Several months ago I wrote a review of an episode of Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling, a wretched 80's cartoon that starred animated versions of popular-at-the-time WWF wrestlers such as Tito Santana and the Iron Sheik. In that review I stated that the show "gave off an unforgivable condescending whiff: this crap is just kids stuff, and kids are stupid; they'll watch anything." Hammerman, an extremely dumb DiC cartoon that aired back in the early 90's, was clearly a product of this mindset as well -- in fact, it's one of the best examples of it I've ever seen. The idea that kids are stupid and can't tell the difference between quality and crap led the geniuses behind Hammerman to create a show completely bereft of creativity, good writing, interesting stories, likable characters, and decent animation. It's terrible.





The series was, of course, an attempt to cash in on the now-puzzling popularity of MC Hammer and his music that existed during the late 80's and early 90's. Hammer is now mainly remembered for his parachute pants and his penchant for spending money wantonly, and, along with most of the other musical acts of the era (Vanilla Ice, New Kids on the Block, Milli Vanilli, Kriss Kross), has subsequently become something of a joke (to put it mildly). At the height of his popularity, however, the guy was hard to get away from: he had dolls and lunchboxes and starred in a bunch of commercials, and his music was ubiquitous. A cheaply-made cartoon series featuring an animated version of him was thus inevitable, since it was a tradition in those days for popular musical acts to be turned into cartoons (a New Kids on the Block cartoon and a Kid 'n Play cartoon aired around the same time as Hammerman). The fact that the cartoon would be awful was probably also inevitable (these cartoons always sucked, largely because of that kids-will-watch-anything-so-why-bother-making-it-any-good mentality, but also because cartoons about boy bands and pop acts simply aren't as entertaining as cartoons about, say, Conan the Barbarian or Spider-Man or whoever).

Hammerman is all about a guy named Stanley (Hammer's real name is Stanley Burrell) who acquires a pair of magical, talking shoes and uses them to fight crime. The show's opening theme, performed by Hammer himself, explains his origin succinctly. As Hammerman, Stanley's powers allow him to do pretty much anything the plot requires: usually, he simply points his arms at whatever's causing trouble, and a bunch of poorly-animated musical notes spring forth from them to fix it. Obviously, this makes for less than exciting superhero-ing. In addition to the shoes, Hammerman is aided in his adventures by Gramps, the old man who owned the shoes and fought crime with them before passing them on to Stanley, Gramps's granddaughter Jodi, and Showbiz, a fat twit with a high-pitched voice who I think is supposed to be the show's comic relief. The gang all live in Oaktown, specifically in "the 'hood", but this is a nice sort of 'hood with no crime (except for Hammerman's comic villains) or hopelessness or anything like that -- it's the sort of 'hood where everyone is friendly and people are always pitching in to help out at youth centers.





The episode I sat down to watch, titled "Lights, Camera, Hammerman!", starts out with a live-action MC Hammer introducing the episode to a bunch of kids dressed up in the sorts of dumbass clothes that were popular in the early 90's (they also dance around hip-hop style; it's very hard to watch). After this painful opening segment, the show begins in earnest: Hammerman saves a plane from crashing by rapping ("The plane might crash / is that your fear / well quit your cryin' / 'cause Hammerman's here!") and by using his all-powerful musical notes to cause the building the plane was about to crash into to bend itself out of the way. Nice. That evening an evil filmmaker, Schlockreeler, watches Hammerman's heroics on the news and laments that no one is interested in watching movies with superheroes in them when they can just look outside and see Hammerman doing his thing in real life. His partner, FX, chooses that moment to unveil to his boss his new invention, a machine that can actually physically capture a person or an object on a roll of film. Schlockreeler, a pudgy guy with a beret and a monocle and a grating voice, decides that if he can capture Hammerman with the device he can force him to star in one of his movies and (presumably) make a lot of money, so he sets out to do that. How's that for a great plot?

Anyway, in order to draw Hammerman out, Schlockreeler puts the word out that he's going to be holding auditions for the new film he's making about Hammerman. Stanley hears about this from Showbiz and decides something fishy must be going on, so he heads to the audition. He tells the people assembled there to go home, irritating Schlockreeler, who proceeds to capture him and Showbiz and Jodi on film (Stanley is without his shoes at this time, so can't use them to escape or fight back). FX then splices the film they're currently stuck in into a series of bad movies, pitting the trio against generic horror movie monsters and outer space aliens. Meanwhile, Gramps retrieves Stanley's shoes (the shoes are constantly making bad jokes in order to remind viewers, in case they needed reminding, that they are indeed watching a horrible show), figures out what's going on, and endeavors to return them to Stanley. He eventually accomplishes this, just as Stanley and Jodi and Showbiz are facing off against a Godzilla-esque monster inside one of Schlockreeler's movies. Stanley shouts, "Hammertime!" and transforms into Hammerman just in time to fight the monster (Hammer's song "Pray" is played at this point). The animation here is incredibly poor; the same shots of Hammerman dodging the monster's eye-beams are recycled over and over again.

Finally, Hammer defeats the monster and escapes the movie by -- how else? -- using his magical musical notes to get the machine to spit them back out into the real world. Schlockreeler and FX go to jail, and the live-action MC Hammer returns to offer a moral of sorts, in the tradition of He-Man and G.I. Joe: "In today's show, Ol' Roll 'Em [Schlockreeler], he wanted to direct and control everybody...he wanted to make them do exactly what he wanted them to do. If someone try to make you do something, like a gang leader perhaps, don't do it. If they try to control you and put pressure on you, get help. Ask your parents, your teachers, any responsible adult, but don't give in. It's your life." Huh. Well, I'll keep that in mind.





Hammerman is a bad, bad show. Beyond the dumb jokes and boring plots and lame premise, the series is very poorly-animated (have I mentioned that?), and the frame rate is awful -- the characters on the show hardly move. Even He-Man, with its goofy-looking rotoscoping, looks better than this crap. The voice-acting isn't much better: Schlockreeler and Showbiz and the shoes all have absurd, slobbering comedic voices, and everyone else talks in hip-hop slang that was passe even back in 1991. It sucks!

Fortunately, this lousy cartoon ran only thirteen episodes on ABC before being canned.

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