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TWO BIRDMEN

302 - Harvey's Civvy - This episode starts out with some Space Ghost rip-offing, where they redub old Birdman footage (it plays as more Space Ghost rip-offy than it sounds ok). Check out this twist on the classic: BIRDMAN HIMSELF gets sued. An old villain sues Birdman for injuries in the old days. One thing I remember is that Peter Potamus gives someone his wallet and there's a huge condom outline on it (he has a condom) and then they go and telegraph that joke further by having him say I HAD A RUBBER IN THERE or something. That's something that would have drove me insane with rage at one time but now idk it just doesn't do it!

303 - X Gets the Crest - X the Eliminator gets Birdman's crest, and Ricochet Rabbit goes to court. One thing I think about Birdman is that basically every character is the annoying comic relief. Each character would be really annoying on another show but all on the same show it kind of creates its own rhythm where annoyingness is not that annoying. If I wrote a list of annoying things about this episode it would be like 10 pages long but when watching them all in a row, getting annoyed by each one is just not worth it.

ONE SEALAB

35 - Chalkboard Jungle - Yeah, you know what, Sealab is easily worse than Birdman. It's not even a contest. I mean at least Birdman has effort put into it. This episode is just DOA. Quinn teaches a class. I wonder what made them decide to write it. I'm having a hard time even thinking of anything to say about it. They don't do anything worth doing at all. It's like something you'd write as a class assignment, they're just getting it over with. Next up is Dearly Beloved Seed, oh man, I'm gonna need to psych myself up for that one.

Can't quite bring myself to watch Dearly Beloved Seed yet, so here's two more Birdmens.

304 - Bird Girl of Guantanamole - BIRDGIRL is introduced in this episode. The court case is that Morocco Mole is found in a spider hole and topical humor ensues. Birdgirl wants to be part of Birdman's bird team. I don't remember much else about this episode, but it wasn't bad enough for me to really pad this out with things to make fun of.

305 - Turner Classic Birdman - Robert Osborne! Robert Osborne is cool with me, no matter what he does, even this crappy gimmick episode. It's a Space-Ghost-ripoff-tacular where they re-edit clips from the original Birdman show and have them revoiced by the current cast, and also edit all the jokes to be wacky/awkward/whatever. But Robert Osborne hosts it like it's a TCM presentation and man he is just so awesome. The way this episode ends is really great, I have to give them that, I HAVE to.

I am still plowing through the Birdman.

307 - Evolutionary War - Captain Caveman's son goes to court because his school doesn't teach evolution and says he doesn't exist. This episode was co-written by Adam Pava, a name I recognize because he wrote for Clone High and then wrote for every horrible show Cartoon Network has ever made. I'm trying to remember stuff about this episode, uhh there was a Beauty and the Beast parody. It was kind of neat.

308 - Free Magilla - Harvey Birdman sets his satire sights on animal rights activists and does not do a worse job than The Goode Family might or possibly already has. Magilla Gorilla gets kidnapped by animal rights activists and Mr. Peebles tries to get him back. There is a pretty funny Patty Hearst parody in this ep. Also Peter Potamus has three nephews that are like Huey, Dewey and Louie and that is also kind of funny. I guess this was one of the better ones!

309 - Return of Birdgirl - Birdgirl returns. As do Race Bannon and Dr. Quest, looking to get gay married. Satire of gay marriage occurs. Birdman goes to the Supreme Court to try to legalize gay marriage, and the Supreme Court is a parody of the Justice League. For a second I thought they were going to actually license the Justice League. That would have been neat! But they just have the actual Supreme Court dressed in superhero outfits. Other stuff happens.

401 - Mufti Trouble - Will season four be as bad as I hope? Yes sort of but in a less hateable way than season one. This episode doesn't really have a plot, it's more "a whole bunch of wacky shit happens." The main courtroom plot is about Shazzan, but I can't even really explain what happens. Peanut rubs a lamp and Shazzan comes out, this somehow leads to Mentok going to jail, and uhhh man I don't know this episode was just a headache.

