Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh’s “Peeps Follows/Mordecai vs. Peeps” from Regular Show’s “Peeps” episode.

Two of my favorite shows returned with new episodes in the last few weeks. One show features a stoner as one of its three lead characters, and the other revolves around two groundskeepers who are clearly stoners, but because it’s a kids’ show (with a lot of jokes that go over its younger viewers’ heads and are actually aimed at Xennials like myself), we never see them smoke trees.

I praised Deli Boys twice before in Couch Avocados headers. It just returned to Hulu for its second season with a new regular—Fred Armisen—and a bunch of new problems for inexperienced Pakistani American gangster Mir Dar (played by Asif Ali), his brother and cocaine business partner, the perpetually baked Raj Dar (played by Saagar Shaikh), and the brothers’ surrogate parent and underworld mentor, Lucky Auntie (played by Poorna Jagannathan, still the show’s funniest regular).

Armisen can be hit-or-miss as a comedic actor—I didn’t care for his version of President Obama when he was a regular on SNL—but fortunately, his role as Max Sugar, a Pennsylvania casino owner who instantly hits it off with Lucky and becomes her new love, is one of his better roles. I love how Max is basically De Niro’s persnickety casino manager character from Casino if he were played by Henry Winkler. The comic centerpiece of the season’s third episode is the scene where Max’s way of challenging Danyal Khan—a lawyer played by Kumail Nanjiani, as well as Lucky’s ex, who is still into her—to a duel for Lucky’s affections turns out to be an unsexy ping pong match against Danyal in the middle of a casino full of gamblers who don’t give a shit about the match.

Deli Boys continues to be funny in its second (and way-too-short) season, but I’m not here to talk about Deli Boys. I’ve been an on-and-off Regular Show fan since its original run on Cartoon Network. The first Regular Show episode I stumbled into was 2012’s “Dead at Eight,” in which Michael Dorn guest-starred as the voice of an unruly baby whose dad is the Grim Reaper. It was one of the strangest guest spots by a Star Trek actor on an animated or live-action show ever.

Since “Dead at Eight,” J.G. Quintel’s animated creation often amused me with its surreal depiction of a world where animals go to school with humans and have dead-end jobs just like we do: Mordecai, a 20-something blue jay voiced by Quintel, and Rigby, a raccoon who dropped out of high school, were lazy groundskeepers at an unnamed city park owned by Mr. Maellard and his son Pops, a kindly man with a lollipop for a head who was fond of saying old-timey things like “Good show!” I got a kick out of Regular Show’s storylines about Mordecai and Rigby’s fondness for watching outdated physical media.

Muscle Man, one of Mordo and Rigs’s co-workers, was a green-skinned party animal who, in keeping with Quintel and his main characters’ obsession with the ’80s, looked like the Lou Ferrigno version of the Hulk if he spoke in complete sentences and developed a beergut. Regular Show’s impressive cavalcade of guest voice actors included Linda Cardellini, who had a recurring role as one of Mordo’s girlfriends, and Kurtwood Smith, who voiced a villainous snack machine who worked as the manager of a rival park. I was into Regular Show for about two seasons before I lost the ability to watch Cartoon Network and my attention got distracted by other animated shows that, unlike Regular Show, were not meant for kids.

Late last year, I rediscovered Regular Show on Hulu, which carries every 11- or 22-minute episode from the show’s original run, and decided to go back and watch for the first time all the episodes I never saw before. It was perfect timing because Quintel reunited with his fellow animators and voice actors to work on Regular Show: The Lost Tapes, a revival that finally premiered on both Cartoon Network and HBO Max last month.

Like a surprise album drop from Kendrick, Warner Bros. Discovery’s announcement of The Lost Tapes last June came out of nowhere. I didn’t expect Quintel to go back to Warner after HBO Max did Close Enough—his post-Regular Show adult animated sitcom—dirty.

Close Enough centered on the Singletons, a young married couple in the Los Feliz section of L.A, their six-year-old daughter, and a divorced young couple that rooms with the Singletons. Because it was a victim of David Zaslav’s animation purge and is unlikely to be released on disc like Regular Show’s complete run was, I’ve had to pirate Close Enough in order to watch it. It was as offbeat as Regular Show, but this time most of the characters, who were older than Mordo and Rigs, were able to curse and fuck. (The aforementioned Henry Winkler did a guest spot as the late father of Alex Dorpenberger, Jason Mantzoukas’s roommate character. Alex—who became temporarily dead while he tried to avoid going to the doctor because his dad died in a hospital when he was a boy—was reunited with his dad in the Hellspital, the hospital in Hell, and, in a tonal shift straight out of Regular Show, he and his dad ended up fighting hordes of demons together in the Hellspital.)

