Review: Adult Swim’s “Space Man”

Let’s face it, typically when we are visited by otherworldly out-of-towners it usually doesn’t bode well. Whether it’s Independence Day, Predator, or Aliens vs Predator, aliens typically want to kick our ass in unimaginable ways.

In Dan Britt’s new series of shorts entitled Space Man which has been airing on Adult Swim and on the Adult Swim Youtube channel, instead we get a nice guy from outer space visiting us and really just wanting to learn about what we do and who we are without any real rhyme or reason other than sheer morbid curiousity. Almost like a more mature take on E.T. though Dan’s character designs are more indicative of 1960s-influenced alien beings rather than anything from the eighties and beyond. It works here because rather quickly we needed to get over the fact that we’re dealing with an alien being and instead for the 10-minute runtime examine the relationship between space people and Earthlings. In this case, instead of facing mass annihilation, we get a pretty catchy keyboard jingle that’s worth the price of admission all on it’s own.

The aesthetic of the series looks like a cross between Tom Goes to the Mayor and Bryan Wysol-produced efforts to create something that may appear simplistic, but as time goes on, isn’t far off from some of the technical fallacies that series like Squidbillies gets away with all of the time. Given a longer runtime, I would’ve liked to have spent more time with our Space Man. For now, this is it, and it’s worth a watch. And quite frankly, it’s shocking that a talented UK-based animation producer is out there but with no local network support to speak of.