Pink Panther and Sons (1984)
First episode title: Spinning Wheels
How familiar with the show am I?: I know what the Pink Panther is, but not this particular show.
Is this the first episode?: Wikipedia indicates that this show was shown in "two shorts" format, but IMDb lists each segment as its own episode. I found it in the latter format so that's what I'm going with.
The Pink Panther was a series of comedy films about a detective called Clouseau, but then the literal pink panther from the opening credits got his own cartoon show. His cartoons are surreal pieces where he torments a white egg-shaped character for his own amusement, with little or no dialogue. This show, which introduces his two sons as its main characters, for some reason ditches all that and is a standard cartoon sitcom instead.
The opening sequence uses a theme song that quotes the original "Pink Panther" theme but with its own sections with lyrics, introducing us to the concept and characters. First of all, the titular sons. Pinky is an ambiguously tween-to-young-teen pink panther who wears a red top and talks like a 1950s sitcom child. His younger brother Panky is old enough to speak a few words but young enough to still wear a nappy (diaper if you're American), which he constantly has to hold up with one hand or it falls down - not that that would make much of a difference to his modesty, as almost none of the other characters wear bottoms anyway.
Their friends, who I guess are all around Pinky's age, are called the Rainbow Panthers and they are all different colours. There's nothing to say they aren't all in an LGBTQ+ polycule together. Most of them aren't relevant to this episode so I won't bother going through them all.
So here's the episode. Pinky is riding a bike, and Panky is hanging onto Pinky by grasping his tail - not recommended for any animal - and sitting in a little wagon which is therefore getting pulled along.
Pinky: What a day, huh, Panky? We lead the kind of life most people just dream about!
Panky: Dream about!
It's not mentioned what it was that made their day so excellent. They also both make some interesting not-quite-laugh noises in this conversation that I didn't know how to transcribe, and which don't continue to happen throughout the episode, so I'm not quite sure what happened there.
They pass a candy store with a window full of lollipops, and Panky sticks out his tongue and licks the whole row. Or at least, licks the glass in front of them, but he seems to act as if they were tasty anyway. He comments "got it licked!" purely to set up Pinky responding "Yeah, we got it licked." as if any of that is a natural exchange for two children to have.
Then they reach a TV shop where all the screens are showing the Pink Panther himself, and Panky lets go of Pinky's tale in his excitement at seeing his dad! Aw. And yes, it seems that the Pink Panther is portrayed as a TV star on this TV spin-off of the Panther's TV show. Ahem. Pinky realises Panky is gone (rolling backwards down the slope of the street) and does a nice cartoony stunt where he and the top half of his bike whirl around and connect back to the wheels in the opposite direction to rush towards him.
Pinky manages to grab Panky out of the wagon right before it crashes, and tells him off for letting go, hanging him by his nappy from a parking meter and telling him to stay "parked" this time. See, there you go! They can write jokes!
Pinky sees a bike in the window of "Wheeler's Bike Shop", but before we can learn anything about it, some more bikers show up. They're a gang of lions who we will soon see are the main villains of the show. Their leader, Finko, looks like a punk, and has a multicoloured mane which looks cool but is an odd choice considering he's an enemy of the "Rainbow Panthers". His followers all look nearly identical to each other but with different objects on their heads as helmets, like a saucepan and a bucket. Finko catches sight of the bike in the shop window too, and quickly skids to a halt.
Pinky and Finko (whose idea was it to give them such similar names?) read a sign that says the shop wants a rider to represent it in a big charity race. The two of them immediately try to rush into the shop and get stuck in the door together, drawing attention to the difference in size - Finko might be almost double Pinky's height, which really makes Pinky seem more like a child than he already does! And Finko's voice sounds almost like Sylvester from Looney Tunes, which makes him seem much older than a teen. The shopkeeper, a balding man with glasses who is the only human we see in this whole episode, explains the race - it's to raise money for a new teen centre, and the winner gets a new bike and the centre will be named after them. But he can only enter one contestant, so it will be up to the two of them to make the choice.
They exit the bike shop, Finko already talking about how the teen centre will be named after him. Waiting for them outside, other than Panky and all of Finko's goons, is Chatta, a purple panther in the Rainbow Panthers. Her whole gimmick is that she talks, well, like this:
Chatta: Your chances of attaining that totally undeserved tribute to your sneaky self are practically without possibility, considering the competition.
Look, I really don't mind the whole "nerdy character speaks in a needlessly wordy way" thing in general, but it's not done well here. That first example might be the least annoying one in the episode. So whenever Finko gets annoyed about it, I'm inclined to agree! Anyway, she drops it to call Finko a loser and Pinky a winner.
Finko continues bragging about how he's the best, and Chatta, in a roundabout way, suggests a race between Finko and Pinky to see who gets to enter. Finko makes a bunch of excuses, like his trick knee and ingrown toenail, about why he can't. I'm not sure why he doesn't seem to want to just race Pinky - everything else in the episode makes Finko look like a good enough racer. Pinky calls Finko a chicken, and these moments are the one reason I do like the way Pinky is voiced, because he doesn't seem like the kind of person that would throw around insults like that until he does it.
In his place, Finko offers up Howl - his minion with the saucepan on his head - to race for him. Howl repeatedly yells "No!" but both Finko and Pinky hilariously ignore him and agree to the race anyway. Finko then tries to take a drink of water from a fountain, but Panky reaches up and puts his finger on the nozzle, drenching Finko. Since Panky is practically a baby, I find it hard to tell whether he knew what he was doing there.
