Titan Maximum: Season 1 review (DVD) ★

Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars the voices of Dan Milano, Seth Green,
Rachael Leigh Cook, Eden Espinosa, Billy Dee Williams,
Breckin Meyer, Adrianne Palicki, Tahmoh Penikett | Written by Various
UK Certification 15 | UK RRP £19.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 114 minutes | Created by Tom Root & Matt Senreich

Being as it's a show from the creators and main voice cast of the rambunctious Robot Chicken, you'd expect Titan Maximum to be just as hilarious and clever. But sadly, the application of such logic in the hope of an entertaining new series proves to be a complete waste of time and thought. Titan Maximum is neither hilarious nor clever.

It's an unintelligibly juvenile show that collapses almost as soon as it begins. With this nine-episode first season, Titan Maximum falls exactly where Robot Chicken stands tall. A plump berry of sweet satire, bursting with wit it is not, but shriveled and sour and disappointing it very much is.

The futuristic series revolves around Titan Force Five, a youthful team banded together to defend Titan, Saturn's largest moon, from whatever may attack, and with the armed and dangerous Titan Maximum, their towering, Transformer-like robot. But after the spiraling costs of putting right the destruction caused in the wake of their actions, the team are decommissioned. We rejoin the former protectors two years later where they each live their own separate lives. One of the team has even died in the hiatus, and another, Gibbs, has turned to the dark side and become fixated on destroying Titan Force Five with his own army of mech warriors. His newfound appetite for chaos sparks the team to be put back in action - and no matter where they are, you know there's going to be a good few explosions and expletives.

A parody of sci-fi movies (to the extent that Billy Dee Williams lends his voice to one of the season's prominent characters) and television, as well as the old anime Super Robot shows, Titan Maximum is really just a big, loud, stop-motion-animated mess. The characters are constantly shouting the jokes, which further dilutes the weak humour to begin with, and on a DVD where the stronger profanities are for some reason censored, large portions of dialogue are indecipherable as so many of the gags are grossly overlong strings of bleeped-out abuse.

I thought Seth Green and cartoons went together like salt and pepper, but I was sadly mistaken.

EXTRAS ?? Anatomy of a Sequence: an example of the different stages a sequence goes through in production, from the animatic right through to the assembly cut, sound effects and eventual completion; a 15-minute behind the scenes feature; crew mugshots; 18 deleted animatics; table read; and trailers for other Adult Swim shows.