Funky Cops: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata, Part 5

"Lacuna Matata" concludes--for now--with another recollection of a show barely anybody remembers.

This time, the subject of this "Lacuna Matata" installment isn't exactly a classic or a buried treasure worth digging for. Remember this curio from a few years ago?

Funky Cops was a bawdy, Austin Powers-style French cartoon show about a pair of disco-dancing '70s San Francisco cops with scary-looking Jay Leno chins that I caught a few times on Fox's Saturday morning schedule in 2003. It was apparently big in France, and it spawned two volumes of not-so-bad original music from the show. The Brand New Heavies-esque tunes are easily the best part of Funky Cops.

I can't say I liked Funky Cops. For the disco sequences--I think each Funky Cops episode was 80 percent disco sequences, 20 percent cop show stuff--the animators took CGI animations of the cops' dance moves and rotoscoped them, and the cels and robotic character movements in those sequences looked rather creepy and ugly (most rotoscoped cartoons look terrible, and Funky Cops was no exception). Also, the show was very French, like how The Fifth Element is a very French sci-fi movie.

One of the reasons why I checked out Funky Cops was because I wanted to see what San Francisco looks like to French animators. The show's constant shots of cars leaping over hills indicated that the Frenchmen did their homework by watching the Bullitt car chase--and that's about it. Aside from the hills and the glimpses of Chinatown, the Transamerica Pyramid and the Golden Gate Bridge, Sucka Free looked more like the nondescript city where Penny took care of her mentally challenged Uncle Gadget than the Sucka Free I know.

Another thing that made Funky Cops an interesting curio was its bawdiness, which showed how much Saturday morning network TV standards had loosened since the days when Rev. Donald Wildmon's theory about Mighty Mouse being a cokehead forced Ralph Bakshi to trim some footage from Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. The standards changed probably because animated Saturday morning TV was slowly dying and nobody gave a shit anymore.

Funky Cops' sexualized character designs were clearly inspired by Austin Powers. The show's creators, Christophe and Benoit Di Sabatino, even ripped off the white Funky Cop's thatch of chest hair from Austin. The bawdiness was one of several elements FPS Magazine contributor Terrence Briggs criticized on the rec.arts.animation newsgroup:

The character designs are grotesque, featuring overly sculpted arms, huge chins, and triangular female breasts (of which you'll see plenty on this show). The Elvis lookalike has a grin that takes up most of his face. The black dude, on the other hand, has no lips and rarely shows his teeth, while his chin and Afro duke it out for ownership of his head. Their black supervisor has HUGE lips...

The musical score pays homage to far better R&B from the era. Unfortunately, the lyrics and vocal performances are embarassing, and they're always used over the silent scenes. The theme song, however, is catchy and well-produced...

And the writing doesn't save the day. Scripts often feature lame comedy (bad singing, ironic sentiments about how awesome and timeless disco is, slacking on the job) and tired plot devices (Could the episodic female dancer who has stolen Ace's heart be the episodic jewel thief?).

Funky Cops made me think I could create a funnier '70s cop show spoof than the Di Sabatino brothers' animated series, so in 2003, I tried to write a comedic screenplay called Timegroove, about a present-day Filipino American cop who gets sent back in time to 1977. I typed up a complete treatment, a full list of '70s tracks I wanted to use (like "Skin Tight" by Ohio Players and "In the City" by the Jam) and a screenplay that only went as far as 11 pages. Except for a cameo I wrote for legendary, now-retired KTVU anchorman Dennis Richmond and a gag involving an argument about who sang "Back Stabbers" that escalates into a fistfight, my unfinished Timegroove screenplay isn't very good. Three years later, BBC's Life on Mars premiered and was such a clever '70s cop show homage that I decided the world didn't need another one.

Billy Nguyen, Private Eye: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata, Part 4

The previous installments of "Lacuna Matata" have been about TV shows only I and maybe you remember. In this penultimate installment, I'm shifting gears and focusing on an obscure comic book I wish I bought when I had the chance.

