Reviewed by Alistair Radley
‘Robot Chicken’ is an Emmy-Award Winning American stop motion animated television series created by Seth Green and Matthew Senreich, who are the executive producers. They are also on the writing team, and have directed some episodes. Green provides many voices for the show and is a regular on other animated shows including the popular Family Guy. The normal series ran about 12 minutes per episode and this special is around twice that.
The programme is a sketch comedy that parodies a number of pop culture conventions using stop motion animation of toys, action figures, dolls, and claymation (usually for special effects) and various other objects, such as tongue depressors and The Game of Life pegs. The show’s name was inspired by a dish on the menu at a West Hollywood Chinese restaurant, Kung Pao Bistro, where Green and Senreich had dined. The opening sequence, which is the only part of the show that includes a robot chicken, opens with a mad scientist finding a road-killed chicken. He takes it back to his laboratory and refashions it into a cyborg. The mad scientist then straps it into a chair, uses specula to hold its eyes open, and forces it to watch a bank of television monitors (an allusion to A Clockwork Orange); this scene segues into the body of the show.
‘Robot Chicken: Star Wars’ is a 2007 special which features a series of sketches poking fun at the Star Wars universe – the opening sequence is adapted so that the Mad Scientist is patterned after Darth Sidious and the Robot Chicken is Darth Vader. Sidious grabs the burning chicken from the volcanic planet Mustafar and takes him to the Death Star. He uses the Force Lightning to revive the chicken and rebuilds him as Darth Vader. Sidious grabs the Vader Chicken and straps him into a chair, where the latter is forced to watch Star Wars stop motion spoofs. These include Darth Vader collect calling Emperor Palpatine to inform him of the defeat of the original Death Star; Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan accidentally dropping their lightsabers and them slicing their way down through decks below; Orientation Day on the Death Star where the Captain explains to the new recruits that Darth Vader believes he has the power to strangle them but in fact they play along with this to avoid being killed by his lightsaber; a hilarious piece about George Lucas (voiced by himself) attending a Star Wars convention; and even a ‘Yo Mamma’ fight between Luke and the Emperor.
As you would expect with a sketch programme, not everything is quite as funny as you would like and some of the references are particularly American so not all the humour is easily exported. Whets your appetite for the original series – only available on DVD – no NZ station has current plans to show it – but well worth the watch for the occasional nugget of gold. My only gripe was thinking it was longer so as a rental be prepared for the short length – nothing here is going to date so perhaps even wait for it to make it to weekly prices. 8/10