The Brak Show-Season 1 (2001)

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General		Extras
Category	Animation	Main Menu Audio & Animation Audio Commentary-for "Goldfish" episode, By Brak Audio Commentary-for "Goldfish" episode, By Brak and Kim McFarlane Easter Egg Featurette-Adult Swim News Highlights Featurette-Brak Presents The Brak Show Starring Brak Highlights Featurette-Cartoon Planet Segments Featurette-More Cartoon Planet Segments
Rating
Year Of Production	2001
Running Time	160:37
RSDL / Flipper	No/No Dual Disc Set	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Ads Then Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Jim Fortier Pete Smith
Studio Distributor	Cartoon Network Madman Entertainment	Starring	None Given
Case	Custom Packaging
RPI	?	Music	None Given

    The Brak Show is a spin of of the short lived Comedy Planet, which itself was a spin-off to the Adult Swim stalwart Space Ghost: Coast to Coast (keep an eye out for our upcoming review of the first box set of that show). Set in the period before Zorak and Brak hooked up with Space Ghost, The Brak Show is a wigged-out animated spoof of all the family sitcoms that have plagued our screens for decades.

    Brak is an ordinary boy who lives with his Mom, Dad and little brother. Well, sort of... He's a half space cat, half human space pirate child. Mom is a giant humanoid space-cat, who loves baking and general homemaking. Dad is a minute unemployed Hispanic man (thanks to an ill-explained shrink ray accident) who spends all day spouting words of wisdom as he reads the paper and smokes his pipe. Brak hangs out all the time with his best buddy Zorak, the unpleasant destruction-loving giant praying mantis. The pair frequently get into mischief while looking after Brak's neighbour Mr. Thundercleese's (a 20 foot tall armed and armoured robot who loves taking care of his perfect lawn) stuff.

    Each 11 minute animated episode follows a pretty standard sitcom formula, Brak and Zorak get into strife, figure their way out of it with the "help" of family and friends, and learn "valuable" lessons in the process. Brak loves to sing, so there are plenty of painfully funny songs featured throughout the episodes. There are 14 episodes spread across 2 discs in this set.

    The episodes in this set are:

1. Goldfish - Brak looks after Thuncleese's pet goldfish, Mr. Tickles, while he is away, only to run into trouble at feeding time.
2. War Next Door - Zorak gets caught in the middle of a war next door between Thundercleese and the clone-bots. An explosion knocks out the lump in Zorak's throat, leaving him with a beautiful singing voice. The lump comes to life and makes Zorak a singing sensation, making Brak awfully jealous in the process.
3. Time Machine - Brak's parent's refuse to take Brak to his favourite restaurant, Fish Pockets, for dinner because he hasn't done his homework. Being in a similar predicament himself, Zorak accompanies Brak back in time (using Thundercleese's Time Shed) to convince their past selves to do their homework.
4. Hippo - Zorak forces Brak to give up his fluffy friend Hippo the stuffed lobster, but Brak has trouble coping on his own.
5. Bawkbagawk - Zorak convinces Brak to kidnap a neighbouring school's mascot, Bawkbagawk, in a misguided attempt to become popular.
6. Mobab - Having grown tired of Dad's chauvinistic tendencies, Mom runs away with a dashing tentacled stranger named Mobab.
7. Expiration Day - It's Tundercleese's birthday, but he isn't in the mood to celebrate as he has reached retirement age and his weapons have been deactivated. When the Earth soon falls in peril, Brak must visit the factory that made Thundercleese in order to have him re-activated.
8. Psychoklahoma - Brak and friends perform a benefit show for their favourite TV scientist, Senór Science. The show turns into a musical cross between Oklahoma! and Psycho.
9. The Eye - Brak's Dad, a retired staring contest champion, takes everybody on in a series of staring contests. Anything goes in these deadly competitions!
10. Poppy - Brak inherits his grandfather's fake nose and decides to use it to attract women.
11. Bully - A new bully comes to town and ousts Zorak from his neighbourhood position. When the bully turns out to be much more reasonable than Zorak ever was, Zorak decides to take bake his old title.
12. Mother, Did You Move My Chair? - Brak is distressed that he has to dissect his friend Luther the clam in science class. Dad is even more distressed that someone may have moved his chair.
13. President Dad - After irrationally losing his temper at the local neighbourhood association, Dad decides to run for president of the association. Little does he know that his competition is a large planet eating space-monster.
14. Pepper - Zorak falls for a tentacled creature named Pepper. Meanwhile fever is spreading amongst the population about the upcoming arrival of "The Mothership".

Video

    The show is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio and is not 16x9 enhanced (nor should it be).

    The video looks near perfect. The show was digitally produced, unlike many of the early Adult Swim cartoons which were made re-using old animation cells, which has obviously helped deliver a first rate look on DVD. The image is razor sharp. There is no grain or noticeable low level noise. Colours are rendered vividly and evenly.