402 - Incredible Hippo - Atom Ant gets kicked out of his house because his shit is radioactive. Peter Potamus eats some radioactive shit and turns into the Incredible Hulk every so often. There was one gag I liked, when Peter Potamus runs over X the Eliminators remote control car with a tank. It's timed well!

403 - Babysitter - Phil Ken Sebben dies in this one!!! They make secrat references to how he's dying because Stephen Colbert is going to be doing the Colbert Report. David Koechner guest stars in this one and basically plays a cartoon version of Todd Packer.

Almost done!

407 - The Death of Harvey - The half hour season finale, complete with a bunch of bumps from that night thanks to compn's bffs at myspleen.web. Oh I was so happy Birdman was dying, I should have just given it another chance. In this episode, Birdman has to retry every case he's ever done, giving the show an excuse to have literally every single character, joke, or thing from the history of the show come back and make a cameo. Stroker and Hoop had a similar last episode, and Stroker and Hoop's last episode sucked a gigantic pile of dongs so this episode couldn't help but look a whole lot better by comparison. The second half of the episode is Birdman fighting a giant monster (he becomes a superhero in this part). It's kind of neat. The action parts are actually well done, like they were trying to make it look good and exciting rather than doing ironic shitty action like most AS shows would do. Oh, also Phil Ken Sebben comes back and Birdman dies for real.

MY FINAL WORD ON THE BIRD:

This is about the last thing in the world I would want to admit, but I have to be honest, Birdman did get better after I stopped watching. The Secret Squirrel is the last really horrible one, but after that I think that being made in Flash and having the ability to do more than three episodes a year was an improvement on the first season. I think it made them less precious with the humor, and the humor felt less forced like they were trying to be "random" or "williams street-y" or "adult swimmy" or whatever, and an actual viewpoint began to form through the jokes. Maybe it wasn't a viewpoint *I* particularly care for, but whatev, I don't begrudge anyone who does, not anymore. I have no more hate for Birdman. This whole experience is going to make me think long and hard before I hate anything again, which sucks because I love hating things. I kind of doubt I'll ever hate anything as much as I hated Birdman, which I am going to miss. Man, I'm a terrible person.

I guess my biggest complaint about Birdman is that it tries too hard to be funny, which gets annoying, but the rest of Adult Swim has proven to me that there are far worse things to try to be, such as gross or awkward or off-putting or "funny because it's not funny" or whatever the fuck else. Even the satire stuff was done without getting into that gross "let's laugh at this because we're above it!" ickyness of stuff like Robot Chicken, Family Guy and Stroker and Hoop. I think if you took all the best Birdmans there's probably one season's worth of good stuff, like a B-/C+ level season. I can possibly see myself buying the complete series on DVD if I find it on a real cheap sale.

I'm pretty glad I didn't end up doing that commentary lol ;_;

I'm probably making it sound like I now like Birdman a lot more than I do. I just don't hate it anymore! That's all.

No one wants to see more from this thread, right?

36 - Dearly Beloved Seed - I purposely put off watching this episode so I could build up how bad it was in my mind. I was trying to remember it as some mythical badness that the actual show wouldn't possibly be able to reach, so when I watched it I'd go "it wasn't that bad." Like many things about this thread, this plan was a failure. Obviously this episode is bad. Every single joke in this episode is just despicable on multiple levels. It's really not worth getting into how bad the actual content of the episode is. But I think the worst thing about this episode is, contrary to what Bobo Adobo said in his classic article, this episode fails as a satire of fanfiction. I'll repeat: this episode fails as a satire of fanfiction. I can't even believe it's possible to fail at making fun of fanfiction, but the Sealab creators did it.

Our old pal Admiral Tailz speculated at the time that he thought the episode was not intended as a fanfiction episode, and that they added the fanfiction stuff because the episode was so bad, and after watching the episode for the first time since the day it aired there is no way that is not the case. Even though this encode of the episode had the bumps it originally aired with explaining that the episode was written by a forum member, I still forgot that it was a fanfiction episode about halfway through. It's really not written like fanfiction, but it does feel like it was written by a 14-year-old idiot with no sense of what comedy is. It feels like the Sealab guys hired an idiot fanfiction writer onto the writing staff and paid him to write it. At the very least, actual fanfiction would have some passion or reverence to the characters going for it.

