I am at a loss how to properly describe this show for those who have not watched it. Anything I say will just sound absurd. I mean, it’s a show about a small yellow duck, the patriarch of a family who almost universally pity and/or disdain him. He is a private eye, a widower and just about as inappropriate as its possible to be at all times. He wears glasses but no clothes and, by the way, his eyes are apparently removable. (Take off his glasses, and the duck is completely blind. Which, actually, I kind of know the feeling.)

The duck (Eric Tiberius Duckman, in case you were wondering, voiced by Jason Alexander), is aided in his detective practice by Cornfed (Gregg Berger), a well-dressed and frighteningly efficient pig; not only is he his employer’s best-friend, but he’s kind of the Penny to Duckman’s Inspector Gadget. In addition, his office assistants are two adorable, squeaky voiced little teddy bears named Fluffy and Uranus, and who Duckman managed to kill in some thoughtless way each episode, and yet they return, Kenny-like, for the next outing. (Happily.)

At home, Duckman has three sons: Ajax (Dweezil Zappa), large and slow, but with occasional flashes of native wit; as well as his younger sons Charles and the one Duckman once referred to as “Charles’s brother” (his name is Mambo, but his loving father has called him everything from Sambo to Simba), genius Siamese twins. Also, there is his sister-in-law, the sharp-tongued Bernice (Nancy Travis), who has lived with the Duckman family since the death of her identical sister Beatrice.

There’s also an arch-nemesis (King Chicken, voiced by Tim Curry), a love interest (King’s wife Honey, voiced by Judith Light. And enough long-lost twin storylines and addled back story to make any soap opera proud. Doesn’t sound like your thing? Well, okay then. Perhaps Cornfed can convince you otherwise…

CORNFED:

Before I met Duckman I was at a crossroads, soul searching, looking for my place in this endless puzzle we call life... You ever wake up in a Cambodian gaming parlor and realize you were living in a dark dank abyss of emptiness and loneliness, then wander the mountains of Asia for two years until you became the chef in a Tibetan monastery?

Or maybe Ajax can tempt you into visiting a while:

CORNFED:	We've got to get to the banquet and stop that toast!
AJAX:	I like toast. It's the muffins that must be stopped.

Or maybe just a word from the (duck) man himself:

DUCKMAN:

Don't you see what's it's like living in this deranged, Waring blender of a world? Every day is an agonizing ordeal, like balancing a pot of scalding water on your head while people whip your legs and butt. Ah, you never forget your senior prom. You think I'm sick? Well the only disease I've got is modern life, a shnug-busting gauntlet of inefficiency and misery that's one long parade of letdowns, putdowns, trickle-downs, shutouts, freezeouts, sellouts, numbnuts, nincompoops and nimrods! All making every day as much fun as waxing a flaming Pontiac with your tongue! And even if you do luck into the possibility of some fleeting pleasure, like say if some nymphomaniac telephone operator with the muscle control of Romanian mat slappers agree to a little strip air hockey, it will be over before it starts, 'cause some foul lacking, Feta-reeking cab jockey slams his checker up your hatchback and the cab is owned by some pinata-spanker from a Santaria cult who starts shaking chicken bones at you and gives you a boil on your neck so big that all it needs is Michael Jordan's autograph to make it complete! And even with all this, with all this! I still drag my sorry butt off the Sealy every morning and stick my face in the reaping machine for one more day! Knowing when it's time to flash the cosmic card key at those pearly gates, I won't be in the coffin anyways, because some underhanded undertaker sold my heart, pancreas and other assorted good and plenty to that same Santaria cult! So does anybody really wonder why anybody is hanging onto sanity by the atoms on the tips of their fingernails, while life dirty dances on their digits, and is it really any wonder THAT I SEEM DERANGED?

And, hey, there’s even a computer game based on the series: Duckman: The Graphic Adventures of a Private Dick, and no, I haven’t played it, but come on. If a show has its own game, it must be good right? I know, I know, The Graphic Adventures of a Private Dick -- it sounds like the porn version, doesn’t it? (Except, the show itself was sometimes kind of the porn version… soft porn, anyway. And with farmyard animals. Um… I mean…)

Look, it’s a pretty funny show, okay? Smart, sharply-observed, subversive, all that good stuff. Some of the jokes are a little dated nowadays, but it’s still very amusing, in a spectacularly non-PC way, and it still has relevance. A lot of relevance.

Take this classic exchange, from 1994’s “TV or Not To Be” (01.02)

DUCKMAN:	Miracle schmiracle, I bet those mindless pod people who believe in that thing still wait up for the Tooth Fairy.
FLUFFY:	Why shouldn't they?
DUCKMAN:	Because he's rotting in a Turkish jail!

Heh.
 
   -- Rachel Hyland