Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys S1E1: “Yes, We Have No Bananas”

Not all of the children's action/adventure cartoons of the 1990's were about anthropomorphic animals fighting crime. Some of them were about anthropomorphic animals in space. I'm not totally sure how this sub-trend got started, but it at least mirrors a similar pattern in American superhero comics (you've got the X-Men, Avengers, Justice League, etc fighting crime mostly on earth, and the Guardians of the Galaxy and Green Lanterns fighting gods and cosmic warlords mostly in space). This show is of the later variety.

In retrospect, it's kind of surprising that there was never a Starfox animated series. The first game launched in '93, so the time period matches up, and it would have fit right in among shows like this one. I digress.

I haven't seen this particular cartoon, I don't think, but I saw plenty of the Mighty Ducks as a kid, so I'm going into this assuming that it'll be more or less another of those.


The intro is pretty typical of these things. Heavy on spaceships, action poses, and stock laser sound effects, low on plot and character communication. No lyrics, which may or may not be for the best given the uneven quality that cartoon OP's of the era had. Anime was a good influence on western animation in at least this one regard. The animation itself is a lot smoother than I was expecting, though, and there's some great attention to detail with the shadows and shading especially. If the show itself looks as good as the intro, that would place it in the upper tier for its time. Or even by modern standards, honestly.

There's also a He-Man esque "guy shouting the name of the show dramatically in an echoing room" bit at the end that feels a bit stylistically out of place.

Open on space. A hyperspace portal opens up and a typical ersatz Star Wars-ish one-man ship comes through, pursued by a much larger battleship that emerges after it with guns blaring. It looks like the bigger ship actually created that portal, so...I guess the little guy hitched a ride on their FTL system and they're not thrilled about it. Inside of the little fightercraft, the pilot is reporting back to "Houston" that he's under fire and attempting to lose the enemy in some nearby planetary rings. Houston, eh? NASA has a lot more staying power than I'd have expected, going by the apparent tech level of this ship. Unless he's just reporting to a mission control officer whose name coincidentally happens to be Houston, that would be funny.

Also, I can't tell if the pilot is supposed to be a human or a monkey, due to being in a full space suit and helmet, but the voice acting sounds less like the typical high-pitched tone that monkeys often get in cartoons, and more like a so-so William Shatner impression.

He hides from the attacker behind some very cartoony ice shards in the planet's rings. So far, the internal shots of the ship interior and character have all been much better than the space stuff. There's a pretty funny gag where he tries to call in reinforcements and gets an answering machine with elevator music while the bad guys are shooting at him, to his resigned chagrin. The baddies' sensors seem up to the task of finding him in the belt, unfortunately, and he takes multiple hits from a disintegrator weapon that evaporates big chunks of his outer hull (really good visuals here. Also, either he has a pet chimp in his cockpit that screams whenever they get hit, or the disintegration just has a sound effect that sounds like a stock chimpanzee scream. Kinda hoping for the former, and for it to turn out that this is a human pilot who dies in the first episode so that his monkey sidekick can rise to the occasion and be the MC for the rest of the show). The little ship goes down, with Not!Kirk reporting that he's not expecting to survive the crash and that he hopes Houston is getting this.

As he's about to hit the planet's surface, he grabs the eject lever in his cockpit. We see another set of space-suited hands grabbing it as well; looks like this is a decoy protagonist after all, and he does have a monkey in the cockpit with him who will shortly take over! Unfortunately, they don't manage to pull it off before impact.

He does survive the crash, as it turns out. The ship skids along the ground, and then gets itself caught in...either some weird tree-analogues, or even weirder mineral formations. The pilot emerges from the cockpit, with the understatedly Shatnerian comment of "well I'll be a monkey's uncle. I'm alive." He removes his helmet to reveal that this may be literal.

I guess this isn't a human decoy protagonist whose monkey is destined to survive and surpass him after all. Oh well.

His survival doesn't seem like it'll last long though, as the enemy warship isn't taking any chances. It lowers itself into the atmosphere and starts opening up on the crash site. Our hero (Captain Simian? Maybe?) responds to this with more Kirk-esque blase quips, and dashes away to hide in some bigger weird maybe-alive-maybe-mineral formations as disintegrator blasts rain down all around him.

Two things I think merit commenting here. One is that he actually moves like an ape, with the loping knuckle-run. You can tell that the animators watched plenty of gorilla and chimpanzee footage when they set to work bringing this character to life, and they did a good job. We also, when he takes his helmet off again to catch a breath, uses one of his feet to hold it, explaining the extra set of "hands" we saw on the lever before. He's anthropomorphic, sure, but he's not just a human who looks like an animal.

