Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm
And so we begin our hopefully long, and assuredly WILDLY POPULAR series of reviews by... reviewing something almost nobody saw.
Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm (2022). Grade: C+
For people who know what I’m referring to, here’s a quick capsule review. For those who don’t, skip past the italicized part.
Has a more coherent plot than the first ATHF movie, which accidentally makes it feel draggier; this is closer to an overlong episode than CMFFT's sheer deranged weirdness. ("Play the drum solo of life!")
Still, fun for fans of the series. Shake's as awful as you remember, and Carl maybe even a little grosser. In what's more of a South Park move, the film has a Jeff Bezos-type character. In true ATHF fashion, he imports two warring species of space aliens to work as proto-slave labor. They are always either hating each other or screwing slurpily. No heavy-metal movie concessions, alas!
OK… what the hell is this?
You might be familiar with Adult Swim, which runs during evening/overnight hours on the Cartoon Network cable channel. In recent years, Adult Swim has become most known for Rick and Morty (whose fans can be awfully Bro-ing – the show didn’t start out that way). It also features a lot of Family Guy/American Dad reruns, some anime, and the occasional live-action program like The Eric Andre Show (which is deranged, but kind of inspired).
At the very beginning, in the early 2000s, most of Adult Swim was what we could call, maybe, “stoned snarkiness,” taking things like forgotten Hanna-Barbera characters and re-using them in completely inappropriate ways. The programming was stuff that college kids watching on the dorm room’s communal TV could enjoy, or young people who just got back from their swing-shift jobs.
Or any sarcastic people under 40 who were just, you know, completely fooking Baked. And the most baked, sarcastic, snarky surreal show of them all was definitely Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
This, too, got its start from a re-used cartoon character, Space Ghost: Coast To Coast – in which Space Ghost hosted real people guests on an imaginary talk show. Two of the writers, Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis, invented anthropomorphic food characters: a talking milkshake, order of fries, and “Meat Wad.”
One walks, one flies, one slithers, and they live in New Jersey next to a guy who looks like a balding Ron Jeremy. They are frequently visited by aliens, robots, monsters, etc., most of whom are utterly insane. The “Aqua Teens” (who aren’t teens) often die in completely gruesome ways and there’s absolutely zero continuity between one episode and the next.
Immature enough for ya?
Of course it was immature – and, like the best immature humor, it could frequently be very, very funny.
In 2005 or so, my youngest brother, for no discernible reason, sent me a DVD of the show’s fourth season, without describing it at all. I’d never heard of it. And I enjoyed it a lot. The “plots” of each 12-minute episode can linger on one stupid thing for so long it becomes hilarious, or veer wildly into any possible direction. Imagine if Terry Gilliam invented a rapping spider who was terrible at rapping and called himself “MC Pee Pants.” That’s the kind of thing ATHF has a lot of.
In 2007, there was even a ATHF movie! In theaters! It was titled Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters (instead of using a :). I laughed nearly all the way through, although I was pretty loaded during the showing (hey, I didn’t drive). Most people hated it; one critic considered it genius. Everyone agrees that the opening is brilliant:
I don’t know if I’ll watch the movie again any time soon, but I do own a copy. I got it at the same time I bought a Harry Potter book at Barnes & Noble; after I came home, I discovered the cashier hadn’t rung up the DVD. All things considered, if I was going to accidentally steal one of these items, I wish I’d stolen the one that gave money to J.K. Rowling.
Hilariously, the ATHF movie caused a terrorism scare in Boston. An odd promotional stunt involved placing things that resembled Lite-Brites in various parts of the city, without any other identifying information. Here’s what one looked like:
Fans of the show would instantly recognize that as a Mooninite (characters which live on the Moon, are depicted as old Atari 2600-style graphics, and have various harebrained schemes to rob people). Boston authorities, who weren’t familiar with the show, worried if the psuedo Lite-Brites were bizarrely decorated explosives. Supposedly, they spent $750,000 finding and disposing of the things! (And Turner Broadcasting, which owned Cartoon Network, had to pay Boston $2 million!)
Meanwhile, New York had some similar Lite Brites, and merely called Cartoon Network to find out where they all were. Dumb New York, didn’t even get money from Turner!
Anyhoo… Plantasm is a 2022 direct-to-video movie that runs 76 minutes (the first movie was 85), and isn’t quite as bonkers as the 2007 film. Which made it less interesting, to me. But audiences willing to try something very unusual might consider giving the first film a watch. No need to finish it if it isn’t your cup of tea, right? It might make more sense if you’re familiar with the show, which keeps returning from the dead on Adult Swim. Then again, it might not! At its very best, ATHF treated sense as a nuisance to be discarded as frequently as possible.