Nineteen years ago, Comic Shop News touted the first issue of an offbeat Caliber Press series called Billy Nguyen, Private Eye, written by John Hartman and starring a Seattle-based Vietnamese gumshoe who, for some reason, was drawn with a Sub-Mariner-like face by artist Stan Shaw. The Namor resemblance was one of many in-jokes in a satirical P.I. title that broke the fourth wall Moonlighting style and had Nguyen acknowledge he was a character in a comic.

CSN's stills from Billy Nguyen looked interesting, but what was especially cool about the comic was that for once, the hero, even with the Namor hairdo and pointy ears, looked like many of the folks from my predominantly Vietnamese part of town. That's something you didn't--and still don't--see everyday.

So what do I do when I strut into the comic shop and leaf through a copy of the first issue of the first comic with an Asian American hero I ever came across?

Stupid me who at the time wasn't used to comics that didn't involve superheroes, Star Trek or Dick Tracy skims through Billy Nguyen #1, thinks, "This comic's too weird," and then closes it and puts it down.

I now regret putting that comic back in its rack. I don't even remember what I bought instead. It was probably some lame comic based on The Adventures of Ford Fairlane or Doogie Howser or something.

Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology

Billy Nguyen never took off and faded into obscurity (it's so obscure the Thrilling Detective entry about the character isn't even sure how long the Caliber incarnation lasted: "2 issues?"). Meanwhile, I grow up to become an angry Asian man, develop an Asian American consciousness and decide that one of my major goals in life is to create a tough, assertive and humorous Asian American hero like Nguyen, whether it'd be for comics, TV or film, so that I can help diminish the stench left by white writers(*) and their stereotypical creations, like that corny and effete assclown Charlie Chan. When Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology chose me to develop a new Asian American hero, I couldn't believe one of my goals was becoming a reality.

(*) Not all of them are clueless about the Asian American experience. The two most relatable Asian American male characters on the big screen in years, Harold and Kumar, were created by Jewish guys--Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg.

Once in a while, someone puts out a comic about a detective or cop of color like Angeltown or Gun Fu. Every time such a comic drops, I try not to pass up the opportunity to buy and support it, after I stupidly rejected Billy Nguyen #1 when I was a kid.

This post is essentially a plea for someone, anyone, to revive this character. There aren't enough Asian American protagonists in the detective genre. Does Hartman still own the rights to Nguyen? Because if nobody wants to try to revive him, then maybe I should do it.

Black Tie Affair: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata, Part 3

In this installment of "Lacuna Matata," I try my damnedest to recall another obscure TV gem that doesn't deserve to be so obscure. I promise this one's way more obscure than Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, which some people don't think was obscure enough to be the focus of a "Lacuna Matata" installment.

Whatever the hell happened to Jay Tarses, veteran comedy writer and creator of too-brash-for-prime-time, sophisticated and smart-ass TV (Buffalo Bill, The "Slap" Maxwell Story)?

While Googling desperately for anything I could find on my favorite Tarses creation, the short-lived Black Tie Affair, my search took me to a post in which the blogger writes at length about his--as well as my--favorite performance in the ultimate '80s teenage underdog flick, Teen Wolf: Tarses as the basketball coach.

I'll let "intensities" have the floor:

Unlike the great majority of Teen Wolf characters, Coach Finstock is something of a rarity in 80s teen movies--the adult authority figure who seeks neither to inspire or oppress the youth under his command. He is not motivated by a desire to teach, nor is he looking to project the failures of his own adolescence unto the kids he's teaching. In fact, Coach Finstock doesn't seem motivated by much of anything--he even seems fairly uninterested in whether the team wins or not, which as a Teen Movie coach, should really be his only concern...

The Coach offers Scott these words of wisdom, which I would consider to arguably be the greatest quote in all of film history:

"Listen, Scott, there are three rules that I live by: never get less than twelve hours sleep; never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city; and never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Now you stick to that, and everything else is cream cheese."

Plopped in the middle of this clichéd, Jeph Loeb-scripted high school flick is a performance from a sharper-witted, less hackneyed movie. Methinks Tarses, not Loeb, wrote most of his own character's dialogue because the "three rules" speech sounds like it's straight out of Black Tie Affair.

