Robot Chicken: Season Three - Season Three

Seth Green
Abraham Benrubi
Breckin Meyer
Dan Milano
Chad Morgan
Victor Yerrid
Robot Chicken

"Well, all the jokes can't be good, you have to expect that once in awhile," Groucho Marx apologized to the camera in Animal Crackers. Though some of the gags in Robot Chicken's third season lay an egg, creators Seth Green and Matthew Senreich have nothing to apologize for, except maybe the moment in the "Half-Assed Christmas Special," in which Charlie Brown asks Snoopy, "Have you seen Linus? He was supposed to walk me to chemo." With its barrage of sight gags and pop culture mash-ups (Rankin/Bass's Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer meets Godfather II when elf Hermey, the aspiring dentist, winds up like Fredo), this ceaselessly-inventive Emmy Award-winning stop-motion animated series is the fastest 10 minutes (without commercials) on television. There is something here to befuddle (if not offend) everyone. Children of the '80s might be unfamiliar with Mister Magoo, just as Baby Boomers may not be acquainted with She-Ra. Still, you don't need to have seen Forrest Gump to be tickled by the sight gag that takes "run, forest, run," literally. For all the sophomoric humor (yes, there will be fart jokes and geysers of plasticine blood), there are transcendent bits of brilliance, such as when Ted Kennedy and porn star Jenna Jameson team up to slay celebrities (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paris Hilton) who have intruded into politics or porn, a goof on If You Give a Mouse a Cookie which somehow descends into vampirism and Earth's destruction, and the Kanye West moment when a Smurf complains, "The king doesn't care about blue people" after a Katrina-like disaster devastates the Smurfs' domain. Robot Chicken continues to attract A-listers who get it, including Ethan Hawke, who reprises his Training Day character as the voice of a rookie monster riding with Godzilla. As befits a series that rewards geek-like obsession, this two-disc set features immersive extras--lively audio commentaries for each episode, video blogs of writer pitches, deleted scenes--that reveal just what makes this Robot tick. --Donald Liebenson