There
will always be room in American animation for shows like Superjail. Crude,
ultraviolent, ugly and careful to present any cleverer ideas masked beneath a layer
of intentional stupidity, it descends most directly from Beavis and Butthead
and shares similarities in tone and humour with other cartoons airing on
Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim section such as Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Metalocalypse.
On the other hand, Superjail! may be the bloodiest, most surreal and
most morally reprehensible cartoon to make it onto a mainstream television
channel. That said, in the Internet age there are more shocking things on every
imageboard, on every flash cartoon site.
Superjail!
is the story of an enormous and ridiculous jail. In every episode, a criminal
is apprehended by an advanced robot called Jailbot and flown to Superjail past
a series of fantastic scenes in a brilliant title sequence that is one of the
season’s main hooks. Indeed, it is usually the same criminal, who has escaped
somehow or other in the previous episode. The jail is run by another of the
series’ main draws, The Warden, a winsome and idiotic master inventor with an
effete manner and dress sense that draws comparisons with Willy Wonka. He is
helped by officious, neurotic little Jared and amusingly masculine prison guard
Alice, while havoc is wreaked by two identical twins with monotone voices I’m sure are an impression
of somebody, though beyond Austin-Powers-doing-an-impression-of-Tim-Curry-in-Rocky-Horror,
I can’t place it.
Most
episodes involve the Warden deciding there is some problem with the jail or getting
inspired to improve it somehow, which invariably goes wrong or is sabotaged by
the twins and ends up causing a fiendishly inventive bloodbath. As the concepts
were often clever or so silly they were very amusing (as when genderswapped
versions of all the characters made an appearance), this did not become
tiresome over the course of the series – but it was also after all only 11 episodes
of 10 minutes each. Plus it was fun to speculate that it was all an
illusion, a jail to contain the one criminal – The Warden.
I
honestly thought Superjail! wasn’t going to be my thing. Too juvenile, I
thought. Too obvious. The amusingly awful moment in the first episode’s intro where
Jailbot tries to give the little girl some ice cream would be the only laugh I
got from it. Yet there was enough humour, enough clever references and enough fascination
in these horrible but compelling characters I found myself really enjoying the
show, and happy to watch season 2 – and the upcoming season 3.
Plus I have to say, slipping in visual nods to the mythological animations in Watership Down definitely
didn’t do any harm.
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