If you love Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the Harry Lockhart, Gay Perry and Harmony Faith Lane characters like I do, you'd also enjoy Black Tie Affair, a private eye genre parody/homage with a similarly reluctant and in-over-his-head hero/narrator, Dave Brodsky (a pre-West Wing Bradley Whitford). He spies on cheating spouses like Cody Man fashion catalog tycoon Christopher Cody (John Calvin), the husband and business partner of his client Margo Cody (Kate Capshaw), not because he enjoys detective work, but because this analog man in a digital world wants to be able to continue running his musty, two-story Bay Area used LP store:

"Speaking of crime terminology, what the hell do they mean by forensics? And what exactly is a bunco squad? Police talk, I hate it."

"I do insurance fraud, Polaroids and 33 1/3 LPs. Two things I don't do? Compact discs and murder."

Brodsky's investigation of Chris is complicated by both his feelings for his attractive client and the body of a murdered woman Chris discovered at his hotel:

"When she called, I thought it was just a normal job--dress up in funny clothes, sneak into a strange room, snap pictures of a couple of naked people and hope the check clears. Now it looks like murder: the World Series of the detective game. Which means I've got to get off this case prontissimo."

(Thanks, Thrilling Detective and Gray Lady archives, for keeping alive three of the only few quotes I could find from Black Tie Affair. Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, who gave the show a C- in 1993, was out of her mind. I'll take Tarses' "manufactured drolleries" any day over the overwritten sentences that often make Schwarzbaum's reviews a chore to read.)

Adding to the other complications in Brodsky's case is his attraction to Chris' mistress, catalog supermodel Eve Saskatchewan (she and Margo were named after the rival actresses in All About Eve). Black Tie Affair gave me my first glimpse of recent Law & Order perp and '90s indie movie queen Alison Elliott (The Underneath, The Wings of the Dove), whose miniskirted appearances as Eve are another favorite memory of mine from a show that was doomed from the start.

Black Tie Affair was originally titled Smoldering Lust, but a few weeks before the NBC show's long-delayed premiere, the Peacock turned chicken and changed Tarses' original title to a less sexually charged one that they felt wouldn't offend already-pissed-off affiliates and advertisers. According to the New York Times' piece on Tarses, the network didn't even bother to tell him his show was renamed. Tarses learned about the title change from a reporter. The new title resulted in the last-minute removal of vocals from composer Patrick Williams' lite-jazz opening theme because the lyrics referred to the old title, which would have made more sense with the horny opening credits freeze-frames (a yuppie couple disrobes and makes out under the sheets) rather than Black Tie Affair.

The new title had very little to do with the show's neo-noir tone and was another in a long list of dumb titles that fail to lure us or tell us what to expect from the show or film. (Latest dumb title from a great show? Better Off Ted. Why did the person who came up with that title--I doubt it was creator/showrunner Victor Fresco--feel the need to rip off the title of John Cusack's teen suicide flick? What does Better Off Ted have to do with the show's backdrop, the research and development division of a conglomerate? And why did they have the title refer to Ted the straight man and narrator, who, despite being well-played by Jay Harrington, is the least interesting character in the ensemble? It's like if instead of Taxi, James L. Brooks called his ensemble show Alex's Garage. Why couldn't they have called it R&D? What is the deal with Grape Nuts? They're neither grapes nor nuts!)

NBC had little faith in a half-hour, laugh track-less show that wasn't quite a sitcom and wasn't quite a drama either (Tarses' Coach Finstock-style response to the Times about how to categorize Black Tie Affair was "I don't know how to describe it"), so the network burned off its episodes in a summertime Saturday night deathtrap time slot.

