My Dad The Bounty Hunter

Finally, some delicious fucking sci-fi.

When it comes to animation, it feels like science fiction has been kinda shoved into a locker for the past decade or so. The majority of big name cartoons that have come out in the 2010s (well, outside of anime) have been falling more on the side of High Fantasy or Supernatural, with dashes of sci-fi tidbits for flavoring, like being sent into a space dimension by the gods, or having dwarves who build robots, or digging up mysterious ancient artifacts that let them shoot laser beams or whatever.

But on the whole, aside from an endless chain of increasingly niche Star Wars spin-offs and the occasional mention of Love Death and Robots, genuine sci-fi cartoons have been few and far between, and those precious few have been given little to no fanfare in the public spotlight. Some of my personal favorites have included Infinity Train, Kipo & The Age of Wonderbeasts, Kid Cosmic, and now, My Dad The Bounty Hunter.

Never underestimate how dangerous children can be. Especially your own.

In a nutshell, this is a show about two kids discovering their dad hasn't actually been working a boring day job at a shoe store in the local mall. Rather, he's been secretly moonlighting as a space-faring bounty hunter with a car that doubles as a spaceship, tracking wanted criminals for some omnipresent Space Corporation known as the EHC. They decide to sneak aboard for his next mission, but when he inevitably catches the little stowaways, Dad (legendary bounty hunter Sabo Brok, or just "Terry" if you're from earth) finds himself in a pickle and begrudgingly must allow the kids to tag along so his quarry's trail doesn't go cold.

Capitalism always has time to put a price on your memories.

This show offers a very kid-friendly approach to sci-fi that offers a lot of fun adventures and comedy, but also doesn't shy away from putting the kids in real danger, and making classic, cartoonishly evil villains in the process. The EHC doesn't fuck around when it comes to committing atrocities, and they're not keen on letting the so-called "terrorists" who threaten to expose their activities hurt their profit margins by disrupting their alien slave camps or denying them the property rights to certain ancient kingdoms they want to "colonize". Classic Saturday morning cartoon villains who mirror very real-world billionaires.

We need to go back to an era of villains with zero redeeming qualities who are just awful people that you want to see destroyed without feeling bad for them.

But what does this show bring to science fiction as a genre? Simply put: sci-fi has been lacking a good family comedy ever since - ironically - Disney bought everything under the sun, and Star Wars/Marvel movies became the only big name sci-fi that ever sees the limelight anymore. Everything in superhero movies has to be BIG and LOUD and SHOCKING, and the bigger picture only comes into focus if you keep up with every single movie they put out. My Dad The Bounty Hunter seeks to reign in that focus and keep the story centered on what really matters to its main cast: being a family.

The family that slays together stays together.

In an age where everyone is laser-focused on memorizing the almighty Lore and knowing every sordid detail of every fictional kingdom's history, My Dad The Bounty Hunter only cares that you know about the family's own history. Who is Terry? How long has he been a bounty hunter? How did he meet his wife Tess? Where is she from, exactly? How do their kids react to going to space and learning about this entire double life their parents have been hiding from them? The rest of the show's details are kept intentionally pretty minimum so you can follow along without keeping an encyclopedia of every piece of trivia to make sure you understand it. And that's something I think sci-fi has needed for a long time now.

Having a smaller scope doesn't mean things aren't just as beautiful or epic.

The other and more important thing sci-fi has needed for a long time is color, and I don't just mean of the rainbow variety (though sci-fi needed THAT too). It's extremely satisfying to watch a show about aliens and lasers and spaceships that is also thoroughly steeped in black culture instead of the standard white American or euro-centric fare we almost always get otherwise. The Hendrix family (good name choice, by the way) are all unapologetically black. Their skin tones are varied, their hair is natural, and they actually get to speak in AAVE instead of some weirdly academic or British accents for a damn change. Even the background music regularly features RnB, hip hop, EDM, a bit of disco, and other great choices that really make it stand out from its typical 80s rock contemporaries.

This show knows exactly what it's about, and I'm glad to see it embrace that with its whole ass.

Sci-fi could always stand to embrace a little more ass anyway.

Which ties into something else I've been thinking about a lot lately. You can argue all you like about how it shouldn't matter whether the characters are black or white, men or women, straight or gay, whatever, as long as the story's good. And while you are technically correct - it SHOULDN'T matter - we still live in a time where it's absurdly rare to see THESE type of characters in THESE roles. A black family who acts black in a space adventure is still an egregiously rare thing to behold. And because it's so rare, getting to see them live these characters, say these lines, act this way, and be the main characters of their own story, is still a radical and ground-breaking thing.

Just like it shouldn't matter whether you choose a Male or Female Shepard when you play Mass Effect, seeing a woman deliver those lines the way Fem-Shep does genuinely hits different than hearing it from a man, because of the long history of sexism in sci-fi. It's that much more meaningful coming from the type of person who regularly gets shut out of the genre for such an arbitrary reason as gender. And the same absolutely applies to race.

This Prince/Michael Jackson hybrid Thundercats oc is proof positive we need more black culture injected into our sci-fi cartoons.

I can't fucking believe we've advanced some 60 years past Nichelle Nichols first appearing as a main character on Star Trek and we're STILL having this same conversation about how differently it hits and how radical it is to see black characters in primary roles. It shouldn't have to be that way. But it still is, and it should still be celebrated every time.

You can try to say Black Panther did it first, but Africa is an entire continent containing hundreds of cultures. Afrofuturism isn't limited to just one influence.

Anyway, what was I saying? Go watch this show. It's a fun little space romp with a bangin' soundtrack and a great story about watching your Mom And Dad Save The World. Two seasons have been released at the time I wrote this review (November 2023), and thanks to Netflix's byzantine algorithms from hell that dictate whether or not a show will ever be renewed, I can't find any further details on potential future episodes. But it can't hurt to get more eyes on it in the meantime, so do yourself and everyone else a favor and give My Dad The Bounty Hunter some love!

Don't say I didn't warn you about those kids.