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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: February 20, 2005
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Robot Chicken, “Junk in the Trunk” (Season 1, Episode 1) [Stream on Hulu]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: There are few more deceptively clever TV series than the Adult Swim series Robot Chicken. The stop-motion-animated series is over a decade old and often seems like it’s just pulling toys out of a box and improvising scenes with them. Which is actually a mighty intuitive idea for a TV show; something that approximates the way we all played with toys as kids is fairly genius. Crossing that conceit with a dorm-room-guy comedic sensibility is ultimately the recipe that produced Robot Chicken, and it’s proved to be quite the durable concept indeed.
Robot Chicken was also the perfect show for these superhero-soaked past dozen years. The show premiered only a few months before Batman Begins ushered in the new era of superhero movies. That the minds behind Robot Chicken were every bit as obsessed with the pop-culture characters who were about to take over the movies as any film blogger made the show the rare niche product with mainstream appeal.
Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop-culture ephemera and a seemingly bottomless toy chest full of every figure from Wonder Woman to the General Lee, Robot Chicken is at 159 episodes and counting of stop-motion creativity. Sure, it’s the kind of thing you were doing when you were six. But were you smart enough to film it? Didn’t think so.
