Directed By: Comedy Central
Starring: Dave Chappelle, Lewis Black, Amy Sedaris, Sarah Silverman, Bob Ross, Tom Lennon, Kerri Kenney-Silver
A bunch of loosely drug themed programs, show segments, and just plain weirdness from the Comedy Central vaults.
The Movie
The DVD is broken up into three areas, Buds, Seeds and Stems. Get it? Buds contains whole episodes of Comedy Central shows from past and present. Stems has just show segments, and Seeds just has some shorts that range from relaxing to just plain weird.
Buds has complete episodes from the following Comedy Central Shows, The Sarah Silverman Program, TV Funhouse, Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil, Reno 911!, Strangers With Candy. Maybe excepting Reno 911!, these are all really love’m or hate’m shows. In the Sarah Silverman Program Sarah spends half the show in blackface making a complete fool of herself and making the audience squirm for a moderately funny punch line at the end of the show. If you love sex and drug crazed animal puppets then TV Funhouse is the show for you. In this episode the cute animal puppets extract Christmas cheer from Doug the show host’s spine and freebase it. Root of All Evil showcases a debate between Weed and Beer, which fits the theme of the DVD but doesn’t really entertain. Reno 911! features the boys dressing up and heading out to Burning Man hoping to bust a bunch of LSD dealers. In the Strangers with Candy episode Jerri ends up whipping up a batch of drugs to get into the in crowd.
Stems, instead of containing whole episodes just has sketches. It has sketches from Chappelle’s Show,The Sarah Silverman Program, Drawn Together, Crank Yankers and Viva Variety. In the Chappelle’s Show segment has a godlike “Shobiz” explaining to the newly popular Chappelle how best to cash in on his new found fame. The donations from The Sarah Silverman Program contains an animated Steve and Brian’s Adventure and a couple of mildly disturbing cartoons about sentient cookies.
Luckily the Drawn Together segments are just a couple of songs from the show. The Crank Yankers segments are solid choices and are represenative of the show. The Viva Variety spots were little nuggets from a show I forgot featuring Tom Lennon and Kerri Kenney-Silver from Reno 911! They also stuck the Comedy Central Quickies, and DVD Previews, in this portion of the DVD as well.
Seeds stays with the drug theme for the most part containing some off the wall selections but is still my favorite part of the DVD. It starts off with something resembling a 16mm film you could have seen in any high school science class called Spider on Drugs, From the Archive: Weed, is an old PSA style film from the early seventies whose message seems to be that pot smoking will not lead to the end of the world. The next to bits are the best thing on the DVD. There is a whole episode of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. Now this is not in anyway funny but it is immensly entertaining and one of the most relaxing bits of TV I have seen in a long time. The DVD finishes up with three excellent selections from Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt’s Animation Show.
5/10
The Video
The video quality varies with the quality of the source material. It’s all presented in full screen aspect and for the most part is pretty good. The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross particularly shows the limits of the technology it was taped with.
7/10
The Audio
The audio is presented in Dolby Digital Stereo in English only. It is well balanced with appropriate levels at all times. Really the only knock to be made here is the lack of subtitles and surround sound.
7/10
The Packaging and Bonus Features
The packaging is actually pretty good. I guess pot leaves would have been a little to much so there is a mushroom on the cover. The theme is continued on the back and includes copy that does a journeyman’s job of describing the contents of the DVD. In a sense the whole disc is bonus features the only thing really lacking is any making of featurettes or any kind of commentaries.
8/10
I can’t say that this DVD is not entertaining, it’s got it’s high and low points but as a whole it just doesn’t really work in any way other than a three hour commercial for Comedy Central.
Overall (Not an Average) 5/10
The Review
The Movie 5/10
The Video 7/10
The Audio 7/10
The Packaging and Bonus Features 8/10
Overall (Not an Average) 5/10