Hello and welcome to Project Nitsuj. It’s time for another edition of Animation Bang. Let’s take a trip back to the 70s. The Civil Rights movement was coming to an end, but the fight for equality was far from over. One of the battlefields was Hollywood. For years minorities particularly blacks were portrayed horribly in movies as secondary characters, victims of crimes, and the infamous magical negro. In order to counter this, UCLA financed black students to attend film school, deciding that in order to portray their race correctly it would have to be done by themselves. This led to a subgenre of films starring blacks and taking place in black communities known as blaxploitation. Films directed by blacks for blacks. Originally, they started in the late 60s but hit their peak in the 70s with films such as Shaft, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Foxy Brown, Uptown Saturday Night, and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Hollywood quickly took notice of these films and hopped on the bandwagon. They were good, inexpensive, had great music, and featured actors who would lay the groundwork for black Hollywood. After the 70s, blaxploitation films started to die down, but in the later years there have been films that paid homage to the subgenre such as Black Dynamite. Released in 2009 and starring Michael Jai White (yes, Spawn), the film follows former CIA agent Black Dynamite who returns to his neighborhood only to see it filled with drugs and crime. Black Dynamite declares war on drugs and vows to bring peace back to his community. The film got good reviews overall with Roger Ebert saying: Black Dynamite gets it mostly right, and when it’s wrong, it’s wrong on purpose and knows just what it’s doing. A sequel was planned for 2012 and again in 2021 but never came to fruition. Its spiritual successor, Outlaw Johnny Black came out in 2023, but there was another project that cemented this film’s lasting impact, and that was the animated series called Black Dynamite. Making its debut on Adult Swim, Black Dynamite ran from 2012-2015 for a total of 2 seasons and 20 episodes. This show came out at the right time. The Boondocks was ending and this show was going to fill in the black void it left behind. How was this show? Let’s review it to find out. This is Black Dynamite. HAAASWOOOO~!
Plot
So the show is very similar to the film with some differences here and there. Black Dynamite and his gang of friends fight crime and other strange beings to protect the black community from over the top situations.
Main Characters
Black Dynamite voiced by Michael Jai White
The main character of the show and what every black man wishes they could be. He’s big, strong, cool, and oh so dynamite. He’s like The Fonz, Bruce Lee, and Shaft all rolled into the one.
Bullhorn voiced by Byron Keith Minns
A friend of Dynamite who rhymes every time he talks. He’s not rapping, he’s rhyming. Huge difference. In the movie, he actually dies in a shootout.
Honeybee voiced by Kym Whitley
The sassy lady of the group. Next to Dynamite she’s the most competent and not afraid to fight.
Cream Corn voiced by Tommy Davidson
A pimp in training who follows Dynamite in the hopes of becoming like him some day. Just like Bullhorn he dies in the movie.
Minor Characters
The show featured a number of characters throughout the series. Mostly, famous celebrities of this time period such as O.J Simpson, Richard Pryor, Bob Marley, and Richard Nixon who would serve as the main antagonist of the show just like in the film. We also had pimps, whores, and little orphans.
Episodes
So the show ran for 2 seasons and had 20 episodes total. The first season aired in 2012 and the second season came out in 2014. Each episode was good, but there were some that were better than others.
For the first season, they came out hard with laughs in the premiere episode. After Cream Corn saves Little Michael Jackson, he becomes his best friend only to find out that Michael Jackson is actually an alien from another planet and he’s abusive. It’s a great episode and perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the show. The final episode of this season I like is the Elvis episode which a lot of Elvis fans didn’t like. In an effort to destroy the black community, Nixon floods it with drugs only for the black community to turn it around and sell the drugs to the white community. Nixon then sends Elvis to the black community in the hopes of him getting killed which will give him the excuse to drop the N bomb. Elvis goes to the black community where he supposedly dies and now the race is on to get him back to Graceland before anyone finds out he died in the black community. Like I said a lot of Elvis fans didn’t like this episode as they portrayed him as an overweight, pill popper, who was a redneck and stole rock and roll from the blacks. Of course this was just an exaggeration of the character as we all know Elvis grew up around blacks and always gave a shoutout to the ones that inspired him.
The second season was more over the top than the first season. My favorite episode this season is the Black Jaws episode. A shark is eating all the black people in the ocean and it’s up to Black Dynamite to stop it. Samuel L Jackson guest stars in this episode and he has me laughing throughout the whole episode. The next episode I like is the Mr. Rogers’s episode. It gets revealed that Mr. Rogers is secretly a military badass. When he kidnaps all the orphans, it’s up to Black Dynamite to save them. The great thing about this episode is that they keep Mr. Rogers as the good guy. Despite his extreme methods he still wants to protect the children of the world from adults who want to take advantage of them and he still speaks in that soft but kind voice that makes you feel safe (scene here: https://youtu.be/tpMti8J5Dqw?si=NCSJ6gozpCJS8wAB). There’s also the Warrior episode where Cream Corn gets framed for killing a gay icon and now he and the gang have to go on the run to escape homosexual and transexual gangs trying to kill them (and they give us this straight to the point explanation on them which I love: https://youtu.be/j8j8xOuBpN4?si=59tqQHQdIOKFjmRW). Finally, there’s the series 2-part finale which is a music parody of The Wiz. It’s Black Dynamite’s Day off and everyone keeps bothering him. After getting hit in the head, Black Dyanmite finds himself in the land of Oz and must follow the yellow brick road to meet The Wiz and return home. This would be the end of the show as Adult Swim didn’t renew it for a third season. A showrunner believes he was the cause of the show’s cancellation after doing an interview on CNN about racism. However, Michael Jai White says it was because the show was expensive and took too long to animate. Apparently, the Korean studios who worked on Batman: The Animated Series also did the animation for this show. It was some high-quality animation with a lot going on so I see why it took so long to make it. In fact, the second opening of the show was animated by Studio Trigger (scene here: https://youtu.be/gw8Jz-N8fXA?si=oOpBJdnaUMqMzn_a). Personally, I think Adult Swim wanted this show to be its next Boondocks. Unfortunately, it didn’t pull in the numbers or reach the same level of popularity. While it got high numbers in the millions it never surpassed The Boondocks’s numbers. The show’s highest viewed episode (1.86 million) only beat one episode from season 4 of the Boondocks (it’s worst season) who were averaging 2.1 million an episode. So imagine the numbers of the other 3 seasons.
Themes
The show didn’t have too many themes during it’s run.
Does this count as Amerime
Yes. It felt like a comic book come to life.
Does it deserve another season
Yes. I really would have loved to see Black Dynamite fight against Nixon like he did in the film. That fight was already silly and over the top in the film so imagine what they could do in animation.
Final Thoughts
Overall, Black Dynamite was a good show. When people talk about Adult Swim shows I’m surprise they never mention this one. It didn’t take itself too seriously and had fun with its premise and characters. While I consider The Boondocks a better show overall, there’s no denying that this show had better animation and more over the top situations that made it fun to watch and kept us coming back for more.
Final Score
The final score for Black Dynamite is a 6.5/10. It’s a hidden gem from Adult Swim that deserved more attention than it got. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time on Project Nitsuj.