#I guess posting seth sketches on christmas | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

adultswim2021 · 2 years

Text

Robot Chicken #15: “Midnight Snack” | May 16, 2005 – 12:00AM | S01E12

A list of sketches I didn’t particularly enjoy. Starting now:

Conan O'Brien as Randy: The Oblivious Pizza Guy. Conan, getting his own title card, voices Randy, an oblivious pizza guy who can’t take a hint that the woman he’s delivering pizza to is hot to trot. Has this joke been done before? Probably. When will we, as a society, get over the porno premise of pizza guy delivering pizza a horny housewife? Surely the sketches that mock this trope must outnumber the times this trope has been earnestly executed in porn. There needs to be a word for this: when the parody out-tropes the trope it’s parodying.

There’s a rehash of the one-sided fight fights but it’s mardi-gras style, I guess it’s a parody of GIrls Gone Wild. I struggled to remember the chronology of Girls Gone Wild as a thing, and wondered if it was new in 2005. But then they had Snoop Dogg show up, which I remembered being years post GGW’s debut. This one isn’t nearly as funny as the previous “one-sided fist fights” sketch, which if I recall correctly I awarded a “I guess this kinda funny”.

Then there’s a sketch where it’s WWE wrestling but with historical figures? Like, the Wright Brothers wrestle Ben Franklin or something. Ghandi shows up. Man, was this unfunny. This is high-school level writing here. IT ALWAYS IS!

Then there’s an Oprah sketch where she gives her audience cars, some native Americans more land, raises the dead. She asks a little girl in the audience what she wants, and she says for “daddy to stop hurting mommy”. Oprah’s eyes go big. END OF SKETCH.

I don’t usually make a point of commenting on the quick channel change bits, but they did one where a pirate has a steering wheel attached to his crotch. Because it’s “driving me nuts”. Which is literally just like, an old joke that I remember being told when I was a kid. It pissed me off seeing this! Fuck this fucking show.

Rumpelstiltskin uses a toilet. Was Rumpelstiltskin (the REAL one, not this BOGUS mockery) a big monster? I forget. Anyway, the joke is he uses a toilet in a public bathroom stall and it is huge and noisy and the guy next to him is scared. Then Rod Serling narrates it like a Twilight Zone episode. Okay.

The last sketch is 12 Angry Little People, doing 12 Angry Men but with the little people toys, which I only barely remember being a thing. Nothing in it is funny. They do a weird assortment of jokes. There’s a black guy who does an offensive black dude voice and then comments “what does every black guy on TV have to be a positive role model?”

This episode had another thing like this, the Oprah sketch, where Seth Green (who also did the voice of the black dude) voices the Native American whom Oprah grants more land. His name is like RUNNING STEREOTYPE or something? and he makes a lame joke about having a casino? Like, there seemed to be a notable amount of clumsy racial “satire” that comes out of nowhere in the middle of a sketch that otherwise has nothing to do with it. I just think it’s bad writing to do this! Those jokes might work in a different context, but they didn’t work here, that’s for sure. I truly wonder if this show just writes sketches and sends them to the production team immediately since it’ll take 9 months to animate them they just gotta get them out the door quick, so they rewrite almost nothing. I don’t respect it!

Anyway, this was a miserable time as always. Thanks

Space Ghost Coast to Coast: “A Space Ghost Christmas” | December 21, 1994 | Special

Fair warning: I’m going to spend most of this write-up discussing the very recent rabbit hole I went down looking for accurate air dates for this as well as “The Mask”.

A Space Ghost Christmas debuted around Christmas of 1994. It was an hour long special, but really it was roughly a single episode’s worth of new material wrapped around 3 repeats (Bobcat, Batmantis, and Gum, Disease). There are alternate versions of the special, which change out the episodes being repeated. According to IMDB, there’s a version that uses “Jacksonville” instead of “Batmantis”, replacing the prompt “y’know, that reminds me of the time Moltar was kidnapped” with “Moltar escaped”. Curiously, there’s a separate Library of Congress listing for a 1995 version of the special. I have no idea what episodes aired as part of it, or if the listing could possibly be a mistake (like a lot of season one Space Ghost episodes, the listings weren’t recorded until 1996). I remember watching a late 90s version but don’t remember which episodes aired part of it.