Besides Whitford's self-loathing yet likable outsider hero--he was like a Bay Area version of Jim Rockford and his iconoclasm reflected Tarses' outsider nature--and the clever and novel idea of having Brodsky run his agency from a used record store instead of a standard P.I. office, I also dug how Black Tie Affair wasn't an overt spoof in the mold of the Naked Gun movies and Carl Reiner's Fatal Instinct, though there were jabs at "police talk":

Mr. Tarses says he has more in mind than mere lampooning. "Sometimes it gets pretty heavy, down the road," he said, not wanting to reveal too much about pending episodes. "There are some pretty dramatic confrontations." The four main characters, he acknowledged, are not as ingratiating as Molly [Dodd] was. "I think these people all have a bit of an unsavory air to them, and you have to grow to like them," he said.

Then came the fly-covered cherry on the top of NBC's shit sundae: after four Saturday night airings, Tarses didn't get to show those dramatic confrontations he promised because the network gave up on Black Tie Affair and chose not to air the other eight episodes that were already completed, which left the show's mysteries unresolved.

Who was the mystery woman Chris found dead in bed in the first episode and who killed her? Who will Brodsky choose to bed? Margo? Eve? Or maybe even Cookie, his underappreciated and much less neurotic assistant (played by hot Korean American model-turned-actress Maggie Han, star of another short-lived gumshoe show, Murphy's Law)?

And going back to the mystery at the top of the post, whatever the hell happened to Tarses?

After the cancellations of Black Tie Affair and Public Morals, an even more controversial 1996 collabo with Steven Bochco that only aired once, Tarses the outsider vanished from the production side of TV. Perhaps he was fed up with the creative differences he kept having with network execs since the '80s. Tarses fled to BBC Radio, where he created and starred in Revolting People (2000-06), a sitcom set in Colonial-era Baltimore.

Since his disappearance, network/basic cable TV (or rather, the part of it that doesn't involve assembly-line procedural franchises and reality shows) has kept up with Tarses' brand of smart, cinematic and laugh track-less comedy, which has been carried on by his grown-up children, Matt, a former Scrubs writer/producer whose most recent credit was Worst Week, and Jamie, a network exec-turned-producer of My Boys, where their father has made a couple of guest appearances. Even so, scripted TV still needs the elder Tarses. I wonder if he has another gem like Black Tie Affair left in him. Basic cable, a place where the standards are looser than the networks' and the creative freedom Tarses used to fight for is totally encouraged, would be the perfect playground for him.

Now that the mystery of Tarses' post-Public Morals whereabouts has been solved, what about the mysteries in Black Tie Affair? A DVD release of the complete, mostly unaired series is long overdue (I refuse to watch torrents of the series). I still want to know who killed the dead chick in the hotel room.

Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata, Part 2

"Lacuna Matata" continues with another attempt to preserve the fading memory of TV shows no one except me remembers watching because the networks somehow Lacuna'd these things from everyone's heads.

In the case of Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi's Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, a hilarious late '80s reboot of Terrytoons' opera-singing rodent superhero, some people still actually remember watching it--particularly artists who worked on the show, animation fans and '80s kids like me who thought, "There's gotta be a better cartoon than Transformers, G.I. Joe and all the other lamer ones starring toys" and then caught Mighty Mouse: TNA and said, "Hey man, we just found it."


The amusingly over-the-top and off-kilter Bakshi Animation fanfare that opened every 11-minute Mighty Mouse: TNA story signaled this was not another saccharine and sanctimonious cartoon kingdom like the ones inhabited by the Care Bears, Teddy Ruxpin, My Little Pony and the Little Clowns of Happytown. The Bakshi/John K. Mighty Mouse brought back some characters from the Terrytoons shorts (Pearl Pureheart, a less prominent Oil Can Harry) and introduced several new ones, like MM's lonely orphan buddy Scrappy Mouse, a bald villain named Petey Pate, the Batman spoof Bat-Bat--a precursor to both the Tick and Die Fledermaus--and Bat-Bat's bovine archenemy, the Cow.


The show also ditched the obnoxious opera singing from the old shorts and gave MM a secret identity for the first time. When MM wasn't busy rescuing Pearl, Scrappy or the other citizens of Mouseville, he disguised himself as a plain-voiced construction worker named Mike the Mouse, a new conceit that actually made MM a more relatable character. In the show's much more anarchic and absurdist second season, the writers apparently lost interest in the Mike persona and had MM appear as his caped self all the time, even when he got married to Pearl at a ceremony that was attended by all the other Terrytoons characters.

