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Robot Chicken Rapes Voltron

// September 27th, 2009 // Humor, Review, Scifi, Television

There are few shows on television as consistently funny as Seth Green and Matt Senreich’s Robot Chicken.  It’s fifteen minutes of awesome that never seems to get it’s due. (In fairness, it’s on Cartoon Network, soooo… ya know… whatcha gonna do?)

Typically, there wasn’t much advertising around the fact that the RC crew was doing their take on the classic Voltron series from our youth (or I guess Power Rangers if you’re young and have crappy taste).

The story centers around Titan Force Five, a group of military heroes who pilot 5 ships that combine to form a giant — look, you’ve seen Voltron, right?  It’s f*^%ing Voltron.  Unfortunately, the military shuts down TF5 and the team goes it’s separate ways.  Then one day, one of the former TF5 pilots, Gibbs (played by Seth Green) goes rogue and tries to take over the world with a giant robot.

Palmer, the cocky jackass who led the group decides to reform TF5 and stop Gibbs’ giant robot.  Jodi and Sasha join him to take on Gibbs, but they still need two more recruits (the fat one died) in order to form Titan Maximum (the robot).  The end up with Palmer’s kid brother and a monkey who built Titan Maximum.  I’m not kidding.  A f*^%ing monkey.  It seems to be a Speed Racer reference, but it doesn’t really payoff much.

Unfortunately, that’s the only decent reference in the show.  Instead of sending up scifi conventions the way Robot Chicken does pop culture, Titan Maximum instead chooses to be a scifi show laced with dick and fart jokes.   Mostly unfunny ones.  They even include a character whose sole purpose is to be Lindsey Lohan so they can make jokes about banging her.  I’m all for whores, but it’s a little cheap.

Oddly, if TM was a straight scifi cartoon, it would probably be fairly entertaining (even as a ripoff).   But as it stands, the show kind of sucks.  Some of the jokes are funny, but it relies to much on juvenile humor and not enough on the talents of it’s writing staff.

Green and Senreich are capable of so much more.  Let”s hope they figure that out.