REVIEW: BOB’S BURGERS “BURGERBOSS”

Episode Synopsis: Bob becomes obsessed with a burger-flipping video game after Jimmy Pesto beats the high score and insults Bob on the leaderboard. Original Air Date: Apr 1, 2012

Guest Cast Jay Johnston: Jimmy Pesto

 

Spoilers Below

Bob gets a relic from his childhood memory, Burgerboss an old-school arcade game that he is the best in the world at even scoring 80,000 points on his first go. You’d think that was good, but Jimmy Pesto kicks the shit out of Bob’s score. Feeling beat on his own turf Bob spends the entire night playing but still only at a second place score and the added bonus of Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. After a full night’s sleep, Bob heads into the restaurant to find out that Linda sold the game, thereby putting Bob into an all-out fury. Thankfully, Bob finds the game at a local arcade, but he can’t even get in without his kids. To avoid having Linda interfere in Bob’s mission to be THE Burgerboss, he tells her that the kids are going to take sailing lessons but really he just takes them to the arcade. Once at the arcade, Bob finds a local arcade legend Darryl who acts as Bob’s new gaming coach in exchange for beating up a bully named Tyler which he does but only after scoring drugs.

Meanwhile, the kids are crashing all the birthday parties at the arcade and eating everyone’s cake. Feeling like they haven’t live up to their potential they decide to venture out on their own and crash the mayor’s ball taking place at the yacht club. Eventually, Linda shows up to calm down a crazy acting Bob and her food thieving kids.

This week’s episode was great as it was almost like a Bobs Burgers meets Code Monkeys what with the 8-bit animation chase sequences and reminding us all of the glory days of arcades and picking your game to be the best at. What I really dug about this week’s episode of Bob’s was Jon Benjamin’s voice acting as we’ve seen Archer get drunk and high tons of times and it was awesome how he didn’t approach both characters the exact same way while wigged out. Jon often jokes that he hardly does any ‘acting’ while doing his voice overs but I tend to disagree and I think most people would too. Also, Aziz Ansari was great as Darryl and if this whole making “$100k per college appearance while doing stand up” tour doesn’t work out he’s gotta future in voice acting for sure. The one thing I didn’t like about this episode, is that I felt the kids’ input on the episode felt rushed and pure happenstance rather than a part of the plot but other than that we got another solid entry.