Nineties cartoons like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs jumpstarted the whole meta-toon trend of poking fun at rival cartoons. But Mighty Mouse: TNA actually went meta years before--and with funnier and wilder results--in the classic "Don't Touch That Dial" episode, which launched an unprecedented attack on cookie-cutter '80s cartoons and viewers' short attention spans. The show's writers and animators, who admired the '40s and '50s Looney Tunes shorts and succeeded in recapturing the irreverent spirit of those cartoons, couldn't resist expressing their hatred for the shabby state of mainstream animation at the time.

During Mighty Mouse: TNA's first season, the writers skewered one particular '80s cartoon, NBC's Alvin and the Chipmunks revival, in "Mighty's Benefit Plan." They reimagined the Chipmunks as "Elwy and the Tree Weasels" (the band's biggest hit was called "Twitch and Writhe"), and in a series of gags they somehow Jedi mind-tricked CBS censors into ignoring, they turned David Seville into a disgusting-looking, Cheerios-craving pseudo-pedophile--an eerie foretelling of creepy teen pop Svengalis like Lou Pearlman and Joe Simpson.

In season two, instead of targeting just one show, the writers decided to go after a whole bunch of shows with "Don't Touch That Dial." The episode follows a Sgt. Bilko's Cereal-eating, diaper-clad kid viewer as he channel-surfs after MM's latest adventure bores him. Evicted from his own show by the impatient kid's remote, MM gets zapped into lame cartoons that resemble The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Real Ghostbusters, Rocky and Bullwinkle (with Rocky Balboa instead of Rocky the Flying Squirrel) and Scooby-Doo (complete with canned laughter). Long before the writers of The Simpsons, Futurama, Arrested Development and 30 Rock were inserting gags that viewers have to freeze-frame, "Don't Touch That Dial" snuck in a great split-second shot of MM getting zapped into a nameless cartoon starring a mash-up of Popeye and a Smurf ("Popeye Smurf").


Not everything in Mighty Mouse: TNA worked. Scrappy, voiced by the late Dana Hill, the Patrick Troughton of Audrey Griswolds, was an annoying audience surrogate who became even more annoying when a cost-cutting Bakshi would string together clips of old Terrytoons shorts and have an offscreen Scrappy snark at the footage for the entire 11-minute segment. Mighty Mouse invented MST3King about a year before MST3K did! (When he was asked in a 1988 interview about the 11-minute montages of old Terrytoons clips, John K. said, "Why waste money on those things? Nobody's going to watch them anyway.") Though these segments weren't very funny--and listening to Scrappy's voice for 11 minutes straight is like being treated to a concerto by the Nails on Chalkboards Philharmonic Orchestra--they showed how much of an improvement the Bakshi/John K. reboot was over the original MM cartoons, which were rather sucky. No wonder the show's writers and animators turned to Looney Tunes instead of Terrytoons for comedic inspiration.

It's a shame this little-seen show is remembered mostly for the uproar caused by the religious right--they thought they saw MM snort coke from a flower--and not often enough for moments like Elwy, the episode that pitted MM against a giant, evil and nameless parade balloon that was clearly Pee-wee Herman (a funny reference to another CBS Saturday morning show at the time) and "Don't Touch That Dial," the most entertaining 11 minutes of small-screen animation from the '80s. Though it lasted only two seasons, Mighty Mouse: TNA was popular enough to spawn an early '90s Marvel comic that brought Bat-Bat, his sidekick Tick the Bug Wonder, the Cow and the show's other new characters to the funny pages. A DVD box set of Mighty Mouse: TNA is unlikely because according to Jeffrey Pidgeon, an artist who worked on the show, "the rights are owned by five different people who don't exactly like each other."

Fans who are too lazy to hunt down bootleg copies of Mighty Mouse: TNA should go to YouTube, where clips of it are constantly posted and then immediately removed, perhaps due to pressure from the rights holders. Just type the words "mighty," "mouse" and "adventures" in your YouTube search and voila, here he comes to save the day.

