“It’s 1987 all over again.” – Grimes
The city becomes overrun by Manbirds because Twayne is shutting down the DOI in an attempt to create evil. Grime accidentally kills a Manbird, and it triggers a fighting binge that leads him to wear a Manbird costume and start fighting in the “cockfighting” matches until he can find her mate and kill him, too. Mark finds the orphaned hatchling of the killed bird and learns that they don’t have to speak in curses and insults.
He tries to raise it to be nice and polite, which works enough that when he’s reunited with his father, he gets disowned because he’s too nice and doesn’t speak the language. Randall takes Mark’s adoption of the hatchling as an invitation to start a cockfighting ring, since the baby bird was shacked up in his rooftop meditation garden.
It’s another gross and moderately offensive episode, but it’s really well structured. All the weird and independent storylines come together really well as the episode comes to a close. Grimes fights in Randall’s ring against Mark’s adoptee’s father, and it happens that Mark’s efforts have been for nothing. It could easily have become a mess of vulgarity, but it really comes out being randomly charming, I felt against my better judgement, and it’s well written for all the bathroom humor involved.
There is nothing grosser than a baby Manbird. It pees gallons at a time, it poops all the time, and it throws up without warning. And the adults are incredibly vulgar to the point where it’s funny as it’s so overblown. Which is what they were aiming for, so that’s good. Mark does his best, which is his purpose in the show, but there’s nothing that can be done to rehabilitate the Manbirds, and it’s not right to try to, since their culture is based around the grossness and no one should take the culture away from a sentient species. Even a gross one.
More thoughts on “The Manbirds”:
- A diet of spare change apparently makes birds hideously insulting when combined with a bad influence in infancy.
- Callie somehow understands what the Manbirds say, even though every sentence is, “Suck my balls.” Which has over five hundred distinct pronunciations.
- They don’t wear clothes, but they wear socks, and Grimes takes them off of all the Manbirds he defeats.
- Isn’t it amazing how Mark’s good intentions keep going terribly wrong?
Some stats and info about Ugly Americans, “The Manbirds”
TV SHOW – Ugly Americans
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 1, Episode 14
AIRED ON – November 17th, 2010
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – Comedy Central
GENRE – Animated Shows, Comedy
CREATED BY – Devin Clark, David M. Stern
CAST – Matt Oberg, Natasha Leggero, Kurt Metzger, Randy Pearlstein, Julie Klausner, Michael-Leon Wooley, Larry Murphy, Devn Clark, Pete Holmes
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.