Kitchen Confidential tanked as a network sitcom because nobody in the kitchen was allowed to curse like Anthony Bourdain did in his original book and during his guest shot on Archer. A kitchen without cursing is like Sunday mass without the flask in your pocket.

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.

Anthony Bourdain is reportedly such an Archer fan he reached out to its producers for a guest shot on the show. So how does he fare as a guest voice actor in "Live and Let Dine," the latest Archer episode? As a voice actor, Bourdain is a great culinary expert.

But as Lance Casteau, a bastard chef who berates and belittles Archer, Lana, Cyril and Ray while they're undercover as workers at his ritzy restaurant Seize (as in the French word for "16") to protect the Albanian ambassador from an assassination threat, the famously outspoken celebrity chef/author/travel show host/reality cooking show judge fits in well with the "be an asshole to everyone and hurl an insulting nickname at someone" milieu of Archer. Bourdain even has the honor of delivering such a nickname in his first scene, when he calls Lana "giraffe lady."

"Live and Let Dine" is initially told from the point of view of the off-screen camerawoman for Lance's reality show Bastard Chef. The little reality genre touches that the animators replicate are dead-on, particularly the camera lens' motion blurs as the camerawoman zooms in on her subjects. However, I'm glad that Archer abandons the show-within-a-show structure early on in "Live and Let Dine" to basically turn into a swinging-door farce, but Archer-style rather than Frasier-style (which means it doesn't contain any actual swinging doors, it's got a body count and characters get to curse without violating FX's ban on F-bombs). Episodes told entirely from a documentarian's point of view are such a tired and overused gimmick (although I liked Raising Hope's recent episode-long Modern Family spoof--mostly because it mocked the ABC smash hit's sappy and forced end-of-episode voiceovers and had Lucas Neff do a dead-on Ed O'Neill during its climactic voiceover--and "The Office Job," Leverage's Jonathan Frakes-directed Office homage from about a couple of years ago, which I happened to re-watch in its entirety on YouTube right before "Live and Let Dine" aired).

The last seven minutes of "Live and Let Dine" are Archer at its farcical best, with the funniest bit of comedic business being Malory and Ron sharing a table with Cheryl/Carol and Pam, both clad in their socialite costumes from the dinner party in last season's "Lo Scandalo." I could watch an entire episode of this faux-family at the table, with Malory as the uptight mom, Ron as the fun dad and Cheryl/Carol and Pam as the mischievous kids whose behavior he encourages (Ron embarrasses Malory with his propensity for smuggling juice boxes and packets of crackers or grape jam in his tuxedo pockets, due to the slow arrival of food during the high-society activities he takes Malory to). Judy Greer is on fire in "Live and Let Dine," whether she's pretending to be an older socialite at the table or hooting and screeching like a monkey a couple of times earlier in the episode. (Speaking of Greer's fearlessness as a comedic performer, I liked how Miss Guided, Greer's short-lived guidance counselor sitcom, would always cap off its five-second opening titles with a hysterical shot of Greer's real-life high school yearbook photo. Letting such an embarrassing photo turn up in every episode takes muchos cojones.)

Fortunately, the stunt-casting of Bourdain isn't completely superfluous like so many celebrity guest shots are on other sitcoms, and Bourdain's character, a parody of two other celebrity chefs, Gordon Ramsay and Rocco DiSpirito, turns out to be a pawn in Katya and Barry's continuing plot to embarrass and ruin ISIS (the bionic couple's killing of Lance must be a delightful visual for viewers who have grown irritated with Bourdain's cantankerous shtick). However, Katya and Barry are unaware that ISIS is headed towards falling apart without their interference--most likely due to the inevitable power struggle between Malory and Lana, who's miffed over the corrupt things Archer's mom has been getting away with as the head of ISIS, like faking the threat against the Albanian ambassador to get back at the Seize staff for cheating her out of a reservation. Malory could be the real antagonist of the fourth season, not Katya.

Stray observations:
* Archer and Cyril's exchange about the former's past credentials as a restaurant manager ("I used to own a restaurant." "It was a burger joint.") is a nice callback to the Bob's Burgers crossover scene in the season premiere. Speaking of Bob's Burgers, Cheryl/Carol and Pam were especially Gene and Louise-like at the table, acting out their clichéd, Marx Brothers movie-style idea of how socialites speak, which is funny because Cheryl/Carol herself comes from money.

* Archer to Lana: "Do you know how TV actually works? They're not gonna broadcast this episode in the restaurant tonight! [Turns to the camerawoman.] Wait, are you, guys?... Like a closed-circuit deal or... Because come to think of it, I actually don't know how TV works either."

* Archer: "He's a master chef, Lana, which turns out is not nearly as gay a job as I thought it was. I mean, it's no secret agent, but it's way above architect."

* Archer's sudden hero worship of Lance echoes his search for his dad, and when his latest surrogate father figure trashes his abilities as a chef at the end of "Live and Let Dine," he takes it pretty hard. Could he be starting to grow bored with the spy life he's returned to and could he be longing for his quiet and unassuming life back at Bob's Burgers? And because Eugene Mirman and Kristen Schaal have been announced as future guest stars (Gene and Louise were atypically mute in the season premiere), is that a hint that Archer will be making a return visit to the seaside burger joint he left behind?

* Cheryl/Carol, as Pam urges her to give requisitions officer Rodney a handjob in exchange for equipment to decode Seize's well-hidden phone number: "Great, so it's give him a handjob or change up my Sunday routine?... Ugh, this is so unfair! Okay, but I am not spitting in your face."

* Lance's comparison of a sheep's blood-stained Cyril to "a dinosaur's tampon" brings me back to another great gore-related gag involving another Chris Parnell character, 30 Rock's Dr. Spaceman, in which the doctor arrived at work in a bloodied lab coat and said, "I was at a costume party earlier this evening. And the hostess' dog attacked me, so I had to stab it."

* I love both the sound FX and animation for a hungry Pam quickly digging in to a plate of tave kosi. Another standout bit of sound FX in this episode is the cold open gag of the prolonged ringing noises of the metal bowls Archer drops on the kitchen floor.

* Cheryl/Carol's off-screen reactions in her hoity-toity voice to Lance's poisoning of the Albanian ambassador kill me, no pun intended ("I'll have what he's having!" when the ambassador keels over, "Then I don't want what he's having!" when the attaché discovers the ambassador's pulse has stopped and "Oh Teddy! Ever the scamp!" when Cyril emerges from the kitchen in only his underwear).

* Lance: "I coated his glass with cyanide, you idiots! For the toast." Ron: "Ooh, there's toast?"

* Lance: "Six million bucks, which I'm gonna use to deficit-finance a new show where I travel, so I can insult people's cooking all over the globe!"


Who would expect an episode of Gravity Falls to occasionally sound as philosophical, deep and ruminative about our purpose in life as the voiceovers in Terrence Malick's film version of The Thin Red Line? I sure didn't.

"What is life anyway, when compared to the immortality of a high score?," ponders a shrunken Soos while he's literally trapped inside the evil pinball machine he had earlier beaten to top the machine's high scorers list.

"Sometimes I think, is this all there is?," wonders Grunkle Stan later in the episode, after Mabel sticks inside his mouth a magical set of false teeth that, ironically, forces its wearer to never lie when he speaks. "Is life just some kind of horrific joke without a punchline? That we're all just biding our time until the sweet, sweet release of death?"

I would have expected to hear such lofty and dark dialogue during Goof Troop, but not during Gravity Falls. Seriously though, the incongruity of such lines turning up on an all-ages Disney animated series is one of the most enjoyable bits during "Bottomless Pit!," a clever anthology episode consisting of three stories involving the characters' encounters with magical items (actually four stories, if you count Stan's clichéd sports movie where he's the heroic coach of a football team, his sidekick is a fawning robot named Footbot and the trailer, which we don't get to see, is most likely soundtracked with James Brown's "I Feel Good").

(Photo source: Gravity Falls Wiki)

Is it me or does this anthology of dangerous supernatural items feel like a family-friendly take on Friday the 13th: The Series? The segments are linked by a framing device in which Dipper, Soos, Stan and Mabel have accidentally fallen into the episode's titular abyss, so to pass the time, they try to regale each other with stories of recent adventures in Gravity Falls that are either fake or true (I especially like how this episode involving a bottomless pit is co-directed by an animator named Joe Pitt).

Each segment reflects its storyteller's personality. Bumbling Soos' segment is sort of bumblingly told (it comes complete with a cumbersome title, "Soos' Really Great Pinball Story: Is That a Good Title? Do Titles Have to Be Puns or Whatever?"), while Dipper's story about himself is a cautionary tale that posits him as more of a loser who's in over his head than a triumphant hero, which says a lot about how Dipper thinks of himself. Dipper's approach to his tale reminds me of the Taxi episode in which the cabbies share their fantasy lives, and when it's Alex's turn to fantasize, he's so neurotic and defeatist that he's unable to enjoy an initially delightful fantasy about picking up a mystery woman in his cab, which the other cabbies are trying to help him to imagine in his head, and he keeps wrecking his own fantasy with terrible mishaps like the discovery that the hot date he's hit it off with (who was played by a pre-Three's Company Priscilla Barnes) is actually his long-unseen niece.

(Photo source: Gravity Falls Wiki)

The first segment, "Voice Over," stems from Dipper's insecurities about his own gawky attributes, particularly his frequently cracking pre-pube voice. Old Man McGucket (who, like Soos and Stan, is voiced by series creator Alex Hirsch) presents Dipper with a solution to his Peter Brady-style predicament: an experimental potion that can alter people's voices. After drinking the potion, Dipper sounds way more stentorian (his new voice is provided by announcer A. Smith Harrison), but he didn't anticipate that people would find the sight of a voice like that coming out of a 12-year-old boy to be disconcerting, so when Mabel and Soos first hear Dipper speak in his modified voice, they each attack him with blunt instruments ("What have you done with my brother?! Dipper, I'll save you from this body-switching warlock!," yells Mabel). Instead of improving Dipper's life, the new voice ends up being a curse.

Though I found Dipper's romantic pursuit of his older co-worker Wendy to be a bit of a tiresome arc earlier in Gravity Falls' first season (and it appears to be resurfacing, judging from the promo for the next episode, which has Wendy moonlighting as a lifeguard), I wish "Voice Over" devoted a few seconds to some sort of callback to that arc because much of it involved Dipper trying to make himself manlier to impress Wendy. The segment doesn't include Wendy's reaction to deep-voiced Dipper, which I would have wanted to see (she'd probably attack him with a blunt instrument also), and that odd omission makes "Voice Over" the weakest and most rushed of the three segments, although it's filled with several amusing gags, like deep-voiced Dipper's bizarre, Toby Danger-esque cry of "Aiyee!" and Mabel's game of "Spin the Pig."

(Photo source: Gravity Falls Wiki)

The other two segments are slightly better constructed. Despite its cumbersome title, Soos' story is far from cumbersome and is a satisfying little character piece about the town's least ambitious citizen, whose one ambition in life is to attain the highest score on the Mystery Shack's western-themed pinball machine. Soos finally accomplishes it, but by cheating and tilting the machine, so the game's talking cowboy skeleton (John DiMaggio) retaliates by zapping Soos, Dipper and Mabel into the machine and making them play for their lives. This isn't the first time Gravity Falls has miniaturized Soos, Dipper and Mabel (the show channeled Land of the Giants in "Little Dipper"), but the show excels at giant set pieces where everyday objects become extraordinary threats to Soos and the twins, and the scenes inside the machine are no exception.

In "Trooth Ache," Mabel's choice for her story, the twins have had enough of their great-uncle's propensity for fibbing, after he nearly lands in trouble when he lies to get Sheriff Blubs (Kevin Michael Richardson) off his back while teaching his "seeing-eye bear" how to drive (great character animation for the bear, by the way, and very reminiscent of the animation during The Simpsons' classic gag of a disastrous daytime talk show hosted byGentle Ben, the bear from the '60s TV series of the same name). So Mabel turns to Dipper's journal for help and learns about the aforementioned set of truth-telling teeth, which is buried beneath a tree stump. The magic teeth ends up making this now-brutally honest Stan even more irritating than the old Stan, and Mabel realizes that the old Stan had a valid point about bending the truth for the greater good when she has to concoct a lie about Stan being a crime fiction author to save him from being arrested.

(Photo source: Gravity Falls Wiki)

"Trooth Ache" concludes with a surprising twist, which is foreshadowed earlier in the segment by the sight of Stan dozing off to a copy of a book called The Plot Twist: Mabel's story actually happened, and the magic teeth is one of the items Mabel threw away into the pit during the cold open, right before the four of them fell into it. An even weirder phenomenon than the pit itself is the Disney Channel's baffling decision to stretch out the season and air first-run episodes of this entertaining cartoon every two weeks, a great way to alienate much of the audience. Where did those magic choppers go, Mabel? I know a few network execs who could use those teeth in order to explain the truth behind that strange decision.

Other memorable quotes:
* Skeleton Cowboy Guy: "Get ready to meet yer maker, kids! My maker is Ballway Games in Redmond, Washington." Redmond is where Microsoft is based.

* "Mr. Pines, I thought old folks were useless, but you taught me and my gloating friends a lesson." As a screenwriter, Stan is as skilled with dialogue as the scribe who came up with that line in Batman Forever where the whiny security guard shrieks, "Oh no, it's boiling acid!"

* Stan defends his self-aggrandizing story: "What? That story was great. I even threw in a talking robot for the kids."

* "STAN IS SICK AND NEEDS A BEAR.--Dr. Medicine"

* "Stan, what do you do in secret every day during your lunch break?" "Usually, I spend the hour aggressively scratching myself in places I shouldn't mention."

* "14-5-24-20 21-16: '6-15-15-20-2-15-20 20-23-15: 7-18-21-14-11-12-5'19 7-18-5-22-5-14-7-5'" = "Next up: 'Footbot Two: Grunkle's Grevenge'"


Jon Hamm brings his pipes to Bob's Burgers and voices a talking state-of-the-art toilet that Gene considers his best friend, as part of an E.T. parody/homage (the episode is entitled "O.T.: The Outside Toilet"). In addition to sanitation, the nameless toilet can rattle off trivia, play any pop song and tell jokes (it's basically Siri, except it can sprinkle cool water on your butt). It's certainly the week's strangest and most amusing guest shot, animated or live-action.

Any viewer who isn't familiar with Hamm's frequent presence on comedy podcasts or his annual SNL guest-hosting stints will either be surprised by the Mad Men star's knack for absurdist comedy or won't be able to recognize his voice. That's how effective Hamm is as the toilet (an equally effective Neil Flynn turns up in the Peter Coyote antagonist role). The episode doesn't list Hamm in the end credits, so it acknowledges his presence by tossing in an in-joke in which Louise reacts to the unexpected sight of the usually drably dressed Bob in a suit and cracks, "Wow, Don Draper's kind of fat this season" (it's also a wink at Kristen Schaal's past--she had a bit part as a Sterling Cooper switchboard operator in the Mad Men pilot).

Bob's Burgers handles Gene's growing awareness of what it's like to care about something outside of himself in its usual way of entertainingly intertwining sweetness with absurdity, especially in one of the episode's funniest lines, when Bob says, "Look, Gene, it's not easy to take care of things. I mean, one time when you were a baby and I was watching you, you ate a fern, and you could have died, but you didn't." As for the episode's B-story, in which Bob gains newfound confidence by wearing a suit at all times, it may not as be quotable as the A-story, but it's made enjoyable by the return of non-sober Bob (an occasionally glimpsed side of Bob that's always welcome, like how on Parks and Rec, drunk or hopped-up-on-flu-medicine Leslie is my favorite side of Leslie and isn't an overused comedic device) and bits of overlapping dialogue that make you wonder how much of them were improvised. The episode even leaves in a moment where H. Jon Benjamin breaks character and chuckles. It's not surprising that Benjamin would have such a blast in the recording booth because he's working on the best non-cable adult cartoon right now.

Other memorable quotes:
* Gene: "I'm gonna bet my sisters $1,000 that there isn't a talking toilet in the woods. That's what I call easy money." Toilet: "Playing artist Eddie Money."

* Linda bristles over the female customers who flirt with sharp-dressed Bob: "We were all single once, but you don't got to be a slut about it, you know?"

* Tina: "Say, 'I love you, Tina. I'm not a toilet, I'm a... boy.'" Toilet: "No." Tina: "Oh."

* Linda: "$14,000? For 14 grand, I'd let that toilet poop on me!"

* Ollie in his underwear: "I can make my knees smile."

* Andy: "Wow, does it wipe for you too?" Ollie: "What's wipe?"

* Gene: "There's a coffee shop! They'll have outlets." Tina: "For people writing screenplays."

If you're curious about how closely Tina's portrayer, stand-up comic Dan Mintz, resembles his animated alter ego, he turned up on Letterman a few weeks ago.




Regular Show writers/storyboarders Madeline Queripel and Andres Salaff were responsible for one of the show's most unengaging shorts, this season's Fourth of July-related "Firework Run," a borderline racist episode that felt like a right-winger's worst nightmare about the Mexican gangster villains from Robert Rodriguez's Mariachi trilogy, even though Salaff himself is Latino (at the end of "Firework Run," the main heavy was revealed to have been a robot, perhaps a "Kim Jong Il is really an alien cockroach, so that's why we made his Engrish accent so cartoonishly thick"-style attempt to make the episode come off as less racist.) Queripel and Salaff also happen to be behind one of the show's best shorts, "That's My Television," an imaginative and wildly funny installment where Mordecai and Rigby come to the rescue of one of their favorite childhood TV stars, a talking TV set named RGB2 (Sam Marin), who's grown tired of showbiz and wants to flee to a much quieter life in a destination known as "Pine Mountain."

RGB2 starred as himself on the crappy '80s sitcom That's My Television, and a nameless TV network has brought back into production the still-popular show, which brings to mind every corny '80s housekeeper sitcom you've seen, whether it's Gimme a Break, Mr. Belvedere or TBS' ultra-cheesyDown to Earth (RGB2's signature catchphrase is "I hope you saved room for dessert!"). But RGB2--who needs to ingest cans of "'80s Air" a la Perri-Air from Spaceballs in order to survive--isn't enjoying a single minute of the revival, especially because the network is run by an intimidating exec who looks like Cartoon Network founder/owner Ted Turner (but doesn't sound like him at all and is voiced here by Jeff Bennett) and sends armed thugs in suits to threaten his stars if they don't do what he says.

At RGB2's Comic-Con-style meet-and-greet with his fans, Mordecai and Rigby win a drawing to receive That's My Television DVDs signed on the spot by RGB2 himself, and the star secretly pleads with the duo to help him escape to Pine Mountain. Mordecai and Rigby agree to help out their sitcom idol--it's not surprising that these slacker park workers identify with a domestic worker who frequently gets into comedic misunderstandings with the head of the household ("RGB2, room for dessert doesn't actually mean a whole room full of dessert!")--and their kind gesture sends Faux-Ted and his network thugs chasing after them in the most entertaining animated car chase I've seen in a while. Either Queripel or Salaff is enamored with both Casino Royale's badass airport tarmac stunt in which the jet wash of an incoming plane sends a police car flying through the air and the Guinness World Record-breakingAston Martin cannon roll stunt from the same film because during the chase sequence, a couple of the network minions' Humvees are seen tumbling through the air in similar fashion.

RGB2 is clearly a riff on ALF, R2D2 and the dwarf actors who played them: Michu Meszaros sweated his balls off inside ALF's costume whenever a scene on ALF didn't call for the ALF puppet to be used, while R2 was operated by Kenny Baker, whose autograph adorns the liner notes of my CD copy of the expanded 1977 Star Wars soundtrack. The parallels to Meszaros and Baker are made plainly clear in the episode's nutty, disturbing and oddly affecting twist ending, when Mordecai and Rigby discover that RGB2 isn't a sentient TV set and has actually been a naked old actor inside the TV the whole time, which explains the need for '80s Air to help the poor guy breathe inside that damn TV. The dying man's destination turns out not to be a mountain but a billboard in the middle of nowhere for Pine Mountain Gas (presumably the gas station he either left behind to pursue stardom or was discovered at when the network was on the lookout for someone to operate RGB2).

Just like how this naked guy stayed hidden inside what was basically a mobile prison for over three decades, hidden within the '80s gags, the hilariously over-the-top car chase, the gunplay and the jabs at both focus group-driven TV and network exec jargon are serious questions about fandom, the pressures the public puts on TV stars and viewers' relationships with those stars and the TV industry--hence the double meaning of the title "That's My Television," which refers to both RGB2's show and people's attachment to the idiot box. The episode asks us to decide which kind of TV fan do we want to be by presenting two types of fans. Do we want to become so attached to TV that we degenerate into the mean and deranged middle-aged fangirl from RGB2's meet-and-greet who doesn't care for the well-being of a star like RGB2 and demands that he continue to entertain her even if the entertainer isn't happy or right in his mind or is endangering his own life by playing this character? Or do we want to be more like Mordecai and Rigby, who aren't as out-of-control in their fandom, are more understanding about RGB2's misery and are treating him more like a human being--even though for almost the entire episode, they think he's just a talking TV set?

"That's My Television" also questions whether it's worth it for performers like RGB2's portrayer to sacrifice a normal life--and their health--for fame and syndication money. Fortunately, the episode raises these questions without a single bit of speechifying and without trotting out Mordecai and Rigby after the episode to address the audience and deliver a moral like Filmation used to do with its characters. That's how terribly written most cartoons used to be back in the day. To borrow the words of one of the network thugs who get attacked by Mordecai, Rigby and RGB2 with weaponized cans of '80s Air, "Aw, sick! It smells like the '80s!"

Other memorable quotes:
* RGB2 defends himself with a rocket launcher: "It was a gift from the Russian Prime Minister! He loves the show!"

* "Bravo, gentlemen, bravo! Overall, that was a pretty nice PG getaway. Way to reach out to the 18-to-35 demographic. Oh, and nice third-act climax, by the way. The helicopter explosion really tied it all in with a cherry on top."

* "We just have a couple of notes for you. You see, our research groups have shown that nobody wants to see the good guys win anymore."

* The network exec threatens Mordecai, Rigby and RGB2 with his new, heavily armed and Poochie-like action star, who emerges on a skateboard: "Our focus group studied everything that boys ages nine to 14 find the most brutal and destructive!"

* "I'm not dead! I was just resting."


Titmouse, the lovable studio behind Metalocalypse, the Tumblr and Deviantart favorite Motorcity, the animated version of Black Dynamite and the upcoming new season of The Venture Bros., has an annual tradition in which animators in both the studio's West Coast and East Coast buildings produce shorts for an animation festival known as 5 Second Day. This week, Titmouse has added 5 Second Day as a one-minute-long anthology show on its Rug Burn YouTube channel, which Titmouse founded with another studio, Six Point Harness. All that's missing from this anthology show is a Rod Serling-style host. It ought to be Bullhorn from Black Dynamite.

For the first week of 5 Second Day, Rug Burn is posting webisodes each weekday, and then it will be a weekly series starting next Monday. I hope one of these sick and twisted shorts does unspeakable things to the members of the Parents Television Council.

The funniest of these shorts so far contains no dialogue. Unless you count "Whee!" as an actual word.

Here we see Archer at his latest assignment, which is to sabotage the making of yet another "Harlem Shake" video.

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.


In "Catbug," Bravest Warriors concludes its first season with a nifty--as well as somewhat frustrating--cliffhanger involving the heroes' missing parents, who have been trapped for two years in another dimension, the See-Through Zone. The Warriors' animal sidekick Catbug (Sam Lavagnino), who's been jumping back and forth between dimensions, frequently brings the teens presents from their parents.

This time, Wallow receives peanut butter squares and the pocket-sized ponies that he used to raise as pets and are known as Pony Lords (a nod to the Bronies, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic's male fans). As for Chris, he's given his baby pictures, Will Rogers commemorative stamps, a sinus irrigator and a note from his parents that they're still alive, while Danny is given an expired lottery ticket and a knife. His folks must adore him. My favorite gag in "Catbug" also involves Danny, and it's the sight of him cradling a chainsaw while asleep, so that he's ready to attack any interdimensional or extraterrestrial threat that shows up at the Warriors' Invisible Hideout.

Meanwhile, Beth, who's never received any sign from her parents that they're alive, is saddened to find she's wound up empty-handed once again. But as the brain of her cherished and super-intelligent pet horse (who's been in a catatonic state since she was six years old, due to the awe--and I assume mental stress--he experienced from discovering the meaning of the universe) points out in the finale's bizarre concluding voiceover, Beth isn't aware that she's received a gift greater than any of her friends' presents. It lies behind the locked door to the See-Through Zone that materialized in front of the Warriors after microbes that were embedded in their parents' gifts fused together--and here comes the mildly frustrating part--we have to wait until next season for the Warriors to unlock the door with a mysterious key that a note from the See-Through Zone refers to only as "Ralph Waldo Pickle Chips."

