Opening Sequence
A mute mad scientist finds a road-killed chicken, which he takes back to his laboratory to re-fashion into a cyborg. Midway through the opening sequence, the titular chicken turns his laser eye towards the camera (a la Locutus), and the title appears amidst the 'laser effects' as Les Claypool of Primus can be heard screaming "It's alive!" in typical Frankenstein fashion. Claypool also composed and performed the show's theme song. The mad scientist then straps the re-animated Robot Chicken into a chair, uses calipers to hold his eyes open, and forces him to watch a bank of television monitors (an allusion to A Clockwork Orange); this scene segues into the body of the show.
In the episode "1987", Michael Ian Black claims that this sequence tells the viewer that they (the audience) are the robot chicken(s), being forced to watch the skits. As a result, the show does not actually focus on the robot chicken until the 100th episode when he finally makes his escape and later kills the mad scientist when he kidnap a hen who is the chicken's girlfriend. Beginning in the sixth season, the role of chicken and mad scientist are reversed in this opening sequence: The chicken turns the mad scientist into a cyborg and then subjects him to watch the television sets.
Read more about this topic: Robot Chicken
Famous quotes containing the words opening and/or sequence:
“The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atmosphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.”
—Richard Blake, and William Cameron Menzies. Narrator, Invaders from Mars, at the opening of the movie (1953)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)