Review: Hot Streets “Blood Barn; The Black Box”

The bloodiest battles and the biggest, blackest boxes.

Overview

In “Blood Barn,” Hot Streets is assigned to win the intergalactic cockfighting competition, “Blood Barn,” in order to win the respect of the League of Planets. French gets into the fight, disguised as a chicken, and learns to empathize with the chickens who are made to die for our enjoyment. After winning the competition, he fights for the animal rights of chickens on earth, where he and Hot Streets battle the Intergalatic FDA to put an end to chicken-eating throughout the universe. Meanwhile, Jen discovers things “aren’t the way they are.”

In, “The Black Box,” Jet. Jr learns that Sue Park is trying to assassinate him and makes Hot Streets accompany him to his home-world — Death World — so that he may erase all Hot Streets files from his “black box” brain before Sue can get to it. However, Sue Park disguises herself as Hot Streets’ Sherpa agent so that she may tag along to find Jet Jr.’s black box. Revealing her identity to French, she attempts to convince him that Jet Jr. is trying to sabotage Hot Streets. After he is brought to the Secretorium, the team learns that Jet Jr. actually has zero ulterior motives whatsoever. Branski has no choice but to kill Sue Park, and the gang goes home shaken.

Our Take

A ton of great joke styles was used in both “Blood Barn” and “The Black Box,” so here’s a few highlights:

The “why are things the way they are” running gag was pretty funny because it matched the overall tone of the episode before it had really even begun. This was an example of Hot Streets’ left-field humor really shining because it came out of nowhere, but persisted throughout. The best part about this was that it had a punchline — usually a Hot Streets gag just kind of lingers without any rhyme or reason, but the hysterical “they aren’t” twist to the question was a very welcome laugh and really made the episode.

Then there’s the wonderfully executed anti-climax. At the beginning of the season, we saw that Sue Park was well on her way to discovering something big about Jet Jr. — something menacing that would surely spin the audience on its toes. All this buildup to reveal that Jet Jr. was actually just a normal dude and that Sue was a raving madwoman. It’s a comedy twist not often done, so it was delightful to see — in addition to little details, such as only now bringing attention to the fact that Chubbie Webbers is a dog — both episodes had quite a few things to offer.

Even though the art style is not Hot Streets’ finest quality, it still takes a lot of imagination to come up with the worlds and characters in them — for example, with Jet Jr.’s home-world being Death World instead of a fitting place for a jet plane to hail from, such as an airport world. This pair of episodes definitely set itself apart from the others — with one being “plot” driven and the other having a high amount of animal empathy.

Overall, Hot Streets would benefit itself if it pulled off jokes/gags the same way it did in these two episodes.