The "Paralyzed Horse's Log" is a doozy of a voiceover, and the horse's mind is voiced by '80s Transformers announcer Victor Caroli. He's a little older-sounding, but he's still the same ominous voice that let viewers know that the beef between the Autobots and Decepticons will be briefly squashed for more toy ads, during a show that was one big 22-minute toy ad. In addition to revealing that Bravest Warriors officially takes place in the 31st century, the horse's mind describes Beth's gift as "an octave of death" and "a tentacle of time." Beth's item might not even be a gift. Perhaps it brings about the end of the universe.

(Photo source: Bravest Warriors Wiki)

What about the Emotion Lord's cryptic hint to the Warriors that "It's always been Wankershim"? How does that--as well as all those visions of the future Chris briefly glimpsed--tie into this tentacle of time? And why am I glad this show is airing on Cartoon Hangover and not on a kids' cable channel where execs who are perplexed by the show's material decide to bounce it around the schedule so that viewers won't be able to find it and that gives the suits an excuse to cancel it?


I was dreading how Archer's "Coyote Lovely" episode would turn out when I first learned that it involved Archer ferrying a pack of illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. "Oh great," I thought, "Archer turns into a white savior movie this week. I fucking hate those movies." Luckily, "Coyote Lovely" prevents itself from earnestly fawning over Archer like so many of those annoying movies do with their white heroes by letting Archer be Archer and having him totally Jack Burton his way through this cause he's taken up because of his hard-on for Mercedes Moreno (Carla Jimenez, who plays Rosa, Virginia's boss at the cleaning service, on Raising Hope), the lovely titular people-smuggler.

In other words, Archer's a buffoon--a la the memorably bumbling trucker protagonist from Big Trouble in Little China, perhaps the most enjoyable upending of white savior movies Hollywood never realized it made--for most of the episode, especially after he gets shot in the back by a pair of incompetent and gay border patrol agents (one of whom is voiced by Justified's Nick Searcy). Archer's life has to be saved by both a drunken veterinarian (Sons of Anarchy's Dayton Callie, another FX star guesting in this episode) and Mercedes, who, as the episode's twist ending revealed, arranged to be captured by Archer (who was assigned to apprehend her mother, the woman in charge of the coyote system) so that her feminine wiles could lure him into helping her get the Mexicans across the border.

Mercedes realizes that Archer is far from the ideal savior she expected. She becomes frustrated--like Lana, Cyril and Ray so often do in the field--with both Archer's boorishness ("You think I am some kind of whore?!" "No, but... Chuy, back me up here. Was there not, like, a cock-hungry vibe?") and the fact that working with this man-child from ISIS turns into babysitting (which Lana realizes her job at ISIS has basically turned into at one point during "Coyote Lovely"), but ultimately, Mercedes is won over by him.

Jimenez, Searcy and Callie are better guest voice actors than the slightly wooden Anthony Bourdain in "Live and Let Dine" last week, and their performances are highlights during "Coyote Lovely," in addition to the usual hilarious dialogue. The story of how Archer creator Adam Reed got Searcy and Callie involved in "Coyote Lovely," as told by co-executive producer Matt Thompson, is amusing as well, even though this story of recruitment doesn't feature a hot Latina flaunting her cleavage.

Other memorable quotes:
* Archer, offended by Lana's theory that he's autistic: "Um, hang on, Lana, I'm stacking rocks in order of descending size."

* Malory to Bilbo: "Clean the impending massive heart attack out of your ears."

* Malory: "Swear to God, you people make me want to pump nerve gas through the vents." Krieger (over the PA system): "Just say the word."

* Mercedes: "¡Está loco!" Chuy: "Loco, no sé. Tal vez autismo." Archer: "Goddammit, Chuy, I don't have autism!"

* A wounded Archer: "Those are .357, ow, Ruger sixes. They each fired six." Mercedes: "How did you count them?" Archer: "I'm just super-good at that. Oh my God, maybe I am autistic."


Christian Slater is unrecognizable for most of Out There's "Springoween" episode as the voice of Johnny Slade, a much-feared biker thug who haunts the kids of Holford. As Slater gets older, he sounds less like Jack Nicholson and more like Chris Penn. In fact, I thought it was Penn, back from the dead just to do a measly guest shot on the Halloween episode of an IFC cartoon.

Last fall, "Summerween,"Gravity Falls' clever Halloween-in-the-summertime episode, dealt with Dipper's urge to grow up and Mabel's sadness over her childhood ending soon. Like that Halloween story, "Springoween" takes place on a day that's not October 31--snowy weather caused the Holford City Council to postpone their town's Halloween festivities to springtime--and it too involves one character's itchiness to become a teen and do teen things and his best friend's sadness over change.

The comedic material in "Springoween" (Jay gets chased around by Johnny, while Chad and Chris attempt to stop bullies from embarrassing them and ex-addict Wayne falls off the wagon during a costume party) is on the tepid side, whereas the less comedic material, which centers on the sadness 15-year-old Chad feels as he makes the awkward transition from a child dressing in costumes for candy to an adult dressing in costumes for parties, is actually more effective. When Chad is told by a neighbor that he's too old to be trick-or-treating, and he's disappointed that this last Halloween as a kid won't turn out like he imagined ("Some prick slams a door, and you know [your childhood's] gone"), it's a genuinely affecting moment, and it's one of the few times older Chad's frequent narration isn't such a distraction on this show.

Another highlight of "Springoween" is Slater's turn as Johnny (it's great casting too, because Out There takes place in the '80s, and Slater played a slightly similar outcast on a motorcycle in one of the best '80s movies, Heathers). To Chad's little brother, Johnny's a frightening bogeyman, but to us, he's a not-so-frightening homeless guy, a sewer-dwelling Fonzie without the laugh track or the ladies. Speaking of Happy Days, Out There is shaping up to be a bit like that show (sure, there are also the obvious similarities to Out There co-star Linda Cardellini's Freaks and Geeks, from the '80s setting to the focus on misfits, but the Chad-and-Chris dynamic has been reminding me of Richie and Potsie). Good thing Out There is reminiscent of the seasons of Happy Days when it was more of a proto-dramedy instead of the seasons when it dumbed itself down--in other words, the era when there was no studio audience applauding every single character entrance, no goddamn Chachi and no sharks to jump.


I think Louise Belcher will grow up to be a movie director because she's great at ordering people around, and she relishes the sight of mayhem, whether she's creating said mayhem or not (also, she's never seen without her bunny-ear hat, and we know directors are fond of rocking headgear). Bob's Burgers' "Topsy" episode finds Louise at her most forceful and brash, as she takes down a Thomas Edison-obsessed substitute science teacher and professional Edison re-enactor (Mark Proksch) who dislikes her and her fondness for volcano science fair projects. Her solution to making her new nemesis look like an ass is to re-enact Edison's electrocution of Topsy the elephant (a real-life experiment I immediately YouTubed, just like everyone else after they saw Louise, Gene and Tina YouTube the Topsy footage in the library) and "tell everyone the truth about Edison the Electro-cutioner."


With the help of aspiring composer Gene, Tina's acting skills and the singing voices of Aunt Gayle (Megan Mullally) and Mr. Fischoeder (Kevin Kline), the family's landlord, Louise turns her science fair project into a mini-musical about the bond between Edison and Topsy. I don't care for show tunes, but I always enjoy John Dylan Keith and Loren Bouchard's original music on Bob's Burgers, and the brilliance of "Electric Love" is that it doesn't sound like a polished show tune and sounds totally like something an aspiring 11-year-old musician would cobble together.

In addition to the fun of seeing Louise, Gene and Tina band together to make a laughingstock out of the cruel and self-absorbed sub (with an added bonus of long-overdue return visits from Gayle and Fischoeder, who wind up making out after Asha Bhosle-ing the tone-deaf Tina and Gene), "Topsy" throws in a B-story that brings out Linda's competitive side, and any B-story that involves that side of her is a good one (her beefing with the other Wagstaff School moms in "Spaghetti Western and Meatballs" was the best example of this). The science fair spurs Bob to resurrect his own attempt at being an Edison in the kitchen: an invention he calls "Spiceps," spice rack sleeves he wears on his arms. The Spiceps make Bob look like a lame '90s Rob Liefeld superhero. The unimpressed Linda would agree--if she knew who Liefeld is. She comes up with a feminine answer to Spiceps, the "Spice Rack," which she wears on her chest (her shimmying and maniacal laugh as she introduces her invention are the episode's best bit of animation), and a rivalry ensues.

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

The most amusing part of this rivalry is that when Bob and Linda press their kids for an answer to who invented the superior wearable spice rack, none of them give a shit. Neither does the episode, which cuts us off from finding out which Belcher parent won top prize at the science fair. It's an open ending Louise, the mischief-maker and master manipulator who's bound to be a director, would appreciate.

Stray observations:
* "Topsy" introduces another entertaining lunatic in the Wagstaff faculty: deranged librarian Mr. Ambrose, who suggests to Louise that she YouTube Topsy for her project. He's voiced by Billy Eichner, host of the only non-Crate Diggers reason to watch Fuse these days: the genuinely funny game show Billy on the Street.

* Besides the Topsy project, Bob and Linda's competing inventions and the Pesto twins' "How Many Hairs Up There?," other projects at the fair include: "Human Urine: Number One Fertilizer;" "Pluto: You Almost Had It All;" "Why Do Peanuts Make My Face Swell Up?;" "How Carbohydrates Made My Dad Fat;" "Sulfur Smells Bad;" "Global Warming: Is It Hot in Here, or Is It Just Earth?;" and "DNA Is Just AND Backwards."

* Louise to her classmate Jeremy: "Oh, you son of a snitch! What's your favorite movie?! Squeal Magnolias?!" Jeremy, under his breath: "War Horse."


Not all the one-to-two-minute shorts in the Rug Burn Channel's 5 Second Day series of animated works (culled from the Titmouse employees' annual shorts festival of the same name) are of the sick and twisted kind like Angelo Hat's puntastic "The Meating" or are absurdist cartoons like Mike J. Moloney's "Origami" and Matthew David Taylor's "Peddals and Mexico." There are also shorts with a serious tone, like one of this week's 5 Second Day entries, Otto Tang's "By the Stream," which Tang has posted before as part of his offbeatHis Little Hong Kong series.


"By the Stream" remarkably encapsulates a Hong Kong newsstand owner's entire life through the time he spends running his newsstand. As a short about the drudgery of work getting brightened up by the presence of a soulmate, I found "By the Stream" to be a more affecting piece than the corny but well-made Disney short "Paperman," which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short last month (and led to one of its producers getting in trouble with uptight Dolby Theatre security for the way she celebrated her short's Oscar win inside the theater, in an incident that interestingly echoes the way the short's title character rankles his equally uptight office).

Now back to more familiar Titmouse turf.

Lana puts a ring on it. And by "it," I mean her sausage finger.

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.

Most love triangle storylines on sitcoms bore the shit out of me. But the triangle storylines on Archer never do because they're accompanied by always hilarious and sharp dialogue and the batshit crazy Greek chorus of Cheryl/Carol and Pam, who, respectively, expound on aphrodisiacs ("The ultimate's doing it on top of a tranqed-up tiger") and break into impressions of Lana that sound more like Fat Albert than Lana while they join Cyril in spying on Lana in "The Honeymooners." Cyril has gotten back together with Lana, whom he dated in the show's first season, and Pam's belief that Lana's latest undercover surveillance mission with Archer will rekindle whatever lust she used to have for Archer spurs Cyril to grab some binoculars and check if Pam is right about Lana and Archer.

(Photo source: Entertainment Fuse)

Lana, the agent-in-command on this mission, and Archer must pose as newlyweds at a luxury hotel (which happens to be owned by Cheryl/Carol's family) to identify the terrorist who's about to sell some enriched uranium to North Korean agents at the hotel. Archer is, of course, easily distracted by honeymoon suite amenities like pedicures and $300 scotch, and for a while, it seems like the espionage material in "The Honeymooners" is on the tepid side. But luckily, it doesn't take a turn towards the tepid when Archer and Lana wind up captured by the North Koreans they've been trying to keep tabs on, and Archer gets to remind viewers of his resourceful killing machine side--which can easily get lost underneath all the immaturity and dickishness that make him and MacGruber such entertaining comedic action heroes--as he fights his way out of his captors' handcuffs and leads Lana to escape.

However, Lana and Archer fail to ID the seller, who, in a great twist, turns out to be Krieger, whose possession of uranium explains recent experiments like his attempt to attain the proportional strength of an ant. In another twist that borders on disgusting--nah, wait, it is disgusting--Krieger apparently enjoys sex with his irradiated pig Pigley Three. I'm looking forward to the inevitable Krieger/Pigley/Holographic Anime Lover triangle. Judging by how well it handles usually tedious triangle storylines, Archer will hit that one out of the park as well.

Stray observations:
* Current Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles voice actor Hoon Lee played the leader of the North Korean spies. On Cinemax's original series Banshee, Lee has been fun to watch as transgendered hacker Job, Lucas Hood's partner-in-crime and the toughest Gaysian character to ever F-bomb--and building-bomb--his way through TV.

* "Relax, it's North Korea, the nation-state equivalent of the short bus."

* Cyril, mortified by Pam going to town on an order of ribs: "Oh God, were you raised in a barn?!" Pam: "No. I just slept out there a lot."

* Archer sometimes gets slammed for containing not-so-great animation. I'd like to submit as counter-evidence the really good animation for both the sequence where Archer rescues Lana after she loses her grip on the suction cups she's been scaling the side of the hotel with (the foley artists also did terrific work during that sequence) and Archer and Lana's reflections in the hotel window during the conversation afterward. The latter must have been really tricky to animate.

* While arguing about the sizes of their ISIS bonuses, Archer's lines to Lana about his brushes with death rival all those lists of comedic irritations Neil Simon characters would rattle off in the kind of monologue Simon once referred to as a "fingerprint" of his own writing: "Since I started working at ISIS, I've been shot, stabbed, set on fire, poisoned, shot, sexually assaulted, partially chewed, shot and declared legally dead. Twice on the same day!"

* Archer to Lana, in regards to North Korea: "It's not democratic, not a republic and definitely not glorious. Jesus, watch Frontline once in your life!"

* Pam and Cheryl/Carol, commenting on the smoke-covered fight between Lana, Cyril, Archer and the North Koreans: "Are they bangin'?" "They will be. Raves make everybody horny."


Viewers who are heartbroken about the cancellations of Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Young Justice have been campaigning to get Cartoon Network to reconsider its decision. GL:TAS and Young Justice are solid superhero cartoons, but their respective series finales, "Dark Matter" and "Endgame," prove that these shows aren't as perfect as their fans make them out to be.

In the case of GL:TAS, maybe it is time for it to go. The writers have pushed the show's biggest storyline, the chaste, non-physical romance between a humanoid (Razer) and a machine (the traitorous Aya), as far as it could go on a kids' show (this isn't the much looser turf of nighttime syndication, where Star Trek: The Next Generation was allowed to have Tasha Yar bang Data), and to have Razer search the cosmos for Aya, who's once again dead (but may not be), for its third season would have just been repetitive. I didn't really care for the second season's Aya-Monitor storyline. As I've said before, the way the show pushed Aya to a place of converting to evil was rushed and unconvincing (there's the rationalization that Aya is basically a teen, and she's overreacting to Razer's rejection like a teen would, but to turn genocidal because of only that is pretty silly), and the jilted lover card (which is funny because Razer and Aya never really got to be lovahs before she left the Lanterns) is such a played-out cliché.

Despite its flaws, I'll miss GL:TAS and its sense of adventure (enhanced by newcomer Frederik Wiedmann's top-notch score music each week), just as much as I'll miss Young Justice, DC's first serialized animated series since Justice League Unlimited, its terrific animation (I get the feeling this might be DC's last cel-animated series), its diverse cast and frequent guest star Tim Curry's enjoyable flourish of having his Glenn Beck-esque G. Gordon Godfrey blowhard character always trill "the RRRRRRReach." Another aspect of Young Justice that made it a solid superhero show was its ease with ambitious storytelling, even though it resulted in lots of clunky-sounding expository dialogue that JLU was better at handling.

Kid Flash dies while helping save the world alongside Impulse and The Flash (who's voiced not by George Eads like in "Bloodlines," but by James Arnold Taylor, making this the second time the CSI star, who voiced Captain Atom in the JLU premiere but didn't reprise the role, has bailed on a DC cartoon). Wally West's demise is the moment that's supposed to make "Endgame" as memorable a series finale as JLU's "Destroyer," but it falls flat. It has none of the shock and dramatic heft of Inspector Dan Turpin's death at the hands of Darkseid on Superman: The Animated Series because Turpin was a non-superpowered human, while Wally's superpowered, and in the superhero genre, there's always some way for a superpowered character like Wally to come back from the dead.

Wally's body disappears in a fashion similar to how the JLU incarnation of Wally nearly faded from existence after increasing his super-speed to defeat the unstoppable Lex Luthor/Brainiac hybrid. If there were a third season, I wouldn't have been surprised if Wally had vanished into another dimension (leading to the inevitable Ghost-style scenes where Wally attempts to reach Artemis, who's now permanently assumed her undercover identity of Tigress, interdimensionally).

This not-so-finite-looking death mars "Endgame" (as does the cliffhanger of Darkseid joining forces with Vandal Savage, an arc that will never get to see the light of day, unless Young Justice showrunners Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti decide to work on a sequel comic). Although the long-homeless Young Justice team's new headquarters at the Watchtower is a nice way to wrap up the series premise of the team's frustrations with playing second fiddle to the Justice League, "Endgame" is a so-so finale to a largely effective second season that proved that Young Justice was so much the opposite of a superhero genre fiasco like Heroes, which collapsed under the weight of all the storylines it attempted to juggle.


If The Eric Andre Show, Scott Aukerman's IFC version of his own Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast and the Aukerman-produced Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis are anti-talk shows, then the Rug Burn Channel's extremely weird Apollo Gauntlet is an anti-cartoon. In each two-to-three-minute installment of Canadian animator Myles Langlois' web series, the title hero (voiced with very Canuck inflections by a mumbly and dazed-sounding Langlois, who also voices all the other male characters) wanders an otherworldly medieval realm in intentionally crude animation, hoping to find his nemesis Dr. Benign, the scientist who transported Apollo from Earth to this other dimension, so that he can make Benign send him back home. Apollo takes down enemies in poorly rotoscoped and frequently recycled action shots that are reminiscent of the frequently recycled running and fighting scenes on Filmation cartoons like the (barely) animated Star Trek.

At times, Apollo is aware that he's in a cheap cartoon ("Holy budget on this episode. Who's paying all these extras?"). Much of the laughs on Apollo Gauntlet thrive on half-assedness, from the lack of production values to Apollo's one-liners. At the start of one episode, a severed arm on the ground leads to Apollo saying to himself, "Quite a handsome scene, even if it is a little disarming," which is followed by him donning a pair of glasses--however, they're bifocals instead of shades--and adding, "Caruso in the house, yo." The sound of Roger Daltrey screaming doesn't punctuate Apollo's Horatio Caine-style one-liner because Apollo Gauntlet doesn't have the money to clear it. The show's so broke it can't even afford a Daltrey soundalike.

But is any of this intentional cheapness funny, and does this strange show, like any cel-animated Adult Swim original show that's not named The Venture Bros. or The Boondocks, require weed to enjoy it? Actually, without weed, Apollo Gauntlet can be pretty funny, especially during fight scenes. Langlois is clearly a fan of the Fleischer Brothers-era Popeye cartoons--the only Popeye cartoons that matter, even though they're occasionally racist--because like inbetweener-turned-voice actor Jack Mercer did with Popeye during the Fleischer era, Langlois has his warrior character mumble unscripted chatter in what's mostly an amusingly incongruous monotone while beating up adversaries. The ad-libbed fight scene chatter is the best part of the show's second-season premiere, "Win, Place, Show," in which the recap part of the episode is longer than the actual episode. It's called a joke, YouTube commenters who have complained about the recap's length.




Just when I thought Bob's Burgers reached the apex of intentionally unpolished music written by 11-year-olds with Gene's creation of "Electric Love" during last week's "Topsy" episode, the show tops itself with an even more clumsy tune in "Two for Tina." When Tina chooses Josh (Ben Schwartz), the boy she fell for at the grocery store in "Lindapendent Woman," over Jimmy Jr. (H. Jon Benjamin, who opts for a lisp to distinguish the Pesto kid's voice from his regular voice as Bob) as her date to a school dance, Jimmy Jr. climbs into a horse costume with Gene to attempt to woo back Tina with the following masterpiece:

"T" is for the way
You take my breath away
"I" is for the way
I like it when you take my breath away
"N" is for
No one else takes my breath away
And "A" is for asthma
That is a disease that takes people's breath away.

The rest of "Two for Tina" is equally inspired. The episode has Jimmy Jr. challenge Josh to an over-the-top, Step Up-style dance-off that must have been a ball to animate, while Linda takes Bob, who skipped out on school dances when he was a teen, to his first-ever school dance in the B-story. She spices up the occasion with peach schnapps and fake drama to make Bob's first school dance a special one.

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

Linda started out as the least interesting Belcher (she was also initially the most irritating, because of John Roberts' shrill voice for her, which took some getting used to, much like how the sight of Doc Hammer's faux-raspy voice coming out of the comely Dr. Girlfriend was kind of disconcerting when I first watched The Venture Bros.). She's evolved into sort of a fourth Belcher child and is someone who's understandably the source of much of Tina's dirty side, Gene's theatricality and Louise's love of mayhem.

Speaking of mayhem, "Two for Tina" concludes with Linda puking up a storm, which causes her and Bob to get thrown out of the dance by Miss Jacobson (Melissa Galsky) and her pint-sized bouncers, but an even funnier gag in that final scene is Bob trying not to puke. "B" is for the way Bob's a great straight man. "O" is for the way that often, like with Dave on NewsRadio and Michael on Arrested Development, the show makes Bob as weird as the rest of the ensemble, even though he's the straight man. And "B" is for blowing chunks, which is always an easy gag to opt for, but suppressing the urge to blow chunks is somehow funnier, especially when it involves the straight man.

(Photo source: The Playlist)

I never really cared for Skrillex's music, but I thought a couple of the score cues that the EDM DJ/producer composed for Spring Breakers were decent (the film also features score cues by the always terrific Cliff Martinez, who worked on Drive). I added one of the Skrillex cues to "AFOS Prime" rotation last week. And then while enjoying Jezebel's guide to hipster racism, a post from last year that I've seen a few blogs mention but I've never gotten around to actually reading until now, I encountered this:

Uh, no, you're not "aloud" to use that word at all, Skrillex.

This Milli Vanilli-haired shithead's off the playlist.

He's being replaced by the never-before-released score cues from Trouble Man, which are bonus tracks on the Trouble Man soundtrack's recent 40th anniversary reissue and were composed by someone who'd probably beat the shit out of Skrillex if he heard him use that word.

Al suggests to his son-in-law Bob an idea for a burger, which he calls the Rusty Trombone Marrow Burger.

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.

When Mel Brooks and Buck Henry tried to pitch Get Smart to ABC in the mid-'60s, network executives found their pilot script to be too strange for their tastes and proposed to Brooks and Henry that they give Maxwell Smart a lovable dog to add more heart to the show. According to Time magazine in 1965, "Brooks and Henry went back and perversely put in a cowardly, mangy, wheezy dog that chased cars and bit strangers." Fang continued to bungle Max's directions for a few more episodes of Get Smart (which ended up on NBC after ABC considered the show to be too "un-American"--oh, conservative America and your idea of humor), until the writing staff (which, by this time, Brooks was no longer a part of) wrote the canine CONTROL agent out of the show because the producers fired the dog who played Fang for being equally uncooperative, just like how the new Broadway production of Breakfast at Tiffany'srecently shitcanned a feline actor for being unruly on-stage.

This week, another spy comedy adds a dog to the proceedings, but with pukier, fartier and gorier results. In "Un Chien Tangerine," Archer sends Sterling and Lana on a mission in Morocco to extract an agent who turns out to be a giant, gun-hating dog named Kazak. His purpose is to transport on his collar microfilm that contains intel about "nukes in Pakistan or one of the -akistans." Archer, who's far kinder to animals than humans, gets the brilliant idea of feeding shitloads of kufta (Middle Eastern meatballs) to Kazak, who proceeds to frequently puke out the snack on Archer and Lana for the rest of the mission. When he's not blowing chunks, Kazak's farting up a shitstorm that's like a soundboard someone on the Web assembled out of each of the many different toots from the bean-eating scene in Brooks' Blazing Saddles.

