Tripping the Rift Season 1 [Import]

Despite a warning sticker on the front of the box claiming it is "uncensored", this is the exact footage shown on the sci fi channel. All the f-words are bleeped out, any time we had blurring on the screen, it's blurred here.

The only difference is you don't have the scifi logo in the bottom of the screen and no commercials.

There is NO new content, and every episode IS censored.

The aptly named Choad is the captain of a band of smugglers. The rest include his reptilian nephew, a sex cyborg, a surly female something or other, and an effeminate gold robot. They roam around between the military-like federation and the empire of the Dark Clowns. Choad is not a favorite of either side and manages to keep running afoul of both.

This motley band manages to get into some very strange situations and thus manages to do some decent parodies as well as original humor. Star Trek and Star Wars are obvious targets but we also see 2001: A Space Odyssey and I, Robot taking shots.

I have to say I don't know how things went from the first episode to the second. The ending of this first made it more like a one-shot. But what can you say about a series that manages to kill off G-d in the first few minutes? There are no sacred cows. Nothing is safe. Not movies, interior decorating, beauty pageants, politics, youthful rebellion, etc. Check it out.

This show is a lot more fun than it has the right to be. If not for CGI, and some basic (and obstructionist) rules on broadcast decency, we'd have probably seen this broad parody of sci-fi legends come and go about 20 years ago. "Tripping" follows the raunchily animated adventures of Captain Chode and his crew. An amoral, greedy and sex-hungry lout, Chode looks a lot like the Hamburger Helper guy, only purple, three-eyed and having tentacles where his fingers would be. Luckily (for the rest of us) Chode's appetites are...uh...serviced by "Six", an impossibly-proportioned fembot voiced either by Gina Gershon or Carmen Electra. (There's a classic early and un-rated "Tripping" floating around the internet in which a more apparently cybernetic Six is voiced by Terry Farrel of "Deep Space 9".) The joke about Six is that between her programming and Chode, Six is often forced to think more like a real woman than the non-androids who populate the show. Chode's nephew Whip, the repellent Harridan T'nuk, and his slightly effeminate Robot (along with the obligatory ship's chatty computer) round out the rest of crew. Arrayed against Chode is the insidious Darph Bobo - an evil clown with powers from the dark side. (The enmity between the all-powerful Darph Bobo and Chode is one of those nonsensical plot points that your brain is willing to accept after watching just five minutes of this show.) Most of the jokes are aimed at fans of "Star Wars", "Star Trek" and Howard Stern (especially comparing how much more animated Six is than anybody else on the show). The animation probably won't win any awards - looking like somebody had just used the scene-editor from "Quake 3: Arena".

So why that many stars from "The Rotten Review"? "Tripping" is still jaw-dropping fun, well paced and voiced, and gets tons of laughs out of the most obvious jokes. The leads bring surprising gusto to what would be another SW parody, especially to the jokes the writers KNOW must fall flat, proof that the scripts aren't meant to condescend to their viewers. In short, "Tripping" truly is a guilty pleasure with no shame.