Danger Mouse…Also Returning

He’s terrific. He’s magnific. He’s the greatest secret agent in the world.

If you’re like me and I know I am, meaning you liked cartoons and had Nickelodeon playing in your house between the years 1982 and 1992, then you probably saw Danger Mouse.

Of course, if you were a fan, you might have liked to have been told that Netflix is reviving it as well on this side of the Atlantic with British comedian curmudgeon Stephen Fry as Colonel K.  But, apparently, I’m the only regular writing for this blog that saw fit to say anything since other folks liked to pretend Inspector Gadget and Duck Tales are the only cartoons returning these days.  But I’m not bitter or anything…

Danger Mouse was a British animated series about a white mouse who was the world’s greatest secret agent.  He lived in a London post box with his shorter, clumsy, cowardly hamster sidekick Penfold.

Penfold, seen here trying to get into the Down Unda Games, which may be a thing I just made up.

Generally, the two would get a call from their superior Colonel K, species more or less unknown, and then they’d rocket off in their car, which could fly by popping some wings.

While Danger Mouse had more than few enemies, his most frequent was a villainous frog named Baron Silas Greenback.  And in true supervillain fashion, he has a white furry pet.  But unlike Blofeld, a cat would have been impractical.  He had a caterpillar.

“No, Mr Mouse, I expect you to die.”

Yes, I know that was Goldfinger, not Blofeld.

One of Danger Mouse’s other frequent adversaries was actually good enough to get his own spin-off.

Yeah, a vampire duck who just wanted to be on TV…look, it was the 80s. Cocaine was a hell of a drug.

As cartoons go, to be honest, the animation wasn’t always stellar.  Many times the same sequences would be seen again and again.  The show would make up for this with clever wordplay and serialized episodes.  That actually made the DVDs rather iffy, since seeing the plot get recapped every three to five minutes in a single twenty-two minute episode got kinda old after a while.  Frequent commercial breaks actually helped this show.  But a narrator, puns, and long form stories combined with bad animation certainly worked out well for The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, so really Danger Mouse was just the dry British equivalent.

But with all the hubbub over an inept cyborg cop and some wealthy waterfowl, let us not overlook the world’s greatest–and tiniest–secret agent.

Oh, Wikipedia tells me Colonel K was a chinchilla.