You never forget your first Inspector.
The most recent episode of Community, “Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism”, reminded us why this show should get six seasons and a movie instead of being shelved for an undetermined amount of time after the episode later this week. Here’s a quick summary so the video and pictures after the jump will make more sense to new viewers. Annie (Alison Brie) accidentally breaks Aded’s (Danny Pudi’s) rare, $300 The Dark Knight DVD, so she stages a robbery of the apartment. As seen in the video below, Abed did the only rational thing: dress up as Batman and interrogate a neighbor. We’ve all been there.
Meanwhile, a group of students have taken over the Greendale Community College’s foosball table, so Jeff (Joel McHale) and Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) join forces against them, until Jeff realizes Shirley was the same girl who bullied him during an elementary school foosball match. Then their battle becomes an ’80s style anime sequence animated by Titmouse (The Venture Bros., Metalocapypse). They don’t explain why it became an anime, because they expect their audience to be smart enough to get it. Which raises a good point about the difference between shows like Community and almost everything else:
Is Community the anti-Big Bang Theory? Where instead of presenting geek stereotypes as crazy people who have trouble functioning in normal society, they present normal society as full of crazy people with geeky interests all trying to function together? You know, like actual society? [TheMarySue]
I couldn’t have said it better myself (and I didn’t). So anyway, the video and several .gifs start on the next page. For more .gifs, check out Dustin’s write-up at Warming Glow.
[Sources: TheMarySue, CommunityThings, BleedingCool, WIRED, Damn That’s Whack, Pleated-Jeans, Lizayzay, tvdea, magic-is-might92, tessresa, firebolting]
https://www.hulu.com/embed/5eY6G3KSZhUG1LkkssPE_w
If you can’t watch the Hulu video above, you may be able to watch the anime sequence on YouTube.
There are four different posters for Inspector Spacetime in Abed, Troy, and Annie’s apartment.
In keeping with Community’s tendency to carry a joke over several episodes, here’s a .gif from episode 4 (“Basic Rocket Science”) of Season Two, where Dean Pelton says, “Pretty soon, they will have an astronaut on their brochure, and we will still be bragging about our foosball table.”
Nick Kroll played a German foosball hooligan. Awesomest part? When he said he wishes there were a word to describe the pleasure he feels at viewing other’s misfortune.