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Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade Of Cartoon Comedy: Uncensored
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (11th June 2009). |
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The Show
 In television there’s no such thing as a Midas touch. The closest people to even near that mark are J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon, yet both have had their fair share of cancellations, Whedon moreso than others, yet most everything they have created becomes a critically acclaimed, cult phenomenon reguardless of financial success. Both of these men created hugely successful shows to build their careers, both based on female protagonists, and have managed to make some of the best television to ever hit the airwaves since. Seth MacFarlane on the other hand is looking more to be a one hit wonder. After “Family Guy” (1999-Present) got cancelled once, and then once again, it kept on getting revived based on the sheer amount of references, randomness and hilarity that could be packed into a single half hour block that drove fans to the show through DVD. Unfortunately the strong sales of the DVD's and renewed ratings seemed to imply that MacFarlane could become another Whedon or Abrams, being able to pump out quality shows that followed in the predecessors’ footsteps, but instead it’s been all down hill. “American Dad!” (2005-Present) is simply not funny, and somehow manages to go on without being cancelled. The lack of comedy in “American Dad!” made me question, was “Family Guy” just crazy enough to work and run wild or was “American Dad!” just one gigantic misfire that somehow keeps going. After seeing “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” (2008) webseries, it’s looking more like “Family Guy” was the peak leading to a downward spiral into an abyss. Similar to the quick cutaway, flashback or random encounter segments of “Family Guy,” the “Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” is a huge collection of shorts that last only a minute. There’s no real sense of continuity, leaving out the running jokes that helped to make “Family Guy” funny, though some jokes will carry over between sketches. It’s a sandbox philosophy of comedy that relies upon enough tiny grains of joke to build something that’s fun to play around in, but unfortunately is about as entertaining and well put together as that metaphor. With at least 50 sketches to the set, its hard to give a complete rundown of the episodes that pop up so instead I’ll throw a long rambling list to just give you a feel for the variety of ideas that get thrown at you: The Frog Prince, a Scotsman who can’t watch movies without shouting at them, AIDS patient zero, cat staff meeting, a pooping mountain climber, ‘The bartender says…’ ‘Name that Animal Penis!’, ‘Die Sweet Roadrunner Die!’, sex with various pop cultural figures, ‘Fat Guy Working Out’, ‘The Gay Knight’, Quentin Tarantino performs a circumcision, Fred Flintstone tries to get in to a club, Tom Waits, Popeye and Bob Dylan have a conversation, fat Jesus, things you never hear, and Jeff Goldblum wafers. As you can see it’s a big weird collection of jokes that always attempt to be edgy, but not always funny. Most of the jokes just seem like ideas made up for “Family Guy” that they couldn’t fly past censors or acknowledged that they weren’t funny enough to make it into the episode, and so MacFarlane just put them online instead. As a “Family Guy” fan, most of the jokes were a miss, save for the occasional, well orchestrated, poop joke and the Tom Waits, Popeye and Bob Dylan sketch that is fairly hilarious. Other than that it’s almost as if someone stole MacFarlane’s notebook with a ton of ideas floating around in it that were mostly duds. Much of MacFarlane’s usual gang shows up, Seth Green, Phil LaMarr, Alex Borstien and others lend their voice acting talents to the web series, but not even the best voice actors could save a shoddy series of jokes. With a runtime under an hour all combined, it’s fairly easy to watch, even though there are very few laughs per minute. The disc is at it’s best with the scene selection feature to skip to the better jokes on the disc, but otherwise is only worth watching in full if you’re a huge MacFarlane fan and even then you have probably already seen all of them online.
Video
The features are presented in 1.33:1 full screen in high-definition 1080p 24/fps with AVC MPEG-4 compression encoding at 35 MBPS, an odd decision to produce the series as full frame, considering the internet is easily capable of widescreen, but honestly the visual presentation is more service to the gag than stunning animation. The transfer itself is a little underwhelming, as sometimes you can see jagged edges on some of the lines from the web production transfer to Blu-ray definition.
Audio
The sound is presented in English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mixed at 48kHz/24-bit; a high quality format presentation despite the fact that the original sound is fairly flat, probably because of the web-based production of the series. But you don’t really need surround sound to hit on jokes about what sounds different pop culture people make during sex, though a surround sound for poop jokes might double the hilarity. Optional subtitles are available in English for the hearing impaired, Spanish, and French.
Extras
The single Blu-ray comes with no sort of commentary or making-of, and just includes a featurette, a few still galleries and a single bonus trailers. “Red Carpet Premiere” featurette runs for 4 minutes and 32 seconds, a few brief words from the different voices and partygoers. The red carpet premiere feels more like an excuse for MacFarlane to buy his whole crew of friends drinks on Fox’s budget. Fair enough, but not really a special feature since half of the featurette is clips from the show itself spliced with laughter shots of the crowd. There are three still galleries: - “Rough Character Models” includes 98 images. - “Cleaned Up Character Models” contains 219 images. - “Colored Character Models” contains 252 images. The bonus trailer on the disc are: - “Notorious” runs for 1 minute and 10 seconds.
Overall
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