MagneticMediaFed

EVIL!

Cartoon Network banned the last two episodes of the brilliantly sharp The Boondocks second season because the episodes took square aim at BET. It seems in the current age of mega-media conglomerates what is off-limits is taking shots at the boys club. BET and Cartoon Network are not owned by the same companies (Viacom owns BET and Time Warner owns Cartoon Network) though it is apparent that these companies want absolutely no ill between them, as you never know when one will try to join forces (or buy) the other. (A less speculative report of the story via the Canadian Press.)

It’s our loss, as those two episodes, entitled “The Hunger Strike” and “The Uncle Ruckus Reality Show,” are brutal in their pointedness and hilariously funny. The first episode follows Huey as he stages a hunger strike until BET is taken off the air, its office’s shut down and “all of its top executives commit Japanese ritualistic suicide.” In the second episode BET gives Uncle Ruckus a reality show (Uncle Ruckus being a recurring older, black character who hates black people). The framework for both of these episodes is a super-villain-like boardroom at the BET headquarters where they attempt to execute their master plan: the destruction of all black people.

The episodes did air in Canada, because… well, what the hell do they care? This means they are readily available on the torrent sites (look for episode numbers 214 and 215). Unfortunately for our law-abiding friends, The Boondocks is not readily available for consumption online. Adultswim.com seems to have clips, but not whole episodes and the show isn’t on iTunes. The best we can do is dig through YouTube looking for soon-to-be deleted episodes.

I was able to find the completely unedited opening to “The Hunger Strike” on HipHopDX.com. NSFW (especially if you work for BET)

Mad Skilz.

Hey animation fans, head over to AdultSwim.com and check out this week’s episode of The Boondocks* as it might have been visually their most impressive episode to date. In addition to a ton of amazing action sequences (that find a way to be simultaneously active and static), it seems like effort has really been put into facial expressions. I’d have to go back and watch other episodes to be sure, but it certainly felt like the frame was unusually tight on each of the characters’ faces this week, to great artistic effect.

And of course the content was strong as usual, especially the opening sequence at the NBA All-Star Game and the announcer at each of the little league games.

Technically, I’m still encouraging everyone to boycott network-sponsored episode-streaming until the writers strike is over, but I don’t think it affects animation (semantics, I suppose).

Kind of a letdown on most fronts as Monday’s collection of comedies proved to be decent though rarely LOL-funny (even to the point of using “LOL” to describe situations that aren’t necessarily worth of laughing out loud, but just chuckling to oneself). They weren’t bad episodes. I never felt like turning the television off, but the laughs just weren’t there — except for The Boondocks, which is achingly funny. Brief thoughts on Weeds, Aliens In America and Samantha Who? coming up after the jump…

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After several weeks of reruns and frequent checks to TV.com’s episode guide it appears that I’ve finally seen season one of The Boondocks in its entirety. First and foremost, The Boondocks is one of the few comedies on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim that actually seems difficult to produce, which was what initially got me hooked. The animation is absolutely top-notch, and I’d go as far to say that it’s one of the three best-looking shows on television (behind Thief and The Sopranos) in terms of visuals. But when the series premiered last January the first few episodes didn’t seem to have all that much punch behind them, and if you weren’t familliar with the comic strip it was hard to figure out the character’s motivations. Either way, it seemed to me that the series got lost in the shuffle. Maybe that wasn’t actually the case.

The Boondocks is about two young black boys, Huey and Riley, who leave urban Chicago to go live with their grandfather in the suburbs. Huey is a young revolutionary while Riley is a young gangster. Grandpa, voiced by John Witherspoon simply wants to live in a nice part of town. It’s takes a handful of episodes before the characters come into their own, but the last eight (or the total 15) provide commentary more biting than anything on The Simpsons, South Park, or even The Daily Show. The show covers a myriad topics (all current though not based on news of the day like South Park) such as gentrification, celelbrity criminal trials, the death penalty, corporate greed and one particularly ballsy episode in which Martin Luther King Jr. wakes up from a coma and sees what his civil rights work has accomplished.

And did I mention how great the art on this show looks?

One more interesting sidebar. I couldn’t have last forever, but it’s sad to see the Sunday-night block of comedy on Adult Swim in such dire straights. Granted, I’m sure it still pulls in the ratings, and perhaps more importantly appeases stoned dorm-dwellers, but now that the original cast has taken a back seat to the likes of Squidbillies, Moral Orel, Forty-Ounce Mouse, Robot Chicken and episode after episode of Family Guy, it just isn’t that funny anymore. Well, perhaps that’s not true, but the type of comedy has gone from funny-smart-weird, to weird-random-funny. I kind of blame the later seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a show that I like for its madness, but which had to keep pushing the bounds in order to maintain surprise the same way a crack head says he needs $20 and “will only do this once.” It worked fine for Aqua Teen, but it also artificially inflated the randomness of just about eveything else they air leading to the block’s current configuration of nonsequiturs and pop-culture. What happened to just writing jokes?