Robot Chicken
Twenty years of action figures murdering your childhood: Star Wars specials, DC specials, sketches that commit until the pun is structural. 218 episodes on Max.
Cast & Key People
Our Review
Two Seth Greens, action figures, and a complete disregard for the sacred: Robot Chicken is a twenty year sketch show about destroying your childhood in fifteen minutes per episode. The format is stop-motion vignettes, each one a toy commercial for something that should not be a toy, and the show’s superpower is commitment to the bit, a Great Escape bit conducted entirely by action figures in a suburban garden will commit to its own stupid pun until it stops being funny and becomes structural.
The Star Wars and DC Universe specials are the high water, and the Celebrity Deathmatch adjacent eras are the low, which describes most sketch shows. The show’s real subject is nostalgia itself: it cannot mock a property without revealing how much it loves the property, and the later seasons learn to aim that contradiction at better material.
218 episodes deep on the Max Adult Swim shelf, best sampled two or three episodes at a time. Seven and a half out of ten: the strongest anthology on the block, the most binge proof of them.