The animation for Kazak is sublime and is the highlight of a story that's one of the more inessential ones on Archer this season, despite a climactic car chase that's probably one of the best action sequences in animation to ever involve a dog who gets to save the day by tearing apart human flesh. A far more interesting development takes place over at ISIS Headquarters, where debt-ridden Pam tries to talk Malory into making her a field agent after she aces the IFAAB (ISIS Field Agent Aptitude Battery) and overpowers Cyril, Ray and Krieger in the fighting portion of the IFAAB (and she does so naked, like Richard Roundtree in the training sequence in Shaft in Africa).

I'm dying to see Pam in the field because it's time to see another female ISIS agent in action, as well as a female agent who'd be more enthusiastic about the job than Lana has been lately (she seems to be considering getting married and settling down, as evidenced by the unspecified "decision" she was weighing in "The Honeymooners" and her thinking that Archer was going to propose to her at the end of "Un Chien Tangerine"). Is it me or is Lana's constant complaining during missions starting to get tiresome, as is the tendency to put her in situations in which she has to get rescued by Archer? We've seen enough bark from Lana this season. How about a little more bite?

Stray observations:
* Archer: "Didelphis virginiana! My second favorite animal with a prehensile..." Lana: "Tail." Archer: "Thanks, Brett Somers. Yes, a tail."

* My favorite sight gag in "Un Chien Tangerine" is a wordless payoff to a scene in which Malory tries to blow off a phone call from Lana and tells Cheryl/Carol to pretend she's not in the office, but Cheryl/Carol takes her literally, thinks Malory's really an apparition and checks her mirror to see if she's visible. During a later scene at Malory's office, Cheryl/Carol can be seen at her desk through Malory's door, slowly checking her mirror again.

* Pam, after being told by a less-than-thrilled Malory that she'll think about promoting her to agent: "Is that a real you'll think about it or a 'Pam, if your pig Leon wins a blue ribbon at the county fair, maybe we won't kill him and eat him for Easter dinner and render what's left into soap' you'll think about it?... Because I never really got over that."

* Archer to Kazak: "Okay, buddy, so here's the deal. A. Scrooch down! And B. Normally in this situation, I do a pit maneuver, but if I do, the truck will flip, and if Lana doesn't die, best case she's a quadriplegic and I marry her out of guilt. But after a few years of feeding tubes and colostomy bags, I start to resent her, and the night nurse is like Brazilian and 20." Kazak: "Rrrrrr..." Archer: "Don't judge me! I have needs, man!"

* Archer, deciding to spare a Moroccan thug's life: "Nah, guy's probably got nine wives and a jillion kids and... Holy shit, that's racist, Archer. What is wrong with you?"


Out There pokes gentle fun at Manic Pixie Dream Girls in "Enter Destiny," when Chad, who's been frustrated over his longtime crush Sharla swooning over a jock, falls for free-spirited Destiny (special guest star Selma Blair), his egg drop science project partner and the new girl in town. This Pat Benatar headband-wearing MPDG likes to snack on sugarcubes, reads Albert Camus' The Stranger and enjoys hanging out in abandoned roller skating rinks.


For a while, Chad thinks he has a shot with Destiny, but he pisses her off when he defends his little brother Jay from a bully named Tenebres (Flight of the Conchords member Jemaine Clement, the episode's other special guest star) and makes Jay's tormentor cry, only to discover that this bully who sounds like he was named after a Dario Argento giallo is Destiny's little brother. Out There takes this moment of triumph for Chad, who's rarely this assertive (or charitable towards Jay), and gleefully flushes the triumphant moment down the toilet with the reveal about Tenebres.

To apologize for their son's rough treatment of Tenebres, Wayne and Rose extend an olive branch to Destiny's equally artsy parents--Dad's a snooty poetry teacher named Babel (also voiced by Clement)--by inviting the family to their house for dinner. Here's the point where "Enter Destiny" goes from a bland episode about the quirky love interest that got away to a slightly amusing one that has some fun with how infantile most of these inane MPDG characters essentially are: at the awkward dinner between the Stevenses and Destiny's family, the episode takes this seemingly mature, Camus-reading teenage chick and unpeels her artsy layers until all that's left is a not-so-attractive girl who still throws temper tantrums in front of her parents like a four-year-old. Babel's refined demeanor also dissipates when he winds up in a fistfight with Wayne, while Tenebres remains an asshole who deserved to get roughed up by Chad.

But the biggest laugh in "Enter Destiny" belongs neither to Blair nor to Clement. It belongs to series cast member Pamela Adlon, who voices both Astoria, Babel's wife, and Martha, Chris' unpleasant lab partner (Joanie, Adlon's usual character, is absent in this episode). Martha grumbles only two lines to Chris, but the raspy voice Adlon came up with for Martha is the funniest part of "Enter Destiny." Adlon does more with a couple of gravelly, Nina Hagen-esque grunts than most celebrities do with some starring role they're phoning in during some lame DreamWorks Animation feature.


Over the weekend, MTV celebrated the premiere of the one millionth season of The Real World (which takes place tonight) by transforming into "Retro MTV" and marathoning earlier seasons of The Real World. Retro MTV, my ass. If you want actual retro MTV, just go and YouTube buttloads of '80s and '90s music videos and late '80s Stevie and Zoya bumpers.


Stevie and Zoya was my favorite MTV show, even though each short lasted either only 40 seconds or a minute. It was the creation of former Boondocks director Joe Horne, who has started posting on Blogger full clips of many of his past animation credits (including his other notable series of shorts from the late '80s, the "El Hombre" segments on Pee-wee's Playhouse) and is still producing shorts featuring his mute spy duo. I used to be able to rattle off all 50 states and capitals when I was in second grade. I've since forgotten some of the names of those capitals, but I still know word-for-word the verses from Biz Markie's "Just a Friend" and the Stevie and Zoya opening narration by the late announcer Russell Johnson (a.k.a. the Professor on Gilligan's Island): "Stevie Washington: The Angry Youth. Born to die. New York's New York. The turn of the century. All crime!"

The adventures of a turtlenecked spy on a red, white and blue skateboard and his yo-yo-wielding, Playboy Bunny ears-wearing partner, Stevie and Zoya was like every shoddily animated, library music-soundtracked '60s action cartoon you've seen, except Johnson kept messing up his lines, the voice actors kept messing up their lines too, oddly patient and polite voice directors kept interjecting off-screen to help out the performers and many of the action shots were unfinished-looking storyboards. Horne's surreal series of shorts was an anti-cartoon--just like Canadian animator Myles Langlois' Apollo Gauntlet, which recently started its second season on the Rug Burn Channel. Stevie and Zoya was concerned not with parodying any specific popular characters but with deconstructing action cartoons by pretending to be an incompetent and blooper-filled one, often with amusing results. Though Stevie and Zoya contained crude animation, Horne's stylized and jazzy character designs actually looked terrific.


On the other hand, Apollo Gauntlet looks genuinely sloppy, as if Napoleon Dynamite took his notebook doodles of ligers and attempted to bring those drawings to life all by himself instead of working with a team of professional animators. But like with Stevie and Zoya, Apollo Gauntlet's intentional incompetence is entertaining. In "Belenus Blade," the show's opening theme song doesn't even show up until halfway through the episode, and Apollo, a straight-up mentally ill hero who often talks to his right gauntlet and makes it talk back, disrupts a swordsman who's about to attack him with the episode's titular weapon by breaking into an earwormy remix of the swordsman's battle cry and moonwalking over a mound of warriors he killed in the second-season premiere. The animation for Apollo's moonwalk is so bad it's brilliant.

The credit that makes a huge deal out of "Hollie Dzama as the Princess" in episodes like "Belenus Blade" is funny because Dzama, a Canadian illustrator who voiced a villainous witch Apollo defeated last season, has been mute every time her princess character makes an appearance. The princess may not be much of a talker, but she's one helluva dancer, as we see in the clunkily rotoscoped dance fantasy Apollo imagines himself having with the princess at the start of the episode, which continues the show's great running gag of Apollo's terrible listening skills. He pays little attention to the swordsman and his speechifying, first by fantasizing a goofy dance with the princess and again by imagining himself as an EDM DJ and busting out the aforementioned remix.

The teaser for the next episode shows that Apollo is still battling enemies inside the throne room. I might go from mildly liking this weird cartoon to straight-up admiring it if its new season never bothers to leave that throne room (is this a jab at how The Walking Dead spent much of its lukewarmly received second season confined to a farm?--I doubt it, but that would be hilarious if it is). I'm not sure if I'll ever bother to watch Disney's much-maligned John Carter, but I think I'll end up enjoying this slightly Stevie and Zoya-esque take on John Carter-style heroics way more than the actual lavishly budgeted thing.


"It Snakes a Village" marks a milestone for Bob's Burgers because during an Indiana Jones map sequence that hilariously lasts a millisecond, the episode puts an end to the dilly-dallying around the issue of where the show takes place and finally confirms it. As a West Coaster (and a rather reluctant one, although I often go to bat for the coast I was born and raised in, except in the pizza department) who was hoping the Belchers' unnamed seaside town (a composite of different seaside towns) would be Santa Cruz, the town where I attended university, I'm kind of disappointed that the show's setting has turned out to be the Jersey Shore all along. (Then again, Jersey would make more sense than a California town because Archer didn't travel very far when he lost his memory in the flashback during the Archer/Bob's Burgers crossover.) My slight disappointment is partly due to the Belchers' (as well as the show's) laid-back attitudes towards outsiders, misfits, different countercultures or sexuality--particularly Bob's lack of discomfort during a conversation he has with his shy father-in-law Al (Sam Seder) to try to find out Al's sexual fetish in "It Snakes a Village." Their attitudes are very Santa Cruz.

During the Belchers' vacation away from the restaurant (Bob has to temporarily close it down to have it fumigated), which they spend with Linda's parents at their Florida retirement home, Bob tries to help Al rekindle his sex life, both out of the kindness of his heart and because he and Linda are dead set against her parents moving in with them. Al and Gloria (Renée Taylor) didn't realize the retirement community they chose to live in is an elderly swingers' club, and unless they take part in the club's sex stuff--which is difficult for Al and Gloria because their love-making skills are a bit rusty--they'll be kicked out of the community, and they'll have to move in with the Belchers. Episode writer Kit Boss must be a Real Sex viewer because the fetish that Al confesses to Bob--he has a thing for ladies who sit on balloons and pop them--is straight out of a Real Sex segment.

The B-story, in which Gene must overcome a fear of snakes to join Louise and Tina in helping one of Al and Gloria's neighbors (Linda Lavin) find her missing puppy, is much more G-rated, but it's equally engaging (the nightvision shots of Louise in the woods are cleverly executed), and it ties in well with Linda overcoming her disgust over the thought of her parents banging each other to help them out. None of the scenes in "It Snakes a Village" take place inside the restaurant, so sadly, there are no burger pun gags, which I always look forward to seeing.

I've always wanted some restaurant or foodie to take one of those puntastic burgers on Bob's chalkboard and make a real-life dish out of it, but stand-up and Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell staff writer Janine Brito is doing one better. To the delight of Bob's Burgers staff writer Scott Jacobson and those of us who have always been curious about what Bob's Burgers of the Day taste like, Brito recently launched a Tumblr about the Burgers of the Day, in which she and other Bob's Burgers fans will attempt to prepare a different burger from Bob's chalkboard and blog about the results. I wonder if any of the burgers will turn out as disappointing as the Jersey thing.

Memorable quotes:
* Gene: "Florida's our most penis-shaped state."

* Bob to Linda: "Why can't they live with your sister? Her life is already ruined."

* Al: "You just, uh, www-dot-womeninflatesaballoonandsitsonitandpopsit-dot-com." You can tell this whole conversation betwen Seder and H. Jon Benjamin about the balloon-popping fetish is improvised because Benjamin nearly cracks up a couple of times.

* Tina: "You saved us, Gene. I owe you my life." Gene: "No thanks. I've seen it, and I'm not impressed."

* Gene, on why he chose to rescue Tina and Louise: "I didn't want to be an only child. They're always weird."

* Gene: "Those people should learn to have a potluck without popping all those balloons." Tina: "And without having really loud sex."


"Simon & Marcy," the final episode that writer/storyboarder/composer Rebecca Sugar co-wrote for Adventure Time (she's moved on to Steven Universe, an upcoming Cartoon Network series she created), is a nice sendoff for the immensely talented Sugar. As a sequel to one of Sugar's best episodes, last season's surprisingly moving "I Remember You," "Simon & Marcy" isn't as heart-wrenching a story about Marceline's past with the Ice King, but it takes a slightly moving turn in the oddest of places, and it's a moment that has TV nerds like myself, uh, cheering.

The sequel flashes back to 996 years in the past, when a seven-year-old, pre-vampire Marceline (Ava Acres) wandered the post-apocalyptic landscape with Simon Petrikov--the man the Ice King was before his magic crown drove him completely insane--as her protector and surrogate dad. In one scene, Simon entertains Marcy with a broken TV and a re-enactment of a show from Simon's younger days called Cheers. Memories of Sam, Norm and the gang, as well as songs he makes up on the spot about Marcy (which plant the seed for her future as a musician), are all Simon has to keep his and Marcy's spirits up, as she comes down with a bad fever and Simon must dodge post-apocalyptic, slime-oozing mutants to find some chicken soup to cure her fever.

When dodging these nasty-looking mutants isn't enough and they start to swell in numbers, Simon must rely on the crown to give him powers that he can use to fight back and protect Marcy, which worries her because he's had some trouble reverting back to his saner self whenever he slips on the crown. It's a great tragic contradiction: the powers that Simon relies on to save Marcy's life will end up causing him to deteriorate to his unhinged and amnesiac state as the Ice King.

Now I never really cared for Gary Portnoy's "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" as a theme for Cheers, even though it's become such a huge part of Cheers (and now Madison Avenue) that I've learned to live with it. Frankly, I think "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" is a bit sappy for a show that was often above sentimentality and proved that '80s sitcom writing didn't have to be so sappy, preachy or dumbed-down, although Cheers was capable of being occasionally heartfelt (like in a rare dramatic scene where Nicholas Colasanto's Coach reassures his insecure and grown-up daughter that she's beautiful or a later moment in the series run when Sam briefly makes a return to the pitcher's mound and wishes the now-dead Coach could see him play again). But when Simon sings "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" to keep his humanity from slipping away as he unleashes his powers on a pack of mutants, I can't think of a better song--or a better use of Portnoy's lyrics. (Tom Kenny's voice work when the Ice King finishes the song while reverting back to Simon is excellent and heartbreaking.)

It's also fitting that Sugar turns to a theme from such a classic work of TV as part of her farewell to Adventure Time, which is on its way to becoming as much of a classic as Cheers. Adventure Time taught her so much about crafting great TV and took good care of her, much like how Simon took good care of Marcy.

Louie Anderson should really avoid coffee before making a high dive.

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.

Only on Archer will you see a lengthy comedic discussion of obscure European weapons like arquebuses and halberds (which, according to Archer, were made obsolete by arquebuses). It's what separates Archer from other spy comedies like Get Smart or the Austin Powers movies. What also separates the show from other spy comedies is its ballsiness--it doesn't give a shit whether you get some of its jokes or not--as well as the terrific character writing, which is on display in the coincidentally timely "Papal Chase," a fast-moving tour de farce that gives plenty of much-needed screen time this season to Woodhouse, Archer's long-suffering, smack-addicted butler (has George Coe been in poor health or something lately?). Woodhouse closely resembles the Pope (also voiced by Coe), so Archer uses him as a decoy to thwart an assassination attempt on the Pope's life.

Pam undertakes her first mission as a field agent and goes undercover as a nun, while Archer dons a cassock and seems to have based his priest disguise on old Weekend Update segments with Father Guido Sarducci. Sure, the ISIS HR lady aced the IFAAB (ISIS Field Agent Aptitude Battery), she's a capable fighter due to all those years of underground bare-knuckle boxing, she's amusingly nonplussed every time Woodhouse jabs a heroin needle in her neck and she's great at quickly picking up Italian phrases, but her field inexperience is evident during the mission, especially when she appears to have accidentally killed the Pope by dropping a giant mirror on top of his body while he's sleeping.

Speaking of dropping things, I wish we saw more mic drops from Pam throughout the season (I loved that "Wind Cries Mary" gag of Archer and Pam punctuating their sentences with mic drops) because the season's about to come to a close with a two-part finale that reportedly had Adam Reed treading carefully around Cartoon Network's legal department due to references to Sealab 2021, Reed's old Adult Swim show (like guest star Jon Hamm's role as Sealab's Captain Murphy). Towards the end of "The Papal Chase," Archer experiences a rare moment of genuine distress for one of the other agents when he sees Lana get shot in the arm (Pam's reaction to Archer not giving a shit about her shoulder bullet wound is classic Pam). Has Archer developed the kind of feelings for Lana that Sean Connery once described as "unselfish love, grown-up love" in the 1990 film version of The Russia House, and will the finale address it? Or will it be left abandoned like a halberd?

Stray observations:
* Pam, to an incredulous Archer regarding the Italian phrases she learned during the flight: "Who am I? Cypher? The gayest X-Man?" Archer: "Well, I dunno. Gambit looks like he knows his way around a pair of..."

* I'm more incredulous about Pam being so well-versed in X-Men and New Mutants comics. She always struck me as more of a Mark Millar kind of gal. I didn't know who Cypher was and had to Google him after the episode. As Don't Panic's "League of the Lame Superheroes" list says about Cypher's not-so-dynamic-looking superpower, "Imagine being surrounded by mutants who can fly, control the weather, set things on fire, or morph into other people, and you're just a slightly more charismatic version of Google Translate."

* "Pambit," Archer's nickname for Pam, resulted in an Archer fan drawing "Pambit." Ooh, ooh, somebody should draw "Nightkrieger." He would bamf every time he exits a room with "Smoke bomb!"

(Photo source: All Aboard the Cutie Muffin Fuck Wagon~)

* In addition to all the dialogue about Marvel mutants during "The Papal Chase," the loss of all of Archer's clothes--including his socks and shoes--during the gas tank explosion appears to be a joke about how Marvel characters like Hulk and Wolverine often emerge from explosions with most of their clothes torn off, yet the remainder of their threads somehow strategically cover their bathing suit areas.

* Cardinal Corelli (special guest star Rene Auberjonois): "Mio dio!" Archer: "I know, right? Trope alert!"

* Archer: "Goddammit, quit telling me what to do! I'm the goddamn agent-in-command!" Pope: "Figo! He really drops the G.D. bombs..."

* The parachute pants-clad Swiss Guard Commander: "Well... ISIS has a certain reputation." Archer: "Hey, whoa! Not cool, Payne Stewart."


This week on basic cable, a teenage weirdo who's way too attached to his previously single mother plotted revenge against the boyfriend Mom adores so that he could have her all to himself. It sounds like an episode of Bates Motel, A&E's new Psycho pre-boot about the nearly incestuous relationship between teenage Norman Bates and his mom Norma, but it's actually an episode of the IFC animated series Out There.

The series previously established Chris Novak, Chad's prankster best friend, as weird and frequently delusional (in the pilot, he planned to escape Holford on a hot-air balloon) but relatively harmless. "Joanie Loves Terry," like most Out There episodes so far, may not be all that funny (the episode's most amusing moment has nothing to do with either Chris or the titular characters and instead involves the absurd fantasy life of Jay, Chris' little brother), but I appreciate the episode's willingness to dwell on the cruel side of Chris' character and make him creepy and unlikable for much of the story. When Chris is finally able to drive Terry, his mom's freeloader boyfriend, out of the house and he tries to fix Joanie up with the father figure he prefers--Paul, who runs the Gulp-N-Go--Terry's departure crushes the spirit of the always upbeat Joanie (one of the reasons why I loved Freaks and Geeks was its acknowledgement that nerds could sometimes be as cruel and unlikable as the popular kids, and "Joanie Loves Terry" takes a similar turn here with Chris).

Showrunner and "Joanie Loves Terry" writer Ryan Quincy really succeeds in making this mama's boy's attachment to Joanie off-putting (I'd hate to see what this cartoon would be like on HBO, the Incest Network) and atypical for a kid his age (props to Quincy for not having Chad explain in his brief voiceovers about how off-putting and abnormal it all is). Chris is 15 years old, and he lets his mom still infantilize and coddle him (she continues to call him "Monkey Pants"--Chris' beef with Terry in this episode intensifies when he overhears her calling Terry "Monkey Pants" as well--while Chris' nickname for her is "Mama Face"). It explains a lot about Chris' overactive imagination and constant run-ins with bullies he thinks he can escape from or overpower. And if you aren't skeeved out by either Chris' choice of words while plotting to save his mom from Terry ("Man, I gotta find a way to win back her love") or the closing credits scene where he gets down on one knee and presents Joanie with a ring to renew their vows as son and mom, well, you just might be in a creepy relationship with your mom right now.

Joanie's taste in men has always been terrible, ever since she married Chris' dad, who later walked out on the family (and is glimpsed in a loincloth with his equally skimpily dressed son in Chris' dream sequence on a pirate ship straight out of a romance paperback cover, a moment that's as unsettling as Chris' fixation on Joanie because it reminds me too much of Matthew and Bill's "homoerotic adventures on the big muddy" from NewsRadio). In one of his voiceovers, Chad lists a rancher, a club DJ and a demolition derby champion as Joanie's boyfriends before she met the lazy and pretentious Terry. Judging from her last boyfriend (I wonder if Chris, who idolizes Evel Knievel and aspires to be a world-famous daredevil, is disappointed that it didn't work out with the derby champ) and her current one, it's clear that the kind of guy Joanie is attracted to is basically--yecch!--her own son.

Chris doesn't ever realize that he's not all that different from his nemesis Terry, an overgrown child in hippie clothes (and out of them frequently). When he temporarily moves in with Chad because he's had enough of the unwanted houseguest that is Terry, Chris becomes a similarly unwanted houseguest at the Stevenses' home, although Wayne is the only one there who despises him (the episode's second most amusing sight gag is a quick shot of Chris crawling into bed with an annoyed Wayne and a not-so-annoyed Rose). Later, after the exasperated Terry moves out, Chris lounges around in his tightie-whities much like Terry would do in his leopard-print Speedo, atop the couch Terry used to call home.

With some prodding from Chad, Chris is able to undo the mess he started by taking into consideration Joanie's feelings instead of his own and getting Terry to move back in, which makes Joanie happy again, but fortunately, "Joanie Loves Terry" doesn't put an end to Chris' hatred of Terry, which is more believable and interesting than having them finally get along. The dark character writing for the Novaks in "Joanie Loves Terry"--Chris has a somewhat unhealthy attachment to Joanie, she's equally strange and Terry is a pathetic-looking grown-up baby--proves that we're not in innocuous, rose-colored Happy Days/Wonder Years territory here. Now if only the comedic side of Out There were as equally punchy.



The funniest moment in "You Will Believe a Man Can Fly," the latest Apollo Gauntlet episode, is a great example of the Rug Burn Channel show's hilariously slovenly and low-energy take on old action cartoons (by the way, if you look carefully, you can spot film grain, hair and scratches on the images, and those were such fixtures of the cruddy prints of the '60s Marvel and Hanna-Barbera superhero cartoons that San Jose's Channel 36 used to air alongside He-Man on weekday afternoons in the '80s). In the middle of what's supposed to be an intense quest for Dr. Benign, the mad scientist who trapped him on a distant planet, Apollo pauses for a discussion with the Princess (who finally speaks!) about a palace mural that reminds him of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He proceeds to deliver a childhood mnemonic about the Sistine Chapel that's so preposterously long that series creator Myles Langlois, who provides the Brian Posehn-like voice for Apollo, has some trouble finishing it and nearly collapses into laughter.

"Is this what a deleted scene feels like?," ad-libs Langlois, who also cracks up while bringing up a form of DVD extras that the Princess would probably not be familiar with. That incongruity of referencing modern-day items in a medieval sword-and-sorcery setting is nothing we haven't seen before in all the countless variations on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, from Army of Darkness to Martin Lawrence's Black Knight, but when it involves movie trailer voiceover-style one-liners ("If you see one sword this year, make it Belenus Blade!") and obscure references to forgotten Garry Marshall rom-com flops that are spoken in an odd monotone, it feels fresh and different. If you see one cartoon that involves Giovanni Ribisi jokes this year, make it Apollo Gauntlet.