    There are no signs of MPEG compression related artefacts, nor any other nasties that would mar the image.

    There are no subtitles available.

    Both discs in the set are single layer discs (DVD-5, not DVD-9 as is stated on the package), so neither are RSDL formatted.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is one English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192 Kbps) soundtrack available.

    The dialogue is well synchronised, for a cartoon at any rate, and clearly audible.

    The Brak Show makes great use of ludicrous musical numbers in pretty much every episode. The music comes across cleanly and clearly in the soundtrack.

    There is no noticeable surround use at any point in the show, but the subwoofer gets quite a good workout. There is plenty of dynamic range in the soundtrack and lots of clean bass in the music. The Brak Show is not the sort of show that would really gain anything from surround sound, so the soundtrack is perfectly sufficient.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    The package of extras is very worthwhile and largely comprises highlights of past cartoons featuring Brak. Unfortunately, there are two special features, a commentary with the creators and a radio play production of the pilot episode, that are listed on the packaging but not included on the discs. The packaging is particularly nice though - a paint by numbers digipak!

Main Menu Audio and Animation

    The menus for this set are well worth a mention as a special feature. As well as being thematically well designed, each menu page features Brak singing a song about the contents of the page. Funny stuff.

Easter Eggs (1:25)

    Not exactly well hidden, or really hidden at all - they look like actual Easter eggs and they're even sung about in the menu song... There are two eggs, both involving characters singing some of the rather silly songs form the show.

2 Audio Commentaries for the Episode Goldfish

    One commentary by Brak himself, who pretty much just narrates every little thing that happens on-screen - this one is stupid enough to be funny the first time you listen to it. The second commentary is by Brak and Kim McFarlane, the maintainer of his webpage - this one isn't too interesting.

Adult Swim News Segments

    Prior to The Brak Show, Brak starred in a series of spots called Adult Swim News. These spots were used to bridge the gap between the short adult swim shows and commercials. Each is extremely silly, but hilarious for anyone that enjoys The Brak Show.

    Each of these spots, with the exception of Puppet Party (which uses puppets), is animated using a very limited set of animation cells from the original Space Ghost cartoon.

    The episodes are:

• Birdkiller (1:03)
• Chicken (1:03)
• Wake Up (1:03)
• Puppet Party (1:03)
• Russian Killers (1:03)

Brak Presents The Brak Show Starring Brak Highlights

    A series of skits and songs taken from the Adult Swim specials Brak Presents The Brak Show Starring Brak. The skits seem a lot like Sesame Street or The Muppet Show spoofed in the most absurd manner possible with cheaply animated Adult Swim characters. The highlight of the bunch is Brak and Freddy Prinze, Jr.'s hillbilly duet Highway 40 revisited.

    The skits are:

• Dr. Shriek/Magic Toenail (2:40)
• Highway 40 revisited(2:20)
• Rock Candy(1:00)
• Beeflog(1:06)
• I'm Forgettable/I'm a Cucumber(1:54)
• Brakula(1:25)
• Bananacheck/Smell You Later(2:42)
• The Umpire Strikes Back(38)

Cartoon Planet Segments (6:50)

    A series of skits and songs from the Cartoon Planet show that pre-dated The Brak Show. There are some rather funny songs here, but they are not separated into chapters or separate features and have to all be watched together.

    The big difference between Cartoon Planet and the future Brak-related shows is that these skits, like the Adult Swim News segments, are animated using original 1960s Space Ghost animation cells rather than digital animation. This lends a unique charm to the segments, but does limit what they can achieve.

More Cartoon Planet Segments (12:50)

    More Cartoon Planet skits and songs, again they are not split up in any way and play only as one long segment.

    The Region 4 edition misses out on a handful of features of the Region 1 edition. Content-wise, Region 4 misses a commentary by the show's creators for the episode War Next Door (even though it's mentioned on the cover of the Region 4 edition), a radio play version of the pilot episode (also mentioned on the cover of the Region 4 edition, but not present) and an Easter Egg featuring Andy Merrill doing the voice of Brak. The Region 1 edition also features English, Spanish, and French subtitles. Region 4 includes a handful of irrelevant trailers for other, non-Adult Swim, Madman releases that aren't on the Region 1 edition. Region 1 certainly wins this comparison.

    Like many of the Adult Swim cartoons, The Brak Show is so stupid it is hilarious. Once you get past the sheer stupidity of it, it is a surprisingly clever spoof of the asinine sitcoms that have plagued our screens for decades.

    There is a great package of extras, but the set is missing some notable extras that are mentioned on the packaging and were contained on the Region 1 edition (this is pretty much the only thing holding this back from being a 5 star-worthy release).

    The video and audio on these discs are both very good.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall