Inceasingly obsessed with the quality of humour churned out under the auspices of Adult Swim, its easy to see an evening pissed away diving back and forth between a list of its shows on Wikipedia and then hunting for them in sequence over on Youtube. The best of the Adult Swim material so far, is Robot Chicken. The brain child of Seth Green - yes, the Buffy werewolf - it's a fast witted, stop gap animation approach to the sketch show. Ripping through a whole season of Family Guy-esque pop cultural parodies in the space of ten minutes, it channel hops from demented second long visual gags and comic one liners to longer sketches that regularly spoof movies, child hood fairy tales, thrash TV and everything in between.

If you find the idea of dope smoking Tellytubbies; genocidal Care Bears; a coke smuggling Santa Claus and Chucky the knive weilding doll getting savaged by the Cabbage patch kids funny, then Robot Chicken is the place for you. It dawned on me yesterday that one could probably trace a genealogy of the core routine of detached irony on many of the Adult Swim shows back to the mashing up of popular culture in the early 1980's kids TV show Round the Bend. Its clever parodies of what passed as contempory TV and pop culture has simply been fast-forwarded to renewed relevance among those reared on the same shows it lampooned. Set in a sewer among the cast of a news show, Round the Bend entailed a similar manic blink and you'll miss it machine gun approach to its humour. I can hardly believe its actually availible on Youtube, maybe have a look and see if you notice the similarities?

Labels: Animation, Internet, Media, TV