Superhero Media: Minoriteam

I rarely regret watching anything that I intend to review here, but Minoriteam is looking pretty grim. An obscure Adult Swim programme from Cartoon Network, Minoriteam tells the story of a team of superheroes who use the power of racial stereotypes to battle the nefarious White Shadow; led by Doctor Wang, Fasto, Non-Stop, Jewcano and El Hefe fight oppression and enemies like the Corporate Ladder and Racist Frankenstein. The animation style is choppy, clearly created in Flash, but is heavily inspired by the work of Jack Kirby, so it comes across in a "motion comic" kind of way. If the name and above spiel has put you off Minoriteam already, I can't blame you, even as a satire, it would appear to walk closely on the line of what is and isn't appropriate. Thankfully, in the programme itself, the idea comes across better that the cast and crew are "punching up", for the most part. The cast and crew of Minoriteam is pretty diverse, which lends to the idea that the jokes are from insiders, rather than targeted slurs. 

At least, that's until we get to Doctor Wang. Most of the other characters have a secret identity that contrasts with their superhero/stereotype one, with El Hefe being an oil magnate and Fasto being a university professor. Doctor Wang, however, is a genius laundromat owner with an accent so thick it could only come from a very white man, and it does. I know I'm pretty white myself, and it's far from my space to be offended on behalf of Asian people, but having Taiwanese relatives and having grown up in the 1990s when the One Nation party sought to segregate Australia, this really rubs me the wrong way. I know I'm hardly meant to take Minoriteam seriously, but I do wonder if some of the audience are going to miss the joke and take the wrong message away. Yes, White Shadow and his minions are constantly shown to be incompetent failures, but they still manage a massive corporation and never seem to go to gaol. 

On top of the sketchy racial humor, Minoriteam is not very well sound mixed and can be visually confusing, so is hard to watch at times, even just physically, so I don't really recommend it unless you're already a fan of Adult Swim obscura. I'm not sure where you can even see this programme, I picked it up randomly in a DVD bargain bin at a local newsagent, of all places. Being a parody series, there's not much fodder hear for gaming, even if you're going for a Silver Age aesthetic in your setting. Some of the design work in Minoriteam is pretty interesting, especially if you're a Jack Kirby fan, but overall it's not worth a serious look for most.