Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation: Unprotected! Shout Factory (2003) DVD $19.98 Available from Amazon.com.

Spike and Mike know their audience. Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation has its roots in animated shorts that appeared as filler during rock concerts -- obvious humor, usually of a sexual or violent nature, with a big payoff in the form of blood or X-rated imagery. That said, I am not their audience. I went to college for computer animation, as did several of the contributors to this collection, and there's nothing here I haven't seen before, either literally or figuratively. The lure of seeing forbidden imagery like drug abuse, sex and gratuitous violence in cartoon form wore off after the first dozen or so times I'd seen it, either in shorts from my classmates, clips from the internet or, in some cases, a Spike & Mike animation (as several of these cartoons are at least five years old). Conversely, there were some folks in class who couldn't get enough of this stuff. For them, every animated penis and dismembered limb was something to be cackled over, a new taboo that would never grow unfunny with age. Fortunately, Spike and Mike are here to amuse them.

To be honest, I think what pisses me off most about the Spike and Mike stuff isn't the subject matter itself, which is pretty bland and sophomoric at best, but the execution. It seems to me that in order to live up to their "Sick and Twisted" label, they'd have to champion something that actually had the power to disturb and/or amuse us. But what is really all that novel about a dysfunctional family consisting of a serial killer, a dominatrix, a drug addict and a webcam exhibitionist (Robert Steven Rhine's "Sickcom")? Or a spoof of '50s student instructional films in which drugs are actually advocated (Dan Dudley's "Home Honey, I'm Higher: What You Should Know About Drugs")? Isn't this the kind of junior varsity irony that most animators should have worked out of their systems after seeing one episode of Ren and Stimpy or Aqua Teen Hunger Force?

Part of the ability to shock is the ability to surprise, but nearly every short here fails spectacularly in that regard. When the guy walks up to the lamppost during a snowfall in "Tongue Twister", is there any doubt that he'll get his tongue stuck to the post? No, of course not; we've all seen A Christmas Story. When he realizes he's about to get run over by a snowplow and he uses all manner of bloody techniques to sever himself from his own tongue, I guess that's supposed to be the shocking part. And then, when the snowplow turns away at the post before him, and he realizes he was never in danger in the first place, I guess that's supposed to be the irony. Likewise, when the titular "Lupo the Butcher" is swearing up a storm about his shitty job while cutting meat in extreme closeup, is there any doubt that he'll eventually sever his fingers in the process? And when his entire body falls apart into "cuts" of its own, and he's left as a hopping head, propping himself up with his tongue just long enough to continue his bitching, I suppose that's supposed to be "cutting edge." Pardon the pun -- or don't, as it seems to fit the motif.

In its defense, not everything on Unprotected! is a waste. Bruce Simpson's "Stickgirl" offers a safe sex metaphor, but it's neither gratuitous nor predicated around a single punchline; it also features an existential condom joke that's actually funny. Breehn John Burns and Jason Johnson's "Beyond Grandpa II" (produced by Spike and Mike, of all people) features a surprisingly deft blend of ageist and minimalist humor ("Sunday Brunch Heart Attack Grandpa" was a favorite). Josh Bass's "Ninjews" seems tailor-made for Comedy Central, while Debbie Bruce and Natalie Repp's "Peepshow" is easily the best minute of stop-motion animated marshmallow Easter bunnies fucking like jackrabbits that I've ever seen. Even the gratuitous sex and violence of "Teach Me" is somewhat startling -- not in its content, but in its brevity. What do all of the aforementioned shorts have that the remainder, largely, don't? Timing. It's the cardinal rule of humor, and yet many of these animators have forsaken it in favor of the over-the-top, gross-out finalé. In their quest to create something shocking, they've forgotten that the delivery of the punchline is always more important than the words (or the images) themselves.

Then again, I think back to those images of Spike opening fire on the Pokémon and Teletubbies and I wonder what I expected from this disc in the first place.

-- Justin Kownacki