In a way, this feels like I'm picking up where I left off last week, when I wrote about Adult Swim in a Box. Xavier: Renegade Angel is one of Adult Swim's more recent programs, having begun its run in late 2007. The show was created by the PFFR gang - Vernon Chatman, John Lee, Alyson Levy, and Jim Tozzi - who were also responsible for MTV2's hilarious and memorable Wonder Showzen. This group's bold, intuitive, ramshackle approach to television comedy is on full display again in this nonstop satire of all things spiritual.Animated using an intentionally-passé CGI visual style (it looks kind of like an MMORPG), the show follows the misadventures of Xavier, a hairy hybrid of a creature with the beak of a bird, one arm that's a green snake, and the voice of a tripped-out self-important California beach bum. With all the obligatory accoutrements of a New Age hero - including a special wooden flute called a "shakashuri" - Xavier wanders the land to seek and spread enlightenment. The form that that enlightenment takes is generally an indiscriminate mish-mash of concepts from many religions and cultures, and this forms the satirical basis of the whole show. Xavier's grasp of these quasi-philosophical concepts is usually grounded in a gross misinterpretation, which leads him to behave violently and immorally, all while maintaining a spacey New Age calm.
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