It's ironic that a lot of folks in the US haven't seen this show for decades. Where I live there is a station which I swear has been playing it continuously since about 1983. I got seriously sick to death of the thing after I must have seen it literally hundreds of times. What made it worse was that it only went for 5 minutes, and it had a really terrible theme song which went for about 2 minutes, and was played at both the start and end of the show, so it was basically a few moments of story in between this horribly annoying song chanted by a bunch of 8 year-olds. It was inescapable, because the show would always be on just before something I actually wanted to watch. I believe the shows were _supposed_ to be combined into 20 minute stories, but I don't believe many stations did that, and most people just copped the 5 minute episodes.

Anyway, Roger dates from 1965 and is basically a campy, ultra-low budget parody of both the super-hero genre and Cold-war era bravado. Kind of a Dr. Strangelove of the cartoon world I suppose. He is a fighter ace, has a squadron of kid pilots called the American Eagles, and usually defeats his enemies by popping a Proton Energy Pill, which gives him the strength of 20 atom bombs for 20 seconds.

It did have a few endearing qualities. Some of the plot ideas were ridiculous enough to be funny, and I was mildly amused by the technique of putting words up on the screen. You know how in super-hero type stuff you'd have the big "Blammo!" or "Ka-whack!" or whatever come up on the screen in big letters. In Roger Ramjet they would also just randomly put up words or phrases from the dialogue or narration, so you'd suddenly get these huge letters filling the whole screen, that read "His Aunt" or "Over the Road" or something completely unimportant. The guy from Laugh-In voiced Roger, and he was excellant, too.

I guess RR is an interesting time-capsule of 1965 humour and culture, and may even have been a little subversive at the time, but the short episodes, maddening theme music, and to be frank, not all that particularly funny jokes, really sink this one for me. Or maybe it's just because I've possibly had to sit through more epiodes of RR than just about any other TV show in history, and don't have any nostalgia for it (I mean, they have to take it off air before you can become nostalgic, right?) God knows why they're playing stuff like this, but you can't find classic cartoons from just 10 years ago. Ah, well.

I'm sure anyone who remembers RR from the 60's, and hasn't seen it since will be thrilled by the DVD sets (which mercifully, I believe give you the option of cutting out the theme songs between every episode).

Might be fun, and worth another half star if I weren't so burned out on it.