JJ Villard’s King Star King was a direct descendant of the works of Robert Crumb, the underground cartoonist whose famously freaky output—including Zap Comix, which he founded, and Fritz the Cat—were gloriously demented satires of 20th-century America that nonetheless exuded a nostalgic fondness for the not-so-distant past.
Villard’s 2014 Adult Swim series similarly embraced and mutated the weird, wild, and wonky of its era, and over the course of seven episodes, it also boasted the sorts of ludicrously pornographic flights of fancy that were Crumb’s trademark. It was an explosive peek inside Villard’s hyper-sexualized id, pushing boundaries in extreme fashion in order to titillate, shock, and amuse.
Now, after a nine-year hiatus, King Star King is back courtesy of the appropriately exclamatory half-hour sequel King Star King!/!/!, which premieres Feb. 13. Fans, however, will be surprised to hear that, while Villard has remained true to his outlandish instincts, he’s simultaneously veered away from the smutty and toward the sweet.
Before one can even begin to describe King Star King!/!/!/, a primer on the entire bonkers endeavor is required. In a realm known as the Gigantiverse, there lives a hero named King Star King (Tommy Blacha), who has the buff body and titanic powers of He-Man and a blonde mohawk that flows down around his neck—and who’s always decked out in a vest and ripped jeans in order to show off his amazing physique.
He’s like a cross between a professional wrestler, a biker, and a punk, and he’s a horny maniac who has eyes for Snow White, an absurdly buxom ditz who wears almost nothing and who’s forbidden from dating King Star King by her father God Star God (John Waters).
In the series’ pilot, King Star King endeavors to rescue Snow White after she’s kidnapped by an evil bunny and he’s banished to a waffle house whose proprietor, Hank (Justin Roiland), is soon mutilated beyond repair. To save Hank, King Star King transfers his soul into another body that boasts a giant stack of waffles for a head. That makes no sense, but then neither do King Star King’s two other companions, a wacko duck wizard known as Pooza (Villard) and a dim-witted blob called Gerbils (Blacha).
Together, they embark on a variety of adventures that are lewd and loony, be it combating a malevolent deviant known as Alfonso Molestro, dealing with an adult-entertainment club owner named Fat Frank, or trying to help an oft-picked-on dweeb named Mike Balls from his preppy tormentor Tim Tumor.
Describing King Star King is one thing but experiencing it is another, since it’s a non-stop eruption of squiring, spurting, sleazy, surreal X-rated superhero mayhem. Everywhere one turns, there are barely clothed, ridiculously proportioned women gyrating, humping and spread-eagling about, and perverse men salivating and spraying in the most uninhibited manner possible.
It’s crass psychedelia that’s infatuated with objectifying women and awash in gonzo hedonism, and it’s so in your face—with regards to literal sex as well as carnal violence, with bodies constantly morphing, turning inside-out, and bursting apart—that it comes across as an unrepressed expression of its maker’s deepest, dirtiest impulses.
King Star King somehow won a 2015 Emmy before riding off into the sunset, and it’s only now that Villard has revisited the series with King Star King!/!/!/, which boasts the same 2D animation as its predecessor if not, to a large extent, its obsession with cosmically enhanced nude women.
In the “normal zone,” paunchy, balding Greg McNelson is a happy husband to doting wife Katrina (Andie MacDowell) and a role model to his two kids Richard (Villard) and Jewel (Rachel Butera). For Christmas, he receives the nose hair trimmer he coveted (cue the David Lynch-ian soundtrack shrieks!) and is then summoned to visit his employer Jeff Bezos (Robert Englund), who’s a hairless psychopath with one bulging bloodshot eye who wears an Amazon onesie and likes to chow down on Popeye’s fried chicken while relieving himself on the toilet.
Much to Bezos’ chagrin, Greg wants the tycoon’s Amazon logo-branded kidney, and he unceremoniously takes it with the aid of a sharp chicken bone. Greg subsequently flees through the night, hunted by monstrous Amazon drones. As it turns out, Greg is actually King Star King, and he’s assumed this average-Joe identity and life in order to nab Bezos’ organ and bring it to Hank Waffles, who needs it for a recipe intended to wow a food critic. Once his mission is complete, though, King Star King discovers that he misses the norm-zone clan he left behind and thus strives to reunite with them, no matter that Bezos and his army of Alexa-enabled minions seek his destruction.
King Star King!/!/!/ obviously has it in for the Amazon mogul, and it sprays loving ridicule about in other directions as well, most notably at CBS’ long-running Blue Bloods, which Pooza and Gerbils apparently adore. In particular, Pooza has a thing for Donnie Wahlberg, leading to a ruse that’s as bizarre and out of left field as it is funny. Much fighting and nostril-licking ensues, with Villard and his animation team drenching everything in primary colors, splattery fluids and random grossness, as when King Star King is consumed by God Star God and, upon escaping, has Hank gun down the titan’s “sphincteral cherries,” or when Jewel witnesses a walking booger smoke some crack and then eat the face off an old lady.
As with the original series, King Star King!/!/!/ not only refuses to make concessions to good taste—it spits in the face of propriety, and then does far filthier things just for good measure. Smushing together disparate elements to the point of avant-garde weirdness, it makes little sense by design, content to hurtle from one crazy plot point to another like it were in the throes of a very bad acid trip.
The fact that executive producer, writer and voice actor Justin Roiland (Rick and Morty) is currently embroiled in an ugly domestic-abuse scandal will only further make King Star King!/!/!/ a difficult sell to mainstream audiences. Still, those with a hunger for unbridled madness will be more than satiated by Villard’s latest—as well as motivated to revisit its impressively insane predecessors.
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