TVSquad

This is the age of personalized entertainment on demand. It's also the age of talking wads of meat and animated fart jokes. Finally, all of that can now come together on your home DVD player.

Adult Swim fans can now go online and create a disc full of their favorite episodes from the channel's top shows with the Build Your Custom DVD tool.

For $20, you get 110 minutes worth of space to build a DVD. You can choose any of the available episodes from such series as Venture Brothers (right), Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Sealab 2021. After arranging them in your preferred order, you give your DVD a name, description and cover art before paying for it and burning your unique creation.

The new Adult Swim In A Box is an embarrassment of riches - six boxed sets for six different shows and a bonus disc featuring five unreleased pilots -- more than 20 hours on 12 DVDs. I was especially happy to get season two of Sealab 2021, which I have never been able to catch regularly, and season one of Metalocalypse, which I have always enjoyed.

Getting season two of Robot Chicken, volume one of Moral Orel, volume two of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and volume three of Space Ghost Coast to Coast just seemed like a bonus. Well worth the suggested retail price of $69.98 for Adult Swim fans who haven't already purchased any of the included sets.

The pilots are a mixed bag, but mostly good. The Best of Totally for Teens is a live action parody of a moralistic teen variety show hosted by thirtysomethings trying to be hip. It's a promising premise, one that should maybe be revisited, but the pilot is a bit of a mess. It hits topics ripe for satire in the format like teen insecurity, drugs, and sex, and has the right look for Adult Swim.

The team behind Robot Chicken is moving on up ...to Fox. They sold an animated series to the network that is intended to appear on prime time.

The formula of the new show will be familiar. It's pretty much a family and school-based comedy like all the other Fox animated shows. It's somewhat of a shame as Robot Chicken presented something fun and different while this could potentially be lost in a crowd that includes the entire Sunday night Fox line-up. Hopefully Green and company can add some sort of unique flavor to the show that will help it distinguish itself.

Obviously, Seth Green is already involved with the Sunday night Fox animated shows, since he's the voice of Chris Griffin on Family Guy. That show even throws in lines occasionally promoting a fictitious Family Guy/Robot Chicken feud. I wonder if this news will change the dynamic of that "feud" somewhat. Probably not, other than giving them something else to make in-jokes about.

It was mentioned a few months ago that some of the folks behind Robot Chicken (including Seth Green) are making a new Adult Swim series called Titan Maximum, which is basically a Voltron parody. I didn't realize when I first heard of this project that there was also a little Thunderbirds in the mix as well. And quite probably some Team America: World Police.

It's too early to tell, but based on the preview, the show certainly looks funny. Unlike Robot Chicken, this show will likely have things like plots and regular characters (the nerd kid from Robot Chicken doesn't count). In that sense, it's more a parody in the vein of The Venture Brothers.

If you asked around to most experts and fans attending Comic-Con International what the biggest event was today, they'd probably pick the 3 p.m. panel featuring James Cameron and his first public showing of footage from Avatar.

But Seth Green was scheduled opposite Avatar to discuss Robot Chicken, the new Titan Maximum and whatever else his fans could throw at him.

Sure the crowds were massive for Cameron, but it was also a maxed-out Meeting Room 6A for Green and the Adult Swim shows as fans lined up down the hall, down another hall and, eventually, outside the upper level of the convention center.

A lot of memories have surfaced of the good times that pop icon and musical genius Michael Jackson provided the world in the wake of his untimely and unfortunate death. However, an elephant in the room has wedged its wide butt in between the happy memories that range from "Billy Jean" to "Rockin' Robin," other than the eye-bleedingly bad Moonwalker movie.

Jackson's life outside of the recording studio and in the blood-soaked pages of the supermarket tabloids provided a lot of fodder for comedies and comedians that turned the man into a punchline just as fast as the radio waves turned him into a legend.

Seth Green and the Robot Chicken: Star Wars team are taking a skate show on the road to promote the release of the sequel on DVD.

Adult Swim's Robot Chicken: Star Wars -- Episode II comes to DVD conveniently in time for San Diego Comic-Con, and Green will kick-off a national bus tour of roller skating rinks for two weeks to hype the disc.

It's a hip choice for Robot Chicken: Star Wars, as the first DVD in the series included a funny "Star Wars on Ice" segment.

Seth Green and a bunch of his associates from Robot Chicken will be lending their voices to a new animated series called Titan Maximum which is, for all intents and purposes, a parody of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and their ilk (or even Voltron). Many of the people behind this show are also behind Robot Chicken.

I've been saying for years that if the world is threatened by an extra-terrestrial menace, the last group of people I would want to defend me is "teens with attitude". With that in mind, this sounds like a really funny concept. I'm just not sure if it would work as a continuing series. It might be better as a limited series or just a movie. Hopefully Green and company will prove me wrong.

It helps that two of the writers behind it write for comic books (Geoff Johns and Zeb Wells) since it's such a comic book premise. This is definitely one that I'll set the DVR for.