This encode also had the bump on the end that said how much the episode sucked and tells you to go to the adultswim.com boards to go hate on mcheshpants420, laughably suggesting that this was some kind of "social experiment" designed to make adultswim.com posters angry. Hey Sealab guys, I know a much easier way to make the adultswim.com posters angry: DO ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING. You already are on adult swim, they will complain about anything you do. You can air four hours of each individual posters' personal favorite animes and they will still whine. You don't need to goad adultswim.com into being idiots.

So basically this episode is about a marriage or something, and it ends with a Matrix parody and then it ends with a nerd writing it as fanfiction. The ending of this episode is really excessively nasty, when the nerd jerks off because of the fanfiction he's writing. Just gross. I'm sure the Sealab guys think that me not liking that means they "got me." They can go to hell.

I want to say right off the bat that it honest to god warms my heart to see that talking about how bad Sealab got can still generate some discussion on this board. Talking about how bad Sealab got has never, ever gotten even remotely old to me, and I doubt it ever will.

37 - Craptastic Voyage - This episode gets an automatic F- for not having the theme song (the content of this episode also earns it an automatic F-). Seriously, is that offensive to anyone else? That the Sealab guys watched this episode and said "oh we can't cut any of these jokes or plot points, we better cut the theme song." Because really, cutting ANYTHING from this episode would have been an improvement on it. If anything they should have cut this episode down to about a minute and played the theme song 20 times.

So, this episode fucking sucks, obviously. Unlike Dearly Beloved Seed, it feels like they were semi-trying to be funny or at least to do some inspired gags, unfortunately they fail completely. In a way that's kind of worse than just the run-out-the-clock writing style of the pure shitfest Dearly Beloved Seed. In this episode, Tornado Shanks gets a big ugly tumor drawn onto his head and the Sealab crew shrink themselves to go inside his body and shoot it. Just about every joke is a gross bodily function joke (Tornado Shanks randomly hemorrhages blood at some points; the crew flies through Shanks's colon), a sub-Family Guy level pop culture reference (a Muppet Babies reference; Han Solo saying a catchphrase and doing nothing else) or a dumb callback (compn's personal pick Jimmy Carter shows up for no reason). Also, plenty of ugly CGI. There is a running gag about Stormy hosting a talk show that comes close to working. Well, "close to working" is putting it strong, more it comes close to not being a complete failure.

Anyway, I was hoping to plow through Sealab and do three at a time like I did Birdman but I can't bring myself to watch more than one episode per sitting. So, this thread will last I'm afraid!

38 - Let Em Eat Corn - Wow I forgot everything about this episode. It's kind of weird to me how Sealab just instantly replaced Murphy threw Tornado Shanks into the lead role, like they didn't realize that he was a horrible character that everyone would rightfully hate. Shanks kind of exists in a weird state where you're not sure if he's supposed to be actually funny or if he's supposed to be an asterisk of a character that says "just imagine how much funnier this would be if it was Murphy."

In this episode, Shanks makes Sealab into a sovereign nation, and then everyone else in Sealab also secedes and makes their own sovereign nation. Tens of bad and unfunny jokes ensue. Ugly drawings of British people are involved for some reason. Sparks builds a bomb and there is an honest to goodness 4:20 on it. Hesh is a pretty big character in this episode, and they are very much pandering to the Hesh fans they just made fun of in the mcheshpants420 episode, what fucking assholes. A Transformers parody occurs on which they drew Murphy's face on a toilet, literally shitting on his memory since figuratively was apparently not enough. There's really just no voice to this episode. It's all random gags with nothing behind it showing that the people making it give a shit about it whatsoever. There was one thing I liked though, that Sealab's nation is called Sealabia. A pretty good pun! It's actually popped in my mind a bunch of times since seeing this episode and I forgot where it was from.

There was one thing I remembered about this one actually! At the end it cuts to some people sitting on a couch, watching the show, saying that it keeps getting worse (100% valid). I remembered our own Jixby Phillips saying that he LIKED this episode and was betrayed by that part. Guess what, Jixby was wrong, this episode fucking sucks, and best of all he ain't readin this heh