Fox's late Saturday night "Animation Domination High Def" block doesn't premiere until July 27, but its YouTube channel of the same name has already been posting original content to generate buzz about the "ADHD" brand, which aims to be more offbeat than its Sunday night counterpart. This original content includes a series of ADHD shorts, which the channel posts each Monday. One of the writers of these shorts is improv comic Heather Anne Campbell, whose past as a Geek Monthly magazine staff writer would probably explain the combo of superhero parody and scatological science factoids in the "Scientifically Accurate Spider-Man" short (I had no idea spiders' dicks fall off--good looking out, ADHD!). The shorts have ranged from amusing and surprisingly educational ("Scientifically Accurate Spider-Man") to forgettable and lame (last week's "Jurassic Park: Really Clever Girl," which dropped just in time for Universal's 3D reissue of Jurassic Park), but almost all of them have one thing in common: they're so filthy it's doubtful they'll get to air even on late-night Fox.


One of the better ADHD shorts, this week's equally filthy and really dark-humored "Future Travel," comes from British siblings Matt and Paul Layzell. The new short pokes fun at people's addictions to both their smartphones and social media. It imagines a future world where technology has progressed to the point where your social media avatars can become holographic beings or you can take hashtags and turn them into holographic scarlet letters to brand people in front of you as awkward or creepy, but no one has still been able to invent ways to improve lousy pick-up lines.

The Layzell brothers' futuristic sight gags in "Future Travel" are an odd mix of cutesy and unsettling, like the rest of the brothers' animation work. My favorite gag has a female el train passenger rolling her eyes and looking comatose in order to generate to her friend a hologram of the avatar of the nervous passenger who's been trying to spit game at her. She's like an ugly version of Rachel Nichols' tech-enhanced counter-terrorism agent hottie on Continuum. Hopefully, some more ADHD shorts will be up to the level of "Future Travel" and "Scientifically Accurate Spider-Man" so that I don't have to tag the ADHD series as unfunny.

(Photo source: David OReilly)

Irish 3D animator David OReilly guest-directed the all-3D-animated Adventure Time episode "A Glitch Is a Glitch," in which Finn and Jake must stop Ice King (who's back to creepy, princess-chasing villain mode after "Simon & Marcy" presented a more sympathetic portrayal of him) from further unleashing a computer virus that will delete everyone from Ooo except for him and Princess Bubblegum. It's a perfect marriage of idiosyncratic director and equally idiosyncratic cartoon.

"The External World," OReilly's 17-minute 2010 short, is an inspired work of absurdist and very adult 3D animation, and some of that short's random, TV-MA-rated strangeness (which, by the way, was co-written by Wonder Showzen co-creator and Louie producer Vernon Chatman) seeps into "A Glitch Is a Glitch," particularly when Princess Bubblegum wards off Ice King's advances by making out with her hand, one of several masturbation jokes Adventure Time has somehow slipped past Cartoon Network censors. Maybe someone at Frederator has a photo of a Cartoon Network censor with a sheep.


Any episode that concludes with dope end title music by Flying Lotus, a.k.a. CaptainMurphy, who's also produced bumper music for Adult Swim, is a keeper in my book. This isn't the first time Adventure Timehas ventured into 3D animation, and because of how enjoyable and batshit crazy "A Glitch Is a Glitch" is (the prolonged "One second later" gag killed me the first time I saw it), hopefully, it won't be the last.

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Jurassic Park, which stomped back into theaters a couple of days ago in a 3D-converted 20th anniversary edition, conquered the box office in the summer of 1993. But that summer, because I was at that time a fan of A&E's reruns of The Fugitive, David Janssen's noirish, anti-authoritarian show from the '60s, I was more excited about--and ended up more enthralled by--a different blockbuster, director Andrew Davis' film version of The Fugitive. Sure, dinosaurs are cool, but white-knuckle, non-CGI-assisted action sequences involving narrow escapes from bus-train collisions and spur-of-the-moment swan dives from dams into waterfalls are cooler.

So are both Harrison Ford in the role of Janssen's memorably laconic and twitchy Dr. Richard Kimble (perfect recasting) and Tommy Lee Jones' entertaining reinterpretation of Gerard, who was a much more unlikable and humorless cop on the original series (Jones won an Oscar for his work, and let's pretend U.S. Marshals never happened). Blink and you'll miss Neil Flynn as a transit cop in a scene that Scrubs later used as a clever gag about the murky past of Flynn's nameless janitor character on the show. A not-as-tiny element of The Fugitive is James Newton Howard's original score.

The first score that Howard composed for a blockbuster is a pretty decent score with a couple of terrific cues. "Helicopter Chase" is the same theme that Debbie Allen's dancers performed a bizarre interpretive dance to at the 1994 Oscars (a moment that elicited snickers from many TV critics, including then-New York Times film critic Janet Maslin, who cracked, "Who ever said the score from The Fugitive had a good beat? Who said you could dance to it?"). The other standout cue is "It's Over/End Credits" (the theme for Kimble during this cue was later recycled by composer Louis Febre in CBS' 2000 Fugitive reboot with Tim Daly as Kimble and William T. Michaelson, er, Mykelti Williamson as Gerard).

In 2009, La-La Land Records released an expanded edition of the Fugitive score and corrected a huge audio mistake on the previous release of Howard's score, which nobody outside of Howard and his fellow musicians would have noticed (someone accidentally reversed the left and right channels on all the tracks). The booklet art on this two-CD La-La Land set is strange because it doesn't contain a single photo of Jones' craggy face and is filled with pics of the One-Armed Man, for the two people out there who are fans of the One-Armed Man. DVD producers can't clear pop songs on box sets of TV shows without ponying up an arm and a leg, and now movie stars' faces inside soundtrack album booklets can't be cleared either?

Though I enjoyed the 1993 film, I never got around to copping the 2009 release until a few weeks ago, when La-La Land posted that the album will go out of print in April. Selections from the now-out-of-print album are now part of the "AFOS Prime" playlist, so you don't have to search every warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse to hear some of this album.


The Fugitivemade great use of Chicago locations--that St. Patrick's Day parade where Kimble hid from Gerard wasn't in the script and was an event Davis, a Chicago native, received permission to shoot in at the last minute--but that's not the only reason why the late Roger Ebert, who was also a Chicago native, loved the film and considered it "the best of all the summer thrillers" that dropped in 1993.

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

The louder parts of Jones' Oscar-winning performance are what everyone from Scott Glenn in a 2008 Monk guest shot to more recently, Tim on Justified imitates or quotes from (and by the way, Tim was referencing a movie Justified cast member Nick Searcy appeared in), but the quieter parts of Jones' performance were also fascinating to Ebert. "As the chase continues, [Gerard] gradually becomes convinced of the innocence of his prey," wrote Ebert, "but this conviction is wisely never spelled out in dialogue, and remains ambivalent, expressed in the look in his eyes, or his pauses between words."

The original series was notable for delivering exposition through opening voiceovers by narrator William Conrad, which 2000 Fugitive series showrunner John McNamara said were a holdover from radio in an Entertainment Weekly article about the 2000 reboot. The film ditches the narration and avoids having characters deliver infodumpy dialogue, except in believable situations where minor infodumps are called for, like in Gerard's famous "Our fugitive has been on the run for 90 minutes!" speech to his team. As Ebert observed, the characters instead gradually reveal the way they are thinking, mostly through their facial expressions.

"The Fugitive has the standards of an earlier, more classic time, when acting, character and dialogue were meant to stand on their own, and where characters continued to change and develop right up until the last frame," wrote Ebert at the end of his four-star review of the film.

Ebert himself was a writer from an earlier, more classic time, when the newspaper industry that he and Gene Siskel emerged from wasn't in shambles and film criticism was everywhere on TV. Both lovers of all things Chicago and haters of deep-dish "Chicago-style" pizza (I agree with their opinion of "thumbs down" regarding that kind of pizza), Siskel and Ebert pioneered the movie review show format of two critics debating each other. It's a format that, frankly, sucked when Siskel and Ebert weren't the critics debating each other because "the original frenemies," as one of Ebert's Chicago Sun-Times colleagues referred to the duo in an oral history about their friendship, were the only ones who were great at it on-screen.

Siskel and Ebert were among several critics who poked fun at themselves in guest shots on the animated series The Critic, but their sense of humor didn't end with "Siskel & Ebert & Jay & Alice," the classic Critic episode about a rift between Siskel and Ebert and fictional critic Jay Sherman's rom-com-style attempt to reunite them. Peep Ebert's brutal takedowns of unwatchable atrocities like North and long before that Rob Reiner flop or the Critic guest shot, The Lonely Lady. Sure, Rex Reed, who also turned up on The Critic, has a sense of humor too, but hissucks. The racist and hacky Reed is straight out of that old Ben Affleck SNL sketch about pun-loving blurb whores who are too in love with the sounds of their own voices and try too hard to be funny ("Deuce Bigalow? More like Deuce Gigg-a-lo. And I'm going to Big-a-go again!"). Ebert proved that a film critic--a profession that's been filled with a lot of humorless or vapid hacks in ugly sweaters--can have a great sense of humor without being a racist and ill-informed dickweed.

When Siskel died, the old-fashioned movie review show genre died along with him, although Current TV's Rotten Tomatoes Show, which eschewed the point/counterpointing and took a more comedicapproach to the format, was a fun successor to Siskel and Ebert's show and was, frankly, a stronger show than Ebert's own Ebert Presents: At the Movies. (The Rotten Tomatoes Show had the potential to become The Daily Show of movie review shows--in other words, a comedic hit show that's more brutally honest about its subjects and more sharply written than much more serious shows of that kind--had it not been cancelled by Current.) No one has been able to re-create Siskel and Ebert's occasionally volatile on-screen chemistry. Richard Roeper was hardly as enjoyable a sparring partner for Ebert (or as passionate about film) as Siskel was, and Ebert Presents was less of a point/counterpoint show and more of a newsmagazine about cinema. I never really got into Ebert Presents, but that show, along with the Ebert site's group of foreign correspondents, was one of Ebert's ways of getting a new generation of critics to carry on his brand of intelligent and witty criticism after he lost both his jaw and speaking voice to cancer. (It's a shame that the disease cost Ebert the ability to speak right when podcasting exploded and became a more polished-sounding medium. A podcast about cinema hosted by Ebert would have been terrific.)

Cancer took Ebert away from us a couple of days after I tweeted that I despise politically conservative film critics like Michael Medved. Ebert was the opposite of that conservative lot, a man who embraced change (although gamers who disagreed with his controversial argument that video games don't qualify as an art form might have found him to be conservative regarding that topic). He wasn't afraid to admit he was sometimes wrong about films he negatively reviewed. When film criticism became less prevalent on TV and more so on the Internet, Ebert took to the Internet and was one of many writers from the print world who brought their brand of professionalism to online writing about film (it didn't have to be just in that typo-ridden, mostly unreadable Ain't-It-Cool-News writing style). Then when cancer started to take its toll on Ebert and deprived him of his speaking voice, he didn't quit writing. He became more prolific on the Internet, intelligently blogging and tweeting about film and a variety of other subjects, including cancer and politics.

As online tributes and remembrances of Ebert continue to pour in (peep that #ToRogerEbert hashtag Matt Zoller Seitz startedon Saturday night), I'm glad to see a few mentions of Ebert's political side. We Asian Americans are quite aware of his political side and his championing of both diversity in film (but he did so without making a big deal about his wife Chaz's race, as Michael Mirasol tweeted) and filmmakers of color, like his badass defense of Better Luck Tomorrow after a Mr. Rosso lookalike at a Sundance screening/panel discussion of the film complained to director Justin Lin and his cast about their "empty and amoral" portrayal of Asian Americans. Like a boss, Ebert responded to that condescending moviegoer with "Asian American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be!"

Then when the Harrison Ford vehicle Extraordinary Measureswhitewashed the real-life Asian American doctor who was integral to the film's source material and then a few months later, The Last Airbender stunk up the screen with white actors in the Asian heroes' roles, Ebert took both films to task. What other white critic outside of say, ThinkProgress would do that?

In these last few days, we're also learning more about Ebert's life with both Chaz, a former lawyer who executive-produced Ebert Presents and saved her husband from "a descent into lonely decrepitude," and his step-grandchildren, his attachment to the rice cooker, his mentorship of younger writers and his encouragement of those with disabilities like his. What about his tastes in film music? In 2009, he wrote that Nino Rota was "the greatest composer in the history of movies. Who else wrote scores in the 1950s and 1960s that are in print and selling well today? I have seven of them on iTunes."

Aside from Rota's outstanding body of work for Federico Fellini, what other scores did this legendary writer with such a strong sense of worldwide film history and such a zest for life enjoy? Was Ebert a fan of both scores that have been frequently sampled by beatmakers and more recent sampleworthy scores like Basement Jaxx's work on Attack the Block just like I am? Or was he having flashbacks to his days with Russ Meyer and digging on the Schoolgirl Report comp like Terry Gross and her husband apparently have been doing? (Gross, of course, had no idea that it's called Schoolgirl Report because with cover artwork like Schoolgirl Report's, no one would be paying attention to the album's title.)

A simple Googling of Ebert's tastes in film music leads to the partial program for "A Tribute to Roger Ebert," a 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert in which the compositions were selected by Ebert and conductor Richard Kaufman. The "I Could Watch a Fellini Film on the Radio" playlist I assembled combines the Rota scores Ebert posted in his 2009 blog post of the same name with the scores that were excerpted at the 2011 concert (I wasn't there, so I picked compositions that I assume were performed that night).

Before the CSO concert took place, someone at Chicagoist wrote that he wanted to see the CSO bust out an orchestral rendition of "Look Up at the Bottom" from the enormously entertaining Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, one of three Meyer flicks Ebert co-wrote with Meyer during his pre-sober screenwriting days. "Look Up at the Bottom" would have been awesome, so the playlist concludes with the actual song from BVD (hell, I'll throw in the entire BVD soundtrack album too).

Ebert's CSO concert picks were on the conventional side, and some of those compositions weren't even written for the screen, but you can never go wrong with Rota, Ennio Morricone's uplifting Mission score or Alex North's rejected 2001 main title theme, and the playlist gives a good idea of what sort of music satiated Ebert, especially during the worst days of his illness, when his wife would bring him speakers for his iPod to help him stay focused. "Music of all kinds became a lifeline," said Ebert about the healing power of music.

I'm tired of these articles about Ebert's passing that take his long-running show's weekly closing catchphrase and conclude with "The balcony is closed forever." Actually, Ebert opened up a whole new balcony full of intelligent, tech-savvy voices to carry on his humanist approach to writing after his leave of presence, and they're voices that are way more diverse than the ones he was surrounded by in the world of film criticism before the Internet. Digital-era Ebert and hisprotégés have helped make me--an ex-film critic of color who lost the appetite for pursuing film criticism partly because there were very few writers of color or writers from my younger generation I could relate to--feel a little less alone.

"I Could Watch a Fellini Film on the Radio" tracklist
1. Nino Rota, "Lola (Yes Sir, That's My Baby): Parlami di Me (Valzer) / Stormy Weather," La Dolce Vita
2. Nino Rota, "8 e 1/2," The Ultimate Best of Federico Fellini & Nino Rota
3. Nino Rota, "Roma," The Ultimate Best of Federico Fellini & Nino Rota
4. Nino Rota, "Amarcord," Amarcord
5. Nino Rota, "O Venezia, Venaga, Venusia," Casanova
6. The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, "Love Theme" (from Romeo and Juliet), The Essential Nino Rota Film Music Collection
7. Nino Rota, "The Godfather Finale," The Godfather
8. Maurice Jarre, "Overture," Lawrence of Arabia
9. London Symphony Orchestra, "Theme" (from The Sundowners), The Greatest Film Scores of Dimitri Tiomkin
10. Malcolm Arnold, "Colonel Bogey March," The Bridge on the River Kwai
11. Ennio Morricone, "On Earth as It Is in Heaven," The Mission
12. Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, "Fanfare [2001: A Space Odyssey]," Star Wars: The Sound of Hollywood
13. The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, "2001: A Space Odyssey - Also Sprach Zarathustra," 2001: Music from the Films of Stanley Kubrick
14. The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, "The Right Stuff," The Science Fiction Album
15. Anton Karas, "Main Title/Holly Martins Arrives in Vienna," The Third Man
16. Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of London, "Die Walküre: Ride of the Valkyries," Classical Music Library: Volume 5, Power Classics
17. The Boston Pops Orchestra, "Parade of Charioteers" (from Ben-Hur), Summon the Heroes
18. Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, "Casablanca (Suite)," Movie Memories: Music from the Greatest Films
19. National Philharmonic Orchestra, "Rosebud and Finale" (from Citizen Kane), Citizen Kane: The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann
20. Henry Mancini, "The Pink Panther Theme," The Pink Panther
21. Henry Mancini, "Moon River (Original Main Title)," Breakfast at Tiffany's: Special 50th Anniversary Edition
22. Henry Mancini, "Two for the Road (Main Title-Instrumental)", Two for the Road
23. The Boston Pops Orchestra, "Tara's Theme" (from Gone with the Wind), John Williams & The Boston Pops Orchestra: A Celebration
24. John Williams, "End Credits", E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
25. BONUS TRACK: Lynn Carey & Barbara Robison, "Look on Up at the Bottom," Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Some people just want to watch the gazebo burn. (Photo source: Archer Wiki)

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.

Jon Hamm's last animation guest shot had him voicing a talking toilet on Bob's Burgers, and in Archer's two-part "Sea Tunt" season finale, Hamm voices a character who's almost as bizarre as that toilet: Captain Murphy, one of many batshit crazy characters who populated Sealab 2021, Archer executive producers Adam Reed and Matt Thompson's Adult Swim show from the '00s. Here, Captain Murphy (the namesake of electronica/hip-hop producer Flying Lotus' masked alter ego as a rapper) is reimagined as an eco-terrorist who's plotting to attack Miami, New York City and the nation's capital with missiles tipped with nerve gas.

But the Mad Men star doesn't really get to do much in "Sea Tunt: Part I." The episode is more of a showcase for guest stars Eugene Mirman and Kristen Schaal, who get to interact with their Bob's Burgers co-star H. Jon Benjamin, and the entire regular cast (except for Lucky Yates as Krieger, who stays behind at ISIS Headquarters), and any episode that traps the entire cast in enclosed farcical situations that escalate into gory (or in other episodes, nudity-filled) chaos is always entertaining.

Instead of voicing their Bob's Burgers characters like John Roberts got to do in "Fugue and Riffs," Mirman voices Cecil Tunt, Cheryl/Carol's oceanographer/philanthropist brother, while Schaal plays Tiffy, Cecil's easily perturbed helicopter pilot and girlfriend. Malory turns to Cecil for one of his deep-sea vehicles, which will allow her and the agents to recover a hydrogen bomb inside a B-52 bomber that went down in the Bermuda Triangle in order to get a reward from the U.S. government. Of course, nothing goes as planned: the bomb turns out to be a hoax concocted by Cecil to get ISIS to stop Murphy, the lead scientist at Cecil's undersea research lab, from going through with his plan. The hoax is also a scheme for Cecil to obtain on record as many stories about his sister's insane behavior as he can from her co-workers so that he can get conservatorship over her to steal her inheritance and use it to fund his numerous philanthropies.

(Photo source: Archer Wiki)

"Sea Tunt: Part II" is bound to be a more impressive and chaotic half than "Part I," but this episode isn't too shabby, thanks to killer jokes about score music and Cheryl/Carol's sanity. When everyone reacts in shock to Cecil's bit of info about Murphy's nerve gas supply, lifelong pyromaniac Cheryl/Carol is the only one who's thrilled about the madness that's about to ensue. Her giddiness matches our own.

Stray observations:
* Malory: "We are going to beat the Russians!" Archer: "Give it up, folks! Mike Eruzione!" I knew watching that DVD rental of Miracle would pay off someday.

* Archer, after being introduced to Cecil: "Yeah, Rien Poortvliet just called. He wants you to pose for him. [Awkward silence.] Oh, c'mon, beloved illustrator of Gnomes? Jesus, read a coffee table book!"

* Pam references an '80s Stephen J. Cannell show that, for a change, is neither The A-Team nor The Greatest American Hero: "I assume you've got an epi-pen on this big Riptide-lookin' bastard?" I wouldn't be surprised if Archer or one of the other ISIS employees was a Renegade viewer back in the '90s.

(Photo source: Archer Wiki)

* Homer Simpson's eating noises used to make me instantly chuckle, but now I think Pam's eating noises while wolfing down vegan crab legs, courtesy of Amber Nash stuffing her face with cheese puffs, are funnier. Or maybe it's because they're paired up with the sight of Pam's face swelling up from soy allergies.

* Cheryl/Carol keeps hearing suspenseful score cues: "Just ignore it. It's non-diegetic." And later on: "Goddammit, shut up, John Williams!"


"Come Undone," the Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated series finale, takes one of the most wack and least imaginative story resolutions in sci-fi, the reset button, and somehow makes it work, much like how Mystery Incorporated took a franchise that was entertaining only when you were a kid--and had become so unwatchable--and made it appealing again and genuinely dark and funny. The Mystery Incorporated team manages to defeat the Evil Entity, the previously imprisoned Anunnaki deity that's responsible for all the costumed criminals and evilness in Crystal Cove and has ended up consuming all of the town's inhabitants except for the detectives (in a series of scenes that are the darkest and bleakest this franchise has ever gotten and are therefore, awesome). Their triumph over the entity erases every trace of it from existence and creates a new timeline where Crystal Cove, "the Most Hauntedest Place on Earth," is now "the Sunniest Place on Earth" because the entity wasn't there to corrupt any of it.

Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby discover that their lives in this new timeline are perfect, and everyone who was previously killed off, including Velma's lesbian lover Marcy (let's face it, Linda Cardellini's reading of Marcy's last line in "Come Undone," "That's my girl," confirms it), is alive again. (Patrick Warburton's Sheriff Stone says the funniest line in "Come Undone," when he introduces his and Mayor Nettles' kids: "Now Eastwood, Norris and Little Billy Jack need to be asleep by eight. Lynda Carter here can stay up as long as she likes, on account of her being more adorable than her brothers.") But in a great turn of expectations, everyone in the team is dissatisfied with this timeline because there are no mysteries for them to solve.

Then here's where "Come Undone" cleverly handles the reset button: previous Mystery Incorporated guest star Harlan Ellison--the new Mr. E in this timeline and the only other person who knows of the changes the team made to the previous timeline because of his ability to see the events of alternate dimensions--contacts the detectives to let them know that he's enrolled them as students at his campus of Miskatonic University, the same setting from H.P. Lovecraft stories. At Miskatonic, there'll be plenty of mysteries for the team to solve, so in a brand new Mystery Machine they repaint after they destroyed the previous one earlier in the season, the detectives drive off to Miskatonic, perhaps encountering a few mysteries along the way, much like the ones they stumbled into while on the road back in the late '60s and early '70s. That means the entire run of Mystery Incorporated was basically a prequel to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

It's a brilliant way to end a cartoon that modernized Scooby and made it more like a Joss Whedon show by stocking it with snappy dialogue or in-jokes for older viewers (my favorite recent gag that no Cartoon Network viewer under 30 would understand was former MTV VJ Martha Quinn as herself, attempting to sell the detectives a bootleg of a Scritti Politti Christmas album that was recorded in Esperanto) and raising the stakes by building elaborate, apocalypse-related mythologies, which is interesting because Buffy affectionately borrowed from Scooby and nicknamed its central heroes the Scooby Gang. (Whedon regular Amy Acker even turned up on Mystery Incorporated and voiced the benevolent Anunnaki being who possessed Scooby's puppy girlfriend Nova.) The showrunner of the next animated Scooby incarnation should just give up. Whatever he has in mind for his iteration of those meddling kids is hardly going to be as good as Mystery Incorporated was.


On Out There, Chad's solution to his fear of public speaking, which threatens to derail a report he has to give in his classroom about the Salem witch trials, is to shoot a home movie about Salem so that he doesn't have to do any speaking in front of the class. A nice surprise about "Salem, My Salem" is that it shifts from a rather bland story about amateur filmmaking (think the Cheers episode about pretentious Diane making an equally pretentious documentary about her friends at the bar or the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode about Mac and Dennis filming Lethal Weapon 5, but with less effective jokes) to a slightly more interesting, Tell-Tale Heart-style story about Chad grappling with both lying about incinerating his church organist mother Rose's cherished organ while shooting his movie and choosing to pin the blame on the previously unemployable Terry, whom the church hired as its new janitor after Rose put in a good word for him.

