Friday, June 29, 2012

Saturday Morning's Forgotten Heroes: Undercover Elephant (1977)

Easily the worst segment of C. B. Bears, Undercover Elephant had to be the last word in oxymorons.

Stop and think about it for a second. How can an elephant go undercover? You can't hide the fact that it's big, burly, and not exactly fleet afoot. Outfitting our hero in a jacket five sizes too small with a matching hat and a domino mask of a different color than the rest of the outfit doesn't help. Likewise, the gags in the following episode, "Baron Von Rippemoff", fall flat. It gives slapstick a bad name.



Hanna-Barbera owned the 8:00 (ET) hour in 1977, with C. B. Bears, Super Friends, & Skatebirds all on the schedule. And I know a certain blue-skinned monkey who was better at pratfalls than Undercover Elephant.........

Rating: D.

2 comments:

magicdog said...

Talk about scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel.

Seeing Undercover wearing that little jacket made me think of Chris Farley's scene in "Tommy Boy" when he danced around singing, "Fat man in a little coat!". Apparently that passed for funny back in the day.

It looks like the creators tried to cross "Super Snooper & Blabber Mouse" with "The Impossibles" (or perhaps "Mission Impossible" by the looks of that self destructing orders) and really came up short.

hobbyfan said...

Wayyyyyyy short.

The real irony was having a mouse for UE's sidekick, given how they used o suggest that elephants are afraid of mice. Oy!