The other is that when the disintegrator beams strike the ground or treelike formations, they erode away a chunk of matter the same size as the holes we already saw them bite into his ship. This 90's kids' cartoon is more consistent about its scifi weaponry than most of the media that shows up in biggaton versus debates.

As he takes cover deep beneath the weird growths while the enemy continues shooting blindly trying to smoke him out, he starts speaking into a voice recorder. Telling Houston that they'll probably never recover this message, and that if they do they probably won't believe a word of it, but he's going to try anyway because the earth is in danger.

Captain Chuck Simian was one of the first chimpanzees sent into orbit during NASA's race against the SSSR. In orbit, he forgot his training and panicked, causing damage to his ship's interior (he describes this nervously as a "technical failure"), causing the rockets to reengage and send him spiraling off into the solar system. He froze before he could suffocate, and was thus preserved for "decades" as his capsule drifted into the very center of the galaxy. That is some really, really fast drifting. There, he was found by an alien ship that pulled him in.

Creative design for the alien ship, by the way. They could have easily gotten away with something much more generic. I'm seeing a bit of Lensman in there, and maybe some of the First Federation ship from Star Trek's "The Corbomite Maneuver."

The alien sphere deconstructs the NASA capsule and removes the frozen Chuck, who is placed on a techno-gurney by robot arms for resuscitation. Then some ghostlike aliens spawn out of the computers all around it and start talking about how this must be the prophesied one they've been waiting for. One of them remarks that his brain structure is surprisingly primitive relative for what they know about his planet of origin, but you can't argue with prophecy. They were already planning to bestow the gift of superintelligence on their rescue using a device called a "cerebrotron," so him being a chimpanzee just means they need to let him spend a bit longer in the machine than they'd have needed for a human.

Thawed, revived, and uplifted, Chuck Simian is now what the aliens refer to as a "class two intelligence." Not sure if baseline humans are class two or class one in their system, and if baseline chimpanzees are in a different category than us, but maybe we'll find out later. Because this is a cartoon, Chuck's uplift includes him speaking perfect English, having the background knowledge you'd expect of a fully acculturated and trained human astronaut, and the personality and mannerisms of James Kirk.

Now that he's able to ask them about such things, the aylmao explain to Chuck that they're the last of their race to have not yet ascended to the tenth dimension and left this mortal coil behind. They've been waiting for a prophesied successor to arrive, upon whom they will bequeath all of the technology they've left behind and task with defending the four dimensional universe in their absence.

...

Saturday morning cartoon Niven/Smith/Clarke?

What?

...

As one might imagine even from a being who hasn't just been granted the intellectual level required to understand such concepts five minutes ago, Chuck is a little overwhelmed by this proposal. Aylmao reassure him that everything he needs for both understanding and performing the job is here on this station, and they also have a longranged ship prepared for his use. A ship that reconfigures itself into a likeness of Chuck's face upon a mere gesture from one of the aylmao. He is now Captain Chuck Simian.

Of themselves, they're able to explain little. Even their names and the name of their species are not expressible in a form of communication that mere organics can understand.

I feel like the concept of entities like that might be as incomprehensible for this show's apparent target audience as their names supposedly are for Chuck.

Chuck (who navigates their crazy environment by swinging between robot arms and gigertubes, which is cool) is just starting to ask them if he can visit Earth again before he gets started, when suddenly the station falls under attack. It's a surprisingly conventional attack, really, just a big ship shooting beams at it. The same ship that we saw chasing Chuck back in the beginning before he started this extended flashback sequence, with weapons that just take a small chunk out of whatever they hit. And yet, aylmao seem to actually be concerned about this. I'll have to take back what I said before about bigatonal consistency. Aylmao tell Chuck that the attacker is an entity now known as Nebula; a former class two intelligence in an organic bipedal body who has managed to turn himself into something closer to their own level of existence. Evidently, he doesn't like them very much.

Cut to Nebula's ship, where...well, the artists continue to be on point. He's another semi-ghostly alien that looks like its sort of being projected by the technology of the ship around it. Uglier and scarier looking, but also more humanlike as per their description of his original species' appearance.

Also, right off the bat the show is explaining that the villain is a transorganic techno-demigod trying to steal the knowledge of a more advanced race of the same. The unconventional choice of scifi inspirations continues to simultaneously please and confound me.

Nebula is ordering a coincidentally monkey-like biomechanoid minion of his to continue cracking away at the station's shields. His voice is a so-so James Earl Jones impression to complement the so-so William Shatner impression. Unfortunately, the weapons loadout they brought for this assault is less effective than they'd thought. Gigermonkey blames this miscalculation on his brain not being sufficient for the task; he rips it out of his own head and blasts it with a lasergun, and then waits for another brain to crawl out of a nearby pit with little robotic tentacles and climb up his back and into its place. This unit should be better suited.