The church incident gives Megan Mullally more to do than just be the June Cleaver of the show and politely serve everyone food or act as upbeat cheerleader to Chad, Chris, Wayne or Terry, whom she mistakenly gets upset at in "Salem, My Salem" when she's led to believe Terry caused the organ to burn. I initially felt like Mullally--whose specialty is characters who are far more uninhibited than Rose, like Tammy on Parks and Rec or Chief on Childrens Hospital--being cast in such a nothing role was a waste of her talents, but Mullally acquits herself well in "Salem, My Salem" as a distraught Rose, who experiences a crisis of faith in other people. Chad, Chris and Terry curse freely on Out There, but some people just can't find it in their heart to blurt out expletives, and Rose, who's one of those people, can only let out a "damn" and then quickly cover it up with "dagnabbit" in a moment that's nicely played by Mullally, in which Rose puts aside her usually polite self for about a millisecond after she hears Chad finally confess to her the truth.

The other highlight of "Salem, My Salem" is another appearance by gravelly-voiced Martha, Chad and Chris' gruff and perpetually scowling classmate. I have no idea how Pamela Adlon is able to summon up a voice like that from her repertoire, but I wouldn't be surprised if it comes from hours of voicing ogres or monsters while reading bedtime stories to her kids. I could listen to 22 minutes of Adlon just reading bedtime stories in her various voices and, because she's famous for having a potty mouth, adorning those stories with expletives too.


A cartoon that's "#1 in Greece, Bulgaria, Syria and Iran," the intentionally crudely animatedApollo Gauntlet gets funnier with each installment and reveals that Dr. Benign, the previously unseen and supposedly evil genius whom Apollo has been searching for to send him back to Earth, is nothing more than, well, a benign screw-up. "I'm Not Angry, I'm Just Disappointed" also introduces a power that Apollo's right gauntlet--the same gauntlet he sometimes talks to like how Sledge Hammer would talk to his gun--has never shown off before: it can extend from his right hand and function as a grappling hook. Apollo listens to the Princess' suggestion that he should try to be less violent by using his gauntlet to grab a snarky dungeon prisoner's neck and make his face collide with the cell bars.

My favorite bit of animation in "I'm Not Angry, I'm Just Disappointed" occurs at 0:29. The effort that series animator/voice actor/composer Myles Langlois put into animating Apollo's startled reaction to a previous enemy's surprise reappearance must have cost a fortune.


"Make sure not to elect a psychopathic leader," warns the announcer in the "Zombie Apocalypse" season finale of Do's & Don'ts: A Children's Guide to Social Survival, a Shut Up! Cartoons series created and produced by F. Ryan Naumann. Someone's been watching their Walking Dead, where one leader lost his temper and massacred almost all of his own followers, while another leader, still traumatized by his wife's death during childbirth, frequently experienced hallucinations about his dead wife.

The demented Do's & Don'ts, one of many webtoons that often leave you questioning the creator's sanity, has only been occasionally genuinely funny during its second season, including this finale. But "Zombie Apocalypse" scores some points for raising a question about zombie physiology not even zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland dared to ask (and I doubt Warm Bodies, which I haven't seen, contains any jokes about it): do zombies ever poop?

Some Shut Up! Cartoons viewers have objected to Do's & Don'ts using actual kids to voice the show's characters, who are frequently put in situations where they murder each other or say profane things. In a Bubbleblabber interview, Naumann pointed out that his kid actors are directed to say "fudge" or "shoot" instead of the actual curse words, and bleeps are added later to make the kids sound as if they're actually cursing.

Even 36-year-old movies get subjected to the same criticism. During a recent Smartest Man in the World episode that was recorded at host Greg Proops' introduction and post-film discussion of a Cinefamily screening of Annie Hall, Proops noted that a film reviewer was offended by the hysterical scene where Alvy Singer's former elementary school classmates update Alvy on their present-day lives, not as their grown-up selves, but as themselves in the classroom, when they were kids ("I'm into leather"). Proops' opinion on that reviewer's objection to kid actors getting directed by Woody Allen to utter adult statements they didn't understand is similar to my own thoughts on kid actors who have no idea what they're saying, whether the comedy is Annie Hall or Do's & Don'ts.

"No actors know what they're fucking saying! Watch TV and movies all fucking day long. Find me two actors who know what the fuck they're saying, man," said Proops. "Do you think Al Pacino, when he did the Phil Spector movie, went, 'This part's deep for me. I don't quite get it…'? Who gives a shit if the kids knew what they were saying? It's fucking hilarious."

(Photo source: The Beat)

Every time I log on to AFOS via the widget on the right side of this blog to check in on what's being shuffled, I notice a lot of Batman animated series or live-action movie score tracks get streamed during "AFOS Prime." That's because I like Batman, especially the animated incarnation that Warner Bros. Animation produced from 1992 to 1999. But even I think I've put too many Batman tracks into "AFOS Prime" rotation.

I want to see a little more variety during "AFOS Prime," so I'm going to reduce the number of Batman tracks (as well as Michael Giacchino Star Trek tracks and a few other sorts of tracks) in "AFOS Prime" and transfer every Batman (or Bad Robot-era Star Trek) track over to a new weekend block that's called "Hall H."

The 10-hour block will focus on selections from scores to shows and films that are popular with the comic con crowd or were promoted at cons, including Batman: The Animated Series, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, the rebooted Star Trek, the Marvel Universe film franchise, X-Men: First Class, the Hobbit trilogy, Attack the Block and Doctor Who. I turned to illustrator and AFOS fan Kevin Greene, the man behind Heroes & Villains: The Science Fiction Caricature Art of Kevin Greene, to pick which name the block should have--it was either going to be "Hall H," as in San Diego Comic-Con's Hall H, or "Masquerade"--and Kevin picked the former. Thanks, Kevin. Now that I think about it, "Masquerade" isn't as original as "Hall H." It was the title of an early '80s Kirstie Alley spy show and was later the title of a Rob Lowe neo-noir. George Benson's cover of "This Masquerade" was playing in my head while I was thinking up block titles, so "Masquerade" wound up as an idea for the block title. "Hall H," which, for about 10 minutes, was going to be called "Masquerade," will air Saturdays and Sundays at 7am-5pm, beginning this Saturday.

In the meantime, enjoy these photos of comic con folks cosplaying as Cloak and Dagger--not the Dabney Coleman Cloak & Dagger, although that too would be interesting. I stumbled into loads of Cloak and Dagger cosplayers while Googling Cloak and Dagger as research for a review I just wrote for Word Is Bond about Adrian Younge's Ghostface Killah project Twelve Reasons to Die. And then I got distracted by a picture of a Psylocke cosplayer and found myself going on a Psylocke cosplayer image search.

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The producers forced Jon Hamm to wear underwear during this role as well.

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.

Damn. So Lana Kane is pregnant, via an unspecified sperm donor. Unlike Ray Gillette ending up confined to a wheelchair once again (by the way, a bunch of Sterling/Ray shippers somewhere must be having a field day over the tickling scene that causes Ray's re-crippling), I didn't see that one coming, although thanks to all that time I spent in TV Clichés 101, when Lana started puking while heading off with the other agents to stop eco-terrorist Captain Murphy in the second half of "Sea Tunt," Archer's fourth-season finale, I knew right there she was with child. It explains her irritability and largely unspoken concern about settling down and having a life outside of ISIS in recent episodes. I appreciate how Archer creator Adam Reed didn't resort to having Lana spell out her concern in dialogue and chose to have her constantly interrupted before she could spell it out during those episodes. It shows how much Reed respects the audience's intelligence, unlike some other animated series showrunners (*cough*Ultimate Spider-Man writers*cough*).

Archer, Lana, Cecil and Ray discover that Murphy was faking his possession of nerve gas missiles, which makes him, along with Malory and Eugene Mirman's Cecil Tunt, one of several characters this season who concocted lies to get more money because they're broke. Killing off Murphy with a soda machine emblazoned with the last name of the late Harry Goz, the actor who voiced Murphy on Reed and Matt Thompson's Sealab 2021, is Reed and Thompson's twisted and oddly affecting way of both paying tribute to Goz and saying that not even Jon Hamm in the role of Murphy can compare to Goz.

The other revelation about Murphy--he doesn't have any personnel with him at Sealab--is Reed's clever way of working around the fact that Cartoon Network's legal department really did a number on Reed and prevented him from using all the other characters from Sealab. The absence of lewd and frequently nude Debbie DuPree, Sealab's precursor to Cheryl/Carol and Pam, is particularly glaring because she would have fit right in with the Archer universe. Maybe Reed should have emulated Murphy, Malory and Cecil and lied to trick Cartoon Network into giving him the rights to the other characters.

Despite the lack of those characters and the rather minimal screen time given to Mirman and Kristen Schaal in the second half, "Sea Tunt" is a satisfying season finale, thanks to the show's always terrific dialogue (especially when the agents argue over undercover personas and when Cyril frequently snipes at Lana because he's pissed that he's not her baby's father) and great character moments like Archer setting aside his usual asshole self for a moment to let Lana know that he wants her to be a better mom than Malory was. Another thing I like about "Sea Tunt" is that it's given me an excuse to revisit one of the greatest--but way too short--TV themes of all time, performed by the indie pop band Calamine.


Memorable quotes:
* Murphy, as he dies: "Forgive my candor. I just felt my spleen slip out of what was my anus."

* Murphy's last words: "Crushed by an off-brand drink machine. Oh my God, just like that old gypsy woman sa--"

* Lana, as Archer lets himself drown Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio style to save her and her baby: "Okay, here it comes! You just gotta relax and let it go in your mouth!" Archer: "Phrasing!"


"Viking Days," Out There's latest episode, has the feel of an old King of the Hill episode about kids and the fathers who have trouble understanding them (having their conflicts play out against the backdrop of a sporting event is particularly reminiscent of King of the Hill). That might be because "Viking Days" was written by former King of the Hill writer Rebecca May. (Pamela Adlon even does a slightly raspier variation on her Bobby Hill voice when she voices Dave, one of Chad and Chris' male classmates.) But the occasional profanity and frequent cutaways to the characters' fantasy lives--Jay continues to believe he's a space alien--are unmistakably Out There.

The arrival of Holford's annual Father/Son Hexathlon brings out the tensions in three different dad/kid duos. Chad doesn't feel like his staid optometrist dad Wayne is fun enough--or manly enough--to be his Hexathlon partner; Chris doesn't want to take part in the race with Terry, his mom Joanie's annoying boyfriend, and Terry doesn't want to partner up with Chris either, despite Joanie's urging; and Sharla is frequently appalled by the manly hobbies of her hunter/taxidermist dad Doug, who's voiced by special guest star Nick Offerman and bears many similarities to Ron Swanson, Offerman's equally macho and old-fashioned Parks and Rec character. Chad thinks Doug and his collection of stuffed and preserved animals are awesome, so he chooses him as his Hexathlon partner and winds up hurting Wayne's feelings.

Chad doesn't realize that an alpha male like Doug is obsessed with winning, so he's unprepared for the amount of strenuous training Doug puts him through before the Hexathlon. Meanwhile, Chris and Terry hate each other so much that they come up with an elaborate plan where they won't have to race together and they'll trick Joanie into thinking they were in the race. But "Operation Fake Race" goes wrong, and like Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin in The Edge, Chris and Terry end up having to get along with each other in order to survive the woods. No grizzly bears attack Chris and Terry and turn Harold Perrineau into an hors d'oeuvre though.

Again, nothing too hilarious or side-splitting takes place this week on this gentle-humored and occasionally melancholy cartoon, although "Viking Days" works in a couple of good deadpan jokes during Chad's voiceovers, like when he summarizes the history of Holford and concludes with "The warriors celebrated their victory by cutting out the beast's heart and declaring the land beneath their feet as their own. There's a Taco Steve's there now."


For the last several years, Sunday has been an exemplary day for TV because of quality shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. Now add the Rug Burn Channel's Apollo Gauntlet to that list of episodic masterworks. It's a captivating drama that keeps getting stronger each Sunday, thanks to Myles Langlois' masterful turn as Apollo, a Don Draper-esque tragic figure faced with the Sisyphean struggles of trying to distinguish whether it's real or Memorex and being upset when children look him in the eye and say, "Where is Baba?"

During "The Interrogation of Dr. Benign by the Hero Apollo Gauntlet," the impromptu intervention Apollo stages for Benign, the scientist who accidentally teleported both himself and Apollo to another dimension, brings to mind the power and complexity of Jon Hamm's riveting "Carousel" speech from the… Alright, I'm bullshitting. Just click to 2:21 and enjoy Apollo's threat of subjecting Benign to "a severance package," one of several "Interrogation of Dr. Benign" one-liners made funnier by Langlois' deadpan, Canadian-accented monotone.


The dissatisfied reactions at the A.V. Club from both the reviewer and the commenters regarding the Belchers being frequently screwed over by the game show producers during Bob's Burgers' "Family Fracas" episode says a lot about the audience's affection for these characters. That minor outcry is also surprising because I feel like those viewers are forgetting that comedy is way more interesting and funny when it arises from darkness, pain, suffering, losing or failure--the blues, if you will. If comedy was all about the opposite, you'd get nothing but Christian cable network sitcoms or... Entourage.

I don't despise "Family Fracas" as much as those viewers do, but we know that Bob will never be able to upgrade his hooptie--it brings to mind any frustrating moment where Gilligan and the other castaways were handed an opportunity to get off the island, and then fate or some last-minute twist shat on them--so that sets "Family Fracas" down a path of predictability that downgrades the episode a bit for me. (Plus a game show being broadcast live instead of pre-recorded like all game shows are these days is such a wack and tired sitcom cliché that needs to be punched in the nuts and kicked away to the curb like any person who blames the Boston Marathon bombings on brownpeople, although the sight of Teddy saying a childlike "Hi Linda" back to Linda on his TV screen made me chuckle.)

Still, a narratively weaker Bob's Burgers episode is way funnier than most other sitcoms from the five broadcast networks. Who doesn't enjoy Tina simultaneously flirting with and trash-talking the teen sons of the competing families in that monotone of hers during Family Fracas? And more of Thomas Lennon and Samantha Bee, who reprise their roles from "Beefsquatch" as now-divorced local TV hosts Chuck (he's now the host of Family Fracas) and Pam (she's become a judge on a courtroom show), is always welcome. Plus we need more of Childrens Hospital's Rob Huebel as the weird TV producer who keeps a bar in his desk ("You don't have a bar in your desk?," he says to a puzzled Bob as if Bob is from outer space) and hilariously likes to role-play Richard Dawson/female Family Feud contestant kisses with Chuck.

Other memorable quotes:
* Louise to Bob and Linda, after being subjected for too long to Tina's bad breath and Gene's smelly feet: "Why don't you wash your children?"

* Louise to Jimmy Jr., who shuts the Belcher kids out of the Pestos' van to the TV studio: "Oh, you're getting a banana in your tailpipe... And I am not talking about the van."

* Judge Pam: "I hate to agree with the defense, and also, I hate the defense. And his smug face. And his misshapen penis!" Chuck: "Ho-ho-ho-ho! Well, it pleased the court." Pam: "The court was faking it."

* Gene: "The Foam Cam! Dad, the Foam Cam is on the ceiling! I never forget a camera that feeds me."

* Bob: "Why are we getting foamed? This is a court show!" Linda: "The losers get foamed on Pam's Court." Bob: "That's insane." Tina: "They have foam on all their shows on this channel."


If there's any American Dad episode that I wish a group of radicals (much like the counter-protesters who came up with a bunch of brilliant ways to mock hateful protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con) would show in a screening room if they kidnapped the members of the Parents Television Council, strapped them down and forced them to watch some great comedic TV made for adults while subjecting them to some sort of Ludovico treatment-like experiment so that their heads would explode, and then they'd wind up catatonic so that they'd shut the fuck up and stop trying to ruin adult animation or adult sitcoms for everybody else, that episode would be "The Missing Kink."

I'm on and off with American Dad, even though it's the best of the many animated shows produced by Seth MacFarlane's Fuzzy Door Productions. On some weeks, I'll hear about an American Dad plot summary or catch a promo of the latest episode, and I'll see some potential sight gag that makes me worry about Fuzzy Door indulging in some of MacFarlane's lame racial shtick from Family Guy or Ted, and then I'll choose to skip the show. And then there are other weeks where an American Dad plot summary will interest me because of how strange it sounds, so I tune in or download the show on iTunes, and the episode ends up being a laugh riot. "The Missing Kink"--which centers on Francine's discovery of a way to spice things up in the bedroom because her conservative, Bible-thumping husband Stan has been making their sex life boring due to his preference for the missionary position--is one of those riotous episodes.

(Photo source: American Dad Wikia)

Francine realizes that getting spanked turns her on. Stan becomes appalled by her fetish and banishes her to the woods, where a side story about a bluebird who disappoints Francine because of his crack addiction ("You're using again, aren't you? You piece of garbage.") is funnier than the B-story about Hayley getting back into the dating scene after Roger sent her husband Jeff away to space at the end of "Naked to the Limit, One More Time." But after some persuasion from Roger ("Sometimes it takes a lavish song-and-dance number to make a man realize he was wrong"), Stan changes his mind about people's fetishes and opts to be more adventurous in the bedroom.

However, Stan's newfound willingness to try every single kink ends up exhausting and weirding out Francine, and it leads to a hilarious montage that stays affixed on a range of astonished or horrified reactions from Principal Lewis (Kevin Michael Richardson) and his "ride" Marguerite (a Morris Day-esque hot tub salesman whom the show killed off last season and has been brought back to life in "The Missing Kink") while they watch Stan, Francine and their various sexual partners. Marguerite, by the way, is voiced by Eastbound & Down scene-stealer Michael Peña, who doesn't get any lines like "That's voyeurism, man! I love to voyeurism, bro!" but should have.

This all could have turned into a laughless, immature and oddly-embarrassed-about-its-subject fiasco on the order of the much-maligned Garry Marshall version of Exit to Eden, but "The Missing Kink," with its grown-up attitude towards freaky behavior, never does. The fact that it's done by younger writers (Jeff Chiang and Eric Ziobrowski) instead of 60-year-old men whose idea of a wild night out is watching Fonzie leap his motorcycle into a fried chicken stand sort of helps.

Other memorable quotes:
* "Fun fact: The church sent missionaries to America to teach the Indians the proper way to have sex. In turn, they taught us the proper way to sit when you're in second grade."

* Klaus, after Steve angrily tosses him out of his fishbowl: "My ankle!"

* "You made this hand filthy! The hand I wipe with!"

* Snot (Curtis Armstrong), on his boredom with dating Hayley: "I guess I'm just more interested in the hunt. I'm like a lion who brings down a zebra and then loses interest and realizes he has to go home and take a huge deuce."

* "So I'll try out something new/Like when Carradine turned blue/Who am I to think my wife is sick and strange?"

This new collection of Michael Landon's memoirs will sell like hotcakes.

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.

It took me a few episodes to adjust to Out There's more gentle brand of humor--though 20th Century Fox Television co-produced the show, former South Park director Ryan Quincy's creation is far less brash and flashy than what I usually expect out of an animated series that's co-produced by Fox--but right when I feel like this cartoon about awkward adolescence in the '80s has started to gel, the show's 10-episode season on IFC concludes with "Ace's Wild." The season (or series) finale covers--in one whole episode--an arc that Freaks and Geeks, one of Out There's spiritual ancestors, would have explored with gawky Bill Haverchuck in the second season that Paul Feig and Judd Apatow never got to produce: what if Bill became a jock and began to spend more time with other jocks? Would his best friends Sam and Neal resent Bill and his new clique or would they remain loyal to Bill like Millie did with Lindsay even though she disapproved of Lindsay's new friends from the "freaks" crowd?

In "Ace's Wild," Chad, who's always longed to belong and not be so invisible to everyone else at school, is the one who falls in with a new crowd: the cool kids in charge of yearbook. Style-conscious yearbook editors Amy (Sarah Silverman) and Amber (Ellen Page) are so entertained by Chad's classroom doodle of their biology teacher reimagined as a walrus that they recruit him to draw similar caricatures for their yearbook. Chad recognizes that his best friend Chris is beginning to feel jealous about all the fun he's been having outside of class with the yearbook committee, so he makes sure Chris doesn't get left out of his new activities by persuading the aspiring daredevil to promote himself to the committee as a candidate for the yearbook's "Voice of the Wild Man" page.

Amy, Amber and an overly pretentious yearbook photographer named Cedric (Jason Schwartzman) are enraptured by Chris and snap several photos of his antics for the yearbook. But Chad realizes that Amy, Amber and Cedric aren't laughing with Chris. Instead, they're laughing at him and are intending to make him and many others around school--like the crying drunk girls at a popular clique's party whom Amy tries to capture photos of at one point--the laughingstock of the campus in the pages of their yearbook. The yearbook staff is basically the TMZ of Holford High School, before there was an Internet or a TMZ: they're a petty, shallow-as-fuck crew of parasites with no journalistic integrity whatsoever. All that's missing from the yearbook staff is an oddly conservativecontempt for rap music.

Chad won't stand for the yearbook staff's treatment of Chris, so to get even, he and Chris secretly devise a prank that's their most elaborate and entertaining one yet. Meanwhile, in a B-story that ties into the finale's themes of plotting behind the scenes to help out someone who's been wronged and trying to improve one's social status, Jay wishes for a new bike for a BMX race he wants to participate in, but Wayne refuses to spend so much cash on a new bike. Rose, who was the youngest in a family of 12 kids and was always stuck with hand-me-downs that were given to her from her older siblings, sympathizes with her youngest son's dissatisfaction with receiving hand-me-downs from Chad like his old bike, so she secretly dives into her own savings and gets him the new bike.

But Jay's new ride is the ugliest thing on two wheels before this ride existed, and when Jay winds up in last place at the end of his first race, the spectators ridicule him, especially for his lame bike. Infuriated by their jeers, Rose takes to her garage late at night, demonstrates previously unseen body shop skills and pimps Jay's ride all by herself. In a great little twist, the badass refit--newly christened "the Black Rose"--doesn't improve Jay's speed overnight. He still ends up dead last in his next BMX race, but thanks to Rose's efforts, the other racers and the spectators are so impressed with the Black Rose's design that they ignore his lousy performance and want to pal around with him after the race. If there's any character on Out There who's evolved a bit over the season, it's Chad and Jay's previously unassuming church organist mom. Rose started out as a cipher whose lines consisted largely of typical June Cleaver-esque dialogue like "Here are your lunches, boys." She's been given a pulse in these last few episodes and has turned into the kind of mom every viewer wished they had: Paul Teutul Sr. in a pink housecoat.

The B-story expresses a tinge of sweetness that Out There has only occasionally shown because the show has primarily been about Chad and Chris' misery within the high school that Chris likens in "Ace's Wild" to a turd farm. If IFC doesn't renew Out There, I'm grateful for how all 10 episodes brought us a view of high school that I identify so much with and hasn't really been seen on a comedic series since the days of Freaks and Geeks and Daria: high school is unpleasant, largely boring and ultimately worthless, and as Chad observes in the final line of perhaps the entire series, which sums up so well both the episode and Out There as a whole, "Visibility is overrated. The people you give a shit about will always see you clearly."

Stray observations:
* Chad, on the artsy yearbook room: "I felt like I just walked into an exotic city, maybe Istanbul or Reno."

* Silverman's character crosses off the yearbook photo caption of a creepy classmate she dislikes and replaces it with a fake quote of him admitting to being a bedwetter, which is funny because the title of Silverman's 2010 autobiography is The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee.

* Chad: "Are you from England?" Cedric: "I wish. Morrissey would be the best dad."


"Initiate: Psycho Mode," the latest Apollo Gauntlet installment, pits the title warrior against both a robot with a past enemy's disembodied head attached to it and a guard who winds up getting kicked in the Gene Simmons Family Jewels by Apollo so many times that somewhere, former nutshot footage collector Kevin Pereira is creaming his pants. There's a bit more fisticuffs in this episode than in most other episodes this season, but the nuttiness of Apollo's deadpanly delivered dialogue, whether it's with his foes or his own right hand, hasn't gone away. Series creator/voice actor Myles Langlois throws in a random American Movie reference that's as enjoyably incongruous as Ben Browder referring to his nemesis and his ambiguously gay lackey as Burns and Smithers in the middle of intergalactic warfare on Farscape.

Apollo's one-liners continue to be far better than Spider-Man's one-liners on Ultimate Spider-Man ("Hey, uh, sweetie, you fell asleep in front of the TV again"). Ultimate Spider-Man, there's a new head writer you ought to look into. His name is Apollo...


