Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World: Season Two Movie Review

A stop-motion animated series that magically breathes amazing amounts of life into plastic Playskool-like figurines, Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World sets out to embrace, reject, make fun of, and revel in every gay stereotype you've ever heard. The fact that it can do this without offending the gay audience or boring the straight audience makes it a good time for all.

The town of West Lahunga Beach is a sort of gay ghetto, where buff Steve (Will Matthews) and his Filipino-American partner Rick (Peter Paige) live a comfortable life, with the smarter Rick always trying to rein in Steve's less-than-monogamous impulses. Their best friends are the older, wheelchair-bound Chuck (Alan Cumming), and his Latino boy toy Evan (Wilson Cruz). Steve's nemesis: their butch lesbian neighbor (and tow-truck driver) Dana (Taylor M. Dooley), who has very reluctantly agreed to have a baby for her kind-hearted partner Kirsten (Jessica-Snow Wilson). The father -- or fathers -- Rick and Steve, who made the all-important donation.

In the course of the eight-episode second season, the gang finds itself hiding out with San Francisco's hidden Straight Underground, goes on an adventure that echoes The Wizard of Oz, deals with a plague of lesbian gangs in the neighborhood, and battles "Lesbian Bed Death," an affliction that dare not speak its name.

Rick and Steve also have their parents to contend with. Rick's immigrant mother is a sweetie, but Steve's racist mother continues to mistake the Filipina woman for a maid, an insult that eventually leads to a bloody knock-down, drag-out fight (Playskool figurines, remember). There's also cat (named Pussy) with human-like intelligence, and everyone must come to terms with the fact that Dana's baby, the cute Dixie, has inconvenient telekinetic powers.

Prolific writer Q. Allan Brocka's scripts are full of zingers that fly by so quickly you'll find yourself stifling your laughter so you don't miss the next joke coming along. His status in gay Hollywood also guarantees a parade of A-list (or gay-list) guest voices such as Margaret Cho, Bruce Vilanch, Perez Hilton, Lorna Luft, and Alec Mapa (in a dead-on take as Rick's gay Uncle Bakla).

In a milieu where things can get really nasty really quickly, Rick & Steve goes for sweet rather than subversive. In fact, some in the gay audience might be hoping for a bit more edge or anger. But in the end, we're talking about cartoons, and keeping it light but sassy is the right strategy, and Brocka succeeds admirably.

DVD Note: the DVD includes seven extra webisodes.

Man this thing was overpriced.