October 6, 2008
Robot Chicken - Season 3
Blake Matthews READ TIME: 2 MIN.
Robot Chicken is a show on Cartoon Network that runs as part of their Adult Swim section. The show comes from the warped mind of Seth Green and others and takes action figures and animates them using stop motion. "Robot Chicken" pokes fun of pop culture, movies, music, and television nothing is off limits including movies and shows that Green himself have been part of, he's even gotten his friends to do voices.
"Robot Chicken" has finished its third season and continues to be consistently funny. Highlights of this past season include a Saw parody using the cast of "Saved By The Bell" with most of the cast reprising their roles, a skit where The Thing of the Fantastic Four and Vic Mackay of "The Shield" switching universes with Michael Chiklis doing both character voices, and plenty of "Star Wars," video game and pop culture references we've come to expect and love from the show.
The creators always pack their DVD's with extras, all 20 episodes have commentary by cast and crew and some of the episodes guest stars including Mark Hamill, Billy Dee Williams, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Kristin Chenoweth, Katee Sackhoff (Kara "Starbuck" Thrace from "Battlestar Galactica"), Hayden Panettiere, Stan Lee and more! What's incredible is that these episodes run about 12 minutes in length and they still get the guest stars to come in and do commentary.
"Chicken Nuggets" is an option that when it comes up on the screen if you select it accesses a variety of short featurettes where the creators of the show explain how something was done or why it was done a certain way.
There is a short Gag reel and VFX comparisons that show before, in-progress and after shots of some of the skits as they were being worked on.
On Disc Two there is the Studio tour where Seth Green and Matt Seinreich give an inside look at how the show is made.
Eleven video blogs show how the show is put together and cover writing, voice work, set and puppet design, animation, directing, visual effects, lighting, puppets, and the toys.
Alternate Audio has alternate takes for both the Mumm-Ra Donald Faison skit and the "Law & Order: KFC Seth Green" skit.
There's also deleted animatics and deleted scenes, the first shows skits that made it to the drawing board but never made it to the final phase, the later were skits that were cut from the show.
Finally, all the episodes are presented uncensored, allowing them to be viewed as they were intended with each curse allowed and all the nudity un-blurred. "Robot Chicken" keeps the level of quality established in its first two seasons and goes even further in its third. The fourth season is coming and it can't get here fast enough, luckily there's a second "Star Wars" special planned for November to keep us held over until that season starts.