Fox recently cancelled the Family Guy spinoff The Cleveland Show, so I thought I'd check up on Cleveland Brown (the not-so-black Mike Henry) and see what he, Donna (Sanaa Lathan) and the other Browns have been up to lately. With standard-issue sitcom plots like the A- and B-stories in "Squirt's Honor," which has Rallo (also Henry), Cleveland's precocious and thuggish five-year-old stepson, joining a Boy Scouts-like group known as the Freedom Squirts and Cleveland and Donna working as hotel maids to pay off a massive hotel room bill, it's no wonder I always change the channel after I hear The Cleveland Show's fantastic theme song.

During the few times I've watched it, I've ended up liking The Cleveland Show way more than the scattershot and lazily written Family Guy, but it's not as interesting or offbeat as American Dad has often been, and the always hilarious Kevin Michael Richardson, who voices Cleveland Jr., deserves better comedic material, despite a funny musical number at the end of "Squirt's Honor" (a poorly performed orchestral cover of Kelly Clarkson's "A Moment Like This") and frequent in-jokes about the show's low ratings. "Stay tuned, Ame-wica," pleads a faux-weepy Rallo as he breaks the fourth wall right before a commercial break in "Squirt's Honor," "we need the watings." The cwocodile tears aren't enough to save your ass, Rallo.


Accidentally cutting a part of my hand is a fear I've always had while chopping ingredients for burgers I cook for myself, which is why, like Bruce Lee once said in Enter the Dragon, you never take your eyes off your ingredient. Bob, who gets distracted by his kids' trouble-making antics while chopping a tomato, takes his eyes off his ingredient and ends up slicing his "finger crotch" at the start of "The Kids Run the Restaurant," the latest delightful bit of Bob's Burgers chaos.

Bob's in no shape to be cooking with an injury like that--he always faints at the sight of his own blood--so while Linda takes Bob to the ER, Tina, Gene and Louise are forced to temporarily close down the restaurant and wait at the apartment above the restaurant for their parents to return. But the waiting and the loss of money that results from being closed--especially during Fleet Week, a potentially great week for business--are driving Louise bonkers, so she hatches a plan to reopen the restaurant, but as an underground casino for kids, and with board games instead of card games. Tina agrees to be the one-woman wait staff, while Gene provides the entertainment, an extremely nervous-looking girl group he plucked from the school cafeteria and has dubbed The Cutie Patooties. I love the continually petrified expressions on the faces of Gene's mostly tone-deaf singers, who never had time to rehearse.

It's funny how Kevin Kline reprises his Fischoeder character in this particular episode because he starred in Grand Canyon, where one of its most pivotal scenes had Kline's character badly cutting his finger like Bob does with his hand, but while making a salad. Fischoeder drops by the casino and proceeds to beat the house at everything, including rock-paper-scissors, which results in Louise owing Fischoeder $5,000 and Bob having to intervene (after a rather disastrous experience at the ER) and save the day in gory fashion.

Gory humor is something I'd expect to see on Archer, H. Jon Benjamin's other animated show, rather than Bob's Burgers, but it works like gangbusters here in "The Kids Run the Restaurant," especially when Bob can't stop a geyser of his blood from hitting Linda in the face while she drives herself and Bob back home. "The Kids Run the Restaurant" is also somewhat bolstered by the return appearance of transvestite hooker Marshmallow (David Herman), a character who's only appeared once before on the show but has become a fan favorite, although the episode doesn't really give Marshmallow much to do around the casino, aside from providing Benjamin with an amusingly matter-of-fact aside of "Oh, hey, Marshmallow."

Stray observations:
* Tina: "I only floss on my birthday, so I can look back on the year and remember what I ate."

* Of course the Belchers would have a burger phone in their apartment. I never noticed the burger phone until now.

* No activity has transpired at the Bob's Burgers Burgers! Tumblr that was launched a few weeks ago by Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell's Janine Brito ("We cook, eat and review each and every Burger of the Day from our favorite animated sitcom"). The site has been beaten to the punch by Uproxx, which took a stab at preparing several of Bob's puntastic burgers, including the Sound and the Curry Burger. My beef--no pun intended--with Uproxx's experiment is that they lazily dumped the outré ingredients on top of the patties instead of cooking them into the patties. Despite that drawback, I wonder what Uproxx would come up with for the Top Butt Burger.

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

* Linda, on Bob's really boyish-looking ER doctor (Johnny Pemberton): "Look at that face! So young! I want to breastfeed that face!" Give it up for Lysa Arryn, everybody.

* Linda: "Da! Bobby, your finger crotch looks like a '70s porno."

* Gene: "Double or nothing--that's also my approach to underpants."

* After Bob's ordeal with his finger crotch injury in this episode, I think I should start wearing thick gloves while chopping lettuce.


The minute-long Rug Burn Channel series Dogsnack, the surreal creation of animators Lynn Wang and EdSkudder, centers on a dog that snacks on its owner's farts. Not since Marley & Me have I been so moved by material about a pet animal.

I'm kidding. I've never seen Marley & Me. I'd rather get a root canal from the psycho lady from Audition than watch a tearjerker.

"Space Snack," Dogsnack's most inventive episode yet, comes up with the concept of air biscuits that are so powerful they cause the other creature in the room to teleport. Animated shows that consist of nothing but shit jokes aren't usually my cup of tea, but the continually clever Dogsnack is a stone gas, honey.

The start of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is the perfect time to introduce AFOS' new late morning block, which will consist of original themes and score cues from films done by Asian American directors and other filmmakers of color (like Spike Lee, pictured above with frequent musical collaborator Terence Blanchard during a Miracle at St. Anna scoring session) who have worked on films or TV series episodes I've admired or enjoyed. I'm calling this block "The Whitest Block Ever."

Justin Lin, a co-founder of the much-buzzed-about YOMYOMF Network and director of the upcoming Fast & Furious 6 (which was scored by Lucas Vidal instead of Brian Tyler, who's pictured above with Lin), will be represented on the "Whitest Block Ever" playlist by Tyler's scores from Finishing the Game and Fast Five and Akiko Carver and DJ Ropstyle's original music from Better Luck Tomorrow, particularly "Eat with Your Eyes."


And if you tune in to "The Whitest Block Ever" and wonder why hip-hop producer CHOPS' "Chinese School" is on the playlist, "Chinese School," the opening title theme for the 2007 sports comedy Ping Pong Playa, is on there to represent the work of Jessica Yu, who directed Ping Pong Playa and is best remembered for her 1997 Oscar acceptance speech, in which she joked about her Oscar outfit costing more than the documentary she won for. The decision to censor characters' F-bombs with basketball dribble sound FX in Ping Pong Playa sort of ruined that film for me. (Remember the original Bad News Bears? Now imagine that flick with some of the shit-talking covered up by baseball bat crack sound FX--that's how dumb the decision to self-censor the dialogue in Ping Pong Playa was.) But I enjoyed both CHOPS' original tunes during Ping Pong Playa and a lot of Yu's other works, like the West Wing episodes she directed, the 1992 short film Sour Death Balls and the 2012 short doc Meet Mr. Toilet.




The current generation of Asian American YouTube content producers will also be represented during "The Whitest Block Ever" by some of George Shaw's score from the 2010 Wong Fu Productions/Ryan Higa collabo Agents of Secret Stuff. "The Whitest Block Ever," which celebrates the efforts of both these YouTube stars and the filmmakers of color who must have inspired them (and in the case of Lin, are now partnering up with them as part of YOMYOMF), airs at 10am-noon on AFOS every weekday, starting Monday.

Here's one more little taste of "The Whitest Block Ever": the Robert Rodriguez/Tito and Tarantula theme from both Grindhouse's fake Machete trailer and Rodriguez's first Machete movie (Machete returns to entertainingly piss off much of the far right again in Machete Kills on September 13).

"Doo-hude... Tina... I can totally hear my heart beating. It's like a Pharrell beat with guest verses being dropped by T.I."

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.

In "Rodent," the latest Apollo Gauntlet installment, Prince Belenus and Dr. Benign (both voiced by series creator Myles Langlois) blame an evil robot's abduction of the Princess (Hollie Dzama) on Apollo (also Langlois) and his pummeling of her royal guards, who would have protected her from the robot had Apollo not knocked them all out. Apollo replies that leaving the guards alone wouldn't have mattered anyway because "that robot would have come in here like Terminator in the police station."

That's not the only Terminator reference in "Rodent." Unless Langlois created a blooper without realizing it, the barefoot Benign is seen at the start of the episode running through a corridor making the kind of footstep noises that would emanate from someone wearing hard-soled shoes, not someone who's barefoot--an exact re-creation of the off-putting footstep sound FX the Terminator 2 foley artists created for a barefoot Sarah Connor after she broke out of her cell. I don't know if Langlois intended it to be a reference to one of the silliest foley artist bloopers ever seen in an expensive and beloved summer blockbuster, but I'd like to think he did.

Earlier in Apollo Gauntlet's second season on the Rug Burn Channel, I said, "I might go from mildly liking this weird cartoon to straight-up admiring it if its new season never bothers to leave that throne room." Since then, the characters have stepped outside the throne room, but we've reached the season's seventh episode by now, and the show is still confined to the Dundrum castle (Apollo, Benign and Belenus will have to eventually leave the castle to rescue the Princess). The fact that the show has remained this long in one single setting proves how low its budget is, but budget limitations don't matter much when Apollo's dialogue, the awkward pauses and the intentionally wretched rotoscoping are so frequently funny.

Stray observations:
* "'Apollo Gauntlet'? Uh, yeah, sure, let's call him that," says a continually puzzled Benign to the Princess. In "The Interrogation of Dr. Benign by the Hero Apollo Gauntlet," Benign addressed Apollo as Paul. Apollo's full actual name is Paul Cassidy, according to YouTube's series synopsis.

* Where did Paul and Benign teleport from? I'm putting my money on an insane asylum where Paul was an inmate--which explains the conversations with his right gauntlet and all the slightly creepy hallucinations he's been experiencing--and Benign was either a scientist who was fiddling around with some sort of teleportation gizmo that happened to be lying around a lab in the mental facility or a therapist who was accidentally zapped along with Paul into the distant planet by the device while in the middle of a therapy session with him. (There's also the possibility that these adventures on this other planet are one whole illusion in Paul's mind.) The show also has yet to explain where Paul's magic gauntlets come from.

* "Oh no, Billy, Witchiepoo captured Pufnstuf!" H.R. Pufnstuf was way before my time, so I never watched it, but my comedy nerd-dom has exposed me to lots of jokes or sketches about the cheesiness of Pufnstuf that were written by comedians who grew up watching it. Weed references during late '60s/early '70s Krofft shows were really subtle back then. I bet H.R.'s next-door neighbor was named Phil E. Blunt.


On The Cleveland Show, Cleveland and his drinking buddies find a living out of being seat fillers at strangers' funerals. Donna objects to Cleveland's new side job because of how creepy it is for him to pretend to have known these strangers who died, so Cleveland wises up and quits. But his temporary stint as a funeral seat filler in "Grave Danger" has resulted in some gorgeous-looking vistas of Cleveland and his friends chillaxing at the cemetary, and the craft and care that's been put into the shots of the cemetary remind me that while this recently cancelled cartoon may not be the funniest on Fox's "Animation Domination" lineup, it can really look like a million bucks from time to time. I'm not so fond of the use of Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" during the funeral montage though. Like all those covers of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," the depressed white person's "Macarena," that shit was charming the first 998 times I heard it on series TV.

Meanwhile, Rallo spends a weekend at his biological dad Robert's apartment in East Stoolbend, and he encounters a pack of street kids who are tougher than even Rallo himself. He's so intimidated by them that he agrees to "jack show-and-tell" at his kindergarten class for them, especially after they blackmail him with photos of him appearing to bully a fat kid at the basketball court (of course, Rallo was actually telling the kid to fall on his ass so that he'd appear to be tougher in front of the street kids). Rallo's story is nothing special, aside from a funny running joke involving eBay (see below). But the denouement--in which Rallo scolds the other kindergarteners for their cruel and classist words towards the East Stoolbend kids who tried to steal their show-and-tell items, and then after the East Stoolbenders leave the classroom, he calls the police on their asses--is a terrific subversion of the badly aging "More You Know" endings that were a fixture of so many of the black sitcoms that influenced The Cleveland Show.

Stray observations:
* There's a good score music gag when Rallo cowers from hearing helicopter blades whirring, gunshots, a violin playing slashing chords, wolf howls, spooky moans and the cackling of a witch. To keep from getting scared, he switches on the TV and hears an anchorman (Kevin Michael Richardson) report that "according to police, the crazy wolf-ghost-witch violinist is believed to be armed and flying a helicopter, hunting for little boys who look like you."

* "Thanks again, Padre, for forgiving me for pushing the fat kid and for keeping your hands to yourself."

* "That's a nice suit, Rallo." "Thanks. I got it on eBay. Peter Dinklage wore it to the Golden Globes."

* Donna to Cleveland: "Is that a new suit?" "Mm-hmm. Got it on eBay. Tilda Swinton wore it to the Golden Globes."

* T-Pain voices one of the kindergarteners on the show? That's bananas. Then again, I shouldn't be surprised because of this cartoon's history of strange and random casting choices--like enlisting David Lynch to voice a bartender.


An array of great reaction shots from Louise elevates Bob's Burgers' "Boyz 4 Now" episode from amusing and kind of predictable boy band parody to standout Louise episode. Sociopathic, previously-indifferent-to-boys Louise experiences her first crush while accompanying Tina to a concert by Boyz 4 Now, Tina's favorite boy band, but Louise is initially in denial about her irrational crush and expresses it in ways that are classic Louise. Her wish to administer a slap to the face of Boo Boo (New Girl's Max Greenfield), the littlest Boyz 4 Now member, instead of kissing him is so punk rock.

"Ew, gross, it's so gorgeous. I wish I would slap it. I want to slap it. I just want to slap his hideous, beautiful face!," exclaims Kristen Schaal as she channels a bit of her own breakout role, Flight of the Conchords' Mel, the stalker who was obsessed with both Bret and Jemaine. Another bit of fangirl behavior that's even more reminiscent of Mel is the sight gag of Tina sniffing the singers' underwear while hiding with Louise inside the tour bus' laundry hamper. The fact that "Boyz 4 Now" is scripted by a pair of sisters, Lizzie and Wendy Molyneux, must be why the scenes where Tina helps Louise process her first crush ring so true. (Another nice touch in "Boyz 4 Now" is the casting of comedian Tig Notaro in a bit part as the band's tour bus driver, which is fitting because one of Notaro's signature bits is about her admiration of the singing voice of one of her favorite pop stars, Taylor Dayne, and her real-life and frequent run-ins with Dayne, "the easiest person in the world to run into.")

The B-story has Bob expressing indifference about Gene's table-settingtablescaping competition that, like Louise's initial indifference about boy band singers, transforms into something else. In Bob's case, he gets swept up in Gene's competition and turns into an excitable stage dad. The B-story is a little less memorable than Louise's attempt to slap a preteen celebrity, but it contains a couple of funny lines each from Gene and Linda and adds a few more outstanding bits of dialogue to an episode that's endlessly quotable.

Other memorable quotes:
* Gene, regarding Linda's purse and the items that frequently go missing in there: "You put my baby brother in there, and that was the last we saw of him! Javier Belcher, I love you!"

* Gene, replying to Bob's suggestion that he should set the tables at the restaurant or at home: "No, Dad. I don't set where I eat."

* "This is the best thing Aunt Gayle's done since she pooped her pants at the cell phone store last year!"

* "Ugh, no wonder no one likes women."

* "Be careful. There's a lot of puberty in there."

* Linda, trying to help Gene come up with a new tablescaping theme: "Lipstick, pepper spray, tiny bag of carrots." Bob: "Uh, what's the theme?" Linda: "Uh, 'Woman of the Night.' She gets dressed up, she kills a john, she has a snack."

* "Tina, did you learn nothing from the Boyz 4 Now song 'Girl, You Don't Need a Backstage Pass'?"

* "Is 'booster seat' code for drugs?"

* Gene to the tablescaping judge (Brooke Dillman): "As you'll see, beside the plate is a sanitary napkin. May I place it on your lap in case there's a big spill?"

* Linda: "Ooh, I got an idea for next year. Baby Jessica stuck in a well." Gene: "Yes! You have to look for your dinner for two days as the nation watches."

* "I'm no hero. I put my bra on one boob at a time like everyone else."

* "Which friends are you mad at, girl?/What size are your shoes?/You just went to the bathroom, number one or number two?/I want to know everything, everything about you."


Like all other shows lately, I've been watching American Dad on my MacBook Pro with headphones on, and the headphones have allowed me to notice that Patrick Stewart's lines this week were pieced together from recording sessions in various different studios (or hotel rooms). During most of his dialogue in "The Full Cognitive Redaction of Avery Bullock by the Coward Stan Smith," Stewart sounds reverb-y--which is especially off-putting whenever Avery is speaking outdoors--and there are other times where the reverb caused by whatever booth or room Stewart stood in has disappeared, so those lines are obviously retakes that Stewart performed in a different studio. But the varying audio quality of Stewart's lines doesn't detract too much from the fact that "Full Cognitive Redaction" is an Avery-centric American Dad episode, and Avery-centric episodes never fail to be entertaining.

In "Full Cognitive Redaction," Stan is faced with the dilemma of betraying his boss and mentor and turning him in to Agent Crisp (Phil LaMarr), a CIA Internal Affairs investigator who doesn't think Avery should be running the agency anymore--he believes Avery's been showing signs of dementia--so Crisp wants to take him into custody and erase his memory. Just when he's about to turn in the man who selected him to take his place as Deputy Director someday, Stan can't bear to see Avery reduced to a drooling vegetable. He changes his mind about cooperating with Internal Affairs and agrees to help Avery stop Crisp, whom Avery claims has been trying to ruin his reputation ever since he stumbled upon a conspiracy masterminded by Crisp and the oil industry to suppress fuel conversion technology that could benefit the environment.

Avery and Stan's quest for evidence to expose Crisp and his conspiracy has the duo sniffing around the SPCA (Seth MacFarlane's dog barks, while Stan is in disguise as a dog, sound exactly like the barks he does when he voices Brian on Family Guy) and at one point, Kevin Costner's house, where Dan Costner, Kevin's scientist brother and the genius behind the fuel converter, is said to be hiding. But the quest becomes increasingly fruitless and Avery's behavior gets more erratic, as we see in the episode's most sublime bit of animation, in which Avery dances to a boombox blaring Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning," exactly like how Midnight Oil frontman-turned-politician Peter Garrett dances in the "Beds Are Burning" video.

Stan may be an often heartless right-winger, but he also has a sensitive side, which is brought out by the kindness Avery has extended to him as his mentor. Like how Boston Legal's Denny Crane, another batshit crazy boss character played by a former starship captain, requested from his best friend and protégé Alan Shore that he euthanize him when his Alzheimer's worsens, Avery confided to Stan that when it's time for him to be put out of his misery, he wants one last cigar and a bullet in the back of the head. So Stan chooses to honor his request, but not before treating him to the most awesome day of his life and giving him a bath, a pedicure, piggy back rides and at one point, the chance to sit in the nude for a portrait he paints of him.

There's no way American Dad would kill off Avery, so the show blocks Stan's bullet to the head with a brain-scrambling chip--implanted into Avery as a prank by Dick Reynolds (David Koechner), a CIA employee who's had enough of being subjected to Avery's office pranks--and explains away Avery's erratic behavior as the effects of the chip. But that increasingly homoerotic final day montage would have been a lovely send-off for Stewart's standout character. Steve isn't as lucky as Avery in the B-story, which finds him regretting turning to Roger for help when a new school bully named Luis (John Leguizamo) threatens to pummel him. This B-story would have been forgettable if it weren't for the presence of the catchy theme song for Stelio Kontos, the mute bully who used to torment Stan in high school and is summoned by Roger to whup Steve's ass in order to cause Luis to lose interest in beating up Steve (because all bullies hate getting sloppy seconds). I'm a latecomer to American Dad, so this is my first exposure to the Stelio song, which previously appeared on the show. It may be the greatest thing Joel McNeely ever wrote.


Maybe Roger should also send Stelio to scare the American Dad episode synopsis writer at Fox into getting the show's details right. I can think of a few things that are wrong with the synopsis for "Full Cognitive Redaction," which was originally titled "Dementor."



This week's Titmouse 5 Second Day installment combines two shorts, both made by comic book illustrator and Black Dynamite animated series background designer Diego Molano and both centering on a powerful grizzly who makes Bart the Bear from The Edge look like Don Knotts. In 2011's "Eat Fuck Kill," the nameless bear goes skydiving and winds up with a naked lady impaled on his dick, but the more amusing short is 2012's "Pluto Is a Dick," which comes up with a great explanation for the decline of Pluto as a planet that would entertain Neil deGrasse Tyson, the enemy of Pluto and third-graders everywhere.

Get over it, third-graders! As this bear proves, Pluto's a poopyhead.

(Photo source: Darkmatters)

Every Wednesday and Friday at noon (with a bonus Wednesday airing at 4pm), AFOS streams the most recent additions to the station's playlists--"AFOS Prime," "Beat Box,""The Whitest Block Ever,""Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" and "Hall H"--for an hour-long block entitled "New Cue Revue." Here's the current "New Cue Revue" playlist.

(Photo source: The Geek Twins)

1. Brian Tyler, "Can You Dig It (Iron Man 3 Main Titles)"
"Can you count, suckas?"


2. Mychael Danna, "Set Your House in Order" (from Life of Pi)
"Tiger style."


3. Howard Shore, "Roast Mutton (Extended Version)" (from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)
"I wish I was a little bit taller."

(Photo source: TRON LIVES: Uprising Art)

4. Joseph Trapanese, "Compressed Space" (from Tron: Uprising, "The Stranger")
"Yeah, bitch! Magnets!"


5. Asha Bhosle, "Dum Maro Dum" (from Hare Rama Hare Krishna)
"Won't you pack the pipe and keep it moving down the line?"


6. Daniele Luppi, "Opening Theme" (from Magic City)
"If I can get my money right, I'm about to O.D."


7. Bear McCreary, "Archeron" (from Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome)
"Gotta roll this bucket, 'cause my Benz is in the shop."



8. Cliff Martinez, "Pretend It's a Video Game" (from Spring Breakers)
"It's a bad decision, starting beef with the butcher/He ain't a bleeder, I pop him, son, your man is a gusher."



9. Marvin Gaye, "'T' Plays It Cool" (Trouble Man original film score version)
"The outcome is death, don't ask me to sympathize."


10. M83 featuring Susanne Sundfør, "Oblivion" (from Oblivion)
"I'm seein' robots, passin' by every day."


11. Danny Elfman, "Silver Lining Titles" (from Silver Linings Playbook)
"Kids, this is how it is when you're older/Wake up and you're bipolar."


12. Kevin Kliesch, "Rebuilding the City/End Titles" (from Superman Unbound)
"I'm a humblekiller bee/You as soft as a bumble."


13. James Newton Howard, "It's Over/End Credits" (from The Fugitive)
No fireworks noises at the end of La-La Land Records' version though.

The following piece was written three years ago as an exclusive article for an aborted print compilation of both a webcomic I drew and several of the posts I've written for this blog, and all the posts that were going to be collected in the book were about lesser-known films I dig. I was going to put the book together by myself and self-publish it, but I ultimately decided not to publish it because I'm not exactly well-known, so no one would want to buy it. I even drew an illustration that would have accompanied the piece, which is a lengthy discussion of a favorite movie of mine, a pivotal work in the history of Asian American cinema that dropped in April 1982 in New York and then three months later in San Francisco.

I was too young to be interested in movies when Chan Is Missing hit the art-house circuit. The only movie I gave a shit about in 1982 was The Great Muppet Caper on HBO. Ten or 11 years later, my tastes in film had matured to the point where I was ready to tackle a black-and-white art-house oddity like Chan Is Missing. I first caught it on KQED, the perfect San Francisco station to watch--with no interruptions, although with lots of audio dropouts that removed the F-bombs--what I consider one of the best San Francisco films, much like how two of my other favorite films,Do the Right Thingand the recentlyProopified 1974Taking of Pelham One Two Three, are great New York films, and how another favorite film of mine,Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, is a great L.A. film.

I've updated the piece about this 1982 classic a bit, and I'm unveiling it for the first time now because it's Asian Heritage Islander American Pacific Month or whatever it's being called this year.

Thank you, Chan Is Missing, for recognizing that there are actually Filipinos in San Francisco and for depicting Filipino characters who aren't maids, houseboys or sex slaves. Even though those characters--a philosophical Manilatown senior center manager named Presco (Presco Tabios) and the title figure's elderly friend Frankie (Frankie Alarcon)--don't get a lot of screen time in Chan Is Missing, the sequence they appear in is one of the film's most enjoyable sequences, and it's not just because I'm Filipino, and hey, it's an American film representing us flatteringly!

