog posts, whether in TV criticism circles or amongst the Jezebel crowd. And the show will continue to be dissected and analyzed long after tonight's series finale. (An example of a 30 Rock-related topic that was discussed within the blogosphere late last season was "30 Rock is racist." I don't think it is. 30 Rock is hardly 2 Broke Girls or Modern Family, where Asian driver jokes are still considered funny on a show that calls itself modern. The Tumblrers who say 30 Rock is racist clearly never saw the first-season episode that raised the question "Is Tracy Jordan a disgrace to black people like Toofer accuses him of being?" Fortunately, that episode dealt with the question in a humorous way instead of morphing into an irritating and preachy Very Special Episode about that subject.)

I think the key to 30 Rock's longevity was its lack of high-mindedness, even during the tedious stretches of episodes that focused on the characters' love lives and must have been what Alec Baldwin was referring to when he recently admitted that the writing in the fifth season once made him say, "I'm going to get the fuck out of here, I'm done." A lack of high-mindedness is always more entertaining than actual high-mindedness, which the one-season fiasco that was Studio 60 was awash with. This anti-Studio 60 didn't put its characters on a pedestal (although Liz Lemon's feats as babysitter to her needy and batshit crazy stars Tracy and Jenna were nearly superhuman and superheroic). 30 Rock didn't think of TGS with Tracy Jordan, the fictional sketch show that Fey modeled after her SNL stomping grounds, as a comedic masterpiece each week (and SNL wasn't the only sketch show TGS was reminiscent of because you could also detect in the fake sketches a hint of MADtv, some All That, a smidgen of In Living Color and a smattering of MTV's Just Say Julie).

Liz and her mostly lazy staff writers weren't curing cancer with their comedy. Almost all the fake sketches we got brief glimpses of were terrible and hacky. The TGS writers' obsession with robots was a parody of comedy writers' obsessions with robots. And omnipresent network exec Jack Donaghy, who was like an older brother from another mother that Liz never wanted but eventually ended up becoming her (strictly platonic) best friend, didn't care about the quality of TGS, as long as the show was making bank and keeping NBC (barely) alive.

As 30 Rock ends its run, TGS is being killed off. But the show-within-the-show is experiencing a fate worse than cancellation: an Axe Body Spray-ish sponsor called Bro Body Douche has taken over TGS and--like the Arsenio-inspired network tinkering that caused Larry Sanders to quit his talk show--the sponsor has turned TGS into an even worse show than the hacky SNL/MADtv counterpart Liz ran for presumably over a decade. The newly rechristened Bro Body Douche Presents The Man Cave barely has any sketches, but it has lots of Spike TV-style bro news, and in what I assume is a jab at NBC's increasingly cheap comedy programs that mirrors Fey's recent not-so-positive feedback on the network's change of direction in scripted comedy, it's all shot in front of a green screen.

Liz may have lost her show, which was never really worth fighting for anyway, but she hasn't lost the one part of it that ended up mattering to her more than writing sketches about robots and TV chefs who can't stop puking: looking after Tracy and Jenna and keeping them out of trouble. At the end of last week's penultimate episode, "A Goon's Deed in a Weary World," Liz--whose arc from a few years ago about her wish to become a parent is one of many loose ends from the past that have been tied up this season--and her new husband Criss (James Marsden) finally meet the kids the adoption agency found for her, and in an inspired gag that could have been a perfect series-ending scene, the agency sends her a pair of orphaned eight-year-old siblings: a narcissistic blonde who resembles Jenna and her brother who's literally a brother, a mini-Tracy who's already showing signs of being, as Tracy so proudly and memorably described himself in the first season, "straight-up mentally ill." It's 30 Rock's twisted idea of heartwarming.

The series could have ended right there, and I would have been a happy dude. But there's apparently more business 30 Rock has to attend to tonight. Afterward, we're losing not just one of the best comedy shows of the last few years but one of the best-scored of any genre on TV. Fey's husband, 30 Rock musical director and series composer Jeff Richmond, who, like Fey, hailed from Second City and SNL, continually came up with terrific comedic score music (is it me or is the Modern Family theme a total ripoff of Richmond's 30 Rock main title theme?) and hilarious fake songs like "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah" and "Muffin Top." On A Fistful of Soundtracks, you can currently hear some of the Richmond cues that Relativity Music Group released in 2010, as part of a two-disc release that's one of my favorite deluxe releases of anything, simply because of Richmond and Fey's jokey liner notes and the sheet music for compositions like "That's Her," a.k.a. Liz's theme.


I'll also miss hearing Jenna's recollections about "the sheik," as well as reading about the cast's off-screen antics, some funny and awesome (Fey's response to Republican bullshit: "If I have to listen to one more gray-faced man with a $2 haircut explain to me what rape is, I'm going to lose my mind!"), others not-so-funny and not-so-awesome (Tracy Morgan's clunker of a stand-up bit about gays). Another thing I'll miss about 30 Rock is looking forward to its guest stars each season, even though the stunt-casting didn't always work (who thought it was a good idea to have the not-so-Puerto Rican Salma Hayek play a Puerto Rican?). But a guest shot on 30 Rock became the modern-day equivalent of guest-starring on Batman in the '60s: whether you were Oprah, Steve Martin, Isabella Rossellini, John Cho, Jon Hamm or Elizabeth Banks, you probably got your ass whupped on-camera (or in the case of Ghostface Killah, was forced to drink really shitty wine), but you ended up with lots more comedy street cred afterward. Not bad for a little show about sketch comedians that was supposed to tank.

Best Super Bowl beer ad ever.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

The first minute of "Legs" is a thing of comedic-editing beauty and an atypical way for Archer to kick off a cold open. It centers not on Archer or a bunch of the major players in the same room but on secondary character Ray and his frustrating morning routine ever since Archer's crash-landing of the escape craft at the end of last season left the gay agent paralyzed (for real this time, after he pretended to be paralyzed for much of the third season).

The sight of Ray struggling with his medical bills and the difficulties that come with being actually paralyzed--like having to relieve himself in a plastic bag--is slightly reminiscent of a much more somber montage during Ed (the Tom Cavanagh lawyer show, not the Matt LeBlanc baseball monkey shitpile), in which handicapped cast member Daryl "Chill" Mitchell, whose character on Ed was wheelchair-bound Eli, wordlessly demonstrated how much longer it takes for a disabled person to get out of bed and change clothes. But because this isn't Ed, where the characters were far less irritable, cynical and TV-MA-mouthed, Ray is grumbling aloud to himself while getting ready for work and cursing Archer, "the other shitbag in my life." Ray is like the long-suffering Frank Grimes to Archer's oblivious Homer Simpson, and this episode's subtlest and cruelest joke (but not as cruel as the countless ways Meg's been humiliated on Family Guy) is that even in an episode where Ray gets to drive much of the story's events, he ends up sidelined for most of it, due to undergoing surgery to receive robotic legs from Krieger.

Despite being a bottle episode, "Legs" is a shining moment for the show's editors. Besides that cold open about Ray's crappy morning, they also demonstrate their editing skills through that "cutting away from one conversation to another so that it sounds like the character in the next scene is replying from faraway" device Archer deploys, but rarely to the extent that the show does in this episode. (The funniest of these gags cuts away from Cyril asking Lana if Terminator cyborgs are asexual to Krieger in mid-conversation with Pam while operating on Ray: "Not when I'm done with him.") It's fitting that "Legs" makes use of this choppy comedic device so often because Ray is being rebuilt in a similar (and much gorier) way.

Word of Ray's surgery causes Archer's fear of robots to resurface, which distracts him from heading to Rome with Lana and Cyril for an ISIS mission. Convinced that the robot apocalypse is near, Archer defies uptight ISIS armory supervisor Rodney and collects an array of weapons from the armory. He tries to thwart the surgical operation by himself, while Krieger races against time to finish Ray's new legs before Archer can burst in and ruin Ray's legs again.

Archer is that rare spy show where the hero occasionally becomes the villain, not because of mind control or brainwashing by some adversary but because he's simply an immature prick. When Archer fires a rocket launcher inside the armory and becomes a danger to the office building, Lana takes up the task of stopping Archer and gets to outwit him while he crawls through ducts like a typical, post-Die Hard '90s action hero. She has a repairman overheat the building's furnace, which causes Archer to doze off. Lana vs. Archer is always an amusing rivalry, whether she's verbally sparring with him in other episodes or pitted against him strategically like in "Legs" (most of her verbal sparring here is with Cyril rather than Archer). But both Archer and Lana wind up looking stupid at the end of "Legs" because Archer is also that rare spy show where the female spy who's supposedly more competent than the lead character sometimes screws up when she gets her chance to step up. Two days after she stops Archer from wreaking further havoc in the building, Lana realizes she forgot to turn off the furnace and let him out of the ducts.

Overheated furnace/ginormous heating bill screw-up aside, Lana and Krieger have helped Ray to receive something the ill-fated Frank Grimes never got: a happy ending. Ray regains the use of his legs--that is until the next time Archer causes him to end up paralyzed again. Because this is Archer, chaos reigns. On this show, happy endings don't last like chaos does--and are not as entertaining.

Stray observations:
* Ray: "I piss and shit in a plastic bag!" Krieger: "Me too!"

* According to Cheryl/Carol's dialogue with Archer about cyborgs, the show takes place in a universe where the Voight-Kampff machine from Blade Runner is now apparently a household item (extra points to Archer for not having Cheryl/Carol awkwardly point out it's from Blade Runner for the folks in the audience who never saw the film). The Voight-Kampff test ought to be used on reality TV stars like Kim Kardashian to confirm that they're all really machines because when most of these attention whore-bots cry on-camera, they don't look like normal people crying--they look like Cameron the Terminator when she creepily imitated human grief during Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

* Someone finally came up with the brilliant idea of giving Krieger and the equally crazy Pam a bunch of scenes together. Krieger's form of crazy is rarely in sync with Pam's form of crazy, except for when Pam, the world's worst nurse, asks Krieger if she was supposed to scrub up before surgery. His answer is "Eh, I didn't."

* More scenes from tween Archer's screwed-up childhood: he injured his testicles after trying to stick his dick in a vacuum cleaner, which had a blond wig and a magazine photo of an attractive lady attached to it. Yikes.

* Cyril: "Why is your instinctive response to run toward explosions?" Lana: "Uhh, because I'm not a giant pussy?" Cyril: "Although somehow incredibly single." This exchange gets an amusing callback a few minutes later when Lana barks at Krieger on the phone to not use nerve gas to stop Archer, and Krieger mumbles, "And yet incredibly single."

* Speaking of repetition, I've mentioned tired ringtone gags as something that's funnier when Archer does them, and in last week's episode and "Legs," ringtone humor is joined on that list of "They're funnier when they're done on Archer" by the repetition of a running joke--not once or twice but three or more times, like when Archer's co-workers bitch about the same past disastrous office party, "the Fourth of Ju-Luau." My favorite of these running jokes in "Legs" are Cyril continually pushing away a horny Cheryl/Carol from his crotch and the casual racism of both Malory and her new husband Ron.

* Speaking of racism, while Malory is a ballsy racist like in Paul Mooney's stand-up bit about old white racists who proclaim that "This Negro doesn't intimidate me!," Ron is a less hostile racist. Perhaps that's due to Ron learning to get on minority customers' good sides from years of being a smooth-talking Cadillac salesman and having minority employees, one of whom he refers to during his defense of Lana's skills as an agent in front of a typically ornery Malory, which turns from well-meaning to condescending in an instant. "[You remind] me of the head mechanic at my dealership in Yonkers," Ron says to Lana. "He's a black!" I love Aisha Tyler's incredulous, almost Christopher Walken-esque "Wow!," as in "Wow, that's kind of racist!"

* The oeuvre of Emilio Estevez is also apparently among the list of movies from Archer's childhood that he believes are real: "The thermostat's becoming sentient! Oh God! That's how Maximum Overdrive started!"


In the "Things That Are Hardly Surprising" department, a badly damaged Aya found a way to reboot herself on Green Lantern: The Animated Series, after having been too faraway from the Interceptor to upload herself back into the ship's computer banks and appearing to die in Razer's arms at the end of the last episode. Off-screen, Aya transferred herself into a disabled Manhunter robot's CPU and found her way back to the Interceptor (her clunky, limping movements while temporarily housed in the Manhunter's hastily reassembled body bring to mind the stop-motion animation of both the endoskeleton at the end of the original Terminator and Sally in The Nightmare Before Christmas, and they're the best bit of animation during "Cold Fury"). Any kid viewer of GL:TAS who didn't see Aya's resurrection coming is really new to this TV-watching thing.

The major twist of "Cold Fury," other than the Anti-Monitor's killing of the Guardians' Science Director, is even more surprising than Aya's demise: the resurrected Aya merges with the Anti-Monitor to destroy it, but then she switches sides and declares herself queen of the Manhunters. But the cause of the twist, her assumption that her friends have rejected and ignored her, is rushed and unconvincing. When Aya returns to the Interceptor and asks Razer if he meant it when he told her he loved her during the cliffhanger ending of "Loss," he says no. But it's clear from the pain Razer feels while he rejects Aya that he's lying to her for a variety of reasons that are more complicated than "This Red Lantern's just being his usual jerky self, and he only knows how to hurt people." "Cold Fury" wisely doesn't have him articulate these reasons (in what would have been clunky-sounding dialogue that would have been out of character for this laconic emo bad boy) and leaves them open to interpretation.

