Cartoon
Amigo and Friends
Big Shot for Bounty Hunters

Animal
Friend






Outfit: cowboy hat / neckerchief / wing-tipped shoes

Tagline: "Buenos dias, amigo! ho ha ho ha! Buenos dias, amigo!”

Plot summary: Mario Moreno Reyes is widely known as the “Charlie Chaplin of Mexico” for his interpretation of the role of Cantinflas, an impoverished campesino come slumdweller that originated in the pelado. In case the only words you understood in the last half of that sentence were “come” and “slumdweller” (you pervert), the Spanish loosely translates to “he wore a cowboy hat that was slightly too small for his head and Mexican people lost their shit over it for fifty years.” That’s not a knock on Mexican culture. We here in America made Bob Hope a national hero and representative of the people in times of war because he made a bunch of movies where he gets lost while traveling and ends up being stewed with carrots by the natives in humorously oversized cooking pots. And that song where Gwen Stefani rhythmically spelled the word “banana” to high school marching band music was number one for six months.

While some of films were dubbed into English for American audiences, and his work found some favor among the people of France (where Jerry Lewis sticking his dick in a vacuum and yelling troinlaven is seen as genius), the wordplay of his Spanish-language humor did not translate particularly well into other languages. Cantinflas’ most notable film, for example, is “Ahí está el detalle,” which in English means, basically, “Yeah, that’s the ticket.” Contextually, this means that the most important and funny film in the history of Mexico is the States equivalent of what John Lovitz says to you when he’s trying to convince you that he fucked Morgan Fairchild. (more)

User Comments: The loss of wit via language difference could be but is probably not the reason why Hanna-Barbera brought the Cantinflas cartoon to America and tastefully renamed it “Amigo and Friends.” It may also be but is probably not the reason why the dubbed themesong has “Amigo” singing about how he doesn’t want to do any work, he only wants to be your friend. It’s also the reason why back when Hanna-Barbera ran the Kings Dominion theme park they made all the cooks wear big foam Amigo mascot suits.

The show was essentially Mr. Peabody and Sherman, if Peabody was a Mexican film star and Sherman was a rotating group of nationalistic stereotypes. It was just Superbook if they’d spent the whole show sitting around making flan. Amigo would travel through space and time for someone’s educational purpose and visit Shakespeare, or see the Pyramids, or visit a distant planet. In one episode he is almost killed by a Mayan while looking for the fountain of youth in a misguided attempt to save his modern-day wife from dying, and ends up a naked man humping a tree inside of a flying space bubble in the year 3000. In another, he makes vegetable faces with Raquel Rodriguez, una abogada de Los Angeles.

“Amigo and Friends” ran for two years in America, which was long enough for the Chinese to pick it up, put it in syndication, and give it an even funnier dub name: “Star Comedian and His Friends.” In Greenland, the show is known as "Look Out! A Mexican."

User Rating: 6.7/10 (32,704 votes)