You see this dog? You see this smug little jerk? This is Hong-Kong Phooey. He's an old Hannah Barbara cartoon character from the 70s. He's a talking dog who jerks his body around and calls it “kung fu” as if he were a respectable martial artist. He fights bad guys, but usually screws it up so much that his cat Spot has to fix it and get no credit.
Just watch the intro. It's the most insulting, patronizing thing you've ever seen. It shows us Hong Kong Phooey, a dog dressed up for cheap karate lessons, and then has the nerve to ask us “WHO IS THIS SUPER HERO?” Gee, it probably isn't the guy who the show is named after. And then it gets even more moronic.
“SARGE?” it offers as if it were a valid response, showing us a fat guy in a police uniform. Sharp minded people will note that a fat guy in a police uniform isn't a dog. Hong Kong Phooey, which I will be referring to as HKP from now on, pokes his head and shakes his head.
“NOPE!” the narrator squawks. You don't say. “ROSEMARY THE PHONE OPERATOR?” he offers again. If you're older than twelve months, you'll notice that Rosemary is a lady and looks absolutely nothing like a dog. The narrator assume that we have no sense of species differentiation.
“HENRY, THE MILD MANNERED JANITOR?” the idiot narrator asks. Henry is just HKP with a bucket on his head. The dog has the nerve to look at the camera and say, “could be!” with the smuggest smile on his face. That's when the theme song starts playing and refers to HKP as a “number one super-guy!”
The only reason HKP holds the title of “number one super guy” is because everyone else in the cartoon has taken under a severe case of the stupids. Are you telling me that there is not a single person in this town that can differentiate between a dog and a person? Or can they just not put two and two together? HKP doesn't live in a world filled with other cartoon animals, he lives with people!
“Gee!” they must say, “how lucky are we that this city has the only two talking dogs in the world! HKP and Henry!”
It got stupider. Some studio executive in 2009 decided that we needed a movie of this half-assed super hero and it should star Eddie Murphy. In 2011, some test footage was leaked and it was like watching a brain dead vegetable spasm to death. There's been little word about it since, but seeing how it's taking them so long to make such garbage it'll take several more whacks to the head before someone puts it in theaters. Of course, in a world where a narrator can't distinguish between a talking dog in a karate gi and a talking dog with a bucket on its head we are in serious danger of “Hong Kong Phooey: The Movie” being released.