Cartoon Network's incorrect and spoilerrific DVR program description of "Cold Fury" says, "Ava [sic] returns to the ship as an emotionless droid." (Uh, "Ava" isn't emotionless when she returns. That occurs later.) A recapper who must have gone by that inaccurate description thinks that "Razer quickly realizes that her 'personality' did not make the transfer and that she is an emotionless shell of who she formerly was. He informs her that he does not love her." Razer rejects her not because she's turned emotionless. Her emotions are still intact because she expresses a tiny smile to Razer when she's back on board (if Aya were really corrupted by the Anti-Monitor's programming and sent back to the Interceptor as its Ilia-probe-like spy, she wouldn't be able to express any of the emotions that the Anti-Monitor has no understanding of and considers imperfections that need to be exterminated). I think Razer spurns Aya because he doesn't feel his broken and troubled self is worthy enough for Aya's love. He's also so damaged by his wife Ilana's death that he doesn't want to experience loss again--like he just did when he thought he saw the last of Aya--so he's been trying to shut down his emotions, including the rage that Saint Walker was teaching him to better suppress through meditation and whatever Blue Lanterns call yoga.

Razer's assumption that lying to Aya is easier and better than articulating his complicated feelings for her and his later advice to Aya that shutting down all emotions keeps you focused on work both end up coming back to bite him, Hal, Kilowog and perhaps the rest of the galaxy in the ass. Aya is unable to process the pain she's feeling after Razer rejects her and tells Hal that this pain is distracting her from her duties, so she heeds Razer's advice about purging herself of all the emotions she's developed over the past season and a half, harnesses the power of the ship's battery despite Hal's misgivings and goes off to face the Anti-Monitor on her own, now that she's made herself able to function at full capacity.

Aya's solo defeat of the Anti-Monitor is, of course, a badass sequence. But the sudden change in sides that follows isn't as effective because the jilted lover card that this show opts for in her conversion to evil (and Anti-Monitor blue) is a tiresome cliché, and this not-exactly-jaded (no pun intended) Green Lantern's extreme decision to renounce and reject mankind is unconvincing when it's fueled solely by "Razer dumped me and Hal didn't talk to me long enough about the birds and the bees." The season could have used an extra episode or storyline where the idealistic AI would have been subjected to the greed and corruption of mankind on some planet and felt betrayed in that situation. That betrayal, combined with her form of heartbreak over Razer, would have made more sense as the cause for her switch to the Manhunters' anti-human, anti-emotion side.

I can already see how this arc will end: to bring Aya back to the Green Lanterns' side, a remorseful Razer will attempt to reawaken her emotions--whether it's by reviving her memories of him, faking his death or actually sacrificing himself--and she finally grasps that emotions are mankind's strength, not its weakness like the Manhunters believe. Fringe's final season just recently put the grief-stricken couple of Olivia and Peter through a similar arc, in which Olivia's love for an increasingly emotionless Peter saved him from completely losing his humanity and turning into an Observer, and that live-action show handled that arc quite well (Peter's reasoning for transforming himself into his enemy had much stronger build-up and motivation than what's been written for Aya's arc this season). GL:TAS is a decent show, but I'm not sure if it'll be able to do anything new and refreshing--or as equal to what Fringe accomplished--with that old sci-fi trope of "love conquers all."


Earlier this season, the recently cancelled Young Justice: Invasion reintroduced to animation Virgil Hawkins (Bryton James), the plucky kid with electromagnetic powers who will become Static, the most popular of the Milestone Media heroes and one of the few of those characters who has survived Milestone's collapse, infighting between their late co-creator Dwayne McDuffie and DC itself, several DC title cancellations and the entire film career of Shaq. The show gives Virgil an even greater showcase for his powers in "Runaways."

He and three other teens whose superpowers were recently activated--during experiments by the alien conspirators known as the Reach--attempt to escape from STAR Labs, the facility that's been protecting them from their former captors. Outside STAR, the impatient and restless teens run into more trouble than they bargained for. Virgil's fellow escapees include Tye Longshadow (Gregg Rainwater), who was introduced in "Beneath" several decades ago and is friends with Jaime Reyes (Eric Lopez), a.k.a. the conflicted Blue Beetle; Asami "Sam" Koizumi (Janice Kawaye), a soundwave manipulator who speaks only in unsubtitled Japanese; and Spike Spiegel-haired Eduardo Dorado Jr. (Freddy Rodriguez), who can teleport.

If Ed Dorado's name looks familiar, that's because he's an updated version of the Super Friends character El Dorado--just as Tye is the new Apache Chief, Asami is a female reimagining of Samurai and Virgil is this group's Black Vulcan counterpart. This "Runaways" arc, which has the escapees choosing to accept an offer from Lex Luthor (Mark Rolston) to join a superteam he wants to form, would be a little more enjoyable if it wasn't such a retread of Justice League Unlimited's entertaining Ultimen storyline.

During that Ultimen storyline, JLU simultaneously mocked and paid tribute to the badly dated but influential Super Friends and its crop of superheroes of color. The Young Justice version is more affectionate towards Super Friends and played slightly straighter, although it's not without its moments of humor (most of them involving the teens' inability to understand Japanese or the clumsiness some of them experience while getting the hang of their powers). Apache Chief's power of increasing his size is cleverly reimagined here as the power to unleash a giant astral form, which Tye controls while in an unconscious state, and this astral form is a lavish bit of animation that's an example of how Young Justice's production values are superior to JLU's. But JLU remains the better-written DC superteam cartoon. Its one-liners were sharper, the writing was less soapy and the Timmverse show was more skilled at handling expository dialogue. Young Justice is as clumsy with exposition as the runaway teens are with their new powers.


Cartoon Network's DVR program description for "Robot Fight Accident," Robot Chicken's latest episode, says, "Little Red Riding Hood; The Avengers' Broadway show; do not mess with Archie; Harry Potter in college; the next Aliens film." As we've also seen from the DVR synopsis of GL:TAS last weekend, the network's descriptions are often incorrect. Neither Archie nor Harry show up in "Robot Fight Accident," but we do get a randy retelling of Little Red Riding Hood where her grandma turns out to be a freak in the bed, the Avengers and Aliens. The Avengers musical, which features guest stars Stan Lee (as himself) and Judy Greer from Archer (as Black Widow), would be slightly more amusing if it hadn't been beaten to the punch last year by the family-friendly MAD cartoon's much more clever "Hulk Smash," a Smash-up of The Avengers and NBC's mediocre inside-showbiz drama.

The two best sketches in "Robot Fight Accident" aren't listed in the DVR program description. "Robot Fight Accident" reveals a rejected, Brian De Palma-esque ending for Jack and Jill (the Adam Sandler shitpile, not the old WB show with Amanda Peet) in which Seth Green does a dead-on Sandler impression ("You're Jack, but you're also Jill because the real Jill died when she was eight years old!"). A sharper musical number than the Avengers version of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is a reunion of Schoolhouse Rock characters like the "Conjunction Junction" conductor and the boy from "My Hero, Zero" (Eric McCormack). They resurface to pummel--in song, of course--all the illiterate adults who failed to grasp the basic grammar and math lessons they sang to kid viewers in the '70s and '80s. ("I'm a six-year-old with Down's syndrome, and I understand!," talk-sings a slovenly kid covered in spaghetti noodles at a restaurant.) The dumbass adults who get subjected to beatings by the Schoolhouse Rock crew for their grammatical or mathematical errors include a female hipster on the street who looks like Skrillex. I like how intentionally half-assed this parody of a hipster chick is, right down to the generic T-shirt that says "Dubstep." Recently on WTF with Marc Maron, Green, a Schoolhouse Rock fan, mentioned that both his parents were teachers, and his concerns over the decline of public education, which he expressed on WTF, must have fueled this Schoolhouse Rock sketch, a rare moment in which Robot Chicken throws some social commentary into its brand of lewd, pop-culture-reference-heavy and mostly mindless humor.

As for Aliens, the facehugger from the original Alien invades the G-rated world of the Jetsons. Its offspring wipes out everyone in the family's apartment before being mowed down by both Rosie the Robot Maid and Jane (also voiced by Greer), who strips down to her undies like Sigourney Weaver at the end of Alien and straps on a big futuristic gun. The one Jetsons character that's missing from the Aliens sketch and deserves a grim end more than George, Judy, Elroy or Astro do is the cloying alien Orbitty, the Scrappy-Doo of The Jetsons.

Orbitty was a very '80s addition to The Jetsons who was so badly out of sync with the Hanna-Barbera cartoon's '60s visual design and non-cuddly sensibility that the producers must have realized what a mistake the new character was, so later episodes of the '80s revival act as if Elroy's new alien pet never existed. I like to think Rosie "accidentally" vacuumed up Orbitty one spring morning and deposited him into a flying garbage truck that passed by the neighborhood.


Goddammit, Cartoon Network! In addition to bouncing Sym-Bionic Titan around the schedule so that it would fail and cancelling decent shows like GL:TAS and Young Justice that deserve renewal way more than Annoying Orange (or that unwatchable live-action gamer sitcom starring that gawky ex-30 Rock semi-regular who bears the distinction of being the only person in the world who reportedly had a bad experience working on 30 Rock--how the hell is that possible?), you can't even get your airings of first-run Adventure Time shorts to properly sync up with viewers' DVRs. The first minute or so of "Little Dude" was cut off from viewers' DVR recordings, including my own, which adds some more credence to a theory of mine: inaccurate Robot Chicken synopses on the DVR aside, the Adult Swim half of Cartoon Network is run by competent (and witty) adults, while the other half is run by hyperactive chimps in diapers.

(Photo source: Adventure Time Wiki)

Luckily, the missing first minute doesn't detract from the funny and imaginative moments throughout the slight but enjoyable "Little Dude," in which Finn's hat is accidentally brought to life after coming into contact with the magic flower that sticks out of the head of the bumbling Ancient Sleeping Magi of Life Giving (Dana Snyder), a wizard with a face made entirely of shaggy hair like the monster from Bugs Bunny cartoons. Finn and Jake's new pet, whom Finn names "Little Dude," immediately charms the duo, but it also causes trouble around their treehouse when it bites Finn in the arm, gets clingy around an uncomfortable BMO and turns each of the snacks BMO cooked and baked for Finn and Jake into poo (Little Dude's mouth is also its booty hole).

According to the Magi, the reason for the creature's rowdy and destructive behavior is that it's made of evil magic, which the Magi inherited from his heartless and evil father and has been struggling to suppress by shielding his hands in oven mitts and burying himself underground. Little Dude is attempting to possess the minds of whoever it leaps onto, which explains its clinginess around BMO. It was trying to possess BMO but was unable to, probably because BMO's a robot, so that makes him immune to its control ("Whomever the hat possesses gains the proportional strength of a hat," says the Magi in one of the short's funniest lines). Like many of the characters on Adventure Time, the Magi comes with daddy issues and must overcome them to help Finn and Jake save the Candy Kingdom from Little Dude.

(Photo source: Adventure Time Wiki)

With its constant "Nyang! Nyang! Nyang!"-ing, Little Dude sounds exactly like the monkey that likes to stick its dick in everything during Richard Pryor's classic zoo animals routine from Live in Concert. If this show weren't TV-PG-rated or lower, Little Dude would also be humping everything in sight.



"Little Dude" also contains further proof that Adventure Time is actually made for adults while trying (kind of badly) to maintain its cover of being an all-ages cartoon. The animators toss in an awesome little sight gag of Finn and Jake munching on sausages that they dipped in a bowl of milk (huh?), with milk dripping from their mouths. How did Standards and Practices miss that? Oh yeah, it too is run by chimps in diapers.

Every time I'd rewatch "Little Dude" earlier this week, I'd ask myself, "Who the hell dips beef franks in milk? That shit's nasty." And then I realize that I keep forgetting Adventure Time is a cartoon about a batshit crazy, post-apocalyptic fantasyland, so dipping sausages in milk is as perfectly normal as a hat getting brought to life by a flower.

Donald Byrd

The death of legendary hard bop trumpeter and composer Donald Byrd last Monday has got me revisiting some of my favorite Byrd tunes, which either have been sampled by hip-hop artists or were collabos with the late Guru as part of the rapper's Jazzmatazz series. Heads like myself are more familiar with Byrd's jazz-funk/Mizell Brothers/Blackbyrds period than his hard bop period because the former was what beatmakers often loved to shape their tunes from. According to the liner notes of Blue Note's '90s Blue Break Beats series (a bunch of compilations that are a great introduction to the sounds of Byrd and other jazz legends), "The Byrd man is the most sampled of all Blue Note artists."

Producer J-Swift memorably sampled Byrd's 1967 track "Beale Street" in the Pharcyde's "Oh Shit," which kicks off one of my all-time favorite hip-hop albums from start to finish, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, an enjoyable (and self-deprecating, which was rare in hip-hop back then) masterwork that celebrated the 20th anniversary of its release late last year. But the Byrd track I'm fondest of is the gorgeous tune "Think Twice." The 1974 recording was all over early '90s R&B radio--thanks to Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam and Main Source--and was frequently covered by the likes of the late J Dilla (whose birthday happened to be celebrated on Twitter when news of Byrd's death spread) and the Norwegian downtempo group Ralph Myerz and the Jack Herren Band. Myerz's badass 2003 cover memorably turns up during the scene where Chris Marquette and a pre-Little Miss Sunshine Paul Dano pretend to be porn directors at a Vegas porn convention in Elisha Cuthbert's The Girl Next Door.

