20 years ago, at a point in time when stop-motion animation seemed to be waning, Robot Chicken came along and kept the artform a regular fixture of television, and arguably revitalized it as a popular medium for adult animation. Born out of a love of the medium, toys, pop culture, and the experience of randomly flipping channels to whatever’s on, Robot Chicken’s crude satirical sketches have produced countless memorable and memetic moments and characters. With a great format and bountiful targets to skewer and parody, Robot Chicken felt like a show that could go on forever, and rightly so, as one of Adult Swim’s longest-running staple series. Yet, somewhat quietly, the show seems to have ended. Seth Green has said the show will be moving away from producing seasons of episodes to making specials, so while technically more Robot Chicken content is in production, it is not really continuing as a television series. Adding credence to this is the recently announced “complete series” boxset, which feels like a pretty definitive statement of the show’s status. Though, if they’re making quarterly half-hour specials, then that’s not necessarily a huge drop in the yearly output of Robot Chicken content fans have received over the years, it’d just be more spread out.
Even if the show is over, however, it’s at least nice that Adult Swim has not neglected to commemorate Robot Chicken’s 20th anniversary, both with a spotlight panel during San Diego Comic Con, and new content in the form of the Self-Discovery Special. Rather than being a celebration of the show’s 20-year history, however, the Self-Discovery special is a send-up of Discovery Channel shows like Mothered, Ghost Adventures, 90 Day Fiance, Naked and Afraid, This Came Out of Me, Diners, Drivers, and Dives, Shark Week, Moonshiners, and even less specifically the general genres and tropes these shows fall into, like how many Discovery channel docuseries are set in Alaska. There isn’t any acknowledgement of the show’s 20 year milestone, and representation from the series’ iconic characters is pretty limited to just The Nerd and Bitch Pudding. The titular Robot Chicken and the Mad Scientist don’t even make any appearances. The show’s specific parodies of Batman and Catwoman do feature as well, and I do like their commitment to having Catwoman ending her sentences with “meow” and poking fun of Batman being more afraid of commitment in his relationship than being naked. The special is at its best when it uses sketches to poke fun of specific character foibles, and conversely, feels kind of dry when it goes for a more general and generic commentary on its targets.
The bulk of the special is devoted to an ongoing storyline involving The Nerd, who bounces through a few different sketches parodying various shows as he tangles with his overbearing and underclothed mother, grows a short-lived conjoined brother on his crotch whom he tries to find love for before he dies, and then goes into hiding in Alaska only to run afoul of other reality show parodies. The Nerd storyline on its own probably could’ve made for a tight 11-minute episode, but other sketches pad out the runtime for the full half-hour, which does at least provide some variety and alternative targets. Ghost Adventures, in particular, features in two sketches, one in which the hosts run afoul of Bitch Pudding trolling them, and another where they compete against the Mystery Inc. gang to uncover the ghostly mysteries behind a haunted house. The Bitch Pudding sketch was my personal favorite of all the sketches in the episode because of how persistently and elaborately she trolls them, which escalates until a big reveal and payoff in classic Bitch Pudding fashion.
Another favorite of mine was a sketch in which Guy Fieri features Gargamel on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, which plays up his enthusiasm for unique cuisine and takes it to a goofy and dark extreme when the food in question is “Smurfs.” There are also some out-there sketches that I appreciated for their weirdness, like a sketch involving a Crab-Woman getting revenge on crab fishers, an avant-garde parody of Shark Week done in the style of French New Wave films, and a sketch mashing-up Moonshiners and Sailor Moon where the Moonshiners transform into Sailor Senshi to thwart Queen Beryl.
While it’s amusing to see Robot Chicken satirize the D in WBD, it doesn’t feel quite as targeted, specific, or deep-cut in its humor as previous specials centered on Star Wars, DC Comics, The Walking Dead, and Archie. Those latter specials felt like they were written by people who really enjoyed those properties, or at least know a lot about them, and could make a wealth of jokes pulled from observations about them from a fan’s perspective. The Self-Discovery special feels much more superficial and surface-level in comparison. Granted, I don’t watch many Discovery Channel shows, but I also didn’t watch much Walking Dead or read much Archie, and I could tell there were deep pulls and very specific jokes in those specials. In contrast, there weren’t really many jokes made in this special that seemed very specific to the shows being parodied outside of their basic premises and formats, or even just playing off their titles. The main exceptions would be the Ghost Adventures sketches, which did have more heightened parodies of Zack Bagan and Eric Goodwin, a sketch featuring Big Ed in Lilliput, and the sketch featuring Guy Fieri. But a lot of the fun of these specials, in my opinion, comes in Robot Chicken’s takes on the characters of the properties they’re parodying, sometimes making them into their own distinct characters, like their versions of Palpatine and Boba Fett in the Star Wars specials. The Self-Discovery Special doesn’t do much of that, instead bringing in other pop-culture icons and plopping them into the Discovery show parodies, like Benedict Cumberbatch, Batman and Catwoman, the Mystery Inc. gang, and the Smurfs, which feels like a bit of a missed opportunity considering how many interesting Discovery Channel show personalities they could’ve chosen to skewer and parody instead.
There are a lot of great visual gags that come courtesy of Robot Chicken’s toybox aesthetic and puppet models. One of my favorite touches is in the Big Ed and Lilliput sketch, where the residents of Lilliput are modeled with simpler cone-shaped dolls in faraway shots and animated with more detailed puppets in close-up shots. There is also some great staging and shot compositions in certain sketches, and stylistic flourishes like in the French art film Shark Week sketch. I generally prefer and am more impressed by the more stylized puppets and models used in Robot Chicken, so I liked the Nerd with the James Deen protrusion, the Crabwoman, and the Sharks a bit more than the puppets for the Discovery stars or regular people, but as parodies, the puppets are designed well and are good approximations of their real-life counterparts in Robot Chicken’s design style. There is not a lot that looked or felt particularly ambitious about Robot Chicken’s animation in this special, but it does demonstrate the consistency of their craft, skills, and techniques they’ve honed over 20 years, which results in a pretty good-looking and well-animated episode of the show.
Robot Chicken’s Self-Discovery Special is mostly just more Robot Chicken. The only thing that really makes it “special” is that it’s a half-hour and focused on Discovery Channel parodies, though even then it plays fast and loose with that. It’s not particularly introspective, as its title may suggest, nor does it acknowledge or feel like a celebration of the series’ 20th anniversary. However, the fact that Robot Chicken is still being made twenty years later is pretty special in of itself. As with every sketch comedy show, there are going to be hits and misses in uneven ratios depending on the episode and your tastes. I appreciate that Robot Chicken can still be very funny and clever with its parodies twenty years in, and playful and creative with its stop-motion animation. Longtime Robot Chicken fans won’t discover anything new about the series in the Self-Discovery Special, but if you have never checked the show out or if you haven’t seen it in a while, there’s plenty in it to let yourself discover what makes the series so special.