One of Close Enough’s most amusing episodes was about six-year-old Candice Singleton’s Deli Boys-like transformation into the kingpin of an illegal hot sauce packet ring at her school. “Sauceface,” Close Enough’s parody of both Goodfellas and the Brian De Palma version of Scarface, was a much funnier Scorsese parody than any of Animaniacs’s Goodfeathers shorts.

The Goodfeathers segment had only one joke, which got really old really fast (the short temper of Pesto, the Joe Pesci counterpart who was voiced by the late Chick Vennera from Thank God It’s Friday and Robert Redford’s The Milagro Beanfield War), and it never got the aural vibe of Scorsese gangster flicks quite right. If America runs on Dunkin, then a Scorsese gangster flick runs on Rolling Stones songs—not the Henry Mancini-esque big-band jazz that regularly acted as the Goodfeathers score music. Meanwhile, “Sauceface” used an actual Stones track that surfaced in a Scorsese gangster flick—“Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” which popped up in the aforementioned Casino—for a montage of Candice’s rise to power (an episode of a Quintel show is incomplete without an ’80s-style montage), and that helped elevate the episode’s parody of gangster movie tropes.

At one point in “Sauceface,” Candice carried around a lunchbox with the Regular Show characters’ faces on it. It was one of Close Enough’s many references to the earlier Quintel show—as well as a sign that Quintel and all the Close Enough animators who came from Regular Show, including “Sauceface” episode co-director Calvin Wong, missed the days of bringing to life Mordo, Rigs, and the rest of the park gang.

Most of the animators who wrote and storyboarded Regular Show episodes are back for The Lost Tapes. (However, one particular Regular Show alum is missing: Shion Takeuchi, the creator of the short-lived Netflix adult animated sitcom Inside Job.) All the voice actors who played the park employees—including Mark Hamill, who provided the voice of Skips, an immortal Yeti in blue jeans who talks like a cross between a Jersey plumber and Harvey Fierstein—and their love interests have reprised their roles.

The Lost Tapes presents never-before-seen misadventures that take place at various points in the Regular Show timeline (before the events of the epic and star-studded 2017 series finale). But other than the stories not being in chronological order, The Lost Tapes is just like the original show: The guys experience an everyday workplace problem that takes a sci-fi or supernatural twist, Mark Mothersbaugh and his team of composers have a ball whenever they get to score an ’80s-style montage, several episodes are funny and some of them are meh, and Muscle Man somehow finds an excuse to insert his nonsensical catchphrase “My mom!”

So far, the Lost Tapes episode that has come closest to the original Regular Show at its best—whether it was “Weekend at Benson’s,” “Eggscellent” (based on a real-life 12-egg omelet challenge), “Diary,” or “That’s My Television” (the episode where the villain was a network exec the animators modeled after the late Ted Turner, Cartoon Network’s founder)—is “Coffee Shop Wars.” It sidelines Mordo and Rigs to put the spotlight on their respective love interests, Margaret (a robin) and Eileen (a mole who wears glasses), who are both waitresses at Mordo and Rigs’s favorite coffee shop.

Margaret and Eileen face competition from a trendy new coffee pop-up that’s run by Valencia, a villainous fusion food inventor voiced by guest star Patti Harrison, and the duo’s attempt to invent a fusion food that will lure customers away from Valencia’s creations ends up angering the Goddesses of Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. Harrison is hilarious as usual, “Coffee Shop Wars” writers/storyboarders Maddie Brewer and Ryan Pequin squeezed in as many poop jokes as they could into an 11-minute short (the name of Valencia’s coffee pop-up is Hot Brown, and Margaret and Eileen call their culinary invention “the Log”), and the character designs for the hooded goddesses are brilliant (their eyes are made of drinks and their lips are made of meals).

Whenever Regular Show does an episode about a meal or beverage that’s so powerful it sends the consumer to another dimension or creates a hole in the space/time continuum, it’s comedy gold. Good show.