Gentleman, BEHOLD!

ATHF is a cartoon about a packet of fries, a meatball and a shake. This should tell you what your in for. A show where not a lot happens except for a lot of gags and (sometimes) witty dialoge. A place where mooninites and mutated mould come together to form a show thats as adult as it is confusing.

Top notch

This show had potential, but the plots are too empty to me. The animation, of course, is crap. The dialogs are better, that's the fun part of this TV series, but it still has some strong flaws. I mean, even Sealab 2021 has more different drawings. This show could have been better if the writers thannk more carefully the plots, instead of just mixing stuff together each episode with practically nobody knowing what is going on.

'Adult' TV cartoons have been around long enough now that we're over the novetly of them, and can start asking questions like "are they any good"? In the case of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the answer, happily, is an unqualified yep.

Here we have four major characters. The 'force' themselves - a thickshake, a bucket of fries, and a lump of hamburger meat, who ostensibly are some sort of crime-fighting trio (in fact this was just a way of getting the show on air. Nobody was prepared to greenlight a show about three pieces of fast food who essentially did nothing in particular, so the crime fighting theme was pushed - and then dropped after about three episodes).

Master Shake is basically a sociopath. He doesn't care what chaos or injury he causes even to his closest friends so long as he gets his selfish way in even the most trivial things. He's also an idiot, which makes his lies completely transparaent.

Frylock, (the packet of fries) is the responsible one, the father figure. He's a scientific genius, and the voice of reason in the series.

Meatwad is the lump of meat. He appears to be a juvenile, and is naive and gullible - though also capable of coming out with disconcertingly wry, intelligent lines at times. That is when you can even understand him, which I have to admit I can't, a lot of the time.

The fourth member, and my personal favourite, is Carl. Carl is a human, the next door neighbour. He is a forty-something, white-trash batchelor, a complete slob, and though he thinks his neighbours are freaks, he takes it all pretty laconically. When aliens from the future land in his yard, his response is likely to be something like a bored, sarcastic "yeah, this is great". One of my favourite Carl moments is where he is trying to pay a particularly seedy looking hooker with a huge jar of pennies, and when she refuses, bemoans that she is being un-American.

The plots in ATHF are often very random and nonsensical, jumping around with no concern for development or closure, and involving things like demonically possessed sandwiches, incredibly stupid space aliens, and ridiculous visitors of various kinds - none more silly than the 'Cybernetic Ghost of Future Christmas Past', who turns up in Carl's house to tell him why his swimming pool is filled with Elven blood, and goes into a ridiculous, lengthy explanation about it, which nobody is particularly interested in (he appears in a later season as a cybernetic turkey at thanksgiving, and makes even less sense).

ATHF has a level of silliness and surreality which approaches Britishness. Though it suffers a little from a rather tired undergraudate fondness for gore and 'shock', the funniness of the characters and situations ultimately win out, and make many episodes real treasures. A lot more original and enduring than its stablemates 'Harvey Birdman' and 'Sealab 2021', ATHF is now in it's fifth season, I think, and with the emphasis on strong characterisation and no concern with coherent plot, could probably continue to entertain until its creators get sick of it.

To say this show entirely depends on random whould be a bit of an inaccurate statement. It's true entertainment value comes from it's sense of comedic timing and laid back style. At first, it seemed just like an entirely random, comedic, super hero cartoon. However, it quickly evovled into to something much better. The random part of show remained in the situations the three main characters got into. However, the characters themsleves developed there own personalities. There constant clashing with each other provided the show's entertainment value. Frylock's logical mind, Shake's idiocy and Meatwad's childish behavior combined into comedic gold. You basically forget that they are all fast food products and just laugh. It isn't exactly outstanding quality, however, your going to laugh.

I'd say this is one of the best things to come out of the old Space Ghost: Coast to Coast show. It seems like the other weird shows on Adult Swim just try to be the strangest, most bizarre shows ever created, but ATHF is different. It's definitely weird, but it's also relatable. Every fan of the show seems to have a different favorite character: Whether it's Meatwad's goofy idiocy, Frylock's frustration, or (my personal favorite) Master Shake's self-righteous sarcasm, each character has well-defined attributes that can be found to some degree in all of us.

On top of that, there's a constant atmosphere of struggle, like the three of them are living together out of necessity and aren't quite where they'd like to be in life...also something a lot of people can relate to, for better or for worse. To summarize, this show has managed to take the random flailings of a typical non-anime Adult Swim cartoon and formulate a very refined--and very FUNNY--comedy. Definitely worth the watch.

Most non-anime cartoons on Adult Swim seem like nothing but a string of randomness. Most of their jokes come off rather stale and weird to my ears. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is just as random and nonsensical as the others, but something about it makes it stand out above the rest. The characters are just so colorful and the humor is just so crass, whacked-out, and just plain nuts that you can't help but take notice and bust out laughing. Just take a look at the title names of the episodes and you'll probably see what I mean. Contrary to what the title sequence suggests, the main characters don't spend much time fighting villains. Rather, they seem content tormenting their neighbor(and sometimes getting him killed), fighting among themselves, and getting into truly oddball and surreal situations with equally oddball and surreal characters from across space and time. My favorite "villains" are the trash-talking two dimensional duo of aliens who look like rejects from the Atari era. All this makes up for some truly wacky fun. If you can stomach the randomness and the occasional swearing, that is.