Disneytoon-cember Part 8: Bonkers

After Gargoyles Disney went through a drought on creativity so instead they decided to just throw out a bunch of shows and see what stuck. One of the shows that stuck was Bonkers a show about an anthropomorphic bobcat who was once a popular cartoon star but soon washed out and became a cop. His partner Lucky of course hates toons and doesn’t like working with Bonkers because of his antics but together the two solve crimes in Hollywood. There are so many problems with this show that makes it so bad to watch.

The first problem with this show is that it is a blatant rip-off of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. There’s no getting around it. Even when I was a kid and first watched this show I made the comparison immediately (and I just turned 5 years old around this time the show aired). That’s how obvious it was. The second problem to show had was that Bonkers was very annoying as a character. He always messed things up with his antics but got lucky at the end. Unlike Roger Rabbit who was a likable and funny character Bonkers was just annoying and uninteresting. Third, his partner Lucky is a very unlikable character with his prejudice against toons. With Eddie it was understandable why he hated toons since one of them killed his own brother. With Lucky there’s no reason why he hates toons he just hates them because the plot demands it. As the show went on Bonkers got a new partner named Miranda who was a little better than Lucky but was pretty bland as far as female characters went. Fourth and probably the biggest problem with this show is that it never fully uses its cast of characters. Now to this shows credit the idea of this show could have worked. The movie showed us this idea was good but Disney never takes full advantage of it. Disney had a wide array of characters to use for their stories and setups but instead they only use these characters as background characters or one-note characters. Probably the most infamous episode in this series was the one where they never show Mickey Mouse. Why? You’re Disney, you own the rights to him. Why would you keep him out of the show? Why would you keep any of your popular Disney characters out of the show that you could of made stories and cases around and instead gave us new and uninteresting characters? So yeah Bonkers was not one of my favorite Disneytoons growing up. It had a lot of potential to work out in the end but with all these problems and mistakes the show made it was only natural was going to fail. But despite this failure this was nothing compared to what I and many others consider to be the worst Disneytoon of all time.