DVD Review: Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy
Fox Home Entertainment Seth MacFarlane's Animated Shorts
May 8, 2009
Seth MacFarlane's brand of cartoon humour is best seen in short bursts. That's not a knock against the Family Guy/American Dad creator, it's that his jokes seem to play a lot better when he's not bound to the half-hour series format.
With Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, he takes his style of animation to the next level. Compiling a group of random shorts taken from his YouTube site, Sethcomedy.com, MacFarlane and his writers offer up such visions as Quentin Tarantino performing a bris or a game show called "Name that Animal P***s."
Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy Stars Seth Green, Wil Wheaton
Imagine all the cutaway gags excised from various Family Guy and American Dad and jammed onto one DVD and you have a pretty good idea of what the Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy is all about. Much like Robot Chicken, the show hits a quick gag, and then off to the next situation.
Not surprisingly, there are countless pop culture references played for laughs – Optimus Prime having sex, Wile E. Coyote suffering an existential crisis after finally killing the Roadrunner – and guest spots from celebrities such as comedian Gilbert Godfrey and Star Trek: TNG actor Wil Wheaton (Robot Chicken co-creator Seth Green offers up his best Matthew McConaughey impression for one short).
Some of the concepts wear out their welcome (a Scotsman yelling various movies gets tedious after the 4th episode) but many of the parodies (every Entourage episode in 30 seconds, Ted Nugent getting visited by a ghost) are bang-on. As you can imagine, there are a lot of scatological jokes (one short simply features Fred Flintstone on the toilet), but some of the more effective gags involve take a more surreal approach, such as when a dog crashes a board meeting full of cats.
DVD Extras
The biggest extra on this DVD is a feature on the red carpet premiere, where a bubbly host interviews various celebrities, voice actors and Family Guy writers (none of whom look like manatees), who all gush about MacFarlane and call him "a genius."
There's also a stills gallery of the various characters in the series in rough, cleaned up and coloured character models.
The Final Analysis
Seth MacFarlane may not be the genius his sycophants claim him to be (he's no Andrew Stanton), but he's found a formula that works and is milking it for all it's worth. How long he can maintain that is the real question.
The best thing about Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy is that, if you don't like the current short, wait a minute or so and a better one will show up. With this series, MacFarlane has found the ideal outlet for his animation talents.
It gets a 7/10.
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