He was still talking and doing things without a brain, he just seemed a little dumber and less stable. I'm guessing his primary consciousness is based somewhere else in his body, with the modular brains just being accessories.

Also: I was just kinda joking when I mentioned Starfox earlier, but...here's a cybernetic brain moving in and out of a gigeresque monkey head. So, yeah. Given that this show premiered in 1996, there might actually be direct influence here. Come to think of it, Babylon 5 also came out in '93, so that might have been a more direct influence for the ascended alien mastermind stuff.

Also also: the music has been really good so far, but the jump from relaxing, New-Agey scifi music to more action-y techno when we switched from the not!Vorlon ship to the not!Shadow one stands out especially.

Nebula tells Gigermonkey, who he names as Rhesus-2, to board the station and steal the thing that he needs as soon as they manage to batter down the shields with their not-great-but-apparently-still-sufficient ray guns. And to remember that there used to be a Rhesus-1; as he says this last bit, he indicates a pile of charred blood, bones, and metal on the deck across the room. It looks like Rhesus-1 was only just now disintegrated a few minutes ago, so Rhesus-2 is probably a fresh clone. And he's already swapping out brains.

Surprisingly gory for a western toon of this time period, honestly.

Back on the station, Chuck is told that Nebula is trying to become a sentient gravitational singularity, so that he can absorb all matter in the universe and then create a new universe within himself, over which he can be an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent god. This all comes with plenty of monkey-related puns and slapstick jokes like any other 90's cartoon. My head is spinning.

The not!Vorlons then wish Chuck good luck, and say that they're off to join the rest of their kind in the tenth dimension now that they've done their job. They pay little heed to the fact that the station's shields are going out and the interior is starting to decompress even as they go. Vorlons are always assholes. I get the impression that this trio were just the ones who drew the short straw and had to stay behind, and they don't actually give a shit and just want to complete the minimum job requirements as per written orders and then GTFO. Chuck is left with just a little spherical robot-ball to help him not die and the 4D universe not be eaten.

Rhesus-2 heads over from Nebula's ship in a little shuttlecraft. His new brain's adjustments to their weapons seem to have paid off, as the station's shields just went out. He's going to get Nebula the thing he needs.

But first, he decides as he removes his new cyberbrain and lets it crawl around on the dashboard, he'll indulge himself in some "mindless fun" wiping out any surviving defenders. Not sure if having a weapon-modifications focused secondary brain is actually an impediment to him having a cathartic murder spree, or if he's just being stupid. Not that those are mutually exclusive, of course.

We cut briefly back to the present, where Chuck has to relocate due to his area of the mineral forest being mostly blasted away. He's carrying something with him that doesn't look like part of his suit or other basic equipment.

I'm guessing it's the thing that Nebula wants. Although in that case, he must be sure that its disintegrator-proof.

...actually, I just realized. Maybe his ship's weapons actually ARE super omega powerful eighth dimensional Vorlon Shadow bullshit omniblasters, but he just turned the firepower wayyyyyy down to mere antitank levels for fear of destroying the thingy. That would make perfect sense.

He relocates to stay hidden, and then continues his story.

The Vorlons disappear, and Chuck is left in a failing space station with only a little white cuckball to help him. Fortunately, said sphere is able to seal the breaches and switch to secondary shields, buying them another ten minutes or so until Nebula blasts through those as well. Could the Vorlons have really not done that themselves before leaving? Pricks. Unfortunately, the cuckball...he's called a "spher-o-tron," but since he's silvery white and spherical there's really only one thing I can call him...isn't allowed to do violent stuff. Chuck will need to handle the shooting back part himself, and to do it well he'll need a crew. Cuckball carries him to a room with the little doohicky that we see him carrying during the "present time" escape sequence. This device apparently can open a portal to anywhere in the universe, which explains why Nebula thinks it can help him make his final ascension.

Chuck asks if he can just escape through a portal back to Earth himself, and Cuckball says that while he *could* do that, that would be a very brief homecoming due to the subsequent consumption of the universe. I guess you can't bring the doohickey through its own portals. Is destroying the damned thing not an option? Maybe not, IDK. Instead, Cuckball scans Chuck's brain and locates some suitable candidates for crew members that should interact well with him.

First new recruit is a spider monkey owned by a Romani street performer in New York City. He doesn't treat it very well, and the whole scene is sort of racist.

Just as the monkey has had enough and is trying to run away from its abusive owner, it gets sucked away into space by a golden light before his eyes.

Next up is a Chinese golden monkey who currently resides in a Tibetan monastery. I guess tame primates are easier to uplift than wild ones? Or maybe Chuck would just get along with ones who have had similar formative experiences, idk. Anyway, we cut to the monastery, where...people are having a martial arts tournament. Erm...is Shaolin a thing in Tibet? I thought they were further sou...oh, now they're talking, and they all have caricaturist Japanese accents.

