If Robot Chicken had merely stuck with the superhero and ’70s-toy-commercial parodies that were its initial bread and butter, executive producer Seth Green’s stop-motion sketch comedy series would have run out of gas well before making it to a third season. Fortunately, each season of Chicken has featured sharper writing and better animation than the last (the Peanuts segment in “Robot Chicken’s Half-Assed Christmas Special” is particularly striking), allowing Green and his cronies to transform the series into an increasingly acerbic mix of social commentary and pop-culture satire.
The general disregard for sacred cows extends to a willingness to satirize black pop culture more than today’s white comics usually do (“Giant Fat Black Lady Who’s Really a Black Man in a Really Big Fat Suit” takes unerring aim at Tyler Perry, Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy), but the freedom provided by using action figures in lieu of actors may also be a factor. Although Chicken is still crude and immature at times—if not, the series would have probably lost its spot in the Adult Swim roster—its ability to add genuine poignancy to a Grease parody, which features a robot that humps everything in sight, definitely counts as a big step forward.