Somebody Else's Nimrod

"So we see, children, that following your dreams leads to horrible implosions."

This weekend, after weeks of Livia's tantalizing me with clips and snippets, I finally got to watch several episodes of Invader Zim all the way through. Zim is a cartoon short about a member of the Irken, a race determined to conquer all life. Alas, in the first phase of Operation Impending Doom, the high-strung and megalomaniac Zim got...a little carried away...and destroyed the Irken planet by mistake. He was sent into exile, but snuck back for Operation Impending Doom II. Disgusted, the Tallest, rulers of the Irken, sent Zim to the least promising, most disgusting rock of nothingness they knew of: Earth. Accompanied by his constantly-malfunctioning robot Gir, he struggles to hatch invasion plans while pretending to be a elementary-school student at the grim Skool. The only one who knows his secret is Dib, an aspiring paranormal investigator in Zim's class who yearns to see his alien guts on an autopsy table.

I can't quite believe this show actually aired on Nickelodeon; it's an eye-popping mixture of the gloriously surreal, disturbingly, even nauseatingly, hilarious, and unbelievably adorable. (Gir, with his cheerful, dopey, unpredictable temperament, far too loving and happy-go-lucky to conquer a planet of Twinkies, much less Earth, is particularly cute.) The art is sleekly cartoonish in a way that suggests The Jetsons on acid, with peculiar and disturbing things constantly popping up in the corner of your eye and the giddiness of a constantly melting and warping reality. The social commentary is, well, moderately unsubtle, but in a good episode can be almost Simpsons-esque. And many plots are settled with off-kilter giant-robot battles. I would have adored it when I was twelve, but I'm fairly sure it would've given my mother an aneurysm.

Sadly, Zim was cancelled--one too many lurches into the grotesque for the kindergarten set, I'd imagine--but if you get a chance, it's worth a viewing.