And now, the various permutations of "Think Twice."

"Piénsalo Dos Veces" tracklist
1. Donald Byrd, "Think Twice"
2. Ralph Myerz and the Jack Herren Band, "Think Twice"
3. A Tribe Called Quest, "Footprints"
4. Main Source, "Looking at the Front Door"
5. Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, "Let the Beat Hit 'Em"
6. DJ Jazzy Jeff featuring J-Live, "Practice"
7. J Dilla featuring Dwele, "Think Twice"
8. Erykah Badu, "Think Twice"
9. DJ Cam Quartet, "Think Twice"
10. Gilles Peterson's Havana Cultura Band, "Think Twice"


BONUS TRACK: Byrd composed only one film score, for the 1975 basketball flick Cornbread, Earl and Me, the film debut of a One Life to Live child actor named "Laurence Fishburne III," who, in his Billy Batson-colored football jersey, looks nothing at all like Morpheus (or Cowboy Curtis). Some of the Blackbyrds' instrumentals from Cornbread have turned up on Spotify. The best of these is "At the Carnival."

"If business wasn't so awful lately, I'd take us to the plastic surgeon and get ourselves chins."

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

I loved Cheryl/Carol's blink-and-you'll-miss-hearing-it Blade Runner reference on Archera couple of weeks ago, and now, another animated series references the 1982 cyberpunk classic in equally amusing ways. "Cereal Master," the latest webisode of Bravest Warriors, the Pendleton Ward-created sci-fi comedy series on Frederator Studios' Cartoon Hangover YouTube channel, spoofs the film's "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies!" blimp ad.


Also, the webisode takes place mostly at a gorgeously lit Martian cereal bar, which webisode writer/director Breehn Burns based on the noodle bar where Edward James Olmos memorably told Harrison Ford, "Lófaszt, nehogy már. Te vagy a Blade... Blade Runner." (Basically, he said, "Bullshit, Deckard. Now here's where I awkwardly insert the film's title into our conversation. You're the Blade... Blade Runner.")


Whatever happened to cereal bars anyway? I thought they were going to be the next big thing. In whatever century Bravest Warriors takes place in, cereal bars are found in more than just college cafeterias, animation studio cafeterias, fancy New York hotels or markets like Fresno and are apparently as commonplace as sushi bars. At the cereal bar in "Cereal Master," customers get to enjoy cereals from all over the universe, like a rare bowl of "Moon-Frosted Double Dolphin Smacks," which Bravest Warriors leader Chris (Alex Walsh) wants to surprise Beth (Liliana Mumy), the fellow Warrior he's been smitten with since childhood, with on the 10th "Jinx-iversary" of the first time Beth beat Chris at a game of Jinx. According to the Martian rules of Jinx, Chris isn't allowed to speak until he gets Beth whatever she wants, and 10 years ago, that something was a bowl of those Smacks. I take it that Beth's favorite cereal is the Fruit Brute of Bravest Warriors' future.

Chris requests to the Cereal Master (Maria Bamford) that she slip into his order some "seahorse dreams," an ingredient that the alien chef says she doesn't include in Smacks anymore and is literally a cloud full of G-rated sex dreams a male seahorse is having while asleep in a bottle (the seahorse is pining for a girl seahorse who, in his fantasies, can't get enough of his "brood pouch," much like how Chris pines for Beth). The Cereal Master is, of course, like the Soup Nazi and the Tony Shalhoub chef character from Big Night before her, a tortured artist. But instead of taking umbrage at Chris' insistence that Beth's cereal should come with seahorse dreams like how the Soup Nazi or the Shalhoub character would react if a customer tried to interfere with their culinary work of art, the Cereal Master weeps and assumes that her cooking has become substandard.

While the Cereal Master is looking away and too busy crying over her daddy issues, Chris, without completely realizing it, uses telekinesis to fine-tune his order. It's one of the powers he'll someday hone when he becomes a Jedi-like being known as an Emotion Lord, a callback to earlier webisodes where the Warriors were visited by Chris' future Emotion Lord self, who's voiced by Burns. (Why haven't those encounters between the two Chrises caused paradoxes like in the last Bravest Warriors episode, which was all about the danger of paradoxes? Are the Emotion Lords such powerful time-travelling beings that they're immune to the destructive effects of paradoxes?) Chris telekinetically opens the chef's bottle of seahorse dreams (which is perched on her shelf even though she doesn't use it anymore) and gets the bottle to pour its contents into Beth's cereal. The Cereal Master notices what Chris did and freaks out, and a chase through different Quantum Doorgate portals (haphazardly activated by an asleep Wallow) ensues.

If you think the 11-minute length of each Adventure Time short isn't enough time to be spent in a fully realized universe like the Land of Ooo, then the five minutes that Bravest Warriors has chosen for its webisode length can be frustrating. Due to those five minutes, this show rushes through its stories even more so than Adventure Time sometimes does, and in "Cereal Master," the solution Chris comes up with to pacify the chef is glossed over so quickly I immediately forgot how he got her to stop chasing him and I had to rewatch the chase the next day to jog my memory.

Despite the show's pacing issues, the Bravest Warriors universe looks to be as interesting and rich as Adventure Time's, and I'm eager to see more material about the Warriors' connections to the Emotion Lords. Elderly Chris' mentorship of his teen self reminds me of the Crewman Daniels nonsense from Enterprise, except it doesn't cause me to change the channel. On the comedic side, Bravest Warriors has fun with running gags like the uglification of Beth, which "Cereal Master" revisits with a goofy variation on the joke from "Gas Powered Stick" that Chris loves her no matter how janky she may look. This time, the show briefly imagines Beth as a walrus. Sometimes, a bowl of Moon-Frosted Double Dolphin Smacks with seahorse dreams is worth going through hell for just to put a smile on the puffy face of your walrus.




"Midnight Ron" may not be the cleverest Archer installment, and the show's terrific ensemble of ISIS characters outside of Archer and Malory may have a lot less screen time in this story, but the episode proves that the hiring of Ron Leibman as Archer's car dealership magnate stepdad is as great a casting move as last season's hiring of Burt Reynolds, Archer's favorite movie star, as himself. The veteran character actor (and husband of Archer regular Jessica Walter) excels at playing live wires, whether they're ornery and excitable like the D.A. in Night Falls on Manhattan or laid-back and a little less spry like Ron Cadillac, née Ron Kazinsky ("C'mon, run like you're younger!," barks Archer to Ron during a chase scene).

Archer and Ron are forced to rely on each other to fend off both gangsters and cross-dressing redneck truckers and find their way back from Montreal to Manhattan. During the course of their road movie-style hijinks, Ron unveils his backstory to Archer, and of course, he turns out to have been mob-connected. But instead of a reference to The Hot Rock like I had hoped, "Midnight Ron" does a brief riff on Once Upon a Time in America, which Leibman didn't star in, though it's nice to see that particular Sergio Leone movie get referenced instead of the same two Leone movies that always get referenced (Leone wasn't just Eastwood westerns, y'all).

"Midnight Ron" also highlights something I love about Archer: the incongruity of referencing Master P (or The Human Centipede) in a universe where the ISIS employees rock mid-'60s hairdos, mid-'80s Mac XLs are their office computers and the Cold War still rages on. (Archer creator Adam Reed once described the show's universe as "sort of intentionally ill-defined.") I get a kick out of every time Archer brings up the No Limit rapper/entrepreneur in this episode because he's such an unlikely artist for a '60s Bond-style spy to be aware of (like when Ron finds out from Archer that Malory thinks he's a boring husband, and Archer says, "Well, not after you tell her you stole a Sherman tank, Master P"). Secret agents may not be Beatles fans, but they love them some N'awlins rap.


One of my favorite Bob's Burgers episodes is "Bob Day Afternoon," mostly because of the scenes where anarchic Louise drives Sergeant Bosco (Gary Cole), a crisis negotiator, insane. Bosco returns in the show's Valentine's episode, "My Fuzzy Valentine," and the divorced, world-weary cop's pragmatism about relationships clashes with Linda's rose-colored outlook on them when she persuades him to take part in an impromptu afternoon of speed-dating at the restaurant while he waits to track down a jewelry store thief. The sergeant believes the lack of honesty in relationships is why they go sour, so he suggests that everyone in the restaurant should just reveal the worst tidbits about themselves, which results in a couple of those rapid-fire exchanges between three or more characters that Bob's Burgers excels at (my favorite of these deep, dark confessions is Teddy's "I dress up as Santa every night. It's the only way I can go to sleep!").

Bosco does raise a good point about honesty because Linda's inability (or Linability?) to be honest to Bob about her boredom with his lame Valentine's gifts (they're all heart-shaped burger patties or heart-shaped laundry piles) results in her receiving the same lame gifts every Valentine's. The kids notice her boredom and spur their dad to go out looking for a much better Valentine's gift (while also talking him into allowing them to spend the rainy day away from school, and this awesome move by the kids and Bob's decision to let them play hooky both distinguish Bob's Burgers from the annoyingly high-minded and upright '70s and '80s family sitcoms that weren't It's Your Move or Married... With Children).

Bob decides he'll give his wife the love-tester machine they had fun with on their first date ("Yeah, she'd totally marry you if you did that!," says Gene), and Bob and the kids' search for the elusive machine all over town gives us the opportunity to see more of this mysterious, unnamed seaside town that's like a cross between San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Coney Island. Even though it doesn't have a name, the town itself is my favorite character on Bob's Burgers (after the Belchers, Teddy and maybe the Silverman sister-voiced Pesto twin brothers). Seeing more of it is always welcome, especially because it lets the writers come up with amusing business names like Falafel on a Waffle.

Hopefully, the satisfying "My Fuzzy Valentine" will start a tradition of annual Valentine's episodes for Bob's Burgers, even though, like Bosco, I don't really care for VD. The mix of affecting-without-being-sappy storylines with randy one-liners like "Clean up, aisle my panties..." is as potent as many of the tantalizing Burgers of the Day Bob lists on his chalkboard, like this week's burger.

(Photo source: Bob's Burger of the Day)

Other memorable quotes:
* Gene receives one of his dad's misshapen attempts at a heart-shaped pancake: "Mine looks like a mustache. Pancake rides, five cents!"

* "Buckle it up, buckle it up/Buckle it up or you'll die!"

* Gene to Bob: "You're the worst storyteller! Where's Maya Angelou when you need him?"

* Gretchen (male actor uncredited and unknown) confesses that she faked a bomb threat at a hotel where Mark Harmon was staying: "I wanted to see him evacuate. And then I stalked him for a year and hit his wife with my car." Wow, she must be the only person in the world who hates Pam Dawber.


Seth Green is either psychic or just very good at planning things about half a year in advance. Every other sketch during "Choked on a Bottle Cap," the latest Robot Chicken installment, involves bedroom humor, and the episode's parody of the box-office flop Battleship focuses on Battleship star Rihanna's baffling reconciliation with Chris Brown, so both those elements made this the perfect episode to air on the Sunday before Valentine's Day, which also happened to be the night of this year's Grammys, where Rihanna was seen arm-in-arm with R&B's reigning king of dickishness. (As Seth Rogen joked at last year's Spirit Awards in response to Brown's inexplicable big night at the 2012 Grammys, "At the Grammys, you can literally beat the shit out of a nominee and be asked to perform twice.")

Robot Chicken kicks off its Valentine's episode by gleefully ruining the biggest-grossing chick flick of all time, Titanic, and showing what happens to Jack underwater after Rose lets go. An octopus pulls Jack's corpse apart, while a dolphin humps his remains. The humping continues in "Battlehump," which pits the officers from Battleship against the Humping Robot, one of Robot Chicken's few original characters. The best part of "Choked on a Bottle Cap" pokes fun at Rihanna's inexplicable presence as an officer in Battleship and her off-stage antics with the evil asshole who used to beat her (to stop the Humping Robot, a scientist suggests, "We need counterintuitive thinking, and Rihanna has some of the worst judgment of all time!").

The other highlights of "Choked on a Bottle Cap" involve Robot Chicken doing what it does best: unleashing the R-rated sides of cartoons we grew up on, whether it's ThunderCats leader Lion-O (special guest voice actor Seth MacFarlane) using the Sword of Omens to peep into Cheetara's bedroom while she's in heat or the dad from the Family Circus comic strip attributing his wife's orgasms to a certain other Family Circus character ("Well, it was definitely NOT ME!"). But taking the details of a movie nobody saw and somehow making them funny even though we didn't see that movie are perhaps a slightly more impressive feat. All that's missing from the Battleship spoof is a joke about Taylor Kitsch Chris Brown-ing the hell out of his movie career.


American Dad proves once again in "Max Jets" why it's the Parents Television Council's favorite animated series, with scenes like Steve Smith prodding his mom Francine to make out with a gold-digging waitress she hates ("Kiss her, mommy, kiss her. Yeaaaah...") and each of the Smiths attempting to murder wealthy old Max Jets--actually Roger the alien con artist in one of his gazillion disguises--to get dibs on his riches (and nearly killing themselves or each other in the process). Anything that would appall the PTC gets high marks from me.

