Mighty love: A look back at Ralph Bakshi's adventurous and long-lost Terrytoons reboot, now on DVD

This is a revised version of a June 5, 2009 post--updated to include mentions of the Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures complete series DVD that came out yesterday.

I never thought I'd see the day. Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi's hilarious late '80s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures reboot of Terrytoons' opera-singing rodent superhero finally got an extras-filled DVD release from CBS/Paramount, delighting animation fans and '80s kids like me who, back in '87 or '88, 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 one Saturday morning 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 the Cow, Bat-Bat's bovine nemesis.


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 admired the '40s and '50s Looney Tunes shorts (the Termite Terrace crew was in their comedic prime during those decades, but several of their shorts were also pretty racist-ass, to borrow a word from a recent tweet by Geo of Blue Scholars about Looney Tunes marathons). Throughout the series run, the Mighty Mouse: TNA staff succeeded in recapturing the irreverent spirit of those '40s and '50s cartoons, and in "Don't Touch That Dial" and an earlier ep, "Mighty's Benefit Plan," they couldn't resist expressing their hatred for the shabby state of mainstream animation at the time.

In the first-season ep "Mighty's Benefit Plan," the writers skewered one particular '80s cartoon, NBC's Alvin and the Chipmunks revival. 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.

Mr. E (Photo source: Jeffrey Pidgeon)

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 ep 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 and a Scrappy-Doo-esque sidekick named "Mr. E," a mash-up of Mr. T and Ed Sullivan who tells MM to get away from his "really big shoe" and stop taunting his "ethnically mixed buddies"). 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 has been 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 the ep 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), the Elwy show 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.

For a while, a Mighty Mouse: TNA DVD seemed 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." I don't know who sorted out the legal mess, but I like to think a mouse in yellow tights was somehow involved.

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.

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.