Why Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law Sucks
Hello! Welcome to the first update on my new website! You may recognize me as the webmaster of the old "The Unofficial Adult Swim Website". You may also recognize this URL as the place that I used to put all the Adult Swim schedules and guides. Well now I have my own website, and my first update is about Adult Swim. Probably all of the updates here will be about Adult Swim. Either that or I'll just review every movie and TV show I watch. Yeah, probably that second thing. Anyway, now that introductions and such are out of the way, on to the actual article.
Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law. Depending on who you ask, it's either the best show on Adult Swim or the worst. If you're asking a retarded TV critic who writes for a newspaper or magazine and he thinks of Adult Swim as the thing that has Futurama and Family Guy on it, he would say it was the best. If you ask anyone else, they would probably say that it's the worst. That person is right. But how, HOW can all the retarded TV critics of the world be wrong? How can a show that so many claim to be the "best" show of Adult Swim actually be the worst? I'll show you how, with my episode by episode breakdown of why Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law sucks.
Episode 1: Bannon Custody Case- Funny episode. HEY I THOUGHT THIS PAGE WAS ABOUT WHY BIRDMAN SUCKS yeah I'm getting to that. But this episode was funny, smartly written, and to me represents what the series should have been. Sure, the idea of Jonny Quest's Benton and Race being gay isn't the most original idea, but this episode had a lot of funny well written jokes, unlike the gay jokes in later episodes (the caveman tongue-kissing Birdman, Magilla tapping on the glass, Booboo and Birdman sleeping together, etc. etc. etc.), these gay jokes actually were funny and had some context, not like in later episodes when the gay jokes were just there for the sake of saying "HEY LOOK, SOME MEN IN THE WORLD HAVE SECKS WITH OTHER MEN HOW FUNNY!!! ESPECIALLY SINCE THEY ARE OLD CARTOON CHARACTERS WHO WEREN'T ALLOWED TO BE GAY IN THE PAST WHEN THEY WERE ON TV BUT NOW IT IS THE FUTURE AND THEY ARE ALLOWED TO BE GAY ON TV, ON CARTOON NETWORK NO LESS MAKING IT EXTRA-ABSURD!!!" but hell I'm getting off track. Maybe the reason I like this episode is because the idea of taking an old cartoon character and putting it in an adult situation seemed "fresh" at the start of Adult Swim and just hearing about sex on Cartoon Network was enough to give me the giggles. But either way, I really do enjoy this episode of Birdman, and it's the only one that holds up if you ask me.
Episode 2: Very Personal Injury- I liked this episode. The first 10,000 times I saw it. Now I'm so sick of it it's rediculous. Like I said in the previous episode, when Adult Swim started dick jokes on Cartoon Network were the funniest thing in the world to me. Now I hate this episode, but I still like the first episode. Maybe it's because once you take away the dick jokes there's nothing in this episode while the previous episode still manages to mock Jonny Quest and Hanna-Barbera conventions well. Um I guess that's all I have to say about that.
Episode 3: Shaggy Busted- The highly controversial amongst nobody in the world "Shaggy gets busted for smoking weed even though they never even imply that marijuana exists, they just show a still frame of Shaggy with his eyes half-closed and every idiot on earth laughs like a retard" episode. I still liked Birdman when I first saw this episode, and even when I first saw it I was disappointed. Yeah the Tab ad was funny but I didn't really laugh at anything else. One of the things I really liked about the first episode is how many Hanna-Barbera in-jokes it had, like the only way you could get every joke is if you saw every episode of Jonny Quest. This episode just seemed to be written for anyone who's heard of Scooby-Doo, a.k.a. everyone in the entire universe including babies who are born just this second. That's really my main problem with this episode. Now that I think about it, they really never made any reference to weed in this entire episode. If you didn't know what to look for, you probably wouldn't have gotten that Shaggy was in a drug bust. In the first episode, even if you never saw Jonny Quest you'd still catch on pretty quickly that Benton and Race were gay, but in this episode they just assumed you already knew about all the "Shaggy has a beard and he rides in a van he must smoke weed" elementary school playground jokes.
Episode 4: Death By Chocolate- One of the worst episodes of anything ever. This is the episode that made me hate Birdman. If this episode never aired, I would still think Birmdan was "ok". I am completely serious. This was a horrible episode in every feasible sense. Like how I said the previous episode seemed to be written just for anyone who's heard of Scooby-Doo, this episode just seemed to be written for every retard alive who's never even seen a cartoon in their lives. It's like they came up with the retarded "terrorist" plot first and then decided on a cartoon character to plug in later. The first episode was enjoyable whether or not you've seen Jonny Quest, this episode seemed to be written specifically for people who've never seen Yogi Bear, it could have just as easily been "UnaQuickDraw" or "UnaDonKnotts". That's well and good if you're trying to get big ratings on a network TV sitcom with a live studio audience, but this is the show that every TV critic is calling "Adult Swim's smartest show". And then the gay jokes, they make Boat Trip seem scholarly. HEY LOOK, BIRDMAN AND BOOBOO ARE SLEEPING IN A BED TOGETHER I BET YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING DID YOU, THIS SHOW IS VERY RANDOM LIKE ATHF OR SEALAB OR SPACE GHOST, AND THEREFORE JUST AS GOOD. What a horrible episode this is. I could write pages and pages of why I hate this episode but I don't feel like it I think I'll quit now.
Episode 5: Shoyu Weenie- I liked this episode the first time I saw it but it only took one watch before I got completely sick of it. This episode does have the feeling of "insert cartoon character" like Unabooboo only it's not nearly as bad. This was pretty much a throwaway episode with nothing at all memorable in it. I know it wasn't memorable because right now I'm trying to write about it and I can't think of anything to write about cause I don't remember what happened except for the general plot. So I think I'll quit this paragraph and in conclusion I'd like to say this episode sucks.
Episode 6: The Dabba Don- Terrible episode. This episode actually had a clever concept that's never really been done before, but filled with boring dumb mafia cliches. It's kind of the opposite of Bannon Custody Case. I really don't get why this is the "favorite", to me it's just standard Birdman fare: gratuitous gay jokes, unfunny character generalizations, bad writing, etc. Actually the writers of Birdman were the same people who used to write Cartoon Network shorts like Staylongers and stuff like that, and it makes sense because every episode only has about 30-60 seconds of funny in them (except for Unabooboo which had nothing funny at all). Like I said, this episode isn't really special at all except for the fact that it has a shitty parody of the Sopranos thrown in and I've never even seen a second of the Sopranos in my life.
There you have it. The completely true story of why Birdman sucks and why idiot TV critics shouldn't like it. Basically, Birdman is "Adult Swim lite". It's for people who want to feel like they're all cool by watching "adult cartoons" but they don't get actual good shows like ATHF or Space Ghost. Birdman has all of the forced "adult"-ness and forced absurdity that people expect Adult Swim to be, with none of the humor that makes Adult Swim what it is. I really really hate Birdman. With Cartoon Network overhyping to hell the fact that they're crapping out three new Birdmans that start next week, I thought now would be the perfect time to share with the internet why I hate it. Maybe I'll update this page after the new episodes air to see if the show still sucks. But I probably won't. Trust me the new episodes will suck. OK BYE BYE SEE YOU NEXT TIME.