Tribeca: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata, Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts I'm calling "Lacuna Matata," in which I attempt to preserve the fading memory of TV shows (or in some cases, comic books) that no one except me remembers watching because the networks somehow Lacuna'd these things from everyone's noggins.

Buried somewhere in my old VHS collection at my parents' house is a tape in shabby condition that contains the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles episode that guest-starred Harrison Ford and the first two episodes of Tribeca, a pretty good, rarely seen 1993 anthology series that was filmed on location in New York and lasted only seven weeks on Fox.

A decade before Robert De Niro and his Tribeca Productions business partner Jane Rosenthal co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival, the two producers used the Lower Manhattan neighborhood as the setting for what was essentially a throwback to the highbrow '50s and '60s TV dramas that were made during "a time when socially-conscious New Yorkers ruled the airwaves," as Maclean's' Jaime J. Weinman describes the New York-centric early years of scripted TV. That somber, East Side/West Side-esque approach meant this anthology drama, which focused on a different Tribeca resident or two each week, fit right in on the Simpsons and Married... with Children network's schedule about as well as Carrie Prejean at an opposite couples pride parade.

There are two things I saw while growing up that made me think to myself, "Wow, despite the cockroaches and occasional muggers, New York ain't such a bad place after all and I want to move there someday": Ghostbusters and Fox's Tribeca. The show also gave me my first glimpse of Kevin Spacey, who guest-starred as a suicidal singer/songwriter--and got to show off his singing voice--in an episode that reunited him with Tribeca showrunner David J. Burke, who previously co-created the classic Wiseguy arc that gave Spacey his big break. Burke's taste for downbeat, untidy endings--a frequent element of his writing on Wiseguy--also gave Tribeca at the time a certain edge over network dramas not called Homicide.

Though it was an anthology show, Tribeca had a two-man regular cast (Philip Bosco as a kindly coffeehouse owner and Joe Morton as an equally kindly patrolman who looked like he came from Law & Order: Mounted Police Unit) and some nice bits of continuity (a character like a homeless war vet played by Stephen Lang would briefly appear one week and then turn up as the main character the following week). Like many other anthologies, Tribeca didn't always hit one out the park, but when it did, it was network TV at its best. The series' strongest episode was the first one, "The Box," which featured a standout Emmy-winning performance by a fresh-off-Boyz N the Hood Laurence Fishburne as a plainclothes cop who's obsessed with both finding the mugger who killed his stockbroker brother (Carl Lumbly) and opening a puzzle box that his brother gave to him before he died.

With its all-black guest cast, "The Box" is also a great 45-minute argument for the need for more network drama series with casts that consist mostly of actors of color. It's a shame that the five networks have been willing to take a chance on all-black sitcoms but not all-black dramas, possibly because of the low ratings of past dramas like Avery Brooks' A Man Called Hawk, James Earl Jones' Under One Roof and Blair Underwood's City of Angels. Sixteen years after its initial broadcast, "The Box" is sadly, still a rarity rather than the norm.

I remember seeing the reclusive De Niro make a surprise appearance in a Fox promo a la John Wayne's 1955 Gunsmoke series premiere intro to get Fox viewers to tune in to his show. No such luck. One other thing I remember about Tribeca was its cool opening and closing theme, an instrumental version of "Keep It Goin'," a James Brown-sampling 1992 track by largely forgotten alt-rap artist and A.V. Club "Least Essential Albums of the '90s" nominee Me Phi Me.

Tribeca is such an obscure series that there are no YouTube clips or .jpgs from the series online (the only pictures that turn up in Google image searches for Tribeca are pics of either De Niro or the neighborhood skyline). So as you listen to the Me Phi Me tune (that is if you can find it online), just stare at the photo of the Tribeca skyline at the top of this post, and you'll get a pretty accurate recreation of the Tribeca opening titles, which consisted of nothing but whip pans across the Tribeca streets and skyline. If you want to see whip pans, just hit yourself in the head with a skillet.