Family Guy, Robot Chicken, and the Form/Function of the Narrative: Part 4

The definitive theme of Robot Chicken is that all narratives can be modified, combined, or cut short; they actually have no effect on the audience’s ability to piece together a rational picture in their mind. Take the 15 minute running time. It is indicative of the watcher’s lack of attention span after years of television and film viewing, not to mention the fleeting commercials in between. The stop animation not only serves as a signifier of nostalgia by its technical obsoleteness, it also functions as a metaphor for the splicing of various storylines together with its crude, unrefined imagery.

Even the opening sequence of the show hints at its ultimate premise. The opening shot is of a dead chicken on a nondescript road (a perverted interpretation of the joke “Why did the chicken cross the road?” perhaps). A crazed-looking scientist picks it up off the street and takes it to his laboratory. There he hacks and cuts at the dead corpse. As he moves away from the camera, we see that the chicken has been revived, sporting new metal prosthetics (hence the emergence of the titular character). The scientist then straps the reformed chicken into a chair and forces its eyes open, presumably to watch the literally dozens of television screens that have been placed before it.

The chicken, as you may have guessed, represents us- the audience, to be more specific. We are an abomination, a twisted experiment resulting from the countless plotlines and stories we have witnessed onscreen. Eventually, as demonstrated previously by the example of the Voltron/ You Got Served act, these once-singular narratives blend into one another. The opening itself borrows from various sources: the aforementioned “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke, the stereotypical mad scientist with a lab in a giant castle housed in the mountains, the Frankenstein-like emergence of the half-robot, half-flesh chicken, and the “rehabilitation” through the forced viewing of televised images reminiscent of the criminal’s in A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1969). This hodge-podge creation displays the superiority of Robot Chicken’s narrative elucidation. We have no idea why a scientist would revive a chicken and force it to watch television, possibly forever. There is no revelation of motives or backgrounds of the characters or a description of the situation. Nor, as Robot Chicken dictates, are we required to know. What we do recognize are the conventional narratives that it borrows from, which is all that is necessary to enjoy what we have just witnessed in the opening and the subsequent acts that follow.

Nostalgia requires information to be drawn from the viewer’s memory. Both Family Guy and Robot Chicken acknowledge that the modern mind is so muddled with data that pieces of information are grouped into a shapeless mass, often overlapping one another. Robot Chicken, however, fully embraces the chaotic state of the narrative’s current form by mimicking the attention-deficient watcher’s experience through short, jumbled skits that can only produce laughter because of its initial incoherence. Family Guy seems to make only momentary indications of the nature of the modern narrative with its cultural allusions, reverting back to a more standard, traditional plot after each one.

Family Guy is by no means a lesser show than Robot Chicken. The problem is that it will always suffer criticism by those who see the insertion of references as random and disruptive in relation to the main storyline of an episode. Chicken makes no attempt to conjure a stable, primary plot, and therefore, randomness may be present, but there is no disruption.

End