Exclusive: Celebrate The 15th Anniversary Of “Robot Chicken” With This Excerpt From Our Upcoming Book

Robot Chicken is celebrating it’s 20th Anniversary (February 20th, 2005) and we decided to give you guys a sneak peek of our upcoming untitled book about the history of adult animation. This is our chapter for Robot Chicken which will be included in the hard copy release coming soon to a store near you!

Sometimes people forget just how big of a star Seth Green was in the early 2000’s. This kid comes out of Can’t Hardly Wait in the late 90s, which turns into a phenomenon, was a lead voice in Family Guy, and Scott Evil in the Austin Powers movies which were HUGE at the box office. Because of this Seth would appear on all sorts of talk shows from The Howard Stern Show, Conan, you name it, he was there. On one such occasion heading to the Conan show he had called up Matt Senreich to produce a stop-motion short featuring both the talk show host and the big time movie star. This would lead to a web series from Sony website Screenblast.com called Sweet J Presents that would inevitably give birth to Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken. 

The premise of the series would stay the same. A hodgepodge of stop-motion sketches that would lampoon and parody pop culture and create original characters like Bitch Pudding to cause mass chaos. The series was initially passed on by a slew of TV networks before being picked up by Adult Swim and has since gone on to be a phenom, most of which went to the number of convention appearances everyone who produces the show goes to. New York Comic Con and San Diego Comic Con have become mainstays for the production company known as Stoopid Buddy Stoodios that has since brought us other solid franchises and helped reinvigorate the stop-motion animation production format that has since permeated in other areas like commercial, kids series, etc. 

Robot Chicken got so popular it was afforded the possibility of doing themed specials. While touching upon Star Wars, DC Comics, and Christmas, Robot Chicken would eventually do full special episodes dedicated to these themes usually with the assistance of producers for either their respective franchises, or in the case of the Christmas specials, Seth MacFarlane. At the end of every season, Robot Chicken usually ends with a sketch with producers at Adult Swim weighing whether or not to continue on with the series after so many seasons and we are totally fine with always getting the resounding…”yes”.