The 10 Most Underrated Cartoon Sidekicks, Lackeys and Henchmen

Posted at 5:08 AM Sep 08, 2008

By Todd Ciolek

Sidekicks. Lackeys. Cronies. Seconds-in-command. Whatever you call them, they’re staples of cartoons, and from Barney Rubble to the latest anime superhero’s bespectacled friend, they’re all inferior to the main characters. That’s why they’re on the show, after all.
Yet some of them are recognized for their B-list accomplishments, both in cartoons and by real-life fans. Others never quite get the respect they arguably deserve, so we’ve decided to give the animated world’s most accomplished but under-recognized sidekicks, henchmen and other also-rans the spotlight they’ve been denied for so long.

10) Slowpoke Rodriguez from Looney Tunes

It sounds like something you’d make up while drunk at a party. Yeah, Speedy Gonzalez had a cousin named Slowpoke Rodriguez. Seriously. But they won’t show his cartoons anymore because he was obviously a huge stoner.

Well, most of that’s true. Slowpoke was a laid-back country mouse who showed up in a mere two Looney Tunes shorts. In one, he sings the marijuana-positive version of “La Cucaracha” and is constantly hungry. He also has the ability to hypnotize Sylvester the cat, but we geek-culture wags can’t work that into a pot joke.

Slowpoke’s other appearance, in Mexicali Schmoes, was brief and involved him gunning down a cat, thus shamefully furthering the stereotype of Mexicans as people who may own firearms at some point in their lives.

9) Lance from Voltron

Since the days of Gatchaman or Battle of the Planets or whatever the hell they called it, anime shows with color-coded teams have lived by simple directives: each group needs a steadfast (read: boring) leader, a sensitive (sexistly weak) woman, an energetic (insufferable) kid, a dependable (fat) guy, and a mildly cocksure but ultimately forgettable beta-male. In Voltron, that second-best team member is Lance, who’s basically there to play bad cop, or at least slightly headstrong cop, to team leader Keith.

He’s also there for viewers to confuse him with Sven, the guy who totally didn’t die and was really just poisoned at the start of the series.

Perhaps Lance should’ve been a little more enthusiastic during that big Voltron transformation. Then he’d have made a bigger mark than the show’s Space Mice.

8) Bow from She-Ra

She-Ra fans could’ve just bought He-Man toys if they’d wanted male counterparts for their line of mostly female characters, but Mattel insisted on making one easily dismissed guy for the She-Ra series. That Y-chromosomal throwaway was Bow, who served as an archer in comparison to She-Ra’s hands-on, up-close mode of combat. In all fairness, there was ample reason to ignore Bow, since he wore a Care Bear heart on his chest and was designed by someone who firmly believed that Errol Flynn mustaches looked good on cartoon characters.

That aside, it was still a little unfair that Bow wasn’t cut more of a break. In a community full of women with toy-friendly and inexplicable powers (such as the girl with the male peacock’s tail), Bow couldn’t find one to take a romantic interest in him, and possibly talk him into getting rid of that mustache. He also had to deal with He-Man’s frequent guest appearances, and any guy’s going to feel inadequate next to a barbarian whose case of muscle dysmorphia makes him bill himself as the most powerful man in the universe.

7) Igor and Nanny from Count Duckula

Count Duckula’s title suggests some lazily made Hanna-Barbera cartoon with a single joke to propel it through 65 interminable episodes, but Duckula was made by Cosgrove Hall, the studio behind Dangermouse. That means it has plenty of dry British humor and a cast of strangely likeable screw-ups, led by the vegetarian Count Duckula. While he’s the most obvious Daffy rip-off this side of Darkwing Duck, he’s often the straight man to his two servants: the grim, exasperated Igor and the towering, moronic Nanny.

If Igor’s dialogue-driven humor was lost on many of the children who caught Count Duckula, at least Nanny wasn’t. An absentmindedly destructive nitwit, she’s the source of all of Count Duckula’s slapstick comedy, and thus got a generation of Nickelodeon viewers to take in something more clever than reruns of Shirt Tales.

6) Ioz from The Pirates of Dark Water

By the laws of pulp fiction laid down by Star Wars, the Han-Solo type is supposed to get a reward for his endearingly roguish ways, be it some stockpile of riches or a woman who puts up with him. Ioz, the most scheming and pirate-like of The Pirates of Dark Water’s good guys, didn’t really get much of anything. Like most Han Solo analogues, he follows the densely heroic Ren in the hopes of landing a huge cache of whatever Pirates of Dark Water consider treasure, but he’s eventually caught up in the quest to find 13 magical thingamajigs and save the grotesque world of Mer.

Like the kids who watched the show, Ioz was gypped when The Pirates of Dark Water got itself canceled after only 21 episodes. The story was unresolved, a bunch of the mystic doodads were undiscovered, and Ioz didn’t get his payoff in treasure or the affections of the leading female character, Tula. In shocking contravention of cartoon clichés, she hadn’t yet fallen for Ioz or the alpha-hero. At best, Ioz caught the eye of a ghost ship’s captain.

Lucky him.