Review: Danny Ketchup

In a year filled with underwhelming adult animation premieres, Adult Swim’s pilots have been a real bright spot. They showcase a weirdness that seems to hearken back to the network’s heyday of original series (more on that next week).

Danny Ketchup is a throwback in a lot of ways. Adult Swim’s early beginnings did so with a number of series slicing and splicing scenes from classic animated series and overdubbing them with better and funnier dialogue. Likewise, Danny Ketchup takes out of Hell Den’s book by taking live-action sequences from classic programming and crudely drawing over animated faces that sick us with puns about Prince, cheesy one-liners, and sexy action. The premise revolves around super agent Danny Ketchup  who must save the world from terrorists who have developed a Supergun with bullets the size of Washington, D.C. With Danielle Pepperjack, and Paran Thakur as Milton Horseradish.

By classic movies, I want to be clear, we’re not talking about anything that was good. We’re talking the cheesiest of live-action flicks made-for-TV like TNT Jackson, The Magic Sword, Laser MIssion, and White Fire and while you would think the likes of MacGruber went to these wells enough, Danny Ketchup is less of a send-up, and more of a “fuck you” to the B-movie action flicks of yesteryear and there isn’t anything wrong with that. The pilot episode tapped the gods of crappy-looking character designs in Awesome Studios (Squidbillies/Aqua Teen) which itself gives us pantomimed live-action characters with tea pots and bunny ears sketched over hurling “ketchup’s getting cold!” just before danger comes.

The gruesome death scenes were already included, but everything else is just gravy. I have a small gripe in that I wish every face in the show was drawn over, most are, but a few were left out early on in the quarter-hour episode. That said, there seems to be actual potential here, and if a feature-length film or a whole series ordered I would be hooked from day one. The dialogue is rife with fourth wall breaks regarding the conventions of modern-day standards of movie-making all-the-while spliced with methods that would make the founding fathers of Space Ghost proud.

Adult Swim’s future looks fine.