During my childhood, I well and truly slept on Samurai Pizza Cats. I imagined to be just another half-assed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles clone and paid it no mind. Bad luck, teen me; that’s hours of weekday afternoons I was missing out.

A children’s anime shipped to American animators with an (allegedly) unusable dub, the Western crew did the only logical thing: made up an entirely new batch of dialogue to suit the animation, complete with weird puns and off-colour humour that would’ve sailed over the heads over the target audience. Very much in the vein of self-aware ‘90s animation like Animaniacs or early Ren & Stimpy, the resultant show is gonzo but kinda great.

That said, outside the context of weekday afternoons – like, say, in its recent Australian DVD re-release boxset – it doesn’t work quite as well. The jokes are occasionally very funny but mostly they’re just fine; you often feel like it would’ve been more fun to make the episode than it is to watch it. It’s fine background noise (or, say, an accompaniment to the munchies) but it’s hardly going to put up a fight against all the good modern animation I’m barely/rarely finding time to watch.