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For four
seasons, Duckman nested comfortably in the USA Network's "Up
All Night" programming block, its politically incorrect misanthropy
given full voice by Jason Alexander as a character whose
cluelessness, insensitivity, deviancy, and boorishness are his best
qualities. Who is Duckman? No one special, he laments, "I'm just one
more duck detective who works with a pig and lives with the twin
sister of his dead wife, three sons on two bodies and a comatose
mother-in-law who's got so much gas she's a fire hazard." As with
Alexander's signature Seinfeld character, George Costanza,
Duckman has few redeeming qualities. He's an incompetent detective
whose few acts of heroism are inadvertent (in one episode, he is
sent flying after groping two women and unwittingly lands on a
Presidential attacker). He rants and raves on everything from
"clean" comics to the commercialism of TV news. What buoys
Duckman are its inventive and vividly colored animation, sharp
and clever writing and virtuoso voice work by Alexander and company,
including Nancy Travis as Duckman's braying sister-in-law Beatrice,
Dweezil Zappa as Duckman's dim son, Ajax, and E. J. Daily, the late
Dana Hill as his other conjoined-headed son, Charles and Mambo and
Gregg Berger as breakout character Cornfed Pig, Duckman's brilliant
porcine partner whose deadpan just-the-facts delivery suggests Jack
Webb, but who insists his "spiritual forerunner" is Jack Lord. |
