Robot Chicken: Star Wars (review)

It’s madness. Madness, I tell you! Thirty sketches jammed into 23 minutes is a certain recipe for insanity, or at least for making milk spurt out your nose, you’re laughing so hard. (And there is, in fact, a reference to milk spurting out someone’s nose here, which you can’t help but see coming, what with the one character/stop-motion-animated toy who’s holding a milk carton in the midst of an amusing situation. I mean, the joke is not what makes this character laugh but the fact that milk spurting out one’s nose may well be a universal thing, even in a galaxy far, far away.) Seth Green and his partner-in-crime Matt Senreich are obviously demented, and thank god, because it means I’m not alone. Some of these bits ape scenes from the films are so perfect in their delivery and intonations of the dialogue that it’s scary... and the fact that I know that the delivery and intonations are aping the movies perfectly is scary too, except that’s how we Gen Xers interact with Star Wars... by memorizing it to the point of liturgy. Some sketches are fan-fiction-ish looks at characters and scenes from new angles (pity the poor Death Star janitor who has to clean up after lightsaber duels). Some flash by so quickly you’re too startled to laugh, and then you have to rewind because Seth Green and Co. are onto the next one, which you’ve missed because you’re still laughing over the previous one. Others are completely wild speculation: George W. Bush’s fantasy of being a Jedi? Oh. My. God. This is how Gen X does political satire, filtered through the lens of, you know, everything we love, and love to hate, and love to rag, and love. Of Robot Chicken on the whole I’ve said, “This is your brain on the speed that is contemporary junk vulgarity.” Well, this is your brain on the brainwashing that George Lucas subjected us to, so that we now see the world through Force-colored lenses, and it is good.