This is introduced by some made-for-TV cowboy who acts like we should know who he is (sorry, buddy), but the movie itself is a cartoon. I assume the main guy in the cartoon is based on the joker from the introduction, because he's drawn differently from everyone else and even though the likeness is negligible at least it's super distracting. And what is with every piece of ass in town falling all over him? How big does your ego have to be to demand that the cartoon version of yourself in a kids' movie be a total pimp?

Psychological issues aside, everything that sucks about kids' cartoons is here in spades: crummy art, shitty songs that don't have anything to do with the story, cute animals engaging in completely unrelated antics every two seconds... Seriously, the mysterious guy in the intro said that this cartoon is about the railroad coming though ("All Western towns have the railroad coming through?" "Yup."); what in the corn-husking fuck does that have to do with a zany pigeon dive-bombing people? Or a dog, a baby horse, and a skunk chasing each other around for nearly fifteen minutes? And while we're on this subject, could someone please explain to me how the annoying geezer sidekick reconciles having a Disney-style pet skunk and a hat that's also made out of a skunk? Wouldn't that be like ordering the czarnina at Donald Duck's wedding reception? (To be fair, he claims the hat's not real, but I think he just said that because the yet-to-be-skinned skunk kept trying to have relations with it.) Anyway, after nearly an hour of assing around the story finally begins, and it has to do with a secret agent sending the main guy to San Francisco to stop some joker from buying up land and selling it to the government. The United States simply won't stand for... uh, capitalism.

Astoundingly, this is when the movie gets weird. When the main guy gets to San Fran, suddenly the whole style of this cartoon changes and everything starts to look less cutesy and more realistic. Stuff's all run-down, we can hear a married couple having a nasty argument through a window, and when we see a rat it looks less like The Secret of NIMH and more like something that would make the news by eating a homeless baby. This leads me to believe that the home life our main guy leads - with all its laughter and singing and lovable, anthropomorphinated critters - exists solely in his deranged, broken mind. Maybe the cynical, amoral qualities of his government work have left him so detached that he had to create an intricate fantasy world just to prevent himself from having a complete emotional breakdown. Jesus Christ that's depressing. Oh, and just to darken the pot some more, there's lots of racism in this movie too, including an Irish guy who looks like he just fell out of a box of Lucky Charms and a little Chinese girl who says "Ah, so!" even though she was raised by white people.

If this is the kind of shit you want your kids watching, I guess that's your business.

Read Mr. Satanism's book, The 100 Best Movies Ever Made ...Mostly Suck, now available here and on Amazon.