It’s worth watching the whole special as it originally aired in 1994, because there’s mild continuity. Bobcat ends with the Ramones, which leads into a Ramones-inspired sketch. The connection is lost in later editions which swap out Bobcat for another episode.

I have to brag about something: I’ve actually put together a much more complete version of the special thanks to my own recording of the Space Ghost bootleg marathon (which uses the full unedited 1994 segments), a 1995 recording that aired during the summer as part of a larger Space Ghost marathon, and the actual episodes on DVD (“Gum, Disease” came from the build-your-own DVD-R site). I’ve found slightly incomplete versions of the special which compile all the wraparound segments but don’t include some of the commercial bumpers, some of which only seemed to get used in the very first edition of the special. In that first edition, what they did was they replaced the usual “:INTERRUPT FEED” and “:START FEED” bumpers with a more Christmasy bumpers of Zorak saying weird rude stuff. Which means more modern recordings of the special was also missing these bumpers.

I have to tell you something very important. Episode guides list this episode as airing on December 25th, which it did. But it actually debuted the previous Wednesday at 10:00PM. The Library of Congress lists it as having debuted on December 23rd, which would be Friday, Space Ghost’s usual night. Again, this date wasn’t recorded until 1996, so maybe Cartoon Network just assumed it debuted on Friday that week. But I found a few newspaper listings that indicate it originally debuted on Wednesday the 21st.

Also, The episode “The Mask” which I covered a few posts ago? That has always had a November 4, 1994 air date attributed to it, but it seems that’s also inaccurate. If it did indeed debut on The Mask VHS tape then it should carry a January 19th 1995 air date. That’s when The Mask VHS hit stores.

A history lesson for those who need it: in the VHS days it was common for movies to debut on VHS in a RENTAL ONLY version, which had a high price tag due to the fact that it was being purchased almost exclusively by rental stores that could make the money back renting the tape out multiple times. A movie would eventually come out as a “sell-thru” title, meaning you could buy it for 10-20 bucks at department stores. The sell-thru version was usually a repressing of the tape and could be slightly different from it’s RENTAL-ONLY counterpart. A lot of times the rental version would have way more trailers and ads at the start of the tape, usually more time-sensitive things like promotional items you could send away for or contests you could enter or trailers advertising upcoming theatrical releases rather than for other video tapes.

AN ASIDE: I learned about this phenomenon through two movies in particular: The Chris Farley film Black Sheep‘s rental cassette included a trailer for Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy. I loved Brain Candy and I loved the trailer for it, which included a Rancid song (this mattered to me when I was a teenager, shut up!), and a bunch of snippets of scenes that didn’t appear in the movie. So when Black Sheep was priced to own at my local Target I asked for it for my birthday, literally so I could own that trailer. I got it, tore off the shrinkwrap, and was aghast to learn that the trailer wasn’t on this version of the tape.

The Mask VHS came out during Jim Carrey’s rising star, and Turner decided to release it as a sell-thru title at the outset, meaning both regular schmoes and rental stores both had access to it at a suggested retail price of $19.98. It contained a Cartoon Network cross-promotion in the way of an exclusive Space Ghost segment. By all accounts I could find, January 19th 1995 was the day The Mask dropped in stores. I’ve seen a December 1994 date for the VHS’s “print date”, but November 4th 1994 remains a mystery to me. Why has that been recorded as the air-date for all these years? I still don’t know!

MAIL BAG

In response to “The Mask” write-up where I discuss Space Ghost’s anti-drug stance:

The regression of Space Ghost as the show gradually went along will never not be great. We went from him going "drugs are bad" at Jim Carrey to him drinking tall boys and wandering around like an idiot in one of the last TV episodes.

A foolish, BOOBISH take. That episode is great. All great films (and I’m lumping in TV shows) are morality tales, no exceptions, and that episode in particular portrays Space Ghost perishing for his crimes, as he should. I hope kids were watching. I hope all the kids were watching.

#adult swim #adultswim2021 #robot chicken #space ghost coast to coast #pizza

3 notes · View notes