Watching: a veritable cartoonarama this last couple of days, but among the highlights were Family Guy 9.8, in which the show ventures into new territory by being objectively good, with fuck-witted patriarch Peter Griffin becoming addicted to Red Bull and destroying his kidneys. The only compatible donor for a replacement is family pet/failed writer Brian who will be killed by the surgery, prompting a melodramatic and largely straight-faced second half of the show that is somehow even funnier than if they'd gone for laughs - though I grant you this isn't saying much going by Family Guy's standards.
Also Transformers: Prime 1.1-1.5 - which ventures into new territory for the talking, ambulatory alien vibrators by being a wee bit good. A CGI offering that borrows the stylistic trappings, bombastic soundtrack, random lapses into slow-motion and character designs from the live-action movies, the show largely blazes its own ADHD-friendly trail through the sparsely-populated American midwest (less people to animate, I imagine) as franchise stalwarts Peter Cullen and Frank Welker return as Optimus Prime and Megatron alongside Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Ernie Hudson, Adam Baldwin and Jeffrey Combs. While it's gratifying to see the 'toon achieve with ease the kind of badassery the films haven't managed to reach while simultaneously shoehorning in neat visual references to sources as disparate as Jackie Chan's Rob B Hood, John Woo's A Better Tomorrow and John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, I'm not entirely sure why I gave this iteration of the show a look given the quality of everything from Energon, Cybertron, Beast Wars and even the original 1984 animated effort (the less said of the live action movies the better), but it is actually quite enjoyable, with Optimus managing to do something other than show up to die like a bitch as he does in all the other versions. Here, you actually believe it when Optimus kills an entire army of the undead with his bare hands (because bullets won't do the job fast enough) and then in order to throttle Megatron pulls himself up a sheer cliff face with those same bare hands because - and I am not making this up - his legs are too tired from kicking ass for him to walk.
Bob's Burgers - an animated effort meant to replace definately-canceled-forever-this-time King of the Hill, it seems a little more gross-out than KotH, but still as rooted in the idea of family and moral lessons learned, even if they're the wrong lessons and the wrong person has learned them. It's a decent enough show but it's hard to tell if it has legs beyond the first episode. I'll still be tuning in, though.
Does 'tuning in' work in the context of just watching stuff on the internet? Whatever - I'll be internetting Bob's Burgers next week.
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