TRIPTANK

**1/2 (out of ****)

What if the answer to television’s recent overtaking of film, as far as everyday conversational relevance, lies in Comedy Central’s short-animation-fest TripTank?

Think about it. When we sit down to watch a movie, we know we’re going to live with these characters for two hours or so. Even if the movie is part of a franchise, the amount of hours we spend with them will still pale in comparison to the amount of time we could spend with Walter White over the course of a weekend Breaking Bad binge. So what if our predisposes itself to only invest a little bit in Captain America, while automatically investing a ton in Mr. White. From this point of view, it’s the difference between your feelings for someone you flew on a plane next to and the person who sits next to you at work for the next eight years. I’m not saying that television is better than film, or vice versa, but saying that your brain clicks a little bit differently, depending on how you decide to spend your Netflix time.

And then there’s TripTank, which is like Breaking Bad only in that the ways they are both delivered to your eyeballs are similar. You probably remember shows like this from when you were a kid: 22 minutes of 1-2 minute animated shorts, and the wackier the better. If you automatically invest yourself more into Don Draper than you would Kevin Costner from Draft Day, then the exact opposite would happen here. Within the first five minutes of the show, you’ve seen four cartoons. You know the premise, so to speak, of the show. How can you give a shit about anything that happens?

You can’t, although to be fair, that’s not necessarily the point. And to TripTank‘s credit, this helps more than it hurts. Shows like this, where the voice of many contributors are on display (think any skit show besides things like Kids in the Hall or Mr. Show, which have fewer cooks in the kitchen, and a decided-upon tone) are inherently hit-or-miss. If it’s not inevitable, it feels like it. You will enjoy a few of the cartoons on any given episode of TripTank, and not enjoy a few. It’s just the way these things work. But your investment level, decided upon almost immediately, will keep you from caring that much about the bad ones.  This makes Mad Men easy to talk about the next morning at work, but TripTank almost impossible. You remember, while watching the show, certain feelings of enjoyment or annoyance. But nothing ever really resonates, given its form. After the show was over, I used my DVR to watch the end credits in slow motion, otherwise they would have sped right by. Watching them was a trip (tank) down memory lane, as I remembered the cartoons from the beginning of the episode 22 MINUTES BEFORE. It’s definitely better than things like Robot Chicken, though, because here you might actually see something new or interesting, or you might discover a new artist. For those reasons it’s nice to

– Ryan Haley