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I powered through some Birdman today.

202 - Trio's Company - This episode is about half not-good and half extremely-annoying-and-terrible. The not good half comes from from the lawsuit portion, Inch High Private Eye gets fired for being short and sues his boss. The very terrible half (which is actually like 70% of the episode) is Birdman trying to get some from Gigi (Galaxy Girl) and I guess the joke is that she screws every dude around except him. The worst part of the episode is when Reducto gets a gander at Inch High and he gets jealous and starts running around screaming. I bet anything that the creators high fived when they wrote this scene because they end the next like ten scenes by just having Reducto run through screaming. The plot and the way this episode wraps itself up is pretty confounding, but I probably only have a problem with that because it's Birdman. Truth is even when Birdman's plot "makes sense" it's still pretty awful so whatever.

203 - The Devlin Made Me Do It - Some kid hurts himself trying to be like Devlin and sues him for it. I've never heard of Devlin!!! It looks like an awesome show. If there is one thing I can take away from watching every Birdman, it's that I now know about Devlin. Thanks for THAT much Birdface. Watching a bunch of Birdman in a row was probably a bad idea, and not for the obvious reasons. It's really easy to get used the way the show is paced; it has that fast-paced comedy feel where if you don't like a joke, just wait and another one comes up next. And it's hard to hate that kind of thing in theory. The problem is, ALL the jokes are bad. This leads me to think that the not-so-horrible jokes are ok-to-good jokes but it's actually just all bad jokes paced as if some of them were good. Comedy of distraction. Also, Jesse Jackson comes back in this one, and it's extremely lame of them to make Jesse Jackson a recurring gag.

204 - High Speed Buggy Chase - Speed Buggy gets in a high speed chase and shockingly they don't do any OJ jokes. The worst part of this episode is when the Funky Phantom (who appears throughout the episode for no reason) does a rap video. Very embarrassing. Besides that, this was one of the not-so-horrible ones (again, the pacing can make the less-horrible things seem good). There's a real quaintness to Birdman I must admit. There's a scene where Phil Ken Sebben juggles a baby and a bunch of dangerous objects (guns, chainsaws, etc) and they do not have the baby die as a punchline. Honestly that's what I consider non-mean-spirited humor by today's Adult Swim standards. I'm not saying that the Birdman writers are more moral or anything, I think it's more because of the standards of the time and if Birdman was on today then every joke would probably be a bloody death and/or a bleeped swear word. But it does jazz me a bit to see new (to me) adult swim content that's not constantly trying to gross out or shock the audience. Consider this a win by misguided nostalgia Birdman. The subplot of this episode is that Avenger quits and Birdman goes through different kinds of birds to take his place. Birds! That's kind of funny right? (man this paragraph could ruin my rep if anyone were to read it... I think I'll be fine)

205 - SPF - Ah, back to the badness! Birdman is afraid he has skin cancer so he stays out of the sun. This causes him to lose his powers and fall asleep at inopportune times. I must say, this was a great joke, and it certainly was not already written by-- oh I'll just pull two names out of thin air here-- Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer, in-- hmm I'll just type four digits at random-- 1997. Only this time they do some great SATIRE by having Birdman buy skin cream and it being like he's addicted to drugs. The other subplot is also bad, Dingaling Wolf sues someone for making Dingaling.biz into a porno website. Come on, there HAVE to be more pornographic Hanna Barbera character names than Dingaling. That is straight bush league. What else? Nothing, let's end it here.

I started off with some Sealab today:

28 - Tourist Season - I watched a really horrible-quality AVI file of this episode, it looked like a VHS rip. That was the best thing about this episode. Man, to this day I still cannot get over how bad Sealab got. The show is like the writing equivalent of a cute child actor that gets uglier every season. I remember our ol pal Doug saying that Sealab should have been cancelled the second Harry Goz died and even though that's a cliche it's still 100000000% true. Murphy's line readings are the only thing in this episode I could possibly consider funny. I mean really this episode is just so bad. Too bad to make fun of! 10 thumbs down.

Birdman:

207 - Grape Juiced - Grape Ape takes steroids to do the Laff-a-Lympics. I kind of like that idea, I guess! I dunno this episode was bad, but whatev.

208 - Peanut Puberty - This too I guess. I think I'm done hating Birdman. These episodes were more boringly forgettable than outrageously horrible. I mean it's not really worse than what most of Adult Swim has become. Truth be told I'd take either of these Birdmans over any Lucy episode. I hope the show gets worse from here, I don't want to be done hating Birdman.

If nothing else this thread will teach everyone not ignoring me to start.

210 - Droopy Botox - In this episode Birdman SKEWERS the practical surgery world. Uhh I dunno what to say about Birdman anymore! I don't hate these episodes and it would be chumpy of me to force myself to hate them just because. I liked when Phil K. plastic surgeried himself into a sexy lady at the end! Also I laughed when Baba Looey was a paperboy. Idk man. The end of this episode had a BUMP encoded into it, I bet myspleen was behind it.

211 - Guitar Control - More SATIRE. Quick Draw McGraw gets arrested for having a guitar and they joke about how guitars are like guns and Quick Draw McGraw is a Charlton Heston parody etc. There's a throwaway gag at the beginning about Birdman turning his office into a bumper car lane that actually plays as legitimately random rather than forced. Am I an idiot now?

Hey I'm at the end of a Birdman season, now finish off the Sealab season.

32 - Frozen Dinner - WOAH!!!!!! An actual GOOD episode!!! Some actual good characterization on Dave Willis's guy who just wants to eat people. I remember being quite taken aback by this episode being actually good, and thinking that Murphy's death might have actually reinvigorated Sealab to try to be good. Not only did that NOT happen in the least, but I later found out that most of this episode is taken from the original Sealab pilot from one of the DVDs. I found it kind of funny that becoming good was so beyond them at this point that they had to rob their oldest jokes in order to produce funny material. BUT there's a whole bunch of shit that works in this episode, I won't deny them this.

33 - Tornado Shanks - lol oh man this episode. I remember liking it at the time but when I was first watching it it had honestly never occurred to me that Tornado Shanks was going to be the new regular captain. I still think that this episode would be not-that-insanely-horrible at times if this was the only episode Tornado Shanks was ever in. I totally forgot about this episode's ending, which I think is Sealab's first time showing outright contempt for the audience. When Tornado Shanks says some people may not like him as captain so they'll go to their blogs and websites to complain. And he says if you don't like it, watch anime! I remember people thinking that line meant that Shanks was going to be the new captain on the show but I thought the "joke" was that they were pointing out how shitty it would be if they did that. I didn't think it was a GOOD joke, but yeh know, bad jokes aren't exactly out of place at this point in Sealab's run.

I have a specific memory about this one! This episode aired at the end of a season so for a few months it was still unclear if Tornado Shanks was really going to be the new captain or not. Then before the next season's premiere adultswim.com had a clip of the next episode, and you could only see the back of Shanks's head and he didn't have any lines in the clip so it still wasn't 100% sure if he was going to be the new captain for real. When the next (horrible) episode actually aired and he was the captain I was just like "shit."