Being the award for Excellence in Animation, this was easily the widest ranging category, and you all really came through in your nomination suggestions (sorry The Venture Brothers doesn't qualify). With animation owning several channels all to itself and still appearing everywhere else, you've got kid's shows, very much adult only series (did I mention The Venture Brothers can't get nominated?), gag cartoons, sci-fi cartoons and even gothic horror.

With your help from my Adam Finley Award call for nominations post last week where you tried to trick me into nominating The Venture Brothers, even though I can't, we've managed to narrow down the field of contenders to what we feel were the five strongest entries into the wide world of television animation in the past season. Don't forget to check out the Reader's Choice at the bottom where you can vote for which of the five you think are deserving to win. Next week, we'll be revealing both your winner and ours.

For many longtime TV Squad readers the name Adam Finley could only be associated with one thing: the wide world of animation. Adam was passionate about animation, covering many shows for us here as well as reporting on anything and everything happening in the industry. So it's only right that the award for Excellence in Animation be named after him.

There's all kinds of possibilities for contenders here. I'd give a nod to both Star Wars tributes -- Family Guy and Robot Chicken -- and South Park definitely stretched their animation style with 'Major Boobage,' but I didn't think the episode was all that good. Aqua Teen Hunger Force had some good episodes this season (personal favorites include the VeggieTales parody and that crazy trilogy that opened the season).

But I've by no means watched all the best in animation this year, so I call out to you, dear readers. Which episodes or shows do you think set the bar or even raised it in this past year? Are The Simpsons out of their prime and not worthy of TVS recognition? How about King of the Hill or American Dad? The new The Mr. Men Show is retro-tastic, simple, but still cleverly awesome! Too many to handle! Help me TVS Readers, you're my only hope!

A few days before an advanced copy of Robot Chicken Season Two arrived in the mail, I had been watching my Mission Hill DVD. For those who don't know, Mission Hill was the creation of Simpsons writers Josh Weinstein and Bill Oakley. It focused on a college graduate named Andy French, living the typical slacker existence of an aimless college grad. The series aired when I myself was an aimless, slacking twentysomething, so I found the series funny, poignant, and often heartbreakingly real.

I realized while watching it that Adult Swim hasn't had a series with that kind of substance in a long time. Series like Baby Blues and Home Movies have been replaced by weird post-modern fare like Aqua Teen Hunger Force* and the works of Tim and Eric, with very little programming left with any real emotion.

And now we return to E! True Hollywood Story -- Optimus Prime.

The early 21st century wasn't kind to the Autobot leader. With revenues from his successful 80's cartoon drying up, the accumulated losses he took from his investments in WorldCom and Enron, and the disaster that was the short-lived game show Autobot or Decepticon, Optimus Prime could barley put a cube of Energon on the table. He tried to get back in television with small bit parts on According to Jim and Still Standing but no one was really watching.

I'm sitting here watching Robot Chicken Star Wars online with video commentary from creators Seth Green and Matt Senreich, and in the opening sequence Green explains how the animators actual animated a real AT-AT toy to duplicate the Imperial Walker scene from The Empire Strikes Back. Green mistakenly refers to it as a Hasbro toy, but as all Star Wars fans know, it was Kenner that made the toys, not Hasbro.

Of course, the fact that I would even know that makes me exactly the sort of Star Wars geek the folks at Robot Chicken were aiming for. I hate to admit I wasn't as floored by the special as I was hoping, and somewhat disappointed to see sequences reused from past episodes, but it was clear, based on the special; the interludes with Green, Senreich and Breckin Meyer; and the aforementioned commentary, that these guys really love Star Wars, and that alone made it worthwhile.

[via Pop Candy]

Before action figures became collectibles that should never, ever be removed from their little plastic bubble packaging boys and girls actually played with them. Sometimes, the adventures that these little characters had were not what they were intended for. In fact, I'm sure that some of these action figures did things that would make a grown man blush.

Boy, howdy! If you don't have the TiVo or DVR (or, for the non-believers, VCR) cleared out by Sunday night you are going to miss a ton of Robot Chicken. In addition to the show's tribute to everything Star Wars premiering on Father's Day evening, the entire Adult Swim schedule will be dedicated to everything Robot Chicken from the beginning of their broadcast schedule till the break of dawn.

It will begin with the 30-minute Star Wars special at 10 pm. The special will then air at the top of each hour until Adult Swim's broadcast day ends at 6 a.m. Monday morning to make room for parent Cartoon Network. At the bottom of each hour Robot Chicken creators Seth Green and Matt Senreich will air their favorite episodes.

USA Today has a nice article about Green, Senreich, and the special they created. In it they talk about what they had to go through to get Star Wars creator George Lucas' blessing to create such a special, and to get Lucas to provide his voice in one of the scenes. I wonder if that blessing also extended to another show that Seth is involved with -- Family Guy. I'm sure it's no coincidence that the FOX animated comedy is doing it's own spoof of Star Wars for next season.