Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm

And The Bag Lunch

In prison, you’re going to find Adult Swim fans. Some of them loved to get lit to Toonami, enjoying the anime stylings of “Cowboy Bebop” and “Inuyasha”. Some love the live-action stylings of “Tim And Eric: Awesome Show Great Job” and “The Eric Andre Show”. And quite a few of them rock with the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”, a group of talking, crimefighting food that live in a rundown house in the suburbs across from a burly flip-flop wearing human neighbor named Carl.

I don’t really read reviews any more – some of the most esteemed critics still lean towards the cliches of the industry, and my eyes glaze over whenever one middlebrow writer starts to talk about the budget or the actor’s last movie or something equally irrelevant. At the same time, I wonder who reads a discussion about “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”, a show that has been absolute gibberish on-and-off for roughly twelve seasons now. If you don’t know what it is, I’m not sure if anything I say can persuade you. And if you do know the show, do you really wanna know what someone else thinks about, say, Meatwad, the baby-voiced meatball with a dirty streak? Consider it – who is gonna sit through a symposium on “Xavier: Renegade Angel”? Maybe me, but I doubt there will be much company.

The show went on hiatus in 2015, but as I’ve mentioned, the streaming era was a wildly exciting time to get your wacky ideas bankrolled. “Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters” had already grossed less than $6 million at the American box office despite a wide release, and a planned second film had withered and died on the vine in 2014. And yet somehow the folks at MAX decided it was time for more in 2021, as “Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm” erupted onto screens.

I’m not certain how much continuity the series really had, though I’d wager “not much”. Regardless, “Plantasm” is a self-contained story, happening after a considerable amount of time has passed since the end of the series (which was later revived after this movie, for the record). At the start of this movie, Frylock no longer lives with the others, instead working for a billionaire named Neil who runs Amazin – I’m glad they got away with that one. After an accident, Neil rebuilds Frylock as a mechanical monstrosity – I would say the joke is that no one has really engaged with the idea that Frylock is an anthropomorphized sleeve of french fries, so the idea he’d become robotic is both nonsense and something that tracks.

Meatwad and Shake, Frylock’s old companions, now live with Carl, though they soon follow a trail of breadcrumbs leading them to Elmer, Neil’s android assistant. There’s a power struggle at Amazin, with Elmer working on creating an army of mutant plant creatures to usurp Neil’s rule. There’s also the genetically-modified Big Neil, which is a cocktail of Neil, a giraffe, and former NBA All-Star Shawn Kemp. Peter Serafinowicz is very funny as Neil as is Paul Walter Hauser as Elmer, but I was more psyched that they actually got Shawn Kemp for this.

There’s an apocalyptic finale set in space that resets whatever mythology would be in place – which is, naturally, none. There, the gang teams up with aliens to stop the plant monster threat, an interstellar Star Wars battle that allows the three members of the Hunger Force to adapt all sorts of peculiar “powers”. For fans, the narrative thrust is less interesting than the return of the Mooninites, a group of deeply sarcastic robot extraterrestrials. Along the way, the animation seems cheap even for a famously cheap show that wasn’t shy about live-action shots within animation or repeated still backgrounds. In this case, you should know what you’re getting into. “Movie Film For Theaters” was the “Aqua Teen” crew aiming for mainstream relevance. “Plantasm” is a dip into the deep esoterica.

I’ll confess, seeing the Aqua Teens after all these years away birthed a fondness inside of me. But it also made me recall the tougher nights in prison when I’d be so hungry, and imagining the food I wasn’t actually seeing, often while exhausted and undernourished, led me to believe that yes, they could be squiggly creations like the fungible Meatwad. I couldn’t remember, truly what it was like to sit in front of a plate of even satisfying junk. In 2022, the privatized business of feeding inmates yielded $3.2 billion, and yet I was down during that year, musing about what it would be like to satiate my hunger after an early and deeply unsatisfying dinner.

The holiday meals were fairly curious. There would be a big celebratory lunch, cheap food stacked on top of itself. But those days meant that dinner would be the bag lunch. The bag lunches were often meant for inmates in transit, just a bag for them to take with them so they could stop and eat briefly. They weren’t meant for an actual dinner while we were down, but that’s how they were – four pieces of bread, two slices of bologna, a slice of American cheese (probably a Kraft Single), and a packet of flavorless dust you were supposed to pour into water. There would also be an apple, but they weren’t all in great condition. A holiday schedule often meant understaffing, which means minimal evening activities. So after that big lunch, they’d hand you the bag lunch, around 11:30, and you’d be stuck inside for the rest of the day. Which means that bag lunch is very likely getting eaten around 2, which means it’ll be 9 PM, and you might have nothing left to eat. Be grateful no one has ever given you the bag lunch.