Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Robot Chicken (revised)

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Robot Chicken [edit source]

Ilovecheeseandsausage 18:57, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

24 hours start now. Jackofspades.png (talk) 19:36, March 14, 2011 (UTC)
Humour: 3 First things: I'm not as nice as BF11 (the last guy that reviewed this) which seems to upset a lot of people. I'm also somewhat of a Robot Chicken fan, although I haven't personally thought about what to do for this article so there shouldn't be any type of bias here (I hope.)

On to the review. Now, the fact you only edited this twenty times over two days before bringing this back to pee review tells me one thing: you really want to get this done quickly. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but a good article isn't going to come overnight, especially not if it's your first time writing. The main thing to remember here is that time=funny. Flamingo recommended a couple times in his review that you read HTBFANJS and you really should do that. It might be the most important thing you'll ever read, it's definitely up there for me. In fact let me say that a little more clearly. You need to read HTBFANJS. There. Make sure you do that.

The next thing I'm going to say is that you need to read Flamingo's review a lot more closely and follow what he had to say, because a lot of what he said is still what's wrong with this article. You did add a couple things that he said to add, but many of those things were just there to give you direction, not so you could copy and paste them into your article. This still seems like a very rushed article, as BF11 pointed out in his review. I've already said that time=funny, keep that in mind. The more you work on your article the funnier it will get. Both BF11 and I are working on an article right now that only survived deletion because we said we would work on it (and after over a month it's still not up to where either of us want it to be; that's with two of us working on it.) So don't be ashamed if the very first thing that you think of isn't the funniest thing in the world. Don't just write down the first thing that you think of. Think about it for a bit, think about whether it's funny or not, then think about it again. Can you improve it? If so think some more. Right now you just need to spend some time on this, because even with an ICU, you have all the time in the world.

Now the actual article. Finally. I'm not going to say as much as I usually would on this as there is a whole concept section below where I will just be telling you to rethink the way this article is done.

I'm going to parrot BF11 here (not for the last time either) quotes at the top of articles are not good. Most of them are just stand alone jokes that don't relate to the article, and even if they are good it just means that a couple people will chuckle at them while everyone else thinks "oh brother, another article with quotes at the top." Take them out. There's a reason I've never included a quote in an article I've written from scratch. In relation to that: lists. Lists are not funny, no matter what. As I tell many people I've only ever seen one good list and it probably wasn't funny to anyone else. So everyone but me has seen 0 good lists. Lists are bad, I will never get tired of saying that. Lists are bad. Get rid of the lists. They are unfunny and make people think "yep, that's a list" which is a bad thing.

Right now the majority of your article's humor (yes humor, BF11 uses an extra u because he is a crazy brit) is based around the fact that the chicken's life is bad. This isn't funny, I mean, is the story of Rudolph funny? It's pretty much the same story except he dies at the end. However, the section "Becoming the Robot Chicken" is rather good. You have some pretty good jokes in this section. If there was one part of the article that you should build the rest of the article off then it should be this section. What I like about it is that there is a line that pokes fun at scientists without going overboard: "this was mainly for fun rather than for science," and you have escalation: "sharp knives, needles, scalpels, and a plunger the mad scientist bought on Ebay." These are good things to have in an article, just try to get more things like this in the rest of the article and make sure that you expand this section as well as all the others, articles need content, but don't overdo it. The rest of the article has more wrong with it conceptually than with the humor.

If you remember anything about the above it's this: Read HTBFANJS and remember that time=funny. Those two things alone will improve this article dramatically.

Concept: 4 Right now your concept isn't entirely consistent. In the intro you talk about the chicken himself, but you also talk about the show. This could confuse the reader, it most certainly will since everyone will try to see where this article is going from your intro. I would recommend clearing this up as soon as possible. You seem to want this article to be about the chicken, so anything and everything about the show doesn't belong in this article. There are a whole lot of examples of articles that are written about a show, but really only talk about one aspect of the show, or take the show literally. A good example of a show article that you should look at, but don't try to copy it as this is a very specific style that only really fits this show, is Prison Break. This article mocks the show in a factual tone by insisting that, when the characters aren't in prison, it changes its title to "People pointing guns at each other." If you've ever seen Prison Break you'll know that this is so close to the truth (without being actually true, mind you) that it's funny, while not being completely obvious (I wouldn't have ever thought about it and I really liked the show.)

