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Cartoon
Hong Kong Phooey
Scooby's All-Star Laff-a-Lympics
The Godzilla/Hong Kong Phooey Hour

Animal
Dog; Scatman

Outfit: gi / mask / Hong Kong Phooey chop

Tagline: "Fan-riffic!"

Plot summary: Who is this super hero? Sarge? No. Rosemary, the telephone operator? No. A dog in a gi? COULD BE!!

When the police just aren't enough, the city calls upon a dog who works as a janitor to jump into a filing cabinet, come out wearing karate clothes, and drive around with his cat in a car that can change into another kind of vehicle when he sounds a gong. The gong can make his car into a boat or even an airplane. The gong also sends that guy with a paper bag over his head sulking away sadly. (more)

User Comments: Hong Kong Phooey is not only a time capsule for the 1970s U.S. love of kung-fu and blacksploitation films; it is a show left to document three very specific kinds of racism:

1) What white people think about black people.

Despite being a super hero, Penrod Pooch works as a janitor for minimum wage for a bunch of dominant white people. Voiced by a black man named "Scatman," Phooey has an innocent, "mamie" sort of charm despite his limbs being two seconds away from morphing into chicken legs and despite hot sauce and four hundred years of oppression spraying from his eye sockets. Besides, who names their kid "Scatman?" That's my generation's equivalent of naming your daughter "Barbie Girl."

2) What black people think about Asian people.

Do you ever wonder why Jet Li keeps passing up good movie roles to star in movies with rappers and titles like CRADLE 2 THA GRAVE or HOMEY B DUN KUNG FOOD? Because black people will pay to see anything an Asian person will do at this point. It doesn't have to be good, or smart. It's guaranteed money. Hong Kong Phooey never does anything more elaborate than a judo chop and still has to consult the Hong Kong book of Kung-Fu to see what his next move will be. It's the same Breakfast at Tiffany's "I PROTEST!!" little-Asian-man-so-sorry mentality, but it's cool because we're ALL NOT WHITE PEOPLE.

3) What Asian people think of white people.

Rosemary the Telephone Operator has the sense of humor of a beta tested version of Bill Engvall. To put it in layman's terms, that makes her about as funny as AIDS, Alzheimer's, cancer, and syphilis joining together to form some kind of Legion of Disease Doom with intent to attack every child and cute puppy on Earth. The Sergeant of the police force has the outward brain power of a punched moose. So what does this say about white people? They are fat, lazy, unfunny, and brain damaged. They hired a dog to be their janitor, for Christ's sakes.

User Rating: 8.1/10 (984,134 votes)