But there's more to American Dad than just shock value. The show is also the weirdest and least hacky of the cartoons produced by Fuzzy Door, because of clever stories like "Rapture's Delight," a Christmas episode that transforms into a post-apocalyptic action flick that ends on the possibility that the rest of the series' run is actually set in a post-apocalyptic reality, and last month's gory "Finger Lenten Good," the show's idea of a heartwarming Lenten story (and an episode that really should have aired this week instead of "Max Jets"--way to have impeccable timing, Fox!). The weirdness of the Smiths fuels one of the most amusing gags in "Max Jets": the family's sudden amnesia about Roger (and their inability to care about or pick apart what his Max persona did to amass such a fortune) because they're too greedy and distracted by all the gifts Max showered them with. This is why heartless, willing-to-murder Francine is funnier than the moralistic Francine of "The Adventures of Twill Ongenbone and His Boy Jabari," just as how corrupted, soap opera vixen-ish June was always more entertaining (and hotter) than uptight June on former American Dad writer Nahnatchka Khan's short-lived Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 (another PTC favorite).

The out-of-left-field guest voice actors in "Max Jets" are Mariah Carey (in a bit part as an unhappy waitress) and Michelle Monaghan from one of my favorite movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. The latter voices Gina, the aforementioned gold-digger who sets off the Smiths' ire after Roger gets lost in his Max character and begins showering his wealth on her instead of the Smiths. At one point in "Max Jets," Max buys for his fiancée a recording studio, where she records an atrocious, Real Housewives-style single about gold-digging. (Who are the saps who actually buy these wack Real Housewives singles? For some reason, all these songs resemble "Friday" by Rebecca Black, another wanna-be singer who came from wealth.) Monaghan sounds like a non-Southern Honey Boo Boo when we hear her talk-sing the praises of mon-eeeey, but because this season's episodes are said to have been completed more than a year ago, it's unlikely that she modeled her talk-singing after Honey Boo Boo. Her turn as this gold-digger who can barely conceal her disgust with Max (she ralphs every time she kisses him) makes up for the dumb rom-coms she's been involved with since Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. She did those rom-coms for the mon-eeeey.

It's Black History Month, so all this week, I'm reposting every single past AFOS blog post about one of my favorite films (and one of my reasons for wanting to get into showbiz), Do the Right Thing, the timeless (except for Radio Raheem's boombox and "Dump Koch") and still-bracing 1989 Spike Lee Joint. You can hear original score (or original song) selections from Do the Right Thing on AFOS.

(The following is from July 1, 2009.)

When I first saw Do the Right Thing in high school--this was a couple of years after the film debuted on VHS--I was more of a fan of Public Enemy than Spike Lee, whose films were too artsy for this kid who was more into Tim Burton's Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. P.E.'s "Fight the Power" theme from Do the Right Thing and their earlier track, the Yo! MTV Raps staple "Night of the Living Baseheads," got me hooked on hip-hop and made me interested in seeing the much-hyped movie that introduced "Fight the Power."

Lee's film floored me. I had never seen anything like it before. The open-ended and complex screenplay about Bed-Stuy racial tensions introduced me to a more cerebral and mature kind of cinema, where there are no clear-cut heroes and villains, and like life, not everything has a tidy ending. Do the Right Thing helped improve my tastes in film. It was my gateway to Lee's other films, then to GoodFellas and Martin Scorsese's other films, and then to Chan Is Missing, Dog Day Afternoon and so on. Movies didn't have to dazzle me with just explosions and tits anymore. I learned to become dazzled by adult ideas and themes and--in the cases of Do the Right Thing and GoodFellas, another great late '80s/early '90s New York movie that was also robbed at the Oscars--brilliant dialogue and astonishing editing.

I first saw Do the Right Thing at a time when I became aware of the racism around me and embraced hip-hop because in their lyrics, rappers were anti-establishment, and they spoke to me about topics I was dealing with at the time--and in some ways, still do. As a teen of color, I identified with the anger and frustrations Lee's younger black characters--and P.E.--expressed in Do the Right Thing. I dug how Lee helped change African American cinema (as well as indie cinema) and empowered black viewers and would-be filmmakers with his bold, angry, funny and complex cinematic statement, and it made me want to someday create something for my community that would be equally bold, angry, funny and complex.

Because this week marks the 20th anniversary of the release of a film that influenced me (June 30, 1989), I thought it would be the perfect time to transcribe excerpts from a couple of Do the Right Thing-related phoners I recorded for a 1999 A Fistful of Soundtracks episode about the classic Spike Lee Joint. The Do the Right Thing ep was part of a series of 1999 AFOS eps called "I'm Gonna Party Like It's 1989."

Two decades after Do the Right Thing's release, even members of the film's cast and crew still can't decide on how they feel about Mookie throwing the trash can. The countless questions that the film raises have fascinated African American Do the Right Thing experts S. Craig Watkins, the author of Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Mark A. Reid, the editor of Cambridge Film Handbooks' volume on Do the Right Thing (Cambridge University Press, 1997), whom I interviewed separately in 1999 for the show.

Almost all the pre-2000 broadcasts of AFOS were pre-recorded on audiocassette, and I don't have the equipment to transfer audiotape content to computer--the audio quality would suck anyway--so I'd rather just post text of the interviews below.


S. Craig Watkins: I think the movie struck a chord with a lot of young African Americans in particular, in terms of the way in which it played into the kind of neo-black nationalist politics that were being articulated in a variety of different ways across the African American community, particularly by young African Americans who were rediscovering leaders like Malcolm X, Black Panthers and even to some degree, a more militant version of Martin Luther King Jr. So I think this film tapped into the racial discord that was going on during that time... So in that sense, it represented the degree to which black filmmakers, black artists, were able to successfully tap into a lot of those mood shifts and social and political sensibilities that were taking place within the African American community.


In a separate interview with Mark A. Reid, the UF Gainesville English and film professor discussed some of the events in New York that shaped the film.


Jimmy J. Aquino: One interesting comment that you made in your book about Do the Right Thing was his ties to his family. He uses his family a lot in his movies. [Spike's father Bill composed Do the Right Thing's original score, and Spike and his sister Joie played siblings Mookie and Jade in Do the Right Thing. At one point in the film, a disgusted Mookie thinks his pizzeria boss Sal (Danny Aiello) is putting the moves on Jade. When Mookie tries to warn Jade, she laughs off her brother's suspicions.]

Mark A. Reid: In fact, sometimes, it's interesting to see how it's played out in Do the Right Thing, where he's trying to protect her, even though she seems like she's much more mature than him. He's trying to protect her against Sal and his Italian sausage. Anyway, uh...

What's interesting also is how he used the Fruit of Islam, how this film can also be taken as a critique of New York City politics. Some people even have argued that the film also helped to bring New York's first African American mayor...

JJA: For those listeners who aren't really aware of New York City political history, can you explain the resentment towards Ed Koch? [In Do the Right Thing, "Dump Koch" graffiti can be seen on a wall, and Sonny, Steve Park's Korean shopkeeper character, expresses his dislike of the then-mayor during the film's famous racial slur montage.]


MAR: Well, one thing is that Ed Koch divided the city--ethnic and racial lines. One thing you have to think about when you think about New York City is it's made up of boroughs, and Manhattan is not the only borough. There's other boroughs that are largely dominated by certain ethnic groups, and sometimes, those ethnic groups are in competition for space and jobs. With Ed Koch, although it was a city that... wasn't in bankruptcy, it was in bankruptcy when you think about the type of racial and ethnic conflict. It led to a lot of deaths during Ed Koch's administration. So I think that that's one of the things that brought together a group of people from different ethnic and racial communities to dump Koch. It was written on the wall.

Another thing about Koch is that he's the type of... Giuliani, right now, is mayor, but after this beating of the Haitian guy by the police officers and the murder of this African, Giuliani at least met with the Haitian and African community to discuss matters, whereas Koch would not do that. He's very flippant after these things happened...

With Giuliani, I think he's at least trying to alleviate that, although I don't think he's going to be successful with that because of the fact that these police officers seem like they're overdoing... He's not critical of the police force...

I recently did visit New York, and it's much a cleaner place, but it seems that the cleanliness... and the lack of much theft and everything, it's taken its toll on how the police deals with the people who pay their wages, the citizens.

This is why perhaps Do the Right Thing is necessary because it's still important when you think of the politics of New York right now. You see how the police are acting, and you see this scene where the police, in fact, accidentally murder this guy, suffocate him. It's interesting because you always will have in New York City struggles between ethnic groups. That's shown there. And it's beautiful in a sense because you also see ethnic groups that can work out their problems.

In Do the Right Thing--it's kind of humorous--the portrayal of the Korean shopkeeper, who's very interesting because he's able to talk to Radio Raheem on the same level, cursing and everything. It's interesting in the sense that he doesn't back down. It's interesting that Radio Raheem gives him a wink, saying "Yes, you're one of us," whoever "one of us" means to Radio Raheem.


It's also interesting, the relationships between the African Americans and the Puerto Ricans... They battle it out with music as opposed to using physical force. The only physical force that's played out is Sal and the police officers, and it's kind of interesting because the people who are considered of color don't do that. It's through language or music.

There's one instance of Savage...

JJA: John Savage's yuppie character...

MAR: ... who is gentrifying the neighborhood... It's kind of interesting because he is part of that neighborhood too. He's not a threatening figure even though he dirties...

JJA: ... Buggin' Out's Air Jordans.


MAR: He's not a person of color, but he's not a threatening figure. And if you think about the people who are threatening figures, they're the ones who pick up the bat or use physical force. They're authority figures...


To be continued. In Part 2 of this series of excerpts from archived A Fistful of Soundtracks interviews about Do the Right Thing, S. Craig Watkins discusses the film's incredible original music.

It's Black History Month, so all this week, I'm reposting every single past AFOS blog post about one of my favorite films, Do the Right Thing, the timeless (except for Radio Raheem's boombox and "Dump Koch") and still-bracing 1989 Spike Lee Joint. You can hear original score (or original song) selections from Do the Right Thing on AFOS.

(Previously on AFOS: The Blog: Part 1. The following is from July 1, 2009.)

"I've been listening to 'Cool Jerk' by the Capitols. It's a real classic, fast and upbeat, and it brings to mind summer in the city. This may be the song for the opening credits sequence. I see Rosie Perez dancing to 'Cool Jerk' all over Brooklyn at the first heat of dawn. Rosie doing the Cool Jerk on the Brooklyn Bridge, on the promenade, and on various rooftops."

--Spike Lee, the May 17, 1988 entry in his production journal, Do the Right Thing (Fireside Books, 1989)

Do the Right Thing wouldn't have been the same without Public Enemy's rousing and confrontational original song, "Fight the Power." I can't imagine the film opening with Lee's earlier choice of "Cool Jerk." The series of excerpts from my 1999 A Fistful of Soundtracks interviews with African American Do the Right Thing experts continues with a discussion with S. Craig Watkins, a UT Austin professor of sociology, African American studies and radio-television-film, about one of the film's most powerful and effective elements, its soundtrack.

The Do the Right Thing soundtrack consisted of original songs by artists ranging from P.E. to Take 6 and a Copland-esque original jazz score composed by Lee's father Bill and performed by the Natural Spiritual Orchestra, which you can hear selections from on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel. For the film, Bill Lee assembled a septet that included saxman Branford Marsalis and trumpeter Terence Blanchard (who later became Lee's regular composer), as well as a 48-piece string section.


Jimmy J. Aquino: Although Do the Right Thing was a pivotal moment in black cinema, the mainstream films directed by African Americans in the next couple of years were from the gangsta genre instead of being influenced by the Spike Lee Joints, which were more cerebral. Why was that so?

S. Craig Watkins: Much of black cinema, I would argue, tends to be influenced by what's happening in black popular music. In Do the Right Thing, you see Spike using a number of different kinds of black musical genres, styles and traditions. The one song that really, really drives the movie and I think is the most remembered is the song "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy, which is playing into this kind of hyper-racialized neo-black nationalist politics that were taking place during that time, and so he features that and uses that as the energy that drives his movie. But as that's happening, at the same time, we see in 1988/1989/1990 a new trend taking place within the field of black American popular music, more specifically rap music, in terms of the emergence of gangsta rap, and what we see eventually in the film industry, again tapping into that same energy, tapping into that same vibe, tapping into what gangsta rap was saying, doing and how it was resonating with consumers. So we see the movies also turning more and more in that direction...

JJA: Is there anything else that you find intriguing about Spike Lee's use of music in Do the Right Thing?

SCW: Yeah, one of the things I like to say in terms of giving Spike Lee some props regarding his movies is that he's always understood that black musical styles and traditions have a long history, a long legacy and are very diverse. Compare, for example, soundtracks that were typically associated with a lot of popular action ghetto-themed movies throughout the 1990s. Most of these soundtracks are most exclusively gangsta rap music, hardcore, harder-edged kind of music, which in some ways, don't necessary illuminate the complex and rich history of black music.

