Minoriteam is either a cultural backlash in animation, or a step to bring suppressed ethnic and racial humor back into public entertainment. All images © & ™ 2006 Cartoon Network.

Round One
American culture has taken a large step backwards where animation is concerned. I do not mean that the genre has regressed in any way; what I am referring to is a step backwards in time, to an age where ethnicity, religion, race, and sexual preference are once again targets for uncensored lampoonery. The bonds have been loosening for quite some time. Many hands have undone the knots that held a sheet of civility over these once-forbidden subjects. A concerted, 30 year effort to instill a sense of multicultural respect and tolerance for diversity seems to have spurred a backlash, one that is almost predictable in its timing. Since a culture’s trends inevitably filter down into its artifacts, it was foreseeable that animation would soon reflect a new irreverence towards subjects once taboo.

There is no religion, ethnic group, or sexual orientation safe from South Park of late. Although the headlines were recently crammed with tales of riots ranging throughout the Muslim world due to cartoons depicting Muhammad, many in the media forgot that Matt Stone and Trey Parker did the same thing on July 4, 2001. The Prophet appeared as a member of the “Super Best Friends”, a team of deities that helped Kyle to defeat a cult of “Blaintologists”. Recently, the series featured a bleeding Virgin Mary menstruating on the Pope. Isaac Hayes, the long-time voice of Chef, quit the show after it lampooned the Church of Scientology. In one episode of Comedy Central’s Drawn Together, a series itself peppered with racial and ethnic innuendo, we witnessed an episode in which Foxxy Love (herself a blatant stereotype) encountered a Board of Education that viewed blacks as characters straight out of a 1940s Walter Lantz Cartune.

As a knockoff of the 1966 Marvel Superheroes series, Minoriteam’s creators Todd James (l), Adam de la Pina (center) and Peter Giardi seem to have channeled a series syndicated during America’s worse race riots.

The latest flogger of political correctness is Adult Swim’s Minoriteam. This series is either the most confused (and confusing) manifestation of cultural backlash in animation, or one of the final steps in bringing long-suppressed wellsprings of ethnic and racial humor back into public entertainment. Many comic book aficionados admire the series, which appears to pay homage to Marvel Comics immortal Jack Kirby; while this is undeniably true, Minoriteam is more a knockoff of the 1966 Grantray-Lawrence series Marvel Superheroes. In this case, Flash animation replaces the Xerographic process of the latter show, but the visual reference to “moving comic panels” is much the same. I find it a rather interesting coincidence that creators Adam de la Peña, Peter Girardi, and Todd James (all late of Comedy Central’s Crank Yankers) channeled an animated series syndicated during a period in which America suffered her most convulsive spate of race riots.

According to the press release, Minoriteam is a cadre of five superheroes under the leadership of wheelchair-bound Dr. Wang (an obvious reference to Charles Xavier, founder of the X-Men). Dr. Wang is an Asian savant with a 40-pound brain who runs the super team from his Laundromat (thus tying present and past Asian stereotypes neatly together). Wang’s legion consists of himself, Jewcano (Jewish), Fasto (Black), El Jefe (Hispanic), and Nonstop (Indian). The aforementioned heroes are shameless, gleefully presented stereotypes that would have surely been quashed by the forces of PC only a few short years ago. They face off in comical combat against The White Shadow and his (inept) minions including Racist Frankenstein, The Corporate Ladder and The Standardized Test (I wonder why The Bell Curve didn’t join up?), all representations of obstacles or enemies to minorities. I wish I could say I understand this cartoon but I do not, except as an artifact that represents the confusion underlying the increasing collisions between free speech, diversity, political correctness, and changing societal mores.