Saturday, January 01, 2011

Gingers II: The Revenging

Seth Green

Gillian Anderson isn't the only television ginger with the ability to call up a rabidly excitable fan-base at a moment's notice. Noted ginger Seth Green is easily as accomplished as Ms. Anderson, even if his career choices have been more along the lines of body humor and melodrama to her English drawing rooms and corsets. Sidebar: Seth Green actually once guest starred on a very early episode of The X-Files, cementing the linkage between these two actors in a Kevin Bacon kind of way. You can see a shot of him in all his early 90s glory illustrating how the UFO his character saw resembled a hamburger here.

Green is probably most known for his role as Oz, the ironically calm werewolf on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although savvy television watchers in the know will also recognize him as the voice of Chris Griffin on Family Guy. As Oz, Green got to play to every musically-inclined nerd-girl's fantasy as the guitar player for cool, hip in-show band Dingoes Ate My Baby who just also happens to be a werewolf and dates a witch. He's considerably less accomplished as Chris Griffin, and yet the character still somehow manages to come off more respectable than his sister, Meg.

Approximately 93% of all Seth Green's time is spent being this cool.

Where he really earned our love, however, is in his work on the terminally awesome shows Greg the Bunny and Robot Chicken. The former was sort of an adult version of the muppet show – Greg, the titular bunny, was a struggling entertainer who also happened to be a puppet. In the show, puppets were treated as though they were real, although second-class minority citizens. The show moved back and forth between being truly edgy (Greg loses his virginity as a result of prison sex after mistakenly being arrested for being a pedophile) and trying to maintain a network television audience without paying a bajillion dollars in FCC fines. Robot Chicken, likewise, is an unorthodox attempt to mix stop-motion animation with sketch comedy. And a lot of Star Wars jokes. Further proving his dominance over television and nerd-life, Robot Chicken was for a long while the highest rated show on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and the second-highest for the network in general. The only show that was ranked higher? Family Guy.

The really creepity thing about Seth Green, though, is how much he comes off as a cool guy. As unabashed in his nerdiness as he is about his small stature, he easily fits the mold of that friend that would just be cool to hang with. And probably watch a lot of TV together.

Seriously. He's wee. That's his wife and that image isn't photoshopped.

1 comment:

Maggie Cats said...

Wait. Seth Green is MARRIED?

Dammit.