Not Made in Japan

Not long ago Dastardly and Muttley and Their Flying Machines arrived from Netflix, which I suspect I haven’t seen in more than 30 years, but which has new life, such as it is, through the medium of DVDs. Yuriko astonished me (hard to do after 12+ years married) by saying she’d liked it as a small child. It was shown in Japan?

You never know about those things. I’d say, however, that in the case of this cartoon and probably some other mid-century US products, the Japanese are currently getting revenge on us for such cultural imperialism by sending us manga-inspired cartoons, or even the manga itself, including such incomprehensible items as Tokyo Pop, which appeared not long ago in the Tribune’s Sunday comics. Sorry, kids aren’t going to start reading your damn newspaper, no matter how much you try to pander to them or dumb it down.

Yuriko was surprised that D&M&TFM was not, in fact, a Japanese cartoon. No, it was produced by the cartoon factory that Hanna-Barbera had become by 1969, the same year that it inflicted Scooby-Doo Where Are You? on the world. Talking dogs must have been all the rage at H-B that year. Actually, D&M&TFM isn’t that bad, just simple-minded; Scooby-Doo is actively bad. (Even when I was 8, I didn’t much like it much, though I did watch it.)

In case you’ve forgotten, D&M&TFM is about four vaguely Central Power-flyers who obsessively try to thwart a carrier pigeon (“Yankee Doodle Pigeon”) in vaguely WWI-vintage aeroplanes. You’d think they’d have better things for three airmen and an airdog to do, such as dropping gas canisters on Allied trenches or maybe strafing Belgian civilians.