The Tick has quickly become one of my favorite animated comedy shows. I say this in the same breath as I would say with other short-lived animated comedies that weren't always necessary "kid-friendly" like the Critic or Duckman. While The Tick aired Saturday mornings and was absolutely agreeable for kids, maybe even the actual target audience, the people who wrote the show and came up with characters like Chairface Chippendale and Dinosaur Neil and Pineapple Pokopo were aiming it on another level for older audiences or just plain-old comic book geeks. This is about as clever and awesome as they come because it can be watched at any age-range, if one is into super-heroes or the satire that can come with taking it all apart.
The world of the Tick is in good fun: the Tick himself is of good intentions but also sees himself as the be-all end-all of superheroes, who with his perplexed sidekick Arthur (he's a moth, not a bunny, by the way) they face off against some really weird and highly mockable villains like the ones mentioned above, or even the Tick's most derisive nemeses like Brainchild or the Tick... another hero named Tick, who can't not be the Tick since he has all of his clothes with his name on it! This is just outright funny and clever and witty, constantly, and it knows its audiences well. Kids love the crazy characters that come up, the randomness, even some of the lowbrow humor.
Everyone else can look to how it is actually pretty sophisticated for Saturday morning fair, as far as ridiculous parody shows go. So many lines are quotable, and so many moments seem to be funnier as an adult than as a kid. There's one episode in particular that I just watched from the first season that illustrates this: in the Tick vs the Proto Clown the Tick is sent off into a journey of self-discovery in his own mind, as a Tick with wings on its head flaps about trying to get the Tick to "get" what he's all really about in the universal sense, and while this is going on a clown who is basically the Hulk is terrorizing the city. We get this part with the clown that is conventionally funny, but the stuff with the Tick in this episode is some of the craziest television of the 90s, a hallucination that makes Homer's hot-pepper trip with Johnny Cash's coyote on the Simpsons look sane by comparison.
It's wonderful stuff, and certainly some of the best, most underrated family programming one could look for. It's outrageous, but not quite as dirty as Duckman or as obscure in references as the Critic. It skates the same lines, but it'll still keep the kiddies entertained. In that sense it's almost close to being a perfect mid-90s show that, sadly, was taken off the air a bit too soon and given a mediocre live-action treatment.
The world of the Tick is in good fun: the Tick himself is of good intentions but also sees himself as the be-all end-all of superheroes, who with his perplexed sidekick Arthur (he's a moth, not a bunny, by the way) they face off against some really weird and highly mockable villains like the ones mentioned above, or even the Tick's most derisive nemeses like Brainchild or the Tick... another hero named Tick, who can't not be the Tick since he has all of his clothes with his name on it! This is just outright funny and clever and witty, constantly, and it knows its audiences well. Kids love the crazy characters that come up, the randomness, even some of the lowbrow humor.
Everyone else can look to how it is actually pretty sophisticated for Saturday morning fair, as far as ridiculous parody shows go. So many lines are quotable, and so many moments seem to be funnier as an adult than as a kid. There's one episode in particular that I just watched from the first season that illustrates this: in the Tick vs the Proto Clown the Tick is sent off into a journey of self-discovery in his own mind, as a Tick with wings on its head flaps about trying to get the Tick to "get" what he's all really about in the universal sense, and while this is going on a clown who is basically the Hulk is terrorizing the city. We get this part with the clown that is conventionally funny, but the stuff with the Tick in this episode is some of the craziest television of the 90s, a hallucination that makes Homer's hot-pepper trip with Johnny Cash's coyote on the Simpsons look sane by comparison.
It's wonderful stuff, and certainly some of the best, most underrated family programming one could look for. It's outrageous, but not quite as dirty as Duckman or as obscure in references as the Critic. It skates the same lines, but it'll still keep the kiddies entertained. In that sense it's almost close to being a perfect mid-90s show that, sadly, was taken off the air a bit too soon and given a mediocre live-action treatment.