El Tigre was the first nicktoon to be created for Nickelodeon and their spin-off channel Nicktoons which was a channel dedicated to showing nicktoons past and present. The show takes place in the fictional Mexican town called Miracle City where crime is rapid. In the show we focus on the life of a 13 year old boy named Manny who is a young super powered kid known as El Tigre. He comes from a long line of superheroes and villains. His dad is the masked superheroWhite Pantera and his grandfather is the retired super villain Puma Loco. In the show we see Manny make choices about his life and what he wants do with his powers. Will he follow the path of his father and become a superhero, fighting crime, and protecting his city or will he follow the path of his grandfather and become a villain favoring chaos and destruction. The idea of the show is good, I really like it. Usually in these kinds of shows the young main character will always use his powers for good but here the kid is unsure if he should use his powers for good like his dad when the side of evil sounds so tempting and sweet according to the words of his grandfather. I like how Manny switches between using his powers for good and evil because I think that’s how a real kid with superpowers would act like. Oh don’t get me wrong, if I was Manny’s age and had superpowers I would use them for good but at the same time I would indulge myself and use them for my own selfish purposes as well because I’m a kid, I do good things but at the same time I wanted to do the things I wanna do and some of those things aren’t always good or right.
Another good thing about the show is the relationship between White Pantera and Puma Loco. Despite the fact that the two are on the opposite sides of the law, the two get along quite well. We see that in the show the two live together and raise Manny (the mother returns a few episodes into the series) both teaching him the values and responsibilities of a hero and villain and even though they don’t agree with the paths the other has chosen they respect their choice and remember that they’re family and love each other. The villains are also pretty interesting, each of them have a Mexican theme to them to fit the show. My favorite being Sartana of the Dead a skeleton lady who has lived for over 200-years and can summon the dead using her guitar. She’s pretty much a representation of the Mexican holiday Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead). Now while the show has a pretty creative premise and a good list of characters there are a few flaws I have with the show. First off is Manny’s best friend Frida a wild tomboyish girl. While she’s a fun girl to be around who occasionally helps Manny out she’s usually the one encouraging Manny to do bad things which is odd considering her dad is a police officer and her mother a judge. One could say she’s an ironic character and is going against the flow to march to the beat of her own drum which isn’t a bad thing but still it would have been a good idea to have her encourage Manny to do the right thing when he’s about to do something to show that just like Manny isn’t sure whether to be good or bad she too is struggling with this choice as well. The other problem I have with the show is that there’s never really any major repercussions when Manny does something bad, he just apologizes saying he’s learned his lesson and won’t do it again. That kinda teaches a bad lesson to kids. It almost feels like the show is encouraging kids to be bad telling them that even if you do bad things and apologize for them saying you learned your lesson everything will be fine in the end. No, that’s not how life works, if you do something bad you have to be properly punished and disciplined otherwise you’ll repeat the same mistake all over again. Another thing I have heard about the series is a majority of people not liking the animation in the series. Personally, I have no problems with it. It’s not great I admit but I think it holds up nicely and matches up with the series. If anything the animation reminds of the animation used in that Guacamelee video game and that animation didn’t bother be all that much either. As far as I’m concern El Tigre was an okay show, it wasn’t good as some of the other nicktoons, and had a few bad themes and morals but it was an alright show to watch.