In director Wayne Wang's 1982 breakthrough film, which he shot in black and white on a $22,000 budget, Chinatown cabbie Jo (Wood Moy) and his nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi) are scouring the streets of San Francisco to track down their business partner Chan Hung, who mysteriously disappeared and took with him $4,000 that Jo and Steve need in order to start their own cab company. At one point, Chan's trail leads the amateur sleuths to a Manilatown senior center where Chan is a frequent visitor because he's a fan of the mariachi musicians who entertain the center's manong (elderly Filipino) regulars.

Wang takes a minute to drink in the laid-back atmosphere of the senior center where Chan, a recent immigrant who hasn't had the easiest time assimilating into American culture, felt accepted despite his different nationality. During the interlude, elderly couples are seen dancing to a recording of "Sabor a Mi" by Los Lobos (back when they were known as Los Lobos del Este de L.A.), and we see why Chan felt so at ease at the senior center.



The manongs' enthusiasm for dance and Latin music is infectious, and it's not an unnatural-looking enthusiasm like in that insipid early '90s Pepsi ad where elderly actors pretended to get their dance on to Young MC's "Bust a Move" while awkwardly using phrases they just learned on the set after the director played them a tape of a first-season episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air between takes. The fact that the Manilatown old-timers weren't actors--they were regulars at the actual Manilatown Senior Center, captured by Wang's camera--might have something to do with their natural-looking enthusiasm.

That documentary realism--Wang did location shooting in areas of San Francisco like Manilatown that Hollywood rarely ventures into--is a reason why I'm more taken with Wang's indie snapshot of Chinatown and Manilatown than with a product of the studio era with a similarly all-Asian American cast like the quaint, mostly confined-to-the-studio-backlot 1961 screen version of Flower Drum Song, which Chan Is Missing references in a charming closing montage that's accompanied by the original 1958 recording of "Grant Avenue."


While promoting his 2008 indie films A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska (Wang still makes indies when he's not directing Lifetime channel-friendly studio fare I'm not exactly dying to see), Wang told an interviewer from AsianWeek that he made Chan Is Missing as a response to previous examples of Asian American cinema. "Documentaries and fictional Asian American films were very seriously sort of talking about how we were discriminated against, and how difficult our history was, blah blah blah blah blah, in a way [that] was almost too serious. And almost like perhaps complaining about our experiences. Or trying to be too rah-rah about how positive we have to be," Wang said. "So Chan Is Missing was kinda looking at the complexity of Chinatown in a different way."

Chan Is Missing's impact on Asian American filmmakers or writers, whether they're Chinese or Filipino, is so immense that Wang's film is still being discussed and prodded and poked, primarily in Asian American film classes at universities, while those '70s films Wang was referring to are largely forgotten. It's also a film that--except for a couple of dated-sounding Chinese pop songs on the soundtrack, the occasional sight of poofy hair and the pronunciation of "FOB" (short for "Fresh Off the Boat") as "ef-oh-bee" instead of the presently more common "fob"--looks timeless. (Charles Burnett's similarly shot 1977 indie Killer of Sheep has that timeless quality too.) Sure, the Flower Drum Song movie has its charms (among them are Nancy Kwan's legs), but if I check out a clip from that movie, I know right away I'm watching something from 1961. Chan Is Missing is the Homicide: Life on the Street to Flower Drum Song's NYPD Blue: the scruffier and more improvisational and down-to-earth work that feels more alive and relevant than the better-known, mostly backlot-based and sometimes forced and self-conscious latter work.

(Photo source: diaposon)

Many of the things I liked about the first few seasons of Homicide are present in Chan Is Missing: overlapping dialogue, effective location shooting (unlike NYPD Blue, neither Homicide nor Chan Is Missing were shot on an unconvincing-looking backlot), a visual resemblance to the films of Frederick Wiseman and the French New Wave and great chemistry between the actors who play the detectives (Crosetti the Lincoln assassination-obsessed conspiracy theorist and his bored-with-all-the-Lincoln-talk partner Lewis--and to a lesser degree, Bolander and Munch--constantly rib each other and sometimes come to disagreements over their case, much like Jo and Steve). The fact that Wang never directed an episode of Homicide is as puzzling as the central anti-mystery that entices Jo and frustrates Steve.

As Jo picks up clues to Chan's whereabouts, he becomes less interested in recovering the $4,000. What matters to him more is piecing together the life of this friend he thought he knew so well. As we see in some nice moments of showing-rather-than-telling during this voiceover-heavy movie, the middle-aged, divorced Jo leads a rather lonely home life. He understands the isolation and difficulties in assimilating that have been experienced by his older and fobbier friend. But the American-born Steve doesn't sympathize with Chan at all and thinks he's a conniving, homicidal and humorless FOB. "He reminds me of my old man that way, you know? Fucking embarrassing!," grouses Steve, referring to what he perceives to be Chan's lack of a sense of humor whenever he makes a wisecrack in front of Chan (in a voiceover, Jo discloses that Chan, whom he likens to "Don Rickles in Chinese," was actually pretending to be humorless and dumb as a prank on Steve). The younger cabbie (and Vietnam vet) is anxious to report Chan's disapppearance to his friends in the SFPD, whom Jo distrusts ("We don't go to the cops. It's none of their damn business.").

Everyone Jo speaks to about Chan tells conflicting stories about the mystery man. Chan is portrayed as a patriot who gave up on America and "has gone back to the mainland to serve the people" by his childhood friend Henry, a restaurateur with a love for silly wordplay (he wears a "Samurai Night Fever" T-shirt and jokes to his waiters that they should tell white customers that "we don't have won ton soup--we have won ton spelled backwards: not now!"). (Henry is played, by the way, by scene-stealer Peter Wang, who later directed and starred in the intriguing 1986 culture-clash comedy A Great Wall.) Henry's take on Chan matches Jo's recollection that "Chan Hung used to always talk about how Marco Polo stole everything from us: first pasta, then pizza." In Manilatown, Frankie tells Jo that Chan is worried about his inheritance and thinks Chan went back to Taiwan to settle a property dispute with his brother. A Chinese history scholar considers Chan a genius because he invented the first word processing system in Chinese. Chan's estranged wife is irked by her husband's fobbiness and lack of wealth and refers to him as "too Chinese." Chan's teenage daughter Jenny (Emily Yamasaki), who resents her class-conscious mother, thinks her father's a stand-up guy who's honest and trustworthy.

Jo's investigation of the unseen Chan is essentially a device for Wang to explore the complexities of Chinese American identity, as well as Asian American identity as a whole. If there's any message in Chan Is Missing (and thankfully, the film is far from preachy or didactic, which, as critic Oliver Wang noted in an essay he wrote in 2001, makes Chan Is Missing superior to similar films that attempt to answer difficult questions of "Who are we?" and "What does it mean to be an Asian American?"), it's a message that's more sophisticated than "Stereotypes suck" or "That Chinese cabbie you know so little about while he drives you and your fellow tourists around Chinatown is a human being too": Chinese American identity can't easily be defined, and it's always evolving.

The complexities of Chinese American identity don't sound like a fun subject for a comedy, but the gentle-humored Chan Is Missing makes the subject interesting and debunks a few stereotypes in the process. You don't have to be Chinese to appreciate Chan Is Missing and its references to aspects of Chinese culture. The confusion that can arise in your life when you cross back and forth between one culture and another is a story anybody who's an immigrant or a child of immigrants like Steve or myself can relate to. There's a lot to enjoy in this rather short film, which clocks in at 80 minutes:

* The Chinese pop song that opens the film and is a rant against inflation in China, sung to the tune of "Rock Around the Clock" ("Red beans, barbecue sauce, tea leaves, all the prices rise/Encumber the whole family, low salaries are just not enough/Till there is not one drop left in the soy sauce bottle/That's enough, this price increase has to stop"). The song is one of several bits of Cantonese or Mandarin that went untranslated whenever Chan Is Missing would air on IFC. Luckily, the Chan Is Missing DVD that Koch Lorber Films released in 2006 supplies viewers with English subtitles during the Cantonese or Mandarin dialogue.

* The scene between Jo and Steve and a fast-talking social worker/linguistics expert, who's writing about Chan for a research paper that's supposed to make sense of "the legal implications of cross-cultural misunderstandings," but everything she says makes little sense to Jo and Steve.

* The sight of Henry in the kitchen, sipping a glass of milk and chain-smoking (I bet he smokes while jogging too) and complaining about the popularity of sweet-and-sour pork ribs while receiving multiple orders for the dish. "I really don't get it. Is it really that good?," grumbles Henry in his native tongue.

* The aforementioned "Sabor a Mi" sequence.

* Moy's rapport with Hayashi during the scene where Jo and Steve act out the roles of a Filipino gangbanger and a cholo in a newspaper story they're reading about a Pinoy-vs.-Chicano gang fight and then Jo jokes that Steve's "a two-faced schizophrenic Chinaman" when he hears Steve complain about the same cops he wants to turn to for help.

* The sight of Jenny's friend (whose name, according to the end credits, is "Jenny's Friend") and Jo both getting irritated by Steve while he talks to her and Jenny like a cross between Richard Pryor and the Franklin Ajaye wannabe superhero character in Car Wash and jokingly refers to Jo and himself as "Charlie Chan" and his "Number One Son, The Fly."

* Jo's voiceover in which he declares he's no Charlie Chan and admits to watching Chan movies on TV to laugh at their corny dialogue.

* Steve's dockside argument with Jo about the pointlessness of looking for Chan and rehashing "that identity shit, man. That's old news, man. That happened fucking 10 years ago!"--a dramatic and mostly improvised moment that Hayashi describes in the Chan Is Missing DVD extras as a scene he had always dreamed of performing as an Asian American actor. During a 1982 Sneak Previews review of Chan Is Missing, Gene Siskel showed the scene in which Steve pretends to be a cop in the hotel hallway and said, "That young actor is fabulous. I'd watch him in any movie." Siskel, you weren't alone. I wish Hayashi, who stuck mostly to theater work after Chan Is Missing, did some more movies.



* The elderly Chinese lady on the apartment building balcony who's aware of the camera during the "Grant Avenue" montage and playfully--but stoically--sways back and forth to music that's probably not there. I imagine Chan was also this stoic when he played pranks on Steve, who mistook Chan's stoicness for humorlessness. The footage of the old lady is an amusing example of the film's implication that Chan may be missing, but he's also everywhere.

* Not quite as aware of the camera: the little kid during the Chinatown bus stop montage who scratches his crotch.

Plus I can't help loving a film where a Pinoy is a step ahead of the main character and figures out the key to understanding the title "mystery" before he does.

In the Manilatown sequence, Presco helps Jo and Steve out on their journey by telling them a parable about Chan's best friend, a crippled mariachi musician who also went searching for something he lost (the ability to play music) and realized the only person who could help him regain it is the man he sees in a puddle in the rain--in other words, himself.

"You guys are looking for Mr. Chan," observes Presco as he delivers Chan Is Missing's most important line. "Why don't you look in the puddle?"

Chan Is Missing is available wherever DVDs are still sold via Koch Lorber Films.

"Maganda!," thought the Ewok. (Photo source: American Dad Wikia)

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.

YouTube comments sections are often moronic forums where almost everyone either simply repeats dialogue from the video above without much regard for correct spelling or hurls racial slurs at each other or at some black or Asian person in the video. Only occasionally will some of these sections take a pause from the trolling or Chappelle's Showfrat-boy-viewer-style parroting of catchphrases to raise a good point, like when several posters in the section below "Hey Guys, It's Me," the latest Apollo Gauntlet installment, noted that it feels like the show skipped an episode that would have explained how Apollo tracked down the fortress of Corporal Vile, the villain who most likely sent a robot to capture the Princess.

Despite the disjointed feel of "Hey Guys, It's Me," series creator/voice actor Myles Langlois gets in a couple of amusing moments here, like Apollo's comparison of the henchmen's movements to "tai chi for dummies" and Dr. Benign's awkward retraction of his understandable perception that Prince Belenus, who sees Apollo as his competition for the Princess' hand in marriage, and the Princess are brother and sister. If the Prince is indeed related to her and is totally Jaime Lannistering for her affections, then ewwww.


Bob's Burgers is usually the highlight of the Fox "Animation Domination" lineup, but this week, it's been bested by American Dad's special 150th episode. I initially found "Carpe Museum," which centers on Bob's first time to chaperone the kids' museum field trip, to be underwhelming (especially in comparison to "Boyz 4 Now"), despite the way that Linda's protest chants sound exactly like the Tom Tom Club's "Wordy Rappinghood" ("Boys are from Mars, girls are from Venus!/I've got a yum-yum, you've got a penis!") or the enjoyable interaction between Bob, Louise (who accidentally slips out that she wants to inherit the restaurant from Bob) and asthmatic Rudolph Steiblitz (Brian Huskey), a.k.a. Regular-Sized Rudy. On second viewing, I like "Carpe Museum" a little more and better appreciated how the episode, during its subplot of Tina's attempts to get everyone else to notice that her field trip partner Henry (Jim Gaffigan) is dorkier than her, nails the arrogance of nerdy school kids who think the graphic novel or fanfic they're going to write will change the world ("Maybe you just don't understand it?... There's 17 installments, and you really need to read them in order, which you haven't, so I doubt it.").

I also better appreciated how well "Carpe Museum" uses most of the secondary characters, from Teddy, whose clinginess to the restaurant never gets old, to inseparable twin brothers Andy (Laura Silverman) and Ollie (Sarah Silverman), who, at one point, both turn to a weirded-out Bob for help when they need to blow their noses (on Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, H. Jon Benjamin was continually pining for an uninterested Laura Silverman, while on Bob's Burgers, he'd rather not be near her and reluctantly has to help her blow her nose). Ollie blows his nose on Bob's vest, which is a moment I'm all too familiar with because I've seen little kids blow their noses on other people's clothes, and when I was a kid, I was frequently attacked by a much younger kid who liked to leave his snot on other people's shirts. That kid grew up to become Owen Kline in the school locker scene in The Squid and the Whale.

Other memorable quotes:
* Bob: "So how did you survive eight years of being stuck with Mr. Frond?" Linda, TV's most entertaining functioning alcoholic who's not an Archer: "Wine Thermos."

* Louise to Pocket-Sized Rudy: "Jeez, Rudy, quit sneaking up on people. Wear a bell."

* Louise: "Hey, Mr. Frond! Why did the chicken cross the road?... So he would be in a different school district where there's a different guidance counselor!" Bob: "Louise... don't say that... here."

* The flirtatious, Margaret Dumont-voiced museum director (Brooke Dillman): "Your skin should be its own exhibit." The equally captivated Mr. Frond (David Herman): "Well, your hair should be sent to an Asian wig factory."

(Photo source: American Dad Wikia)

"Lost in Space," American Dad's epic-looking 150th episode and the first to not feature either Stan or Francine, proves that the show is the best of the Fuzzy Door cartoons at handling pathos, in addition to being the company's funniest and strangest show. The episode pulls off the once-thought-to-be-impossible feat of making me give a shit about Jeff (Jeff Fischer), Hayley's dim-witted and not-very-interesting stoner husband. He's the focus of "Lost in Space," which checks up on Jeff's life as a space slave, after Roger, who's been having too much fun scamming the people of Earth with his various schemes, sent Jeff away by shoving him into the alien mothership that was supposed to take Roger back to the birth planet he no longer considers home.

Anybody who's ever dreaded shopping mall work will enjoy how the aliens' idea of slave labor is not to have Jeff push a giant wheel of pain but to have him work the counter at a Shawarma Hut in an alien shopping mall within the ship. The next time we see the Rura Penthe prison planet in one of Bad Robot's Star Trek movies, there ought to be a shot of a prisoner groaning in agony because the Orange Julius blender he's been put in charge of has started to break down.

Jeff pushes for his freedom by submitting himself to a test presided by Emperor Zing (Michael McKean). The test is to see if Jeff's love for Hayley is genuine, and if he passes it, the aliens must return him to Hayley. If he fails, he won't be freed, and Jeff will have to be subjected to what all the other male slaves on the ship (including an Andorian from Star Trek) have experienced: a "smoothening." In other words, his dick will be snipped off and kept in a fish tank. Sinbad (voiced by none other than Sinbad himself), Jeff's Shawarma Hut co-worker, as well as the only other human slave, unbuttons his pants to show the results of the smoothening, and the sight gag reminds me of the controversial intro NBC deleted from the series premiere of The Richard Pryor Show.

I'm not big on hippie bands--"Wait a minute, what about your De La Soul drawing that you use as your Twitter wallpaper?," you might ask, and then I'll say, "Yo, De La's not a hippie band, you possibly Republican dumb fuck who hasn't listened to a rap record since Young MC's 'Bust a Move'"--but I like the original score that Wax Fang provided for this episode. The smaller-scale and sometimes dreamy-sounding cues the band wrote and performed are a huge departure from the orchestral sounds of regular composer Joel McNeely and are quite effective in establishing the alien feel of both the ship and the episode (along with the imaginative character designs for the ship's various alien species).

Wax Fang's offbeat 2007 ballad "Majestic" fuels the highlight of "Lost in Space": the visually stunning, Defending Your Life-esque sequence where a singing alien official called the Summoner gets the Majestic, the giant creature in a pit that probes the test subjects' minds and displays their memories, to plug its tentacles into Jeff's mind, and the Majestic shows the other aliens Jeff's worst and laziest moments as a boyfriend and husband to Hayley (like when a mugger held him and Hayley up at gunpoint, and he left Hayley alone with the mugger). A frequent gag on these Fuzzy Door shows is to have a teenage or adult character erupt into tears and run away from the room while regressing into a four-year-old (a gag that's reprised here with a drunk alien who fails to pick up a female bartender). But when Jeff tears up from watching on the Summoner's big screen how much of a dick he was to Hayley, "Lost in Space" doesn't play his sadness and regret for laughs, and the Wax Fang song builds up pathos more effectively than the strained, All in the Family-style attempts to be serious during another similarly risky and equally quasi-dramatic 150th episode of a Fuzzy Door cartoon, Family Guy's "Brian & Stewie."

Of course, the test is rigged every time by Zing, who's been ordering the Majestic to project only the slaves' least flattering moments and not their better moments. The emperor is so bitter from being two-timed by his own true love--who turns out to have been Roger, which explains why he switched places with Jeff at the last second back on Earth--that he's been taking it out on his slaves and "waging a war against love." Sending Jeff away to a slave ship and having him fight Zing and his minions to get back home to Hayley both force Jeff to step up as a grown-up. The change in scenery does wonders for this previously inconsequential and one-joke character, although he still doesn't think through some of his actions (I chuckled over Jeff forgetting to tie his rope to an anchor before plunging into the pit to reason with the Majestic on his own).

But the MVP of "Lost in Space" is Sinbad, who's been poking fun at his own stalled acting career ever since his guest appearance with singer Rob Thomas on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and continues to do so here--to genuinely funny results--in this episode, which posits that the former Different World star disappeared from the Hollywood radar because these aliens captured him. So if Katt Williams' 15 headline-making, store employee-abusing minutes should someday be over and he suddenly drops out of the public eye, he probably wound up manning the counter at Zing's Shawarma Hut.

Memorable quotes:
* Sinbad, regarding the shape-shifting alien bartender voiced by frequent American Dad guest star Paget Brewster: "She's hornier than Kadeem Hardison. I'm talking when his glasses were flipped up."

* Jeff to the shape-shifter, who's taken the form of Hayley: "You look like her, but you're not her. I mean, I didn't learn to read for you or stop eating my scabs for you or start to pee sitting down so I wouldn't wake you up!"

* Sinbad's last words (in corporeal form): "Jeff, when you get to Earth, do me this one last solid... Clear my... Internet browser history."


For most of its running time, "Pug Lord," the latest Animation Domination High Def short, is hilarious only if you're either a 14-year-old, a grown person who thinks the tough-talking pug from outer space is the funniest thing about the Men in Black movies (it isn't) or a gangster genre fan who worships Scarface (Carlito's Way is better). The short doesn't really take off until it reveals that the doggie drug lord is actually an undercover cat who's tired of his drug lord cover, by far the most amusing part of "Pug Lord."

The only other noteworthy bit about "Pug Lord" is the pug character design created by pug-obsessed British cartoonist Gemma Correll. The following cartoon by Correll would make for an even funnier animated short than "Pug Lord."


This week, the Rug Burn Channel's Dogsnack, the continuing saga of a gassy man and his farts' tendency to either injure him and his dog or kill them both, doesn't get interesting until it switches to live-action. The hands of Dogsnack creators Lynn Wang (is that her voicing the dog earlier in "Fruit Snack"?) and Ed Skudder start to perform fart and vomit gags with fruits (the fake outtake of Skudder taking his anger out on the fruits after a scene goes wrong is a nice closing gag). It's a very Mr. Bill-like moment.

Speaking of Mr. Bill, I kind of miss seeing the accident-prone castrato turn up in advertising. I learned from his (and Mr. Bill creator Walter Williams') official site that he appeared in a dream sequence on Medium a few years ago, with Patricia Arquette playing the part of Mr. Hands. Mr. Bill should have really done his homework and should have been made aware of how a badly bloodied Arquette took down James Gandolfini with a corkscrew, a toilet lid, a porcelain bust of Elvis, a makeshift flamethrower and a shotgun in True Romance before agreeing to share the screen with her.

(Photo source: Corbis)

Starting next week, AFOS brings the daytime to the nighttime. "AFOS Daytime in the Nighttime" will stream a different weekday AFOS block ("Beat Box,""The Whitest Block Ever," and "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round") at 9pm from Monday to Wednesday.

"Beat Box" consists of selections from old scores with funk, synth or jazz sounds that have been sampled by beatmakers, plus cuts from more recentscores with funk, synth or hip-hop sounds. Beatmakers, get ideas for future samples during "Beat Box."

"The Whitest Block Ever" is a block of original themes or score cues from films made by filmmakers of color who have directed projects I like (and the occasional dog or two), including Justin Lin, Jessica Yu, Spike Lee and Robert Rodriguez.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" consists of original score cues from animated shows and movies, whether cel-animated or in CG. I'm not really into metal, but I like what Vernon Reid and Rodrigo y Gabriela have done with the genre, and I'm also cool with the metal score music Stephen Barton wrote for Titmouse's short-lived, too-badass-for-Disney Motorcity. I wish Barton released his cues from that show. They'd be perfect for "Brokedown."

Then on Thursday in the same slot at 9 (as well as earlier that day at noon), "AFOS Vault" will stream old one-hour shows from the AFOS vault that were never streamed before in stereo.

Studio Paradiso in San Francisco

The only episodes of AFOS: The Series I actually like and can bear listening to snippets of are the ones I recorded in a professional studio. I'm not so big on the rest of them. But back when I had a steady income, which was three centuries ago, I was able to afford to record a few of those shows in an actual studio, and I'm honored to have done so in the same San Francisco studio where Kid Koala and the band Dengue Fever cut some records. Thosethreeepisodes that don't make me cringe--along with the 007-centric "Dance Into the Fire," the final episode, which I occasionally get asked by listeners to stream again--will be streamed in the "AFOS Vault" slot.

Pow! She just shit her pants!

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. "5-Piece" has been posted for 54 consecutive weeks--a.k.a. one year and two weeks--since May 11, 2012. I need a goddamn break. "5-Piece" returns on June 5 with a discussion of the first new episode of The Venture Bros. in 47 years.

Goofy-looking rotoscoping of Michael Jackson footage and a polite, purple-skinned baby who speaks in full sentences with a Julia Child-like falsetto are the highlights of "Just Me and You Now, Bud," another enjoyably surreal installment of Apollo Gauntlet. When animator Myles Langlois first streamed Apollo Gauntlet on his own, a few years before the Rug Burn Channel picked up the show to stream it exclusively, someone wrote, "If they were ever to make this into a live-action film, I'm going to suggest Will Forte take the lead." Apollo has the bullheadedness--and pornstache--of a typical Forte character, combined with a "What Up with That?"-style habit of interrupting people, especially his enemies, with rapping and dancing.

For Apollo's big "If I put my golden boot in your ass" dance number, "Just Me and You Now, Bud" recycles Apollo's dance moves from "Belenus Blade"--just as how Filmation used to always recycle footage to cut costs--but this time, the episode cops a few classic Michael Jackson moves, including the late Jackson's still-dope-ass anti-gravity lean from the "Smooth Criminal" segment of Moonwalker. That's not all that "Just Me and You Now, Bud" cops. The character design for the purple baby who agrees to help the Princess free herself from her cell appears to be lifted from the Dancing Baby. The voice Langlois chose for what's clearly a man in a baby's body is unsurprisingly strange--and amusing. The man-baby sounds more like the French Chef than Baby Herman. I keep expecting him to start giving the Princess tips about how to prepare a soufflé.


