El Chapulín Colorado

I’m willing to bet that most of the native English-speakers reading this (all two of them) have absolutely no idea who this guy is, unless they’re Latino and/or grew up around Latino people. (Is Latino even politically correct anymore?  I can’t keep up with this…) El Chapulín Colorado, “the Red Grasshopper”, is the brainchild of Mexican comedian Roberto Gómez Bolaños, a.k.a. Chespirito.  The characters he created—particularly Chapulín Colorado and Chavo del Ocho (dude had a thing for “ch” sounds)—are immensely popular, scoring monster ratings across multiple nations and multiple decades.  He’s popular outside of Spanish-speaking nations too; his shows have been translated into Japanese, Portuguese, French, Russian, and more. 

The one language it hasn’t been translated into?  English.  The DVDs I own don’t even bother to provide English subtitles.  Which is a pain, because that means I have to do the translating myself.* But hey, nowhere in my list of superhero requirements does it say that a superhero needs to speak English, so let’s take a quick look.

The material I’m reviewing today all comes from the El Chapulín Colorado, Volume One DVD, which contains four fifteen-minute episodes.  It’s a bit difficult to tell which season these episodes are from, since there don’t appear to be any standard episode titles from what I’ve been able to dig up online.  As near as I can figure, they’re from Season Five, which originally aired in 1976.  The episode titles I’m citing come from the DVD itself as opposed to any online lists.

 

Also, as a side note, I couldn’t find any images of my DVD case on the internet for some reason.  So you get a slightly blurry picture that kinda sorta comes close to the one I own as our introductory image instead.

The first episode is “The Story of the Forest Witch.”  We start off in a forest, because duh.  Here we meet our future damsel-in-distress, a nameless Bavarian-looking maiden who is out gathering firewood.  Unbeknownst to her, she is being spied on by Nene, the Neanderthalish son of the local witch.  Nene tells his mother that he’s fallen in love with the maiden, and the Witch goes to tell her the “good” news.  The Woman is somewhat less than thrilled by the idea, which infuriates the Witch, who ends up turning her into a tree so that when the lumberjacks come by, they’ll chop her down.

Somehow, the woman has managed to retain the use of her vocal chords and some means of projecting clear words into the open—an ability she uses to get Chapulín’s attention as he runs by.  Although it takes a little while to convince him that she’s telling the truth.

 

"But before the lumberjacks, you have to watch out for dogs..."

After some wrangling with Nene, the Witch, and the witch’s broom (let’s just say Chapulín makes Kiki look like an expert), Chapulín saves the day yet again and hands over the witch’s magic wand to the delighted maiden.  The end?  Of course not.  What would a fairy tale-inspired story be without a fairy tale-inspired ending?  Now that the maiden has a magic wand, she uses it to transform Nene into a handsome prince whom she is more than happy to marry!

The second episode, “Pirate of the Asteroid,” is about a bunch of guys trying to complete a space mission, but they are thwarted by a disgruntled crackpot named Pancho, who’s holed up on an asteroid with a weapon that could disintegrate the entire planet.  The scientists call for help, and Chapulín Colorado arrives, right on cue.

The scientists do have a jetpack that could conceivably fly someone out to the asteroid to rendezvous with the crazy man, but it’s still in mini-prototype mode at the moment and the earliest that a full-sized version could be developed is in five years. 

 

 

Lucky for the world, one of Chapulín’s superpowers is the ability shrink down to twenty inches tall (“So the same size you are normally,” as someone in another episode put it) with the help of his magical shrinky-dink pills (‘scuse me, pastillas de chiquitolina).  So he takes a dose and dons the jetpack.

Chapulín does successfully make his way to Pancho, but while the two are talking things over, Pancho gets clocked in the head with another asteroid and falls off his asteroid… yes, he’s falling in space, but considering everyone involved has been breathing and talking in space this whole time, complaining now would just be petty.

So anyway, Pancho is defeated, o frabjous day.  The others are briefly concerned about the fact that they left the Earth-disintegrating weapon up on the asteroid, but they ultimately decide there’s no danger.  After all, who could possibly get up to an asteroid AND be dumb enough to push a button on a device they’ve never seen before?

 

Whoops.

I can’t translate the name of the third episode because I grossly overestimated my own Spanish-speaking abilities when I decided to review this series.  It’s something about an infected robot, which is appropriate since this story focuses on a scientist who uses a robot/android—also named Pancho, oddly enough—as a servant to save the money and trouble of hiring a real one.  As you would expect, this backfires when the robot malfunctions—it doesn’t go evil or crazy, it’s just malfunctioning—and breaks the scientist’s arm by mistake.  Well, supposedly.  He’s shown using the arm later on without any noticeable pain, but whatever.  We’ll just pretend it’s broken.  He goes to call a doctor for his arm, while his niece wonders “who can possibly defend us now?”

