Sausage Party: Foodtopia is a stale, unimaginative sequel series

Watching 2016's Sausage Party through a 2024 lens is a fraught experience. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s anti-VeggieTales comedy is stuffed with jokes based on ethnic stereotypes associated with foods. Bottles of sauerkraut spout Nazi rhetoric in song form (the joke being some pun on “exterminating the juice”). A Black-coded character named Mr. Grits recycles Chris Rock’s “cracker-ass cracker” bit from his 1999 special Bigger And Blacker, lobbing the insult at (what else?) a box of crackers. Bill Hader portrays a Native American caricature practically copied from Disney’s Peter Pan of the ’50s and voices a bottle of tequila and a gangster named El Guaco.

The question for its sequel series is if they would double down its off-color brand of comedy or re-fire the dish entirely. After going through a Trump presidency since the original movie (and teetering on the edge of a second one), an insurrection, a rise in hate crimes, and pandemic-sown political division, it’s an important question going into Prime Video’s Sausage Party: Foodtopia, which premieres on July 11.

Well, for starters, they killed off Lavash. Kareem Abdul Lavash is a Middle Eastern flatbread voiced by David Krumholtz, who does an outrageous accent and spouts jokes evoking Islamophobic tropes. His partner, a counterpart Jewish stereotype bagel named Sammy Bagel Junior (Edward Norton), weathers this loss throughout season one. Sammy is the lone ethnic stand-in that remains. While he ends up dominating Foodtopia’s media, which has some problematic associations historically, he remains a central character with a little more nuance to his portrayal than expected (and at least the majority of the writers are Jewish, so that makes it feel more self-deprecating than xenophobic).

Except for potatoes getting profiled by the police, which emerges once economics divide up Foodtopia after a character commits a crime in “potatoface,” ethnicity isn’t brought into this. The human/food conflict isn’t even the central focus, though Sausage Party ended (and this show begins) with a full-scale apocalypse brought on by a food/ human war. The theme is more class-oriented. The movie grappled with the dangers of unchecked religious doctrine and loyalty to “gods” (in the foods’ case, humans), but this installment is about the forces that come to divide the food community: Wealth inequality, distrust, and overwork (a bold one to tackle given the labor controversy surrounding the film’s animators).

Interestingly, the cultural and ethnic jokes are largely absent, as dog whistles and fear campaigns against marginalized folks have historically formed the entire backbone of right-wing political movements. That this is being released globally just months before the American presidential election, and as countries worldwide are heading to the polls with extremists on the ticket, seems to be no coincidence. The show seems determined to drive home the point that interdependence and cooperation are key if we are to operate anything resembling a functioning society.

While the aim is noble, Sausage Party: Foodtopia doesn’t correct previous missteps. The cast and writing staff have benefitted from added diversity, but it doesn’t always succeed with humor, which one might argue is the point of making a comedy series. The food puns are still there, but now they’re mostly pop-culture-related. There are multiple songs like “Can Of Tuna” sung to the tune of Heart’s “Barracuda,” and a version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” that has Sammy the Bagel listing and rhyming foods. Instead of ethnicities, there are nods to celebrities (think Pita Ora, Megan Thee Scallion, The Talking Breads, and Iced T, a reference to his wife, Hot Coco). Of course, there is plenty of porny food and even a little food-on-human action. In an early scene, a watermelon moans “Call me organic” as a carrot pleasures them.

Truthfully, though, this all gets a little old with repetition. The food porn thing now and the grocery-related wordplay lead to a chuckle but get stale with overuse, and it’s certainly not laugh-out-loud funny. Foodtopia relies on comedy heavyweights like Will Forte and Sam Richardson to do its bidding. Forte plays Frank, a hapless lone human in similar terrain as The Last Man On Earth, so it’s admittedly perfect casting. His weedy voice strikes the right timbre as he’s apologizing to his food friends for wanting to eat bread or drizzle olive oil (akin to a person) on things, or when he’s recounting particularly painful breakups, like one that happened on a rollercoaster with an on-ride camera to capture him crying. Richardson is as great as ever as an orange named Julius because he can make just about any line funny.

This is still an edgy comedy, to be sure. It’s not all puns. There’s a graphic sex scene that Amazon demanded a disclaimer for. The end credits to one episode linger on Frank taking labored bites of a human foot. If comedy like this makes you cringe pleasantly, it’s worth digging into Foodtopia. If not, excuse yourself. Sausage Party’s sequel isn’t bland, but it leaves much to be desired in its wake.

Sausage Party: Foodtopia is now streaming on Prime Video