On the other hand, soundtracks that Spike Lee generally compiled for his movies--and Do the Right Thing is a perfect example--you've got your traditional R&B songs on there, a reggae-style joint on there, you have the rap music by Public Enemy, you have the black female rhythm and blues tradition... He did a jazz score for the movie and subsequently released a jazz score CD. So my main point is that Do the Right Thing, that soundtrack, as well as a number of his other films--particularly School Daze comes to mind--he draws from a broad cross-section of black musical traditions, tapping into an understanding, just how complex, diverse and dynamic black American music has been.



Not all the films we love are perfect. The Cambridge Film Handbooks volume on Do the Right Thing that UF Gainesville English professor Mark A. Reid edited is a compilation of essays that both praise and critique Lee's controversial film. The book also reprints film critics' reviews of Do the Right Thing from the summer of 1989. During A Fistful of Soundtracks' 1999 episode about Do the Right Thing, I wanted to hear from Reid what he thought were the film's merits and if there was anything that was missing from Lee's depiction of 1989 Bed-Stuy.


JJA: In the film's portrayal of Bed-Stuy and the interracial tensions... is there anything in this portrayal of racial politics that it overlooks?

Mark A. Reid: Well, one would have to know the Bedford-Stuyvesant area pretty well to be able to say that it overlooks it, but I think it gives an ample picture of the different types of African Americans that live there. You have the West Indians and the different types, and you have the African Americans. You have the fact that there are Korean shopkeepers. Perhaps when Spike was younger, they weren't Korean. They were probably either Jewish or maybe Arab. The fact that there's gentrification going on in Bed-Stuy. But gentrification isn't always white yuppie. It's also buppies. We can see that in Jungle Fever, when in fact, the people who live in that area--and I think it's Harlem--the people that gentrified that area, and they're all upwardly mobile African American couples. You do have the hanger-on who's probably been there a long time... and you have different types of reactions by this Italian American family. I think that's interesting.

You don't get much of an art community around there, and I think there is a black art community that developed because they couldn't afford to live in Manhattan. You don't get the fact that there's drugs, and everybody has criticized him for that. I think if he introduced that, he'd have to develop it, and it would probably overtake the story he's trying to tell...

Do the Right Thing, although it's interesting and everything, I still think it's a very thin film. I think it's an important film because politically, how it was used when it came out and what is criticized in the film, not only Koch, but the brutality that some law officers--although that, I think, was an accident--they abuse their power. It does talk about the tension that was mounting, that would later erupt, and not only in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but in Los Angeles, the trial of Rodney King. It's like a marker. It sees certain things that are happening in the urban situation between blacks and other ethnics. Because ultimately, it did happen between the Korean businesspersons in Los Angeles.

JJA: And also, years before in New York, there were conflicts between the Korean shopkeepers and the blacks.

MAR: Right. But the thing is that what would have been interesting is that also--which is I guess it's hard to do in most films since you have a singular narrative that dominates a film--is that it's very important to understand who those Koreans are and their culture, and that's what we don't get. If Koreans come from a culture where you don't touch people when you're handing back the money or other things, and other people who aren't Korean read it differently, then there's a miscommunication, and it's on both parts, the Koreans and whoever the other community is, be it African American or Mexican American or whatever. It would be interesting to have a film that dealt with that and dealt with what Do the Right Thing did.


Watkins explains why even some black viewers thought Do the Right Thing fell short.


SCW: I would argue that the problem with Do the Right Thing in retrospect is that it also illuminated some of the limitations with the kind of racial politics, the racial ideology, that the movie both played on and used as a driving and narrative force. Some thought that it was a bit overdone, in terms of the black racial politics. Some thought that the black racial politics were articulated in ways that weren't either nuanced or very sophisticated, in terms of the kinds of characters who were the leading proponents of a prism of the black progressive agenda. Here, I'm talking about, for example, the character of Buggin' Out, who many argue--and I think accurately so--was basically more of a caricature than a character per se.


I asked Reid about some black viewers' gripes with Giancarlo Esposito's Buggin' Out character.


JJA: There's this interesting criticism about Buggin' Out, that Spike Lee's portrayal of Buggin' Out is a mockery of black political activism.

MAR: It's a mockery in a sense that what Buggin' Out wants to do is boycott Sal's, as opposed to... In the history of African Americans, we boycott, and we also choose another alternative to Sal at the same time. What Buggin' Out wants to do is change pictures, which really doesn't mean that much. It's superficial.

JJA: It's about image.

MAR: Right. Why wouldn't he say, "Hire more people from the community"? Why wouldn't he help support somebody else who wants to build a small restaurant and teach them--an internship? That's what a boycott could do. A boycott to change photographs on a wall? "You put up Muhammad Ali and you put up a basketball player"? So what? That's decoration.

But even within the film, the characters didn't take Buggin' Out that seriously. Spike Lee using those characters and taking that not so seriously means that they're waiting for a more serious type of political activism than what Buggin' Out offers them. So I wouldn't look at it totally as a critique of black activism. I'd look at it as a critique of a certain type of black activism, which might, in fact, be a critique of Al Sharpton. That hasn't ever been discussed, but you could see that at that point in time. I don't know what "Tawana Told the Truth" means. Are we supposed to take it seriously or is it like a critique of the Tawana Brawley thing? That's the problem too... But the thing is that do we want a conclusive "Yes, this is what it's about"? Or do we want to be forced to think about these issues? I think that maybe that's what Spike Lee is doing.


Watkins offers his take on the film's open-endedness.


JJA: Another intriguing aspect about Do the Right Thing is the narrative techniques. What's unconventional about these narrative techniques?

SCW: What Spike does in Do the Right Thing in some ways is indicative of the way he approached film early on in his career--adopting and incorporating very stylized, very non-conventional kinds of cinematic techniques into his own narratives. One of the problems that a lot of people had with Do the Right Thing is that the narrative structure was very unconventional, both in terms of the way the story evolves, but perhaps more importantly, in terms of the way in which the story is concluded. That is how he goes about trying to engage in narrative closure, when in fact, he engages in a more open-ended kind of narrative structure.

We as filmgoers are so accustomed to movies where there's a definitive beginning, definitive middle and decisive end. I think that Do the Right Thing threw a lot of people off and was perhaps part of what made it a sensational movie in 1989--sensational in the sense that perhaps more so than any other movie during that year, it attracted considerable media attention. It attracted considerable attention within the academic community. There was a very interesting and profound buzz about the movie, and I think part of that was because the movie ended on a series of question marks as opposed to definitive conclusions and definitive statements. It left people wondering, "What was the right thing?" Was Mookie right or justified when he threw the trash can through Sal's pizzeria window and then started the incident that ensued from that point on? What are the right racial politics and black political ideology? Is it Malcolm's version or is it Martin Luther King Jr.'s version? What are the best and most effective ways for blacks to deal with perceived racial injustices and real racial injustices?


So because the movie ended in that way, I think it caught a lot of people off guard and left a lot of people pondering a lot of different questions, which I actually liked because what it does is, unlike most films, which pretend that the kinds of issues, conflicts and crises that it might address during the middle of the film, instead of pretending that those conflicts, tensions and crises can be easily resolved through some heroic individual or some heroic stance, what Do the Right Thing suggests is that many of society's deepest and most profound social problems are in some ways almost unfortunately... very difficult, and you can't come up with a very tidy ending to address these issues. This is something that we need to leave open-ended. This is a debate that we need to have, an ongoing conversation. I think the movie, in terms of a narrative sense, provoked that kind of discourse, provoked that kind of conversation. When I was in graduate school at the time, I could remember a number of different panels and a number of different forums. Even one of the local theaters in the city where I was in school in Michigan actually screened the movie and then had a post-film discussion.


To be continued. In Part 3 of this series of excerpts from archived interviews about Do the Right Thing, Watkins praises the film's nuanced characters.

It's Black History Month, so all this week, I'm reposting every single past AFOS blog post about one of my favorite films, Do the Right Thing, the timeless (except for Radio Raheem's boombox and "Dump Koch") and still-bracing 1989 Spike Lee Joint. You can hear original score (or original song) selections from Do the Right Thing on AFOS.

(Previously on AFOS: The Blog: Parts 1 and 2. The following is from July 1, 2009.)

Do the Right Thing caused quite a stir at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, dividing the audience, the jurors and the guest filmmakers. German filmmaker and Cannes juror Wim Wenders complained that Mookie was not enough of a hero for throwing the trash can in the film's climax. Later on, star/director Spike Lee would say that somewhere in his closet is a baseball bat with Wenders' name on it.

When the film was first released, some critics feared it would incite black moviegoers to riot or start fights in the theaters, while more open-minded critics praised it for its ambiguity. Desson Thomson of the Washington Post called Do the Right Thing radical filmmaking at its best, and Roger Ebert said "it comes closer to reflecting the current state of race relations in America than any other movie of our time... this movie is more open-ended than most. It requires you to decide what you think about it... Do the Right Thing doesn't ask its audiences to choose sides; it is scrupulously fair to both sides, in a story where it is our society itself that is not fair."

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association was as equally awed by Do the Right Thing, and they awarded the film with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (for Danny Aiello as Sal) and Best Music honors. Meanwhile, the Oscars acted like the film didn't exist, although it was nominated for Aiello's performance and Lee's screenplay. In one of the most memorable moments from the Oscar telecast that year, a nervous and trembling Kim Basinger criticized the Academy for snubbing Do the Right Thing, which she called "the film that might tell the biggest truth of all." Barely anybody applauded, but Lee, who was in the audience, passed on a note of thanks to Basinger after her shout-out.

This week, Do the Right Thing makes its debut on Blu-ray with a few more extras than the already fully loaded 2001 Criterion DVD. This series of partial transcripts of segments from A Fistful of Soundtracks' 1999 episode about one of my favorite films concludes with more comments from S. Craig Watkins, the author of Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Beacon Press, 2005), and Mark A. Reid, the editor of Cambridge Film Handbooks' volume on Do the Right Thing (Cambridge University Press, 1997), whom I interviewed separately for the show.


Jimmy J. Aquino: Let's talk about Spike Lee's portrayals of the white characters in Do the Right Thing. What fascinates you about these characterizations?

S. Craig Watkins: What's really interesting about Spike's representation of whiteness is a number of things. I think that was the first of his feature films that actually involved white characters. Prior to that, most of his movies had been all-black casts, all-black-themed types of movies. So one of the questions that was actually posed to him as Do the Right Thing was being released was "Spike, how was it trying to direct white actors? How was it trying to write characters who are white?" The presumption for having that question was that a black filmmaker really had little of any knowledge or familiarity with whiteness, so therefore, he or she would have difficulty imagining, creating and directing white characters. Obviously, there's some sort of racial implications embedded in that in terms of... It's okay, I guess... White filmmakers are never asked, "Well, how is it creating or directing a black character?" So the question then is "Why is it that black filmmakers should have difficulty?," particularly given the sort of savvy ways in which blacks see, experience and understand whiteness in our society today anyway.

The other interesting thing about Spike Lee and his representation of whiteness and the white characters in the movie is that Sal is by far the most fully developed character in that movie, in terms of being a well-rounded, three-dimensional character. We see multiple sides of whiteness, multiple kinds of conflicting values around race, class, community, pride and ethnicity that are articulated via Sal's character. In that sense, it really showed how Spike on occasion is able to create very interesting, very nuanced types of characters.

The other thing too that I thought was very important about his portrayal of whites in that movie is I think it would have been very easy for Spike Lee and later African American filmmakers to play on what we might call counterracial stereotypes of whites, and that is depicting whites as the villains, in very one-dimensional, flat ways. I think what he was able to do in Do the Right Thing is to show and suggest that there are multiple ways in which whiteness gets expressed. There are multiple racial attitudes that white Americans develop. So in that sense, the way in which each of the white characters in the movie--and I'm talking specifically about Sal the father and his two sons--they all in some ways represented very different kinds of white racial sensibilities, white racial experiences and white relationships to blacks and blackness.


Reid explains why Lee's perspective gave Do the Right Thing an edge over other films about race relations.


JJA: How does Do the Right Thing succeed in its portrayal of racial animosity and racism, whereas other films about racism have failed?

Mark A. Reid: Like what other films would you say have failed?

JJA: Not so much as failed, but more problematic. For instance, films that portray tumultuous episodes in African American or African history, but it's really the story about the white friend of the black leader.

MAR: Oh, those types of films. I see. I think it's very important that a black directed the film. I'm not saying that any film directed by a black is going to be successful about portraying racism, but I think it's very important that Spike Lee's an African American. I think it's important also, to add on to that, that he's an African American that is aware of racism. In his film, the active characters are not just white people. It's very important to have a large swipe of different types of blacks that are involved, as opposed to one unique black and maybe two or three whites. I think that's what Spike Lee films do. They activate those blacks who are involved...

When you think of... Who Killed Vincent Chin? I don't think a white person could have made that film. I know somebody's going to call me an essentialist. I think at that point in time, when that film was made, I think it was very important that an Asian person made the film--and an Asian person who's talented, just like Spike Lee. Although he has a lot of flaws, he's a very talented filmmaker, and his language is well-versed in black culture.

I think it comes down to that--who the director and the writers are, when you work in a collective where you have mixed people, and you listen to all their different cultural stories and languages, to create a film... Because when Spike Lee made that film, his Italian American stars wrote a lot of what they'd say, and if they didn't believe in what they were doing, they'd say, "You know, we should do it this way." Spike Lee was a strong enough director to accept that. I think that's very important. Although I think he had a problem dealing with that in Jungle Fever, when Annabella Sciorra... I think he was unable to accept her reading of that relationship. But I think he's a director that's able to work with actors and be led by them sometimes.