 

YAY!!!  Or, uh, I mean, ¡¡¡VIVA!!!

 

Our hero mistakes a suit of armor for the robot, the robot for the uncle, the doctor for the robot, etc., etc.  Many hijinks ensue, including one scene where the rogue robot tries to make a cake out of Chapulín.  The result is physical comedy that would make I Love Lucy proud.

 

Eventually, the niece comes up with the idea to throw water on the robot to make it short circuit.  Unfortunately for her, she didn’t realize what a bad idea it was to give Chapulín a garden hose and several full buckets of water, at least if everyone else planned on staying dry.  But all’s well that ends well when the malfunctioning Pancho ends up grabbing a bucket and dousing himself with water.  What a twist!

And that brings us to the fourth and final episode on the DVD, “Idleness is the Mother of a Friend of Mine,” (I think) where Chapulín tries to get the layabout husband of a hard-working woman to get a job.  I guess it was a slow crime day.  His first attempts to convince the guy to get off his butt involve beating him up with his hammer, and Chapulín ends up bashing the guy’s head through the ceiling.  The rest of the episode is dedicated to getting him out of there—and convincing him to get a job once he’s free.

After much cajoling, both physical and verbal, Chapulín tries to get the guy to take one of his shrinking pills so that he’ll slip right out of the hole, but he is somewhat justifiably nervous about that and refuses to swallow the pill.  In the end, it’s not the pills that save him but Chapulín’s accidentally slamming a door onto his head with enough force to slap him out of the hole.  The end!

I guess to those sophisticated and/or jaded viewers who only find stuff that’s on the cutting edge of comedy/technology/anything entertaining, this won’t look like much.  It’s a surprisingly quiet sort of comedy for a superhero show, like if The Andy Griffith Show fused with The Adventures of Superman.

My personal favorite out of these four is probably “The Story of the Forest Witch,” partially because I was able to understand more in this episode than any other and partially because it has the most going on.  At certain points in the other episodes, the last one in particular, there’s a lot of standing around and talking and no plot, which probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I was fluent in Spanish, but there you go.  “The Pirate of the Asteroid” comes in a very close second because darnit, it has a PIRATE on an ASTEROID.  That by itself is gold.

 

The show’s budget is nearly microscopic.  The sets are blatantly cheap, the special effects can hardly be referred to as ‘special’ except in the context that they were the only Mexican TV show using blue screen at the time, and the stories are short and simple to the point of occasionally being almost nonexistent.  There’s no explosions or fancy costumes or elaborate displays of superheroism/supervillainy.  We never even get a bonafide fight scene.  But the show’s objective was never to create a superhero show; it was to create a comedy that happened to have a superhero in it.  On that front, El Chapulín Colorado does quite well for itself.  Is it the BEST THING EVAR?!!!1!1  No, but who cares?  It’s a fun, quaint little romp, unconstrained by generally accepted notions of continuity and logic.  (How does Chapulín get from 17th century-ish Bavaria to the future to 1970s Mexico, anyway?)

 

Plus, Chapulín Colorado is just a fun character.  He’s about as effective a superhero as Scooby-Doo, but he is genuine and sincere, and somehow, the day always manages to get saved in the end.  Nor is he a mindless do-gooding heroic type; he is shown to have a bit of a temper (if only a mild one) and has been known to slap around the people he is supposedly trying to save.  Though really, if you start joking about his height, you’re kinda asking for it.

Long story short, don’t just ignore this series because it’s old and bare bones.  Give it a chance!  If you don’t own the DVDs, buy them.  If you don’t speak Spanish, kidnap someone who does.  And while you’ve got a Spanish-speaker locked up in your closet, make them translate El Chavo as well.  There’s no superheroes (well, except that one crossover with Chapulín Colorado, which as I recall was suitably awesome), but there is fun to be had.  Promise.

Next Time: Ever wanted to see Batman and Joker in a surfing contest?  No?  How about Batman and Riddler in a boxing match?  Still no?  Well too bad.

Images from El Chapulín Colorado

*My understanding of Spanish is, well, not the best.  I know enough to translate most of what I hear, but I missed out on some jokes and slang terms.  Hopefully I did well enough to get the spirit of the show across.  Also, this review didn’t go quite as well as I hoped, so I apologize and promise to never review anything in Spanish again unless that something has subtitles.