Robot Chicken Season 2: Uncensored

Created by Matthew Senreich and Seth Green (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Austin Powers flicks), Robot Chicken is a subversive, sometimes vulgar stop motion comedy series. In this uncensored DVD set (lots of 'fucks' to be heard), dolls, action figures, toys and clay characters are brought to life to enact the writers' bizarre and often nihilistic parodies and flights of fancy. Chicken is essentially a rapid-fire deconstruction of pop culture icons and touchstones, from Lindsay Lohan to Hungry Hungry Hippo. Even Phyllis Diller gets a shout out! A long list of celebrities do guest voice overs (heavy on 'young Hollywood'), many as themselves: Sarah Silverman, Christaian Slater, James Van Der Beek, Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron and Paul Rudd and many others all play along this season.

A cheeky send up of The Brady Bunch ala Mr. & Mrs. Smith is quite funny, and a hilarious bit involving Star Wars' Darth Sidious mocking his codependent sidekick Darth Vader (this led to this years all Star Wars Robot Chicken episode. The extras in this set feature many deleted scenes, including 'Purbertis' a send up of Harry Potter, along with writers' commentary. Also on tap is 'The Making of a Sketch' in which the series' writers, animators and actors dissect the creation of the Inspector Gadget meets the Terminator episode.

To truly appreciate Robot Chicken, it helps if you are roughly in the creators age bracket; born between, say 1970 and 1980. The references are unexplained, and very specific; My Little Pony, Corey Feldman, Skeletor and so on. Robot Chicken is decidedly a 'guy thing', very testosterone heavy- lots of skateboards, explosions and fart jokes. The pace of the show is speedy to the max - some bits are literally 2 seconds long. The 12-minute segments fly by, which isn't exactly a bad thing. Twisted genius for sure, but a little of this goes a long way.