JJA: Mark Reid, thank you.

MAR: Oh, you're welcome very much, and I enjoyed this. I learned something.

JJA: What did you learn?

MAR: That I didn't know that much about Spike Lee's films. [A woman in Reid's office can be heard laughing in the background.]

After the vacuum cleaner in the "Legs" episode's flashback, Katya is the second machine Archer has banged. That can only mean one thing: watch your back, El Camino.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

One of my favorite recurring bits back when Conan O'Brien hosted NBC's Late Night was "Closed Captioning," where a disgruntled captioner would sneak insults about Conan and Andy ("Audience laughs. Barely.") into the closed captions. The snarking would escalate into threats to derail Conan's show with pranks like the captioner pulling a fire alarm or flashing his junk on-camera to delight his girlfriend, which the captioner would end up doing. The captioner who types up the captions for Archer may not be as disgruntled about his show as the Late Night captioner was during Conan's era, but he makes Archer's captions equally fun to read by slipping in occasional Easter eggs that can be missed when the captions are shut off, like translations of the unsubtitled Japanese lines uttered by creepy Krieger's holographic anime child bride in the solid Valentine's episode "Viscous Coupling."

The captioning also drops a hint that Archer's cyborg ex-fiancée Katya (Ona Grauer), who also resurfaces in "Viscous Coupling," is conning Archer during the description of her reaction to the recording that Archer badly doctored to try to win her back and make it sound like her current beau Barry (Dave Willis) cheated on her aboard the space station ("KATYA: [almost feral sobbing/screaming]"). Other sitcoms use the Hallmark holiday of Valentine's to display their warm and uplifting side (particularly Parks and Rec), but because Archer is a dark spy comedy, its Valentine's episode involves characters like Katya using their sexual relationships with others to get ahead in the spy game--a view of relationships that's far from warm or uplifting.

And because much of Archer's humor thrives on kinky or freaky behavior, the show's idea of a Valentine's episode is gag after gag of ISIS employees indulging in their usual kinks or getting sexually violated while passed out (in "The Wind Cries Mary," Archer learned he was sexually assaulted in his sleep by his best friend Lucas Troy, while here, Pam tranqs Cyril and Ray and makes them do a tentacle porn video). While this would get tiresome in the heavy Truckasaurus hands of the writers of lesser adult sitcoms, "Viscous Coupling" exercises restraint with these gags by leaving most of the twisted sex-related acts of Archer's co-workers to our imaginations, which is funnier than cutaways that graphically show the freaky-deaky. Simple and effective shots of Cyril and Ray waking up naked, intertwined and with tranq darts in their necks while they discover an octopus swimming in the nearby toilet, followed by hilarious and off-screen "Noooooooooo!"'s, are all we need to put two and two together.

While we're quick on the uptake in regards to gags like the aftermath of the off-screen tentacle porn video shoot or the unremarked-upon ligature marks on the neck of erotic asphyxiation addict Cheryl/Carol after her night out with a fireman, Archer isn't as quick on the uptake in regards to Katya, who tricks him into bringing back to Earth her marooned-in-space beau (with the unintentional help of an oblivious Krieger). Barry, in turn, isn't aware that he too has been tricked by Katya so she could attain her ultimate goal: ousting him from his top position as head of the KGB. In addition to being an enjoyable anti-Valentine's episode about the loneliness Archer has wound up experiencing as a result of his self-serving behavior, "Viscous Coupling" nicely sets up both a future Archer-vs.-Barry rematch and a new role for Katya as Malory's KGB counterpart. And if Archer doesn't take better care of his hearing ("Damn you, tinnitus, you're a cruel mistress!"), a future in which all his favorite Burt Reynolds flicks have to be watched with the closed captioning always switched on may await him.

Other memorable quotes:
* Lana: "Your apartment is one level. How do you have a dumbwaiter?" Archer: "It goes sideways."

* Katya: "Yes, my dear Sterling, come for me. Phrezzing, boom."

* Krieger, as Archer tries to lure him with the image of cyborg fights between Ray and Barry to persuade him to keep Barry trapped in space: "Bup bup bup bup bup! Stop. My penis can only get so erect." Hologram bride: "Honntou ne... [Very true...]"

* Archer speaks for many viewers like myself when he discovers that Ray's choice of bathroom reading is tentacle porn: "Seriously, how is that even a genre?"

(Photo source: Archer Wiki)

* "Sorry, that's, uh, just a sympathy boner."

* Barry: "So tell Archer I'm coming for him--phrasing, boom--and both Barrys out."

* A frustrated Archer to Krieger: "Hey! Thanks, Neil deGrasse Tyson!" Hologram: "Oooooh, deGrasse Tyson-san..."

(Photo source: Archer Wiki)

* A Malory-like Katya: "Now who do I have to screw to get a drink around here?" KGB soldier Boris: "Nobody, ma'am. Unless you wunt. And if you do wunt, I ken be buttum. No problem there."

(Photo source: Proud to Be a 'nerd')

After a couple of decades of reruns, the first season of Gravity Falls resumes on the Disney Channel with a new episode, "Boss Mabel." Coincidentally, the storyline of "Boss Mabel" happens to be somewhat similar to the storyline of the latest Bob's Burgers episode, "Lindapendent Woman." Grunkle Stan challenges disgruntled employee Mabel to a bet that she won't be able to make more dough as temporary manager of the Mystery Shack than Stan will while he gives himself a three-day vacation (which he spends as a contestant on a game show to try to win the bet). Mabel enjoys being a boss who's more fair-minded than Stan, but then Wendy starts to take advantage of her, and both Wendy's laziness and Mabel's managerial inexperience result in chaos. Meanwhile, over on Bob's Burgers, Linda takes a full-time job at a Whole Foods-like grocery store to help with the family's expenses, and she adores her new job ("Ooh, is that a watercooler? Oh God, I'm gonna be gossiping around a real watercooler like on TV!")--until the day she gets put in charge of the store. Everyone there takes advantage of her too, and chaos also ensues.

How do the two Kristen Schaal-voiced cartoons handle the same storyline? Both handle it well, although "Lindapendent Woman" has a slight edge over "Boss Mabel" due to its bizarreness, especially in its running joke of Louise freeing the store's frozen shrimp and its B-story of Tina experiencing her first kiss. The way "Lindapendent Woman" builds towards that important and tender moment for Tina is classic Bob's Burgers bizarreness. Tina has a brief meet-cute with a partially obscured teen shopper (Ben "Jean-Ralphio" Schwartz) from behind the store's dairy fridge, but she ends up with only a Band-Aid accidentally ripped from his bitten-by-a-turtle index finger to remember him by, so in a gender-swapped (and disturbing-for-hardcore-germaphobes) version of Cinderella, she attempts to track down her Cinderfella by slipping the used Band-Aid onto the fingers of local boys.

"Boss Mabel" isn't as offbeat, but it's funnier and cleverer than the average Disney Channel comedy show, thanks to gags like the nightmare that haunts the Gremloblin, a creature that overpowers humans by showing them their worst nightmares if they look into his eyes. When Mabel accidentally lets loose the caged Gremloblin, a quick-thinking Dipper defeats the Gremloblin by simply flashing a mirror in front of him and making him see his reflection, which causes him to experience his own worst fear (in amusingly subtitled monster gibberish): he's starting to resemble his father. I like how this cartoon afflicts its monsters with silly weaknesses that aren't usually associated with monsters in paranormal shows, whether they're daddy issues or weaknesses for Icelandic disco.

While Mabel learns to assert herself as temporary boss and everyone's able to save the shop in time for Stan's return from vacation (plus Mabel wins the bet), Linda and the kids aren't able to save a damn thing. She quits her market job after accepting Bob's apology for lashing out at her and giving her a mixed job performance review at the restaurant, which has been deprived of its electricity because without Linda, Bob is even more clueless than Linda when it comes to bills. Because it's Fox and not the Disney Channel, Linda and the kids amusingly walk out on the store and leave it in total disarray, and off-screen, Linda is basically back to square one, returning to a restaurant that will be upgraded from "no electricity" to "still in the red" like at the start of "Lindapendent Woman." Well, at least it won't close like the non-crematorium businesses next door do every week.

(Photo source: Stores Next to Bob's Burgers)

Stray observations (regarding both "Boss Mabel" and "Lindapendent Woman"):
* The "Boss Mabel" cold open's button of a carsick kid tourist visualized by Stan as a wallet puking out change made me laugh, even though it's straight out of any How I Met Your Mother episode that replaces bongs with sandwiches.

* "SVZEB RH GSV SVZW GSZG DVZIH GSV UVA" = "Heavy is the head that wears the fez."

* The game show host (Kevin Michael Richardson) in "Boss Mabel" looks like how former KTVU anchorman Dennis Richmond looked in the '70s. I'm not sure if that's Bay Area-bred creator Alex Hirsch's shout to the badass Oakland TV news legend (in addition to a little shout to Fairfield, California via one of the contestants), but that would be fantastic if it is.

* Gravity Falls is off the air again this week and then returns on March 1? This is why I'm tired of dealing with the kids' channels. Consistent schedules are to kids' channels what real hip-hop, rationality and hydratingbefore speaking on-camera are to Marco Rubio.

* Teddy misses how Linda used to gently lower the restaurant's thermostat: "Two degrees is everything! Two degrees killed the dinosaurs!"

* Tina is astonished by the milk fridge: "Wow, it's like I'm backstage at a Broadway show. About people who buy milk."

* Gene: "My first promotion! Watch out, glass ceiling!"

* A randy license plate in the market parking lot says "BRN2DRLU," the same plate that belongs to Dr. Yap, the skirt-chasing dentist and wanna-be rock guitarist voiced by Ken Jeong last season. So that means Dr. Yap dropped by the market off-screen, perhaps because he shreds with the Steve Miller Band cover band that one of Linda's co-workers dabbles in. Or maybe Dr. Yap's just there to pick up women. Try the frozen food section, player.

* During the "Lindapendent Woman" closing credits in the kitchen, the animation for Tina and Louise grooving to the fake disco song while helping out Bob is simple but sublime.

* I missed this when it was first posted last week, but St. Vincent recorded a nice cover of the montage music from "Bad Tina" for the "Bob's Buskers" series of Bob's Burgers song covers.



I like how "Immortal," the Robot Chicken season finale, plows through 15 sketches (mostly forgettable, but the funniest of these simply ends with the chyron "Fish Glory Holes") before devoting half of its 11-minute running time to a parody of director Drew Goddard's clever Cabin in the Woods, last year's other Joss Whedon sci-fi/fantasy film and the meta horror flick to end all meta horror flicks. "Immortal" is a good example of Robot Chicken's approach to sketch comedy, which is similar to how Key & Peele and Kroll Show approach it (it's also why these three shows play better in reruns than SNL does): sketches rarely overstay their welcome. If one doesn't make you laugh, on to the next one.

The episode's final sketch tweaks The Cabin in the Woods' "the ancient gods that have to be appeased are the bloodthirsty horror genre fans" concept and makes the stoned Adult Swim viewers the ancient gods. Creators/executive producers Seth Green and Matthew Senreich voice themselves and assume the Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins roles from the film, while Green's old Buffy boss voices one of the monsters from the film's zoo, a zombie version of himself, who's got a literal ax to grind with the Fox network execs who cancelled his creations Firefly and Dollhouse. (Zombie Whedon even says "Grr, argh" twice, just like the monster in the Mutant Enemy Productions logo that closes Whedon's shows.) The other creatures in the Robot Chicken version of the zoo range from Aqua Teen Hunger Force's Master Shake to Gabourey Sidibe (her non-verbal appearance in the zoo is a great what-the-shit moment).

Because I enjoyed the short-lived Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, which got mistreated by the Humping Robot that is ABC, my favorite element of the Cabin in the Woods spoof actually has little to do with either Whedon or Adult Swim. Guest voice actors Krysten Ritter and Dreama Walker get to switch their Apartment 23 personas, with Ritter voicing the virgin of the teen group and Walker voicing the slut. It's hard to dislike a sketch that does that role reversal and has the famously grumpy Alan Moore attacking people with his tentacle-like facial hair (I'd hate to see what "Viscous Coupling" would have done with that). The Cabin in the Woods backdrop is a fun reworking of Robot Chicken's season-ending tradition of Adult Swim head Mike Lazzo declaring Robot Chicken cancelled and the perfect way to cap off a death-minded sixth season I only caught bits and pieces of but enjoyed when a gag or two killed, both literally and figuratively. On to the next one.


It's interesting that the most anticipated Adventure Time episode of the season doesn't feature Finn and Jake at all. The Adventure Time universe is so rich and fully realized that it remains entertaining even when Finn and Jake are absent, like in "Bad Little Boy," the second short to center on Fionna the human (Madeleine Martin from Californication) and Cake the cat (Roz Ryan), the Ice King's gender-swapped fanfic versions of Finn and Jake. Since the airing of "Fionna and Cake," the female Finn and her cat have turned into two of the show's most popular (and in the case of Fionna, most frequently cosplayed) characters despite being figments of the Ice King's imagination and receiving very little screen time.

Fionna and Cake run the risk of being boring Mary Sues, but luckily, they're as sharply drawn as Finn and Jake, and Martin and Ryan bring their story-within-a-story characters to life quite well. As a comedic episode about the storytelling process and refining an unappealing piece of fiction so that it clicks with the audience, "Bad Little Boy" is on a par with "Steve Guttenberg's Birthday," one of my favorite Party Down episodes. The short tosses a jab or two at how terrible and haphazard most fanfics are (the Ice King's royal prisoners, who are to the stories in this episode what Megan Mullally's non-geeky Lydia was to the sci-fi movie script in the Guttenberg episode, can't bear to hear their captor read any more of his wack Fionna and Cake fanfics). At the same time, it also finds the joy in that kind of storytelling when it's done with much more skill, like when Marceline--a musician who's no stranger to spinning taut and economical stories, but in song form--steps in and comes up with a Fionna and Cake adventure that leaves the imprisoned princesses satisfied.

The Vampire Queen inserts the Ice King's gender-swapped version of herself--charming but jerky Marshall Lee (Donald Glover, in a role that writer/storyboarder/composer Rebecca Sugar wanted Dante Basco to play)--to shake up Fionna and Cake's world, and it's remarkable how "Bad Little Boy" doubles as a great Marceline episode (and without giving her much screen time too). The story-within-a-story reveals in clever ways how Marceline feels about her past self (Marshall is reminiscent of Marceline's earlier adversarial self, before she befriended Finn) and what she thinks of other Ooo-ians. For instance, her friendly rival and ex-lover Princess Bubblegum, who's in the form of Prince Gumball (Neil Patrick Harris, reprising his role from "Fionna and Cake"), doesn't come off well in her story and is a bit of an uptight killjoy.

(Photo source: Adventure Time Wiki)

But what is up with that part of the musical number where Cake morphs into a shapely cat woman while dancing with Marshall? That bit was clearly thrown in to excite the furries in the audience. Like tentacle porn, the furry thing doesn't appeal to me at all, so I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable during that bit (although Cake's shapely form isn't as disturbing as some of the really grotesque forms Jake has morphed into). Okay, Catwoman is hot, whether she's Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfeiffer, Anne Hathaway or Tamara Taylor, but a feline with tits and an ass is weird in a not-so-pleasant way, like any time the Ice King winds up in a state of undress or we get a close-up of his nasty bare feet. People of Earth, stop sexualizing your cats! Or your cars! Or octopi...

It's Black History Month, so all this week, I'm reposting every single past AFOS blog post about one of my favorite films, Do the Right Thing, the timeless and still-bracing 1989 Spike Lee Joint. You can hear original score (or original song) selections from Do the Right Thing on AFOS.

(Previously on AFOS: The Blog: Parts 1, 2 and 3. The following is from August 25, 2009.)

After posting a bunch of interesting Batman concept drawings and set photos from the 20-year-old blockbuster's official movie souvenir magazine, I'm doing the same thing with a similar tie-in for summer 1989's other landmark film, Do the Right Thing. But instead of an official movie mag, the Spike Lee Joint spawned a now-out-of-print Fireside/Simon & Schuster companion book that Lee wrote with the assistance of ex-girlfriend Lisa Jones. The director has done several companion books for his films. Each of these books contain behind-the-scenes photos, the film's script and Lee's own production journal (some of the Do the Right Thing journal passages are like tweets with better spelling: "Haven't written in a couple of days. I've been busy trying to save School Daze from being dogged.").

I've discussed before why Do the Right Thing is one of my favorite films and why writers of color like myself cite it as an influence. One aspect of the film that I don't think gets enough props is the terrific production design by Wynn Thomas, who drew this sketch of the We Love Radio and Sal's Famous Pizzeria set exteriors. Using an old Coney Island pizzeria as the basis for Sal's, the film's crew built it from scratch on an empty Bed-Stuy lot. "The ultimate compliment was when real people would walk off the street and try and buy a slice," said Thomas in an L.A. Times oral history about the movie. Thomas later created nifty-looking sets for Mars Attacks! and brought CONTROL Headquarters into the 21st century for Steve Carell's Get Smart.

Clockwise: The sets that are listed on this Do the Right Thing ground plan are the neighborhood church; generator storage; the home belonging to John Savage's gentrifying yuppie character; Da Mayor's home; the Puerto Rican stoop; We Love; Sal's; the street corner inhabited by the trash-talking Greek chorus of ML (Paul Benjamin), Coconut Sid (Frankie Faison) and Sweet Dick Willie (the late stand-up comic Robin Harris); the Korean market; Mother Sister's home; and Jade and Mookie's apartment. I like how the "Corner Men" are included on the ground plan. In the journal's February 21, 1988 entry, Lee wrote that he wanted to give Harris a part in which he could ad-lib ("I wouldn't dare to write his dialogue"), and a corner man character would be perfect for him. It sure was.

Rosie Perez, who at the time was a Soul Train dancer who was making her big-screen debut in Do the Right Thing and was a reason why its main titles are one of the illest openers in a film ever, sits with the child actor who played her character's son and his triplet brothers.

I'm posting this pic of Steve Park as Sonny the irritable Korean grocer simply because pics of Park or his Do the Right Thing character never turn up in Google image searches. Park will always be cool in my book for putting the Friends crew members on blast in 1997 because of a staffer's racist treatment of James Hong when both actors guest-starred on the sitcom. Lo Pan should have fried that douchenozzle's ass with his laser beam eyes.

Several of the most fascinating quotes in the companion book's photo gallery came from Giancarlo Esposito, who played wannabe activist Buggin' Out.

According to Lee, "At the last moment, Paramount asked me to change the ending. They wanted Mookie and Sal to hug and be friends and sing 'We Are the World.' They told me this on a Friday; Monday morning we were at Universal."

The Do the Right Thing crew, which shot the film from July to September 1988 and helped start diversifying New York film crews by employing mostly black crew members, poses in front of the We Love set.

Heat storyboard artist and Danny Deckchair director Jeff Balsmeyer drew these boards for the harrowing scene in which cops murder Radio Raheem. "If in a review, a critic discussed how Sal's Famous was burned down but didn't mention anything about Radio Raheem getting killed, it seemed obvious that he or she valued white-owned property more than the life of this young black hoodlum," said Lee to the L.A. Times. "To me, loss of life outweighs loss of property. You can rebuild a building. I mean, they're rebuilding New Orleans now but the people that died there are never coming back."

In Living Color once poked fun at Lee's "skinny legs and big feet." In Balsmeyer's storyboards for the Trash Can Toss Heard 'Round the World, Mookie looks like he's been hitting the NordicTrack.

It's Black History Month, so all this week, I've been reposting every single past AFOS blog post about one of my favorite films, Do the Right Thing, the timeless and still-bracing 1989 Spike Lee Joint. You can hear original score (or original song) selections from Do the Right Thing on AFOS.

(Previously on AFOS: The Blog: Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4. The following is from April 4, 2012.)

(Photo source: The Criterion Contraption)

Laura K. Warrell's 2002 Salon article about Public Enemy's "Fight the Power"--which the group wrote for Do the Right Thing after Spike Lee abandoned his early idea of having Rosie Perez dance to The Capitols' "Cool Jerk" in the opening titles--excellently elucidates the P.E. track's impact on hip-hop, as well as pop music that means something more than the first four things in Elvis Costello's line about how songs are about five subjects ("I'm leaving you. You're leaving me. I want you. You don't want me. I believe in something.").

But Warrell's proclamation that conscious hip-hop is dead was premature. It's still out there. You just have to know where to look:

Like “Do the Right Thing,” the Spike Lee film to which it was tied, the song broke at a crucial period in America’s struggle with race, capturing both the psychological and social conflicts of the time. Unabashedly political, “Fight the Power” was confrontational in the way great rock has always been. It had the kind of irreverence that puts bands on FBI lists. “Fight” demanded action and, as the band’s most accessible hit, acted as the perfect summation of its ideology and sound. Every kid in America, white, black or brown, could connect to the song’s uncompromising cultural critique, its invigoratingly danceable sound and its rallying call.

And who could blame them? Ultimately, parachute pants and Flock of Seagulls haircuts couldn’t quell the frustrations of the Me Decade. The presidential tag team of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. had dismantled a battery of social programs, squashing urban communities already struggling with poverty, guns and violence. Crack ravaged the inner city. AIDS rocked the nation. Black leaders, including Jesse Jackson, tried to bathe America’s race problem in as bright a spotlight as possible. The artistic community, already defiant in the face of Reagan-era conservatism, became even more provocative. The ’80s gave us Robert Mapplethorpe, the U2 of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” Darling Nikki…

From inside the storm, Chuck D comes out swinging, verbally hacking into scraps a roster of American icons: “Elvis was a hero to most/ But he never meant shit to me, you see/ Straight up racist that sucker was simple and plain/ Motherfuck him and John Wayne.” Arguably the most fearless lyric in all of popular music, this anti-ode to Elvis and John Wayne is a virtual flag-burning. Who better embodies the American ideal than Duke and the King, bumbling patriots who personified the nation’s illiberal character and defended its order, an order from which blacks had been routinely barred? Chuck D cutting them up so brazenly was like a spiritual emancipation for anyone who felt excluded from American culture. In making a mockery of two of the country’s greatest heroes, P.E. assailed white America’s fairy-tale world and boldly accepted their place at its margins.

I keep misidentifying Out There as Over There, that Gulf War show that starred Sticky Fingaz from Onyx. What I really need to do before writing is... cram! Duh duh duh, duh duh duh. Let the boys be boys!

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

"Ultra Wankershim," the penultimate webisode of Bravest Warriors' first season and one of the series' strangest installments, marks the return of the enigmatic Emotion Lord (series showrunner Breehn Burns), a cross between a Jedi and a Time Lord. This older and nutty incarnation of Warriors leader Chris travels back to his past to witness the Dawning of Wankershim (also voiced by Burns), the moment in Martian history when Wankershim, the holographic elf from the Warriors' Holo-John who has evolved from hologram to actual lifeform, becomes so large and infinite in size that he absorbs all of humanity and the universe into his "Wankerbeing."

The Emotion Lord explains to the Warriors that the Dawning also brings about the end of the universe, but he's not allowed to divulge anything else about the future because doing so could damage the space-time continuum, so he can only help the Warriors to figure out how to save the future on their own. Chris becomes curious about his future with Beth, the fellow Warrior he has a crush on, so he gets his older self to teach him the Emotion Lords' power of seeing visions of future events. The few images of the future that Chris is able to briefly glimpse include the emergence of an evil version of Plum (Tara Strong), the alien mermaid chick who threw herself at Chris in "Gas Powered Stick," and Beth making out with a darkened stranger who appears to be Danny, Chris and Beth's fellow Warrior. Chris also inadvertently receives hints about a grim future for Beth when his older self starts to weep while staring at Beth. To keep himself from ruining space-time, the Emotion Lord makes himself vanish and departs with a phrase he's been repeatedly saying during his latest visit: "It's always been Wankershim."

"Ultra Wankershim" may sound like a somber installment that's concerned with advancing the show's mythology and is all business, but the episode doesn't forget to be funny and tosses in silly gags like a play on that old time-travelling term "paradox" and a Martian anchorperson (Maria Bamford) who oozes slime from her face when she speaks, a gross and amusing alien version of Albert Brooks' sweating scene in Broadcast News (except this anchor is unruffled while slime oozes out of her). This first season of Bravest Warriors may be a bit short, but the series compensates for the small amount of webisodes by featuring clever writing, as well as animation that exceeds what we usually expect out of a web series and is equal to the animation quality on series creator Pendleton Ward's Adventure Time. Bravest Warriors has seen the future of animation produced exclusively for the Internet, and it's not crude Flash animation with wonky sound quality anymore.




I knew at some point in Archer's current fourth season that the show would revisit the title spy's curiosity about the identity of his dad, whose absence from his son's life was one of many reasons why Archer's such a screwed-up man-child. I just never expected the arc to resurface in "Once Bitten," while Archer's poisoned from a snake bite in the middle of a mission in fictional Turkmenistan and hallucinating sketchy and rudimentary flashbacks to his boyhood, with James Mason's Mr. Jordan character from Heaven Can Wait (special guest star Peter Serafinowicz) as his spirit guide. (In a couple of other Heaven Can Wait shout-outs, Archer is clad in Warren Beatty's football sweats from the film, and he finds himself playing Beatty's sax, which Archer clobbers Buck Henry's officious angel character in the head with. You can tell how young some Archer recappers are by their inability to notice the Heaven Can Wait references.)

Archer's mind reimagines his hazy memories about why he is the way he is as clips from '80s HBO fixtures like Beatty's 1978 hit movie and The Natural instead of reimagining them as something more typical of his obsessions, like The Cannonball Run or Gator (although his fevered dreams are full of gator imagery, which is connected to his fear of gators, but does the imagery also mean some part of him believes Burt Reynolds is his dad?). The material about both Archer's past and the mixed-up movie references in his poison-addled state ("What frickin' movie is this? What's next? Mr. Gower slaps me deaf? C'mon, you're all over the road here!") is easily the most entertaining part of "Once Bitten."

Several critics have found the plotting of "Once Bitten" to be flat and underwhelming (I'm not as underwhelmed by it), but even when the storyline may be sort of underwhelming, the dialogue on Archer is always golden:

* Malory: "Look, I don't want to sound racist, but..." Lana: "But you're gonna power through it."

* Archer to an injured Ray: "Are you shitting me? Bionic legs, and you lifted with your back?"

* Everyone's hatred of Lana, the agency's voice of reason, and her "self-righteous clomping" in "Once Bitten" seems to be building towards either a future office mutiny against Malory led by Lana, who questions Malory's actions in this episode, or the Truckasaurus-handed spy's departure from ISIS (and switch to ODIN?). Insane but sometimes lucid Cheryl/Carol's mini-monologue to Lana about the latter's self-loathing is so terrific (and is responsible for one of many excellently animated expressions from Lana this season) that I've included it word-for-word: "Please, if you really cared, you'd resign, but there's no way you ever will because you're just counting the days until, her face bloated and yellow from liver failure, she calls you to her deathbed and, in a croaky whisper, explains that Mr. Archer is totally incompetent and that you, the long-suffering Lana Kane, are the only one qualified to run ISIS, and you weep shameful tears because you know this terrible place is the only true love you will ever know... What? Oh my God, was I talking?"

* A barely conscious Archer (to Cyril and Ray), while reacting to the arrival of the fur-hatted Turks: "Hey, check it out, Fred and Barney, we're at the Water Buffalo Lodge!"

* Cyril to the Turks, whom he thinks want revenge for the camel he accidentally ran over with Archer's Jeep (in, as usual on this show, extremely gory fashion): "No, I had the right-of-way!"


IFC's Out There takes place in the early '80s (dig the poster of the 1982 version of Swamp Thing on a kid's bedroom wall in the "Great Escape" pilot) and follows the lives of 15-year-old loser Chad Stevens (series creator Ryan Quincy) and fellow misfit Chris Novak (Justin Roiland), who's been dying to run away from home ever since his single mother Joanie (Pamela Adlon) shacked up with Terry (Fred Armisen), a sleazy New Age hippie Chris despises. Luckily, like the similarly Reagan-era-related--and equally melancholy--Freaks and Geeks, whose star Linda Cardellini is also a regular here, the coming-of-age cartoon doesn't bombard us with tiresome "look how goofy the '80s were" jokes and concentrates instead on a more timeless subject: the hardships of being a teenage misfit, especially in a time when conformity was favored above all else because of the country's turn towards conservatism, and there were no PSAs, YouTube videos or documentaries that decried bullying and reassured the bullied with sayings like "It gets better."

In "The Great Escape," Chad and his new friend Chris bond over their frustrations with school bullies and their hatred of Holford, a Midwestern suburb that's so lifeless and bland that in "Quest for Fantasy," the hot dogs at Chad and Chris' regular hangout, the Gulp-N-Go convenience store, are Joanie's idea of adventurous and loungy cuisine ("As far as fixings go, I say stick with those high in vinegar content. The onions here, they even sort of tingle like champagne."). The Gulp-N-Go is also where Joanie first met Terry and fell in love with him when, according to her, he killed a scorpion that was crawling on her back and then vowed to protect her forever. Due to Terry's constant braggadocio and implied ease with being surrounded by drugs, I wouldn't be surprised if the scorpion was something Terry hallucinated while on acid or shrooms. Most of Out There's funniest moments involve these delusions everyone outside of the pragmatic Chad has about their lives, whether it's Joanie, Terry, Jay (Kate Micucci), Chad's daydreaming little brother who thinks he's an alien, or Chris. In "The Great Escape," Chris' elaborate plan to escape Holford involves hopping onto "a magical balloon to an exotic new land teeming with breastled women" (not "breast-led," but "breastled," which rhymes with "nestled").

Roiland's shrill Earl of Lemongrab voice from Adventure Time seeps through whenever Chris gets shouty or when Roiland's other character in "Quest for Fantasy," a compulsive liar named Grump, lisps about how he can sneak Chad and Chris into a rumored nudie mag photo shoot so that they can see their first live naked lady. The best moment of "Quest for Fantasy" is a tiny bit of character business where Paul (John DiMaggio), the Gulp-N-Go clerk who scolded Chad and Chris for attempting to steal a nudie mag from his store, cringes when he overhears Rose (Megan Mullally), Chad and Jay's mom, promising to Chad that she and her husband Wayne (also DiMaggio) will be as honest as possible when talking to him about the birds and the bees. I take it that Paul suspects that Wayne and Rose's talk will somehow either turn out not so smoothly or will end up degenerating into a screed against masturbation. So in the show's great little way of saying "fuck off" to the terminally annoying Parents Television Council, Paul changes his mind about the nudie mag and secretly slips it into a newspaper for Chad.

Paranoid Wayne, who runs an optometry practice, misinterprets his eldest son's hijinks with his new friend as a druggie phase. Wayne's anti-drug shtick, which stems from his shame over his own sordid pre-'80s past as a drug-crazed hippie, is the least original part of the pilot. South Park, the show where Quincy cut his professional teeth, handled the hypocrisy of the overzealous anti-drug crowd more cleverly early in its run, when it had Mr. Mackey lose his job after being wrongfully accused of stealing a sample of marah-juh-wana while teaching a class about drug prevention, and his depression from joblessness ended up driving him to booze and drugs.

A far more original aspect of Out There is the offbeat character design. Instead of being regular-looking but stylized humans like on all the Fox "Animation Domination" shows and even South Park, everyone in Holford has claws and paws for hands and are dog-faced with button noses like the characters on Goof Troop, while the males in the Stevens family are fur-faced and resemble the Little Critter character from Mercer Mayer kids' books. (Quincy cites Charles Schulz, Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak and Richard Scarry as his stylistic influences in interviews, but I also see a bit of a Mayer vibe in the Stevens males' character designs.) It's an interesting choice that perfectly suits Out There's theme of life as an outcast, and I especially like how there's no "some meteor arrived and mutated everybody"-style explanation for the characters' animalistic look during the show.

If only someone told Quincy to be equally minimal with older Chad's Wonder Years-style voiceover narration in the pilot and the third episode, "A Chris by Any Other Name," because like the worst kind of narration, it tends to state the obvious. However, Chad's off-screen narration is less distracting and exposition-y during "Quest for Fantasy," and hopefully, Quincy will minimize it even more in later episodes. (Instead of over-explaining what you see on screen, the best kind of narration is either mostly unreliable, like in Alexander Payne's Election, or only partially related to the action on-screen, like on Burn Notice, where icy, distant and secretive Michael never refers to himself, his friends or his mom and describes the action only through spy tips or lines about how the intelligence community operates, except for in the first season, back when Burn Notice creator Matt Nix hadn't quite figured out Michael's narrative voice yet. So during reruns of the Burn Notice pilot, when you hear Michael remark off-screen about how much his mom irritates him, it's as off-putting as hearing the anti-profanity Omar curse in an early episode of The Wire.)

Unnecessary bits of narration aside, Out There is an intriguing work-in-progress, much like Chad and Chris themselves, who bumble their way through adolescence like anyone else who's been a teen but perhaps didn't grow up with fur covering their faces.


Do's & Don'ts: A Children's Guide to Social Survival, the most popular animated series on the Shut Up! Cartoons YouTube channel, is a streamlined and hilariously dark spin on an old type of comedy bit that's been done in cartoons by the late Tex Avery (who was born 105 years ago yesterday, by the way), Kentucky Fried Movie and SNL Digital Shorts: a fake documentary short or instructional film that's factually inaccurate or completely useless. In each three-to-four-minute webisode of Do's & Don'ts, a '50s educational filmstrip-style announcer (Luke Adams) gives the same group of kids (voiced by actual kid actors) amusingly horrendous advice about topics ranging from getting into the rap game ("If you confront a lyrical writer's block, feel free to liberally toss around expletives like fuck, shit, cock, cunt and the N-word.") to finding a place to hide a corpse ("The swamp is a fair option, popular among party moms and naughty nannies.").

The announcer also provides silly "facts" about homosexuality, which he revealed was measured by modern science in "Lamberts" (as in Adam Lambert), and anime, this week's subject. I don't consider myselfan anime fan, but I grew up on Star Blazers and Robotech and was enthralled with Cowboy Bebop when it first aired on Adult Swim in the early 2000s, so "Anime" is one of my favorite Do's & Don'ts installments because of its jabs at anime clichés ("Anime is notorious for dedicating full episodes to high-octane staring contests") and pervy anime fans.

The webisode manages to poke fun at anime without resorting to tired (and very '80s) "You ever notice how Asians do this and Asians do that?"-type racial humor like Drawn Together did in the episode where its Ling-Ling character tried to whitewash himself. (Drawn Together's attempt to speak out against racial self-hatred was really just a lame excuse to reinforce some more Asian stereotypes. Great racial humor challenges these stereotypes, but by remaining funny and never getting preachy. Examples include Blazing Saddles, ego trip's Big Book of Racism!, Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell and the stand-up act of Totally Biased staff writer Hari Kondabolu. Bad racial humor does nothing to challenge stereotypes. Examples include that Drawn Together episode and any Asian stand-up whose entire act is either just a laundry--no pun intended--list of the differences between Asians and everyone else or just a rehash of Margaret Cho's impression of her mom).

"Anime" also continues Do's & Don'ts' best running gag: what sort of situations will Do's & Don'ts creator F. Ryan Naumann place Sean Connery's disembodied head from the original 1963 From Russia with Love movie poster in this week? His head has been pasted onto a hair band rocker, a Native American, a Fabio-like gym douche, an anchorman and a magician.

This week, 007 is again a magician and is also seen spanking a monkey literally. Little touches like Connery's cameos and the subliminal gag in the "Rap" webisode are why Do's & Don'ts is a highlight of the Shut Up! Cartoons channel, but, like the announcer says in "Anime," if you get bored with Do's & Don'ts, move on to hentai.




Adventure Time has been having an incredible two weeks of first-run episodes. The engaging "Bad Little Boy," the show's second episode about Finn and Jake's gender-flipped counterparts, the immensely popular Fionna and Cake, was a season highlight last week, and now "Vault of Bones" follows "Bad Little Boy" as another season highlight, functioning as both a great character piece about Flame Princess (Jessica DiCicco), Finn's current love interest, and a fun homage to tropes from both video games and D&D. (My older brother, who used to be a D&D fanatic, once tried to get me into role-playing games when I was younger. I didn't care for role-playing games back then, and I still kind of don't, although Key & Peele's D&D sketch--in which a thug is forced by his nerdy cousin to join him in playing it, and the initially reluctant thug, who chooses the moniker of "Kanye the Giant," ends up enjoying D&D his way--and now Adventure Time have made me understand why role-playing games appeal to so many.)


When Finn first encountered Flame Princess, she was volatile and unstable--a literal hot mess--and understandably so after the Flame King (Keith David), her intimidating father, imprisoned her for so long to keep her from hurting others with her flames, at the urging of Princess Bubblegum. Since then, the time FP has spent with Finn and Jake has mellowed her out and improved her social skills, although as we see in "Vault of Bones," when Finn takes his girlfriend along with him on a dungeon quest for treasure to help her clear her mind and keep her away from her omnipresent dad's evil influence, a bit of her naughty and mischievous streak remains. (By the way, Jake stays home during the episode and doesn't get to do much, but it's amusing to see his maternal side as he brews chamomile tea for Finn and FP and then chillaxes alone with a cup of it like a lady in a General Foods International Coffees ad.)

The dungeon scenes in "Vault of Bones" nicely echo every experience an avid gamer or D&D head has had introducing his favorite pastime to a newbie like his girlfriend or somebody who's similar to the thuggish cousin in the Key & Peele sketch (FP: "Boy, this place is creepy!" Finn: "Really? I feel like it's trying too hard."). Finn's method of carefully prowling through a dungeon comes into conflict with FP's more impulsive preference for destruction and intimidation, which leads to a bit of good cop/bad cop humor when Finn and FP encounter a lazy and stammering skeleton who possesses some intel about the treasure (FP wants to burn him alive, while Finn's less aggressive method for getting info from the skeleton involves shouting at him to do the splits). I especially like how the skeleton sounds like a bored amusement park employee and isn't really in the mood to get into character and play along with the dungeon's grim ambience.

Like how the skeleton must have felt a long time ago, FP grows bored with dungeon-questing and its many rules, and in an interesting sign of maturity, Finn realizes he's been too domineering throughout their adventure together and agrees to let FP try things her way. FP's powers especially come in handy when Finn winds up in genuine danger during an attack by a legion of slimy creatures known as Goo Skulls. It becomes clear that when Finn and FP merge their methods together so that one doesn't dominate the other, they make quite a team (kind of like how, as Adventure Time regular Tom Kenny recently noted to the L.A. Times about the show's preference for recording Kenny's co-stars Jeremy Shada and John DiMaggio together in the same room, "there's really no substitute for having a bunch of people around a mic, and riffing with each other and playing off each other").

And when FP is given the opportunity to obliterate the Goo Skulls' big boss at the end of the quest, instead of reducing the biggest and baddest Goo Skull to ashes, she takes a cue from Finn and makes the leader do the splits--kind of like how on Justified, Raylan has been learning that there are other ways to take down criminals besides killing them. But FP is still a bit behind Raylan in terms of being civilized, as we hear when Finn realizes that "maybe next time, we should just go to like a farmer's market," and in the episode's funniest line, FP adds, "And burn it."