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Description: The envelope-pushing cartoons created by Robert Smigel for "Saturday TV Funhouse" on Saturday Night Live are tasteless, crass, borderline offensive, and almost universally hilarious. This disc collects two dozen of the best, and viewing them together makes for a deliciously warped vision of Smigel and a relentlessly silly prism through which to view American pop culture. Case in point: The action-adventure heroes Ace and Gary, "The Ambiguously Gay Duo" (voiced, with deadpan earnestness, by Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert), are actually pretty unambiguous, but the joke is played just straight enough--while fighting to save the earth, they always allocate time to accessorize--and to pat one another on the bum for a job well done. In "Bambi 2002," Disney is roasted for its policy of pulling choice children's titles from the marketplace and releasing instead direct-to-video sequels that may not be up to the level of the original. In the "sequel," Bambi's mom is OK ("it was just a head wound, son"), and Bambi and his forest posse are hip-hop kids fighting terrorists in their spare time. "Remember, kids," the TV announcer intones, "it's all the Bambi you'll get for 10 years." Other highlights include the cartoon beauty contest "Are You Hot?" (in which Strawberry Shortcake beats out Betty Boop for sex appeal), and the black-and-white industrial training film "Sexual Harassment and You," which advises employees on the three rules for trysting with a co-worker while avoiding a sexual harassment lawsuit: 1. Be Handsome. 2. Be Attractive. and 3. Don't be unattractive. Elsewhere, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are skewered by their own words, and Michael Jackson reappears as a Hanna-Barbera creation--and still manages to be creepy. Extras include commentaries by Smigel, Carell, Colbert, Al Franken, James Carville, and others, as well as extra cartoon snippets and original art and storyboards. --A.T. Hurley
~ Saturday Night Live - The Best of Saturday TV Funhouse
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