Ever seen a wizard going down on a mermaid? Or a zombie whose self-abuse made his own penis run away? Until recently I couldn’t say I had either, but that’s all changed thanks to Ugly Americans. A common epithet for the stereotypical loud and obnoxious behaviour of Americans abroad, in this case “Ugly Americans” has its meaning kind of inverted as the title for an animated series that focuses mainly on the integration of bizarre immigrant creatures into New York. In this alternate Big Apple the human population has been gradually marginalised by an influx of werewolves, zombies, demons, landwhales, various animal-human hybrids, disembodied brains, weird two-headed worm people, yetis, gorgons, trolls, wizards, warlocks, robots and a monstrous multitude of way more bizarre creatures. The series follows human social worker Mark Lilly at the Department of Integration, whose job it is to help these new arrivals survive and prosper in their new home.
Along with his colleague Leonard, a 400-year-old drunken wizard, Mark must help a ramshackle bunch of new arrivals fit into life in New York City. It doesn’t make life any easier that Mark himself is new in town and for the most part highly ignorant of the etiquette and intricate details necessary to get along with the multicultural population. As you might expect, this leads frequently to hilarious and often gruesome consequences. The token bleeding heart within his department, Mark is very much a straight man in contrast to his increasingly weird friends and colleagues. His roommate Randall is a zombie with a serious taste for human flesh and especially brains, having joined the ranks of the undead in a poorly conceived attempt to get laid. Now he’s unemployed and spends his time falling to pieces and fucking everything from toasters to floating brains. Mark’s boss Twayne Boneraper (yeah, you read that right) is a horned red demonic mummy’s boy with minimal compassion for the human race whose bureaucratic position within the DOI seems motivated by some larger demon conspiracy. Even Mark’s office fling Callie is a half-human half-demon, quite literally the spawn of the devil, and constantly at odds between the good and evil sides of her personality, at times very visually evident as her face takes on a sharp-toothed red-eyed visage straight out of Japanese anime. Mark’s attempts to help the city’s new arrivals are constantly challenged by intolerant minority-bashing immigration cop Frank Grimes who views basically all immigrants and non-humans as illegals and thinks nothing of violently dispatching them wherever possible.
Visually Ugly Americans is a real delight. The animation style borrows heavily from 1950s EC comics like “Tales From The Crypt” and “Weird Fantasy” with a lot of flattened perspective, simple lines and bold shadows. There are tons of playful visual gags, which totally make the most of such a bizarre cast of supporting characters. You can’t help but love Doug, the small helpless koala-man who is almost always seen shedding a small tear of sadness or joy. There are creatures with hands for heads, faces where their junk should be, two heads, no heads, animal heads and even more fucked-up demon monsters. Airing on Comedy Central in the US the series is way past the watershed and this allows for plenty of gruesome blood and guts which are thrown in with gusto by developer David Stern, previously a writer on The Simpsons. It’s hard not to feel that the freedom of expression to crack dick jokes, disembowel, decapitate, swear, insult and create disturbingly sexy demons and other creatures must be liberating and downright enjoyable after working within the restrictions of a family friendly show. You sure as hell wouldn’t see Bart and Lisa hanging out with an anti-Semitic gelatinous pink blob. Some recognisable elements of Simpsons humour carry over into Ugly Americans, noticeably the amount of hilarious puns in the background. Fancy a bowl of Cadaver-O’s? Or a trip to Port-O-Pottery? How about Blood Bath And Beyond? Actually that one was also used in a 1997 episode of The Simpsons but hey, it still works.
While it has received criticism for the lack of depth with which it explores genuine issues, Ugly Americans is happy to skim along on the surface of immigration without delving too deeply for weighty social commentary. If anything there is a strong danger that deeper exploration and deconstruction of immigration would end up like the increasingly annoying satire of South Park. It should be enough that the central theme is that of integration and tolerance. Every character in the show struggles in some way to fit in - Mark is finding his way as a new resident of a big city, Randall went zombie just to please a girl, Twayne has no trouble terrifying his human employees but longs for respect from his demon peers and has a crippling fear of public speaking, Callie is constantly unsure whether she wants to fit into the demon or the human world, and Leonard lives his life in the booze-soaked shadow of his famous younger brother Christ Angel (a spot-on parody of illusionist-douchebag Criss Angel) unable to see himself as anything but a failure by comparison. Although few of these characters are human, their flaws and weaknesses, goals and ambitions are deeply recognisable. After all, aren’t we all just trying to fit in somewhere?
Ugly Americans should appeal strongly to anyone who has grown up with science fiction and fantasy and it pokes fun at the genres irreverently, but there’s certainly no need to be a sci-fi nerd to enjoy the trials and tribulations of a giant ape with OCD, or the rewriting of history to include the gang fights between the Irish and the vampires in the early days of New York, or the Human-Zombie wars of the 1970s. There’s a wealth of minor details to hold the fleeting attention-span of today’s hipster youth from a two-headed worm guy in a baseball cap using the adjective “tubular” to a zombie decorating his bedroom with a Slayer poster. Ugly Americans is at the same time comfortably close to home and fantastically far out. While the plot lines generally arc around Mark’s ignorance of immigrant or demonic culture, so much of the humour is visual that Ugly Americans defies being put on in the background and demands your full attention, and deservedly so.