Sometimes, educational TV takes a different approach. It teaches us important life lessons, and helps us socialize.

There is a TV show on every night that I strongly recommend everyone watches. Each episode is only 15 minutes, but the lessons it delivers is essential to a person’s pop culture education.

Robot Chicken is an amazing tool. It is a crash course in current and retro pop culture, ideal for learning just enough about anime, kids shows and toys to appear competent in any social gathering, or fan convention like Comic Con.

I am a 50 year old man. My young years were in the 60’s and 70s, so I missed a lot of childhood programming from the 80s and 90s. My Saturday morning cartoons were from the years where they were really crap. I remember bad shows like the original really horrible Spiderman cartoon, Rocket Robinhood, Friendly Giant, Rocketship 7 and Davey and Goliath. I looked up to Mr. Dressup and Mr Greenjeans.

Kids today know all about different shows, as every generation has their own version of Saturday morning. I know nothing about Anime and Naruto and Power Rangers and Transformers. I missed them all.

Robot Chicken is a unique show. It’s not live action and it’s not a cartoon. Robot chicken is primarily a sketch show that parodies all ages and all forms of children’s television and classic TV shows. Animated dolls replay scenes from our youth, and all the youth shows we missed. We laugh at the jokes we know, like Davey being possessed by his devil dog Goliath, and we laugh at the jabs at shows we don’t know too. It’s a funny show.

The secret is – we’re learning the basics of the shows we don’t know. We’re getting educated on the pop culture we were not a part of. We’re seeing HE MAN and SKELATOR and RAINBOW BRIGHT… all characters I knew absolutely nothing about before episodes of Robot Chicken mocked them.

One of my weekend hobbies is going to fan conventions and comic cons. In the Toronto area we have over 70 of them a year. A number that might actually be a record for North America. Because of Robot Chicken, I am able to listen and even participate in discussions about MY LITTLE PONY or GI-JOE. These are shows I’ve never seen, but I know all about Cobra Commander because of the parodies I’ve seen on Robot Chicken.

I want to get a whole line of T-SHIRTS:

ALL I KNOW ABOUT ANIME I LEARNED FROM ROBOT CHICKEN