Wonder Showzen - Season Two

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The absurdist comedy of Wonder Showzen is back with all of your favorites in tingly delightful abundance—the puppets, the cartoons, the kids, the madness. Relive all those Saturday mornings spent in front of the tube in your jammies, with a demented twist of course, as Chauncey, Wordsworth, Clarence and the gang deliver more smartly subversive fun. Sing along now, "Kids show….. kids show……" .com ---- The second season of the bizarre MTV2 series Wonder Showzen is not exactly a rehash of season one; it's more like a ramped-up version of the same stuff that was such a cruelly hilarious invention of a children's puppet/variety show from hell. The same warning about it not being a kids' show precedes each episode, with the material following more lunatic, more self-reflexive, and way more not-for-kids than the stuff remembered by those who fell in love with Wonder Showzen for exactly those reasons. The eight episodes and smattering of bonus materials are presented in a fun kid's book rip-off cardboard case, complete with a "storybook" that has nothing to do with the episodes, but everything to do with the psychotic antics and fuzzy characters returning that populate the show. A sampling of the bigger-budgeted episodes include "Body," in which the letter P gets , turns into the letter B, then gets liposuction to improve her self-esteem. It's no surprise when the puppetted, sucked-out excess gains self-awareness. There's also "Cooperation," in which fake bootlegged versions of Wonder Showzen battle it out using the same theme and sketch outlines simultaneously in the four corners of the screen. Another episode is entirely devoted to a take off on "Hee Haw" called "Horse Apples" which gleefully tromps all over "Middle America" (a.k.a. Texas) and right-wing conservative values. The "Horse Apples" thing pops up in another episode, and is explored more fully in some of the off the wall bonus material. The final episode of the season is an analysis of TV in which Chauncey asks people on the street what kinds of shows they would make. Some care and some don't, which pretty much sums up how people will feel about Wonder Showzen itself as television. Only two of the episodes have commentary tracks, but the show's creators do not speak on them; they're the real thoughts of actual scientists talking about the physics of time travel and the morality of genocide. Funny! --Ted Fry