Good Lord I hate Batfink.
What is Batfink you ask? It’s some dark-ages five-minute-an-epsiode cartoon series the ABC have dug up out of their vaults and put on just before Dr Who. It seems to be a parody of the Adam West Batman series – a really bad parody. A bad, unfunny, offensively racist parody.
The hero is some kind of humanoid bat. Where this freak of biological science came from is never actually explained. His sidekick is a buck-toothed funny-voiced Asian man named “Karate”, who’s attempts at both heroism and humour consistantly fall flat. Naturally they live in a cave … (I have to go off on a tangent here and quote one of my favourite lines from The Drew Carey Show – “Batman’s car has a morals clause? He kept a young boy in a cave!” *grin* OK back to complaining about BatFink).
Every single episode features pretty much the same plot. Some unlikely criminal mastermind commits some insanely unlikely crime. We cut to Batfink’s “split-level” cave where he and Karate engage in some spectacularly dull and unfunny dialogue. Then the Police Chief (who looks so like Elmer Fudd I’m surprised the animators weren’t sued by Warner Brothers) calls them up on “the hotline” and lisps the details to them. Batfink orders Karate to get the “Batilac” a volkwagon beatle with really lame wings on the back, and they go driving around for no obvious reason.
Eventually they reach the crime scene where Batfink uses his “Supersonic Sonar Radar” to find the bad guys (this is apparently a sentient animated ‘beep’ that does all his work for him). Once the beep returns and the bad guys are located Batfink and Karate head off to catch them, only to be trapped in some patently stupid fashion. Karate then steps up to free them using his karate. Naturaly as a simple oriental he fails, and it’s up to Batfink to release them, usually by use of his “wings of steel”. Once free they locate the evil doers again who shoot at them. Batfink then delivers the line that any sane viewer soon comes to dread…
The epsiode soon wraps up in some tired fashion (usually involving Karate smashing down a door which lands on top of Batfink temporarily crushing him), and closes with a really lame visual gag, which the entire cast laughs at as if it was Kreskin*No, ‘Kreskin’ doesn’t make any kind of sense in this context, but c’mon, it sounds good 🙂.
Arghh!! Is the ABC that strapped for content?? Bah!
