Robot Chicken has been satirizing popular culture with tremendous success since its debut on Cartoon Network’s [adult swim] in 2005. The brainchild of executive producers Seth Green and Matthew Senreich, the show has skewered all manner of films, television series, and celebrities.

Their most successful outing was the [[[Star Wars]]] Special, first aired in June 2007. The wild success in terms of ratings, critical commentary, and DVD sales meant a sequel was inevitable. The [[[Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II]]] special aired last November and was recently released on DVD by Warner Home Video. It was also nominated for a 2009 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour).

Amazingly, the 22-minute special has been expanded and extended so the disc is filled with 93 minutes of material. You have the original broadcast version, plus the 38 minute extended versions and then 33 minutes of extras.  That’s pretty impressive.

The special is also pretty damned funny. The short sketches plays with most of the six films, mainly [[[A New Hope]]] although the AT-AT race is inspired from [[[The Empire Strikes Back]]]. All you favorite characters are represented with original performers Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams and Ahmed Best reprising their film roles. As a result, it sounds and feels right.

Highlights include a Stormtrooper bringing his daughter to work and involving her in the fight with the rebels at the opening of the fourth film. The Geico commercials having people interpret real life incidents gets a once over with Jar-Jar Binks, in his best role yet, trying to help a woman. Throughout the special, there are great sight gags and one-liners. Obviously, not every joke or sketch is brilliant, but they never fail to amuse.

Clearly, the extended version gives you more to enjoy and plays better than the truncated broadcast edition. The tons of extras show you how the stories were conceived, from Green acting out a sketch for the animators, to a look at the production designs and set construction. A feature on the stop-motion process shows how much time goes into shooting these figures and gives you new appreciation for the art form.

A short shows the cast and crew trekking to Skywalker Ranch, now in the Presidio, to screen the finished show for the staff, including George Lucas, who at least gets the joke. Another short features the 501st Legion presenting awards to Green and Senreich.

Finally, there’s a ton of commentary, as amusing as the shorts themselves, from a ton of folk including Best, Williams, and unexpected folk such as Frank Oz.

[[[Ponyo]]] (“[[[Gake no ue no Ponyo]]]”),  an animated feature film directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
Dubbed English voices by Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina
Fey, Liam Neeson, Cloris Leachman, Betty White, Lily Tomlin, Frankie Jonas, and others.

In advance of its August 14 limited release, Hayao
Miyazaki’s latest film [[[Ponyo]]] made its East Coast debut at Symphony Space in Manhattan on Sunday, August 9, to the great delight
of those of us who have been waiting too long for a Miyazaki film, thanks to
the legal issues surrounding [[[Tales From Earthsea]]]. Free posters were given out
to several people waiting on line. and plush Ponyos were tossed into the
audience, one of which was claimed by one of my companions in an impressive
high catch.

The title character, Ponyo, is apparently the oldest and
most powerful of the many girl-faced goldfish daughters of the sea goddess Gran
Mamare and Fujimoto, a human-hating, hollow-cheeked wizard who lives
underwater. Curiosity brings Ponyo to the surface and gets her stuck inside a
jar; a 5-year-old boy named Sosuke rescues her, dumps her in a pail, and feeds
her a ham slice. These deeds are apparently enough to win Ponyo’s heart; she uses
some of her father’s magical elixirs to turn herself adorably human and show up
on Sosuke’s doorstep. Unfortunately, her act upsets a natural balance, putting
most of Sosuke’s town underwater and threatening further damage unless Ponyo
declares his love for her. Yes, you got that right. He’s five, and he’s got to
promise to love her always—whether as a sister or as a future bride, it’s not entirely
clear. How many of us have declared their eternal devotion to someone we met at
the age of five? How many of us are even still friends with someone we met at
age five? (I’m still friends with one woman I met at age seven, and that’s
really pretty impressive, I think.)

As other reviewers have mentioned, Ponyo is essentially a
riff on [[[The Little Mermaid]]], but without the singing of the Disney movie or
the walking-on-knives and rigidly Lutheran moralizing of the original story. Frankly,
some appropriately directed moralizing might have been what this story needs (over and above
the usual love nature, hate pollution message that’s present in all Miyazaki
films).

Disney produced the English-language version of Ponyo;
these are the same people who were so disturbed that the 13-year-old witch
protagonist of [[[Kiki’s Delivery Service]]] was drinking coffee, they awkwardly wrote the
English dub to indicate that she was drinking hot chocolate instead. I wouldn’t be
surprised to hear that execs had considerably more ethical qualms about this
film, but given the international box office and prestige that Miyazaki gained
in previous efforts, decided to stifle them.

(more…)

Just prior to Comic-Con International, NBM’s David Seidman sent out a note suggesting to reviewers that their just-released [[[Happy Hooligan]]] comic strip collection had been overlooked. [[[Gadzooks]]], I thought, he’s right and had them rush a copy over to be read. Having just finished the 112-page volume, I can say this early example of popular comic strip humor was undeservedly overlooked.

The better remembered characters from the comic strips have crowded the book shelves of late, from IDW’s exploding line to Fantagraphics beautiful year-by-year collections. Think of a character you grew up reading and odds are, there is a collection out there or one already announced.

But, the real pioneering strips such as Hooligan have been left behind. Under their Forever Nuts banner, NBM and Editor Jeffrey Lindenblatt seek to fix that, first with [[[Mutt & Jeff]]] and now Happy Hooligan. When a strip endures for 32 years, especially from that first era, it clearly spoke to an audience. Created by illustrator turned cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper, the strip followed a fairly strict formula but never ceased to be entertaining or inventive.

Back then, as explored in Cole Johnson’s closing essay, each strip had a gimmick and stuck with it. In this case, Hooligan, usually accompanied by his brothers, Gloomy Gus and Montmerency, saw something amiss, try to correct it and in so doing wind up causing trouble and usually being punched or jailed for his efforts.  Week after week this went on and the theme rarely varied until the strip was in its second decade. In six evenly constructed panels, Opper set things up and had them pay off in a breezy way while each panel was filled with business. Usually, Gus would see trouble coming and warn the reader, a role that was later filled his Happy’s three nephews (an idea lifted later by others, notably Carl Barks), and we never learned which brother was the father.

Opper would take his time with the strip’s stories, sending the trio of siblings to visit the world but just sailing from New York took months. In each country, Opper used cultural elements for his humor and invariably, the trouble would have him bashed and jailed as the international cast of gendarmes, cops, and other law enforcement types protected their people.

Later, Happy took on various jobs so the setting for the chaos altered but the gags rarely did.

Allan Holtz’s informative introduction gives us a look at Opper’s career and establishes why Hooligan and Opper succeeded. While producing the Sunday page, Opper through the years also wrote and drew accompanying features, totaling fourteen other strips until he put his brush down in 1932 when his eyesight failed him. During this career, he gave us a memorable character in Hooligan but also the immortal Alphonse and Gaston. It was Opper who began heavily using word balloons to convey dialogue as opposed to narrative surrounding the drawings.

Given the sameness of the strips to today’s readers, NBM wisely did not go the comprehensive route, but instead offers up a sampling of strips from 1902-1913, scanning the originals in their 2- and 4-color splendor. The book presents the strips horizontal, as intended, and the reproduction is solid. At $25, it’s a little pricey but the overall package and historic importance makes it worth a look.