-_-

Also, the winner of their martial arts competition is chosen by their "goddess." A monkey who they stuck in a bunch of finery, and whose word is law.

-_-

The first recruitment scene was only kinda racist. There's no qualifier on this one.

The Chinese golden monkey is sucked away by the Vorlon teleportation beam, and the Tibjapchinese monks bow and pray at the sight of their godess ascending to heaven for 15-20 extremely cringey seconds.

...

We were doing a weird Mighty Ducks/Babylon 5 mashup, but now I guess its Disney cartoons from the era that Disney wants you to forget ever existed.​

...

Next is an orangutan being tormented by some dumbass kids at a shitty roadside zoo in Bumfuck, American Midwest. Poor guy was just enjoying a banana before the kids started throwing stuff at him.

Fortunately, he's beamed away before it can go on for too long.

Chuck tells Cuckball that he wants a real bruiser for close quarters combat, in case it comes to that. Cuckball cautiously agrees, and locates a wild gorilla in the jungles of Uganda who is currently trying to defend its troupe from poachers. And doing a pretty good job of it, honestly, which explains why he's been chosen for the infantry role.

It looks like they beam him away just at the worst possible moment and thus allow the poachers to capture one of his young. That's, um...kinda dark for a...oh wait what?

Okay, so, they beam the silverback away. The poachers are confused, but decide to just capture they undefended baby gorilla now. But then they randomly get surrounded by lions and presumably killed and eaten. I...somehow don't think that that baby gorilla is going to fair much better than the poachers, given that there are like six lions. Honestly, I'm not sure if the silverback would have survived this either, with or without the poachers being a third party in the encounter. So, I'm just going to infer that his family all got eaten by lions, Chuck and Cuckball rescued him at the last minute, and the poachers were just sort of also there and got eaten too.

So, four primates of various species and backgrounds. Cuckball sticks them all in the cerebrotron, and bam, they all have typical childrens' adventure cartoon personalities and quirks. Looks like the spider monkey is the jokey guy, the orangutan is the absentminded professor type, the gorilla is big and dumb (the uplift process didn't go quite right in his case, due to his violent struggling during the process), and the golden monkey is...a pompous ice queen with a fake Chinese accent straight out of a Fu Manchu movie.

She's going to be like this for the entire goddamned show, isn't she?

The monkeys all get space suits, with the gorilla getting full on battle armor. Also, the gorilla doesn't have a name. The others due, because of humans having named them, but I guess wild primates don't have names among themselves.

That's surprisingly dismissive of primates, given how sympathetic the show seems to have been toward them in their prior circumstances. Like, in real life, I'm pretty damned sure that great apes at least have personal identifiers among their kind.

Anyway, the crew all want bananas. Chuck doesn't have any. You'd think Cuckball could pull some of those through as well without any difficulty, but I guess not. Chuck leads them all to the ship he's been given so they can go out and fight off Nebula. Chuck tries to sort of flirt with the golden monkey in true Kirk fashion, but she violently rebuffs him in true Chinese dragon-woman stereotype fashion. She's going to be like this for the entire goddamned show, isn't she? Before they can launch, the shields fail again and Rhesus-2's fighter comes crashing through into the hangar. He's surprised to find only some uplifted primates (like himself? Is he an actual monkey, or just an alien biomech that happens to look like one? The name could suggest the former, or it could just be a creator nod to the monkey theme) guarding the place, and declares that he certainly won't need any extra brains to deal with them.

♪ I'll be the rouuuuuuundabout.~ ♪​

End episode. Two-part pilot, I guess.


That was certainly surprising. The intro sequence had me expecting the Star Wars plotting, Star Trek aesthetics, and DuckTales characters of most similar shows, just with better-than-average production values. The opening scene being pretty much a direct shoutout to the beginning of "A New Hope" with some Kirkisms thrown in further suggested that. But then we started going high-concept transhumanist scifi while keeping the SatAm tone and story conventions, and I just didn't know what to think.

I would probably be praising this show through the roof for its sheer courage in doing what it did. Whether it succeeds or fails at living up to either its SatAm medium or its literary scifi inspirations, it deserves a TON of credit for being willing to break the mold and trying to push kids beyond their intellectual comfort zone. But then I reached the last third of the episode, and it was all just not-very-funny monkey jokes and racism.

She's going to be like this for the entire goddamned show, isn't she? Even if we never see Earth again, just having the Yellow Peril Princess monkey in the main cast is going to make this hard to watch.

The next part of the two-episode pilot is up next. I'll see how that goes.