Cartoon
The Adventures of Don Coyote and Sancho Panda
The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera

Animal
Hispanic Panda
(Hispanda)

Outfit: peasant hat / rain booties (?) / cartoon giant's shirt

Tagline: "Are you Sancho?"

Plot summary: If Miguel de Cervantes had written a symbolic, seventeenth-century Spanish novel about a minor landowner who had read so many stories of chivalry that he descended into fantasy and became convinced he was a knight errant, but didn't give him a last name that sounded like "coyote," William Hanna and Joseph Barbera would've been up parody shit-creek, writing "CAT HATE MOUSE" and "MOUSE RUN FROM CAT" over and over on a chalkboard until they went bankrupt and starved to death. But thankfully the classics are ripe with satire, and "Panza" also sounds like "Panda," so we got almost two years worth of the same goddamn Hanna-Barbera cartoon we always get, only the animals rode around on horses and were in Spain. Seriously, if The Divine Comedy had had a character with a name that sounded like "bear" they would've strapped a chariot onto Yogi and had him riding around in the fourth circle of Hell, swiping pic-a-nic baskets from those whose concern for material goods deviated from the desired mean.

I mean, my God, what passes for "Funtastic" these days?. (more)

User Comments: Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to look cute while eating bamboo and falling over.

Sancho Panda is the sidekick of the show, so you'd expect him to be the one to go "I DUNNO, DONNY" whenever Don Coyote went charging after a windmill, crashed into it, and said something trite, like "It's a livin!" Sancho was NOT the voice of cynicism, however, because the talent pool on Don Coyote was so deep that they had THREE sidekicks. Panda just rode along, charging away on whatever zany quest Don has cooked up, having difficulty breeding in captivity. Panda and Don both had "steeds" with sass-mouth, one voiced by Brad Garrett, doing that same fucking lousy Frankenstein jew-face he always does, being paid millions of dollars while Frank Welker could've just made a donkey noise for thirty bucks and gotten the same laughs.

If I ever get rich and burn a time machine I'm gonna go back to the fifties, get a job working for Hanna-Barbera, and just fuck with them to see what I can get them to make. I'll show up at board meetings and yell things like, "hey guys how about lewis carroll's hunting of the SHARK," or, "make tolstoy's master and man be about a giraffe and a billy goat." I might end up depriving the world of Snagglepuss, but I will have replaced him deftly with The Red Badger of Courage.

User Rating: 5.2/10 (11.567 votes)