Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars the Voices of Gary Cole, Thomas Allen, Stephen Colbert,
John Michael Higgins, Chris Edgerly, Peter MacNicol, Erik Richter, Paget Brewster, Lewis Black
UK Certification 15 | UK RRP £19.99 | Runtime 157 minutes | Created by Michael Ouweleen & Erik Richter
Having only seen this two-disc DVD set of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, and not the previous two volumes, maybe I was missing something when watching the 13 ten-minute episodes, because for a show with such a celebrated cult following over its six-year run, I wasn't too impressed by it at all.
Birdman and the Galaxy Trio was a very short-lived (nine episodes) Hanna-Barbera cartoon in the late '60s that, as you can see, failed to attract much attention. Fast forward a few decades to 1994 and Space Ghost Coast to Coast was alive and well, a parody of the Space Ghost cartoon, which at a couple of points featured Birdman himself. Fast forward again to the year 2000 and Space Ghost has spawned Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law, about the solar-powered D-list superhero who quit his job saving the galaxy to become a lawyer, standing in the courtroom defending and accusing a motley crew of Hanna-Barbera characters, from Fred Flinstone to Scooby Doo. Such outrageous cases include an animal rights group who have kidnapped Magilla Gorilla and branded Peebles a danger to animals, and Top Cat being arrested for simply being a cat.
It's odd stuff. For many of the episodes I was watching with a straight face, others I was not. The series is a mixed bag with its dumb, silly humour which occasionally elicited a smile. It's heavy on the random like most adult-themed cartoons, often preying on silence and still shots for a few seconds which I have to say always gets a laugh out of me, no matter how overdone.
It's interesting to see all the various character creations of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera make guest appearances, especially with accurate voices (see Shaggy from Scooby Doo). I'm glad that a show like this exists, but couldn't it have been better written? It's undoubtedly better than the awful cartoon of which it parodies, which is funny in itself, but there was absolutely nothing in this series that made me bust my gut with laughter. I've had more fun watching one or two episodes of Family Guy than the entire third volume of Harvey Birdman.
The episode that I found the funniest in fact didn't follow the formula of the series and served as an introduction of sorts to the volume, with a few episodes of the original cartoon edited together with new voice overs to create what was a genuinely hilarious parody, whereas the actual Attorney at Law shows are drawn from scratch. Perhaps the earlier seasons were better, but this volume of superhero-turned-lawyer bite-sized comedy definitely isn't super-funny.
EXTRAS ★★ A random compilation video of the show's main characters; Final Record: a mishmash of taped performances from the voice cast of the final episode; The Origin of X the Eliminator: a 5-page digital comic book featured in one of the episodes; a timeline of recurring jokes from volumes 1-3, ten deleted scenes and a couple of trailers for other Adult Swim shows.