"The Unnatural," the Bob's Burgers third-season finale, caps off one of the most consistently funny seasons of any show--animated or live-action--in typically strong and endlessly quotable fashion. Gene dabbles in a sport he has no understanding of, while Tina gets addicted to espresso and can't bear to give it up. These two storylines are kind of standard-issue for a sitcom, but when Bob's Burgers gets its inventive, "Electric Boogie"-covering hands on them, these storylines soar.

Tina's storyline hits the same comedic beats as other "kid gets hooked on a drink she's too young for" storylines (I'm having flashbacks to Maggie Simpson going buckwild after tasting coffee ice cream). But then Bob's Burgers diverges from the other shows by intertwining her storyline quite smoothly with Gene's A-story (Tina has to go through caffeine withdrawal after Linda pawns the restaurant's new espresso machine to pay for Gene's overpriced baseball camp) and then tossing in a funny Trainspotting shout-out when Tina copes with withdrawal. (According to the comments section below the Movieclips excerpt of Renton's withdrawal hallucinations from Trainspotting, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magicreferenced the same Trainspotting nightmare scene as well. Sure, that's cool, and yeah, that Trainspotting gag is proof that Friendship Is Magic ain't your mommy's My Little Pony, but that's still not going to make me want to watch more of that cartoon. Sorry, Bronies, I'm still not feeling it.)

I'm glad to hear Rob Huebel return as a guest voice actor, even though it's as the "Dr. Yap" scam artist formerly known as "the Prince of Persuasia," the seduction guru Yap sought advice from, instead of his other Bob's Burgers role, as the Family Fracas producer who kept trying to make out with his show's male host a few weeks ago. Now known as the "Deuce of Diamonds," Huebel's con man character has been scamming wanna-be Little Leaguers and their parents out of their cash by running a half-assed baseball camp full of no actual baseballs and lots of amusingly ill-informed advice about the game ("A famous baseball player whose name I can't remember right now had Lou Gehrig's Disease and he didn't let it slow him down"). When Mr. Manoogian (Jason Mantzoukas, reprising his thick foreign accent from his role on Enlightened), the manager of the motel where the Deuce currently lives, threatens to throw him out on the street for not paying him back $1100, the Deuce tricks the kids into thinking he's taking them on a road trip and makes them act as his hired muscle at the motel ("We're just gonna take some swings... at your soda machine").

I enjoy seeing Bob's pragmatic approach to parenting (he doesn't think Gene is cut out for baseball and would rather have him quit, and he can see through the Deuce's scam) bump up against Linda's optimism (she believes Gene has lots of potential in the sport, and she keeps thinking the Deuce is a legit coach), especially when it leads to a hilarious scene where Bob and Linda argue like an umpire and a manager over Gene's hit in the climactic game, a great example of the overlapping dialogue that distinguishes Bob's Burgers from the rest of the Fox "Animation Domination" lineup. "Ah, you're such a dick, Bob," grumbles Linda to her husband, whose unwillingness to root for Gene and the fact that the kid's baseball skills don't really improve overnight both make "The Unnatural" a cut above the overdone "bumbling kid athlete succeeds at the right moment in the game" story.

Other memorable quotes:
* "I love baseball: the pizza parties, the spiky shoes, the parade at the end of the season where we ride on a float." And later: "I'm gonna have a killer fastball and a magnificent perm!" Yup, Gene bats for the other team. He just doesn't know it yet.

* Teddy, refusing Bob's offer of a cup of espresso: "I don't like those tiny cups! They make it look like I have giant hands!"

* Louise, overhearing Bob's opinion that Gene's thought-to-be-permanent abandonment of baseball has a quiet dignity: "Quiet dignity? Have you met us?!"

* An overcaffeinated Tina rattles off Burger of the Day ideas: "Woulda Coulda Gouda. You Gouda Be Kidding Me. As Gouda as It Gets. Gouda Gouda Gumdrops. A Few Gouda Men. Gouda Gouda Two Shoes, comes with shoes. Gouda Day, Sir..."

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

* The Deuce to the kids: "Okay, any questions so far? About anything at all? Girls, boys, life, money, inkjet printer repair?"

* Andy, recognizing the Deuce's motel: "Hey, this is where our dad goes for his naps."

* The Deuce, encouraging the kids to damage Mr. Manoogian's soda machine: "Babe Ruth used to beat the crap out of a root beer machine. Now look at him."

* "Soda, you made me fat, but you also made me strong!"

* Ollie, defending the Deuce: "He's gifted; he said so." Andy: "He's gonna do a TED Talk."

* Gene, regarding the Deuce: "He gave us his magic and then he disappeared. Just like Toad the Wet Sprocket."


"Da Flippity Flop," American Dad's eighth-season finale, encompasses everything I like about American Dad (offbeat gags like the hilarious cutaway from Steve's accidental phone conversation with a mute Dame Judi Dench to a live-action clip of a puzzled-looking Dench on her phone from Notes on a Scandal) and everything I hate about Fuzzy Door cartoons, whether it's American Dad or Family Guy (the lazily written "oh, those Asians and the funny way they talk" jokes). Sure, it's perfectly in character for a dickish con artist like Roger to slip into an offensive persona like a pidgin English-speaking Chinese restaurant owner, but it's fucking 2013. Network TV is still laughing at the way Chinese folks who weren't raised in America pronounce "bicycle"?

The A-story about Klaus' plot to steal Stan's body (and trap Stan in the goldfish body he's been forced to inhabit since the '80s) isn't as marred by wack racial shtick. The best part of the A-story is writer Matt Weitzman's decision to have Hayley and Francine immediately notice Klaus has taken over Stan's body when Klaus and Stan return home from the CIA lab. It's a great way for "Da Flippity Flop" to skip all the "everyone's so dumb and unaware about the body switch" hijinks that are typical of the body-switching genre. Stan inhabits two different bodies other than his own during "Da Flippity Flop," but that's nothing compared to the gold standard of the body-switching genre: Farscape's 2000 "Out of Their Minds" episode, where everyone in the cast--whether human or Jim Henson's Creature Shop alien puppet--swaps each other's bodies several times. Stream that awesome Farscape ep if you ever get the chance.

Memorable quotes:
* "You've got it made in that bowl. All you gotta do is float around all day, eat and poo wherever you want. Your whole life is like the last 20 years of Orson Welles' life."

* "I don't want to hear it anymore, Francine. The only thing I want to hear right now is the sweet sound of this Nickelback CD... cracking as I drive over it repeatedly."

(Photo source: Jamie Iglehart)

* "Sheesh, if it were only that easy to shut him up after seeing The Help. I get it, Stan, you want a black maid."

* Klaus, regarding his previous human body: "Now it's all gross and decomposed. It looks like Cameron Diaz without her Cameron Diaz mask."

(Photo source: here you leave today)

If the late Russ Meyer directed a Cartoon Network Adventure Time short, it would look a little like "Shh!," whose special guest talent is not someone like Meyer but veteran Nelvanaanimator Graham Falk, who storyboarded and co-wrote the episode. The primary gimmick of "Shh!" is Finn and Jake's muteness for almost the entire episode, because they're playing a day-long game in which they've chosen to communicate only through pen and paper, which results in amusing sight gags like Finn realizing he didn't write enough signs to reply to Jake and the fact that his signs are all compliments to Jake. But that's not what's so Meyer-esque about "Shh!"

The Meyer-esque element of "Shh!" is the bevy of blue- or turquoise-skinned bikini babes BMO invited to the Tree Fort for a dance party, which BMO accidentally delays when he mistakes Finn and Jake's game as an attack by evil apparitions whom he thinks have stolen their bodies, so he hides in the Tree Fort's walls. There are tons of charming visual touches during this short that's driven by visuals and contains minimal dialogue, from the shout-outs to old-timey cartoon mice designs when Jake slips behind the Tree Fort's walls to search for BMO (Jake runs into a single mom mouse and her kids and a tormented writer who writes nothing but--what else?--signs), to, of course, the bikini babes themselves. The best part of these hot characters is the way that Falk and the other writers give the babes some personality (and diversity) despite their minimal dialogue (peep the babe who rattles a pair of maracas--the musical kind, not her own), particularly when they beat up Finn and Jake in the climax.

BMO's favorite song is "No Wonder I" by LAKE, an Olympia, Washington band that features Ashley Eriksson, who sang the Adventure Time end title theme that surfaces only during the iTunes and VOD versions of the show. LAKE happened to release "No Wonder I" online right when "Shh!" first aired. The drum and bass remix that's crafted out of "No Wonder I" for the climactic melee (and layered with Adventure Time's customary 8-bit bloops and chimes) is a great musical touch by the show's scoring department.


"Shh!," which is dedicated to series storyboarder Armen Mirzaian, who died in a car accident in February, is nothing more than eye candy, but it's cleverly written eye candy.

(Photo source: Graham Falk)

(Photo source: Falk)

(Photo source: Falk)

(Photo source: Falk)

(Photo source: Falk)

(Photo source: Falk)

(Photo source: Falk)

(Photo source: Falk)

(Photo source: Falk)

Executioner, the new Rug Burn Channel show starring Brian Posehn as the voice of a medieval headsman who's trying to adjust to modern-day life after an evil spell trapped him in the present, looked really shaky for the first couple of episodes. Look, I like gory decapitation gags like everyone else. Decapitation gags are why America loved watching Touched by an Angel for nine seasons. But they're not so amusing when there's no wit to their, um, execution or there's no genuinely funny situations or characters to surround them with like on Metalocalypse. However, that seems to be changing in "Ye Olde Dead Computer."

I haven't had a lousy experience at an Apple Store ever since I started using a MacBook in addition to a PC (in fact, I love how their employees ring up your purchases with just their iPhones), but I can see why those stores--or rather, most of the people inside those stores--would come off as annoying to Beavis and Butt-head writers and Executioner creators Greg Grabianski and Andy Rheingold, who seem to be PC people (maybe I'm wrong about the computers Grabianski and Rheingold prefer). "Ye Olde Dead Computer," which has the Executioner causing a bloody scene at an Apple Store while trying to get his office laptop repaired, is the first Executioner episode to show some promise with this ultraviolent fish-out-of-water concept. Or maybe it's because I just enjoy the sight of a hipster in a scarf over a V-neck T-shirt getting his head lopped off.

(Photo source: JJA)

This Sunday, Netflix will finally unveil--all at once--15 new episodes of Arrested Development, the hilarious cult favorite that aired from 2003 to 2006 on Fox. These new episodes will be available exclusively at the streaming video service. Ever since I posted in 2010 my attempt to make Arrested Development-style frozen bananas, I've seen some Arrested Development fans on Pinterest and Twitter link to my post. If you're having an Arrested Development season four viewing party, try the following frozen banana recipe I'm reposting, and if the results are as disastrous as Gob's racist ventriloquist act, then try again just like I did (it took me a couple of tries to get the frozen bananas right).

(Photo source: Balboa Observer-Picayune)

I learned a lot from watching Arrested Development, like the importance of always leaving a note, the existence of a dessert known as a frozen banana (which, in the show's universe, was created by a Korean banana stand owner and known as "Cold Banana in Delicious Brown Taste" before the Bluths stole the idea from him) and George Bluth Sr.'s adage that "there's always money in the banana stand." I had never heard of a frozen banana before Bluth's Original Frozen Banana Stand (a.k.a. "the Big Yellow Joint," the subject of Arrested Development composer David Schwartz's amusing fake '70s stoner anthem "Big Yellow Joint"). I thought a frozen banana was Asian American slang for a McCain-supporting Asian guy who lives under the Uncle Ruckus-style delusion that he's as white as Edward from Twilight while suffering from hypothermia.

I didn't realize a frozen banana is a banana covered in chocolate until when I became curious about fictional foods that were integral to episodes of sitcoms like 30 Rock, The Boondocks and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which gave us "milksteak" and "the grilled Charlie"), and I stumbled upon online recipes for the not-so-fictional dessert.

Yeah, it kind of looks like a chocolate-covered dick, and when peanuts are added to the coating, it starts to resemble poop on a stick, but it's also a delicious snack that's alright for any season. It's essentially a banana Popsicle in a chocolate coating.

Bananarchy (Photo source: A.V. Club)

In 2009, a couple of Arrested Development fans in Austin opened their own Bluth-style banana stand called Bananarchy and offered toppings like cinnamon and coconut. They even named an item after Will Arnett's breakout character. "The Gob" is two bananas double-dipped in chocolate and covered in peanuts.

Arrested Development narrator/co-executive producer Ron Howard and Terry Crews, a guest star during AD's new season, both help Netflix promote the show's return at an actual Bluth's banana stand opened by Netflix in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, I attempted a few times to make for myself a frozen banana because I always wanted to re-create a snack that came from a show I admire (and occasionally revisit on DVD). I failed the first time with the chocolate coating, which is the trickiest component to master while making this otherwise simple snack. The coating shouldn't be Oreo cookie-esque, which was how my coating turned out the first time I made the dessert. It should be as smooth as Tobias Fünke's shiny blue pate:

Ingredients
1 ripe and peeled banana
1 cup (6 oz.) of Nestle Toll House Milk Chocolate Morsels
1 tbsp. vegetable shortening
1 Popsicle stick

(Photo source: JJA)

1. Unpeel a banana. Cut an inch off one end of the banana. Push a Popsicle stick into that end of the banana.

2. Put the banana in a Ziploc bag and freeze it overnight.

3. The next day, place the chocolate morsels and the vegetable shortening together in an uncovered microwave-safe bowl. The shortening will thin out the chocolate and make it easier to work with. Heat the bowl on medium-high (70%) power for one minute. If there are still some morsel shapes in the melted chocolate, heat it again for a few more seconds. Stir.

4. Unroll a sheet of wax paper and pour the melted chocolate onto the sheet. Take the banana out of the freezer. If there are ice crystals on the banana, scrape them off. Roll the banana around in the chocolate until it's completely coated in it.

(Photo source: JJA)

(Photo source: JJA)

5. Seal the chocolate-covered banana in an airtight container and place it in the freezer. Keep the banana inside the freezer overnight or longer or until you're secure enough in your sexuality to stick a chocolate penis in your mouth.

"The Whitest Block Ever," a new AFOS block that I added to the station schedule as a way to mark Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (the block will remain on the schedule after May), is actually made up of five different one-hour playlists (and hopefully six, if Live365 hard drive space will allow it, and perhaps with an original track from Furious 6). All five playlists contain original themes and score cues from films done by Asian American directors and other filmmakers of color who have worked on films or TV series episodes I've dug or admired. "The Whitest Block Ever" airs every weekday at 10am-noon on AFOS.

Last week, I finished assembling the fifth playlist, a.k.a. "TheWhitestBlockEver05" (all the tracks in "TheWhitestBlockEver05" are streamed only during the "Whitest Block Ever" block and nowhere else on the station schedule, in order to reduce repetition). I enjoyed reading the replies Edgar Wright and "Whitest Block Ever" playlist fixture Robert Rodriguez gave to Empire magazine about their favorite score cues or soundtrack albums in the magazine's soundtrack tribute issue, so in a fashion similar to what Wright and Rodriguez did for Empire, here are descriptions of each of the 13 tracks in "TheWhitestBlockEver05."

1. Elmer Bernstein, "Prologue" (from Hoodlum)
Man, Bernstein could do it all: from slapstick vehicles for SNL alums like Trading Places and Ghostbusters to Harlem period pieces like the Bill Duke films A Rage in Harlem and Hoodlum. The ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument that Bernstein utilized most memorably in his Ghostbusters score and can easily be mistaken for a theremin, pops up in "Prologue" too and was used to great effect to represent an era of Harlem gone by.

2. Keisa Brown, "Five on the Black Hand Side" (from Five on the Black Hand Side)
I've seen only bits and pieces of this 1973 film, which has an enjoyable opening theme penned by legendary Capitol Records soul arranger H.B. Barnum and an equally enjoyable shot-on-a-shoestring trailer. The marketing for Five on the Black Hand Side brashly asserted that the film, an adaptation of a comedic stage play about the clash between Afrocentricism and black conservatives, was an alternative to the violent blaxploitation fare that was popular at the time of the film's release. "You've been Coffy-tized, Blacula-rized and Superfly-ed. You've been Mack-ed, Hammer-ed, Slaughter-ed and Shaft-ed. Now we wanna turn you on to some brand new jive," proclaims Fun Loving (Tchaka Almoravids) in the trailer. "You're gonna be glorified, unified and filled with pride when you see Five on the Black Hand Side."



3. Kid 'N Play, "Kid vs. Play (The Battle)" (from House Party)
I wish the Obama/Romney and Biden/Ryan debates were more like the freestyle battle scenes in 8 Mile and House Party.



4. Mader, "Rhumba (End Credits)" (from The Wedding Banquet)
Gentle-humored comedies about generational discord within families (or survival dramas about orphans who find unlikely surrogate families in the form of tigers) are where Taiwanese-born Ang Lee, this year's Best Director Oscar winner for Life of Pi, works best, not action material that calls for a nimbler touch from someone like Tsui Hark or Joss Whedon, like Lee's 2003 misfire Hulk. (As Stop Smiling said in its amusing evisceration of the two pre-Mark Ruffalo Hulk movies, "Lee shouldn’t do pop; his attempts to 'enliven' the material and make it more like a comic book with screen panels and visible page breaks was the cinematic equivalent of Karl Rove dancing.") Over a decade before he won his first Oscar for directing Brokeback Mountain, Lee tackled LGBT characters in The Wedding Banquet, a standout piece of Asian American indie cinema about Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), a Taiwanese American landlord who, with the prodding of his boyfriend Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), marries Wei-Wei (May Chin), a struggling Chinese artist, to enable her to get a green card and to satisfy his traditionalist parents from Taiwan. I feel like The Wedding Banquet has kind of been overlooked during this Brokeback/Life of Pi period of Lee's career, despite having been the most profitable film of 1993, even more so than Jurassic Park (it also went on to spawn a stage musical version in 2003). On paper, The Wedding Banquet reads like a shitty sitcom. But the film is far from being such a thing, thanks to Lee's thoughtful and low-key direction, which is aided by French-born composer Mader's equally low-key score, a mishmash of Chinese and Latin sounds that (spoilers!) mirrors how the future child of Wai-Tung, Simon and Wei-Wei will grow up to be a mishmash of various cultural influences.


5. Melba Moore, "Black Enough" (from Cotton Comes to Harlem)
I had no idea Galt MacDermot, one of the most frequently sampled composers in hip-hop, scored Cotton Comes to Harlem until recently. I've seen the Ossie Davis-directed adaptation of the Chester Himes novel of the same name two or three times, but that was before I became interested in finding out where beatmakers copped so many of their illest samples from (it's also kind of hard to notice MacDermot's musical trademarks during Cotton Comes to Harlem when all your 19-year-old self can think about is the film's T&A, like Judy Pace's T&A when she ducks out of being kept under watch by a dumb white cop by craftily tricking him into bed without sleeping with him). One of my favorite MacDermot samples takes place during 9th Wonder & Buckshot's "Shinin' Y'all," which loops "Sunlight Shining," a tune that happens to come from Cotton Comes to Harlem. I'd like to see some beathead make use of another Cotton Comes to Harlem joint, "Black Enough," the film's opening theme, which, like "Sunlight Shining," is filled with soothing strings and classic MacDermot beats.






6. Michael Jackson, "On the Line" (from Get on the Bus)
It's been a few years since I watched Spike Lee's Million Man March-themed Get on the Bus, so I forgot that Michael Jackson sung the film's opening title theme, which contains lyrics about overcoming self-hatred that bring to mind the Five on the Black Hand Side theme (and the Jackson theme was produced by Babyface too!). "On the Line" is, along with "Butterflies" and maybe the Teddy Riley-produced "Remember the Time," one of the few tunes from Jackson's post-Bad, extremely treacly "won't someone think of the children?" era that I actually like. The fact that "On the Line" is--like Everybody Loves Raymond used to say at the start of each episode--not really about the kids also helps.

7. New Human Formantics, "I'm Just a Human" (from Fear of a Black Hat)
In the 1993 mockumentary Fear of a Black Hat, future Chappelle's Show director Rusty Cundieff poked fun at the excesses of gangsta rap, as well as hood flicks and various early '90s R&B trends. The funniest of Fear of a Black Hat's fake tunes has to be ex-N.W.H. member Tone Def's solo effort "I'm Just a Human," a spoof of the New Age rap duo P.M. Dawn's 1991 hit "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" (that's Mark Christopher Lawrence, a.k.a. Big Mike from Chuck, as Tone Def, espousing his Stephen Colbert-style "I don't see color" philosophy to the interviewer character played by future Talk to Me director Kasi Lemmons). A plea for racial tolerance ("You are just like me/I'm just a human") morphs into one of the most delightfully disgusting songs ever written ("'Cause black, white, yellow, red, brown or gold/Our shit all comes from the same little hole"). And as a bonus, the album version of "I'm Just a Human" gets even more delightfully disgusting ("Sometimes I smell the lint from my belly button/How could something so small make a stench so rotten?").



8. The Rays, "Be Alone Tonight" (from School Daze)
Though I'm a Spike Lee fan, I still haven't seen School Daze. But I'm familiar with Tisha Campbell's "Be Alone Tonight" and a couple other School Daze songs due to the airplay they received on music video channels back in 1988. Tisha sure can saaang.



9. Robert Rodriguez, "The Grindhouse Blues" (from Planet Terror)
Here's a YouTube comment on "The Grindhouse Blues," a source cue during a restaurant conversation in Planet Terror between ex-lovers El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) and Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan): "Thats baby makin music, thats what that is!" I don't care for that guy's inability to apostrophize, but I agree.

10. Robert Rodriguez & Graeme Revell, "Marv" (from Sin City)
I've lost my appetite for any of Frank Miller's works ever since he went all Islamophobic, but I still like the atmospheric score Rodriguez co-wrote with Revell and John Debney for the first Sin City film he co-directed with Miller.

11. Rose Royce, "I Wanna Get Next to You" (from Car Wash)
I find it interesting that the first film in each of New Line Cinema's two big pothead comedy franchises, Friday and Harold & Kumar, needle-dropped the classic Car Wash love theme as music for the love interest of the film's romantic lead (in Friday, the love interest was Nia Long, while in the case of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, a bag of weedPaula Garces was the love interest). I'm glad both Friday and the first Harold & Kumar opted for "I Wanna Get Next to You" and not "You Remind Me of Something" ("You remind me of my Jeep...").


12. Tito & Tarantula, "White Train (Showdown)" (from Desperado)
There's an interesting tidbit about the Desperado shootout sequence that features the rousing "White Train (Showdown)." One of Antonio Banderas' backup gunmen is played by Carlos Gallardo, who starred in the Banderas role of El Mariachi in the 1992 film of the same name, so the sequence is basically a team-up of both old and new Mariachis, snuffing out hijos de putas side-by-side.

(Photo source: Da'VeonTheDon)

13. Dr. Dre, "Keep Their Heads Ringin'" (from Friday)
Almost forgot about Dre. Written for the endlessly quotable Friday, "Keep Their Heads Ringin'" was a huge hit for Dre in the '90s, in addition to being a really solid commercial rap track. During then-music video director F. Gary Gray's breakout feature film, the tune turns up as a source cue in the scene where a crackhead attempts to scam a liquor store out of cash by pretending to have slipped and fallen. I would rather have had two or three Friday movies with Chris Tucker and Ice Cube instead of three Rush Hours with Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. Tucker didn't want to reprise his breakout role as Smokey when New Line wanted to move forward with Next Friday (IMDb claims it was because Tucker had become a born-again Christian and started to view the material in Friday as objectionable, while Tucker himself claims he turned down the sequel because he preferred Money Talks over Next Friday as his starring-role follow-up to the first Friday). It's a shame because Tucker was at his funniest as Smokey, while the Rush Hour franchise is pretty goddamn deplorable (I explain why here, while Yo, Is This Racist? host Andrew Ti gives basically the same explanation as I did here, although he's a little kinder to Rush Hour than I am). Something that's not as deplorable is rapper Rocky Rivera and DJ Roza's 2011 Friday Mixtape, which cops soundbites from the first Friday and occasionally has Rivera quoting Smokey. According to my iTunes playlists, I've bumped The Friday Mixtape 27 times on my MacBook. I guess I love hearing ladies quote Friday.