Now, the concept of writing about the actual chicken. I like the fact that this article is about the actual chicken. However, for an article like this if you're going to have the chicken being made fun of when he's little you could add not only comedy for those who know about Robot Chicken, but also for those who don't by making the chicken's life an allegory for Seth Green's (the creator of Robot Chicken) life. You already have the start of it with the chicken being made fun of for playing with action figures (Green was made fun of for doing that as a kid,) so just adding a couple more things that are similar to Seth Green's early life could add quite a bit of humor to the article, and it would be Robot Chicken related which is always good.

Lastly, you go into lists. As I've already said, lists are bad. You also introduce characters that aren't heard from again, don't relate to the chicken at all and aren't important. They are also random, especially the last two. Both of these things are big no-no's and are mentioned in HTBFANJS. Again, you should just delete these lists and replace them with sections that have actual text. Alternatively you could add more to what you already have. By that I mean expanding your list into multiple paragraphs, not just adding more names or longer descriptions.

Prose and formatting: 5 Right now you don't have a very good or consistent tone, much like BF11 said in his review. A lot of the humor of articles at this site derives from the fact that they could be perceived as neutral. This is why we are a "parody" of wikipedia (they are actually a parody of us, but we'll let that slide.) I would recommend reading wikipedia:Robot Chicken on wikipedia to get an idea for how to write with a neutral tone. This is something that I try to make a habit of when writing on something fairly notable. Reading the wikipedia article can also give you good ideas for sections, or ideas for things that you already kind of had an idea for. Keeping swearing to a minimum is usually a good idea as well, except for when you absolutely fucking need it.

The formatting, for the most part, is alright. You seem to have copied a lot of the formatting from other articles as you have the section headings, the images and links at the bottom, but you could use some practice with the format. The main way I learned to do wiki formatting was experimenting with the buttons at the top of the edit box and looking at other people's articles. Talk pages are also good, as there is a common way to format things when you're having a conversation that uses other formatting things that usually wouldn't use. Honestly formatting isn't that big of an issue in most articles outside of the ones that are submitted with 3 lines of text. I would focus on the other parts of this article first before worrying about the formatting at all.

Images: 4.5 You have 3 pictures and a template. I'll talk about the template later. The three pictures generally fit the rest of the article, but right now they could be improved on. The first one is of the chicken strapped to the chair. While this is from the show itself (and fits) the caption doesn't add anything to the article, it just tells us what we already know about robot chicken. What you need is something new like "No, really he likes it. I swear." or some other joke to induce a laugh. This image is also way too small for this article. You can make it bigger, but I would recommend uploading a bigger image and making it fit the article by putting |200px| (or whatever size) inside the brackets for the thumb. For the second pic the caption doesn't really seem to fit, although the image itself is pretty good. If that's what the chicken looked like why wasn't he bullied for that? I would recommend taking that pic down to RadicalX's Corner and getting something added to it. Usually getting another pic (of a robot in this case) that could fit into other pic so that another user can just easily combine the two. Alternatively you could think of a different caption to go with this pic, although I can't think of any that fit and are funny so good luck. The third pic could easily be the mad scientist from the show itself, that's up to you though. The caption is another one where you just state what we already know, you do throw in a joke though, although a weak one. I would change the caption to something that is shorter and funnier, like the example I gave for the first picture. It doesn't have to be anything gut-busting, just less fact-stating. This last pic is also a bit too big, but making it smaller would be up to you as it's eliminating a lot of white space right now, but if you take out the lists then it will be crowding the rest of the article.

I'm not too fond of templates like the one you have at the top. Usually this kind of template advertises the fact that you don't have enough content to make the article long enough and had to slap a template onto the top. This template in particular doesn't really fit the article you wrote as it doesn't endorse satanism or evil in any way really. If you really want it up there then keep it, but templates don't really look good in most cases and aren't funny, especially the sixth, seventh and seventeenth time you read them.

Miscellaneous: 4 Overall "feel" of the article.
Final Score: 20.5 Don't let the score bother you, everyone has a different scoring system. However, you haven't changed it much since the last time it was here. Spend more time on it this time, the more time you spend on it, the better it will be.
Reviewer: Jackofspades.png (talk)