TVSquad

On an Adult Swim schedule where every show is strange in some way, Xavier may be the strangest of the bunch. The title character is a hairy birdman with a beak and legs with knees that bend the wrong way. And a snake hand. And a loincloth. And two different colored eyes. And six nipples (I could go on, but...) He talks like a surfer dude, mashing up new age double talk with double entendre, inhabiting a sort of alternate, SIMS-like earth and killing or damaging irreparably all he seeks to help.

The effect of this only intensifies when you watch a lot of episodes of Xavier in one sitting, which is what you can do with the new Xavier: Renegade Angel Seasons 1 and 2 DVD. In its usual dose of fifteen minutes per episode, it's odd. Watch it for two hours, you start to see spots. Even the animation, which stresses the bright colors and blocky movement of computer generated graphics, pushes you off kilter. It's an overused description to say something looks like a cartoon on acid, but if ever a show actually deserved the description, it's Xavier.

So is it funny? A lot of the time, yes, at least for me. There are some great lines that could be right out of the Naked Gun series. Xavier wanders into a town called Burbury, Connecticut in the first episode (yes, Burbury, Connecticut, where all spiritual wanderers go) and immediately gets a beat down for his philosophical blabbering, When a woman asks if he's okay, he says, "I'll be fine. I'm a survivor. We're a dying breed."

As in Naked Gun, the line is tossed out quickly and it's on to the next thing, so you don't have too much time to dwell on it. Which is for the best, since, as Xavier puts it, he is a "conun-drummer in a band called Life Puzzler." There are a few bombs thrown in here and there. In that first episode, Xavier uses a gallon of AIDS he gets from the military to fight a computer virus. An episode in season two centers around a hate crime theme park "dream vacation" where rednecks can abuse robot Middle Easterners. But the execution is so off the wall that's it's hard to take offense. Hard to say, "I take exception to the show with the hairy man-bird." Just sounds silly, which is the point.

The extras are enjoyable, especially the contest submissions where fans made their own short Xavier episodes. It's a fun character to mimic, and apparently there are a lot of folks out there with at least rudimentary video skills who agree.