Cut to later, in a park, where both racers and their crews are preparing their bikes. Finko slings over a jibe about Pinky eating Howl's dust, and Chatta starts to say something in response about "involuntary ingestion of sedimentary silic-" before one of the other panthers (a yellow guy apparently called Rocko) puts his hand over her mouth. It's funny when even the Rainbow Panthers get annoyed by her.
Then they all head to the starting line to hear the rules. Even now, when they're not on Pinky's bike, Panky is holding onto his brother's tail as they walk along. It's actually pretty cute. But two of Finko's gang peel off from the group and head over to Pinky's bike to sabotage it! There is a gag where they get a bunch of actual tools ready one by one, and then "bubblegum" appears on the list too. It could be part of the sabotage, but in my mind one of them just wanted a sweet.
So we skip forward to the actual start of the race. Finko is the one doing the "on your marks" bit, but he can't remember "get set" until Rocko tells him! Finko doesn't seem like that much of an idiot the rest of the episode - well, except whenever he's trying to interpret what Chatta is saying. Finko fires the starting pistol, Howl races off, and Pinky's bike falls apart immediately, of course.
This is where one of the other panthers gets her brief chance to shine in this episode. Her name is Annie, she's brown, and she wears a hard hat and dungarees. As you may guess from her dress sense, she's good with fixing things. Given how old-fashioned his cartoon is in most other respects, I was quite pleased to see that a female character was given this role. She very quickly gets the bike fixed up again, and, for good measure, helps to physically put Pinky back on it as well!
Meanwhile, Finko is getting on his bike after all, and indicating that he has some kind of nefarious scheme in mind to ensure that Howl will win. Chatta spots him and questions what happened to his "trick knee", and Finko boasts about how "tricky" he is in response, but the distraction causes him to go off a cliff and fall into water! I love how his first defeat in this race comes before he's even tried to do anything evil. Pinky starts to catch up to Howl, and this distracts Howl into driving through a metal tube that must be part of some construction work - the tube is full of twists and turns, and leaves him looking a bit shaken up afterwards.
Anyway, now Finko gets a chance to actually enact a plan. He has a lion girl called Liona on his side, and tells her to do her thing while he hides behind a bush "where it's safe". It's not clear what there is for him to be scared of here. I'm also not sure what Liona's accent is meant to be.
Pinky approaches, and Liona does her best "damsel in distress" impression to call for his help. She says she got lost from the "Howl's Angels" - wait, is Finko's gang named after Howl? - and she thinks something is following her, but Pinky uncovers Finko from his hiding spot and jokes that he's harmless. Then Pinky speeds off and it's clear Liona actually does find him attractive, angering Finko even more.
So Finko sets up another trap. There's a building site that for now is just a maze of girders that are the framework of what's going to be a building, and Finko covers it in signs with arrows on them, and then adjusts the actual detour sign outside the site to point into it instead of around it. By the way, Finko repeatedly getting ahead of everyone to set traps really shows he should have just raced the race himself without any cheating required!
Unfortunately for the bad guys, Howl somehow shows up here first. He has a similar tricky idea to Finko - he adjusts the sign to point the "wrong" way, and then follows the direction it was pointing! I'd excuse this from counting as a "stupid villain" move because he's got no way of knowing what Finko did, but then he goes on to say something this stupid anyway:
Howl: You gotta be pretty dumb to outsmart me!
Howl speeds into the building site and Finko spots him - he jumps into his path to try and stop him, but that just means they both end up on the bike, speeding into the girder maze together! They crash into an elevator but somehow end up speeding out of it again when it stops, going all over the place in some brilliantly cartoony antics. I guess there are some builders on the site somewhere because at one point they end up on a girder that's clearly being lifted by a crane which then slams them onto a different floor. Eventually their luck runs out and they fall out of the building... into a cement mixer!
They pour out of it, covered in cement, still trundling along on the bike but unable to steer. They crash into a statue of a man on a horse, knocking it off its podium and taking its place as a new "statue"! Pinky finally catches up at this point - I have no idea what delayed him - and he makes a joke about Finko and Howl keeping "stiff upper lips". Groan. Pinky makes it to the finish line, although his bike does finally fall apart again right when he reaches it!
The shop owner shows up to congratulate Pinky, and then we get the worst Chatta bit in the whole episode:
Chatta: With all your bi-pedalled cyclican velocipedic expertise, tomorrow's multi-competitive exercise'll most assuredly be in an earth tone shopping container!
Rocko: You mean, Pinky's got the race in the bag?
Chatta: That's what I said, didn't I?
No, you fucking didn't. Some of those aren't even words. And the colour of the bag is not relevant here. Stop this.
That night, Finko's minions are working with hammers and chisels to get Finko and Howl out of the cement - their heads are now free but their bodies are trapped. Howl makes a comment about how they'll be here until "next year's race", which doesn't really match up with what the purpose of the race was - it wouldn't make sense for it to be annual. Pinky cycles by and jokes that they should worry about pigeons the next morning, and they look pretty worried by that!
Overall, this one was fairly underwhelming. There were some good jokes but not enough to keep me interested, and I would have expected better from something claiming to be Pink Panther.