Featured TV on DVD Review: The Robot Chicken Walking Dead Special: Look Who's Walking
March 22, 2018
The Robot Chicken Walking Dead Special: Look Who's Walking - Buy from Amazon: DVD or Blu-ray
Robot Chicken started its ninth season last fall, which is very impressive for any show. It is doubly so for a show with an obviously high-concept beginning. High-concept shows tend to burn out quickly. Does this show still have what it takes to entertain? Or is it running on inertia at this point?
Due to the nature of Robot Chicken, it is impossible to talk about the plot without almost immediately hitting spoilers. After all, the show is comprised of sketches, most of which are in the minute-long range, and describing the sketch would spoil the sketch a lot of the time. I can talk about the framing device. Some years after the events depicted in The Walking Dead, a museum has been created to commemorate these events. However, it is a tacky tourist attraction and a now elderly Carl shows up and tells one of the patrons how all of this is wrong. And at this point, the sketches and spoilers begin.
It has been a while since I watched Robot Chicken and it has been even longer since I watch The Walking Dead. When I first heard of this special, I was a little confused, as The Walking Dead and its spin-off Fear the Walking Dead have lost a lot of viewers over the past few seasons. In fact, its past two episodes are below season two’s average when it comes to ratings. Fortunately, while the show it is based on has jumped the shark, it still provides lots of opportunities for laughs. That’s not to say every joke hits, but the hit to miss ratio is about three to one. With how fast the jokes arrive, even a two-to-one hit-to-miss ratio would be enough to keep you laughing.
One last note, my favorite sketch of the special was the zombie POV sketch.
Like I said, the special is only 22 minutes long, so the DVD / Blu-ray lives and dies on its extras. There are two audio commentary tracks, the first has Matthew Senreich, Scott M. Gimple, Robert Kirkman, Tom Sheppard, and Seth Green. The second has Seth Green, Josh McDermitt, Tom Root, and Tom Sheppard. Up next is a seven-minute long making of featurette. There are eight cut sketches, mostly in storyboard form. They are just under six minutes, including intros, and sometimes the intros are longer than the skit. Sketches to Die For has the creators talking about their favorite sketches. There’s a short featurette with some of the creators pretending to be a zombie chicken. Behind the Screams is a two-minute featurette with some of the artists on the show, who are attacked by a zombie. That’s almost as long as the special itself.
The Robot Chicken Walking Dead Special moves at a brisk enough pace that even some of the misses pass by so quickly that you barely notice them. The extras on the DVD or Blu-ray are impressive and make up for the short running time of the special. $10 for the DVD seems like the better deal over the Blu-ray, on the other hand.
The Show
The Extras
The Verdict
Filed under: Video Review, Seth Green, Scott M. Gimple, Robert Kirkman, Matthew Senreich