The time squad in question is made up of gung-ho cop Buck Tuddrussel (voice of Rob Paulsen, Pinky and the Brain) and the robot Larry 3000 (voice of Mark Hamill, Corvette Summer). In the premiere episode, they pick up their third member, the orphan Otto Osworth (voice of Pamela Segall, King of the Hill), largely because this eight year-old waif has knowledge of history, while Tuddrussel and Larry do not. The mission of the time squad is to go back and fix history where and when it's started to go a little funny, to insure that the future of peace and prosperity they all know and love will actually come about.

Like I said, it's an interesting premise, but while I was watching, the phrase, "Sherman, set the Way-Back machine..." kept coming to mind. As in the adventures of Sherman and Mr. Peabody, this is a fractured view of history, but the fracturing in Time Squad in the pilot is nowhere near as adroit nor clever as in its predecessor. There is a similarity between the shows, in that our heroes encounter historical personages who deviate from the plans we all know and love. Future episodes promise to show us Confucious converted from being long-winded to pithy, Leonardo Da Vinci thinking twice about being a beatnik, Napoleon preferring the life of a house-husband to that of an Emperor and Beethoven pursuing a career in wrestling. Now those are ideas that show great promise, and maybe the series will improve with time. But execution is half the battle, and the debut is not very well executed.

That may be because the first half of the story is taken up with the necessary exposition - Time Squad meets Otto, explains their mission, shows him home base, yadda yadda - before we get into the story of Eli Whitney and his horde of flesh-eating robots. Consequently, the historical portion of the program is somewhat stunted and tossed off rather simplistically. If you're looking for a history lesson for the kiddies, you won't get it here, beyond their learning that the cotton gin made affordable, comfortable clothing possible. Never mind any mention of the economic impact of the device, or the later influence on the economic tensions between North and South that led to the Civil War. Of course, that would be entirely out of place here, but still...

One inexecplicably annoying element of the series, though, is Paulsen's voice. He's impossible to understand half the time, firing off his lines in an overheated, gravely WWF type voice. It's hard to believe this is the same man who brought us Pinky in Pinky and the Brain. His reading is more distracting than anything else. Hamill does have a load of fun with his part, subtly parodying C3PO and the whole prissy robot working beneath his dignity routine. Segall brings a lot to Otto, and manages to not sound like a Bobby Hill clone while doing it. A nice touch was having Eli Whitney look and sound like a Pat Butram clone, something today's kids won't get, but which is in keeping with a tradition from Mr. Peabody's day. Let's hope Wasson and company keep up that sort of thing in future episodes.

Visually, the character design is... unusual. Larry somewhat resembles a cross between a Phantom Menace battledroid and Bender from Futurama, while Tuddrussel looks like Space Ghost with a huge green lantern jaw, some time after the lower half of his body lost a battle with an hydraulic press. Otto is mostly head and horn-rim glasses. (Oh yeah, that's right, all intellectuals wear them horn-rim glasses, let's perpetuate another stereotype for the kiddies.) For the most part, the style is colorful, and mostly avoids that whole cel on top of tossed-off static background look that's become so common. Mostly, but I only noticed the animators cheaping out when the foreground elements were already very complicated and detailed.

I guess the real question, given the venue, is this: will kids want to watch? The answer is, I don't know. The pilot seemed a bit on the slow-paced side, with none of the hyperkinetic frenzy the younguns' love, and the big flash-bang time travel sequence from the traveler's POV was only shown once, lack of repetition of that sort of thing being a cardinal sin with that demographic. On the other hand, Otto is an eager, vocal hero along the lines of the star of Dexter's Laboratory, and a muscle-headed WWF wanna-be and snobby robot might be hits with the target audience. So, with those givens, the show may do well, and it might even serve to introduce the very briefest of highlights of history to them. Think of it as the Cliff's Notes for the Cliff's Notes of the summary of the textbook of history or, as creator Wasson calls it, "a 'C' student's guide..."

Anyway, as a parent, you could do worse than plopping the kids down in front of Time Squad. (Would you rather it was Mighty Morphin Power Rangers or Pokémon, or whatever equivalent isn't already passé?) It's just that you may not really want to watch it with them. Of course, that's always the perfect excuse to hunt down and re-watch those old episodes of Mr. Peabody and Sherman and do a little time-traveling of your own...

Jon Bastian is a playwright and screenwriter, as well as a native and resident of Los Angeles.

Got a problem? Email Jon at filmmonthly@hotmail.com