Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines: The Complete Series Blu-ray Review: For the Birds

Warner Archive continues their Blu-ray upsells of classic Hanna-Barbara animated series with this 1969 oddity, previously only available on DVD. The show follows the comical exploits of a ragtag group of pilots tasked with stopping a plucky carrier pigeon from delivering his secret messages. Unfortunately, they’re very bad at their jobs, and yet their demanding general never fires them.

The show is a spinoff of Wacky Races, but the writers seem to be bereft of ideas for how to keep the series interesting, with each episode following such a similar plotline that there’s virtually no differentiation. In brief, the team of four pilots take to the skies and try various foolish methods to stop the intrepid Yankee Doodle Pigeon, with the pigeon always coming out successful and the enemy pilots suffering the general’s wrath. Dick Dastardly is the lead villain, poorly assisted by his long-suffering canine pal Muttley, who alternately snickers at him behind his back or kisses his ass in the hopes of being rewarded with a shiny medal. The other two human pilots are barely defined, reduced to slight sketches of a perpetual scaredy cat named Zilly and a speech-impaired numbskull named Klunk, serving little purpose and offering zero entertainment value.

Each half-hour episode includes two feature cartoons with the gang, along with one Magnificent Muttley short where the pup daydreams about himself in heroic settings, as well as a couple of inconsequential Wing Dings gags. The Blu-ray compiles all 17 episodes of the thankfully short-lived series onto two Blu-ray discs, and includes a couple of special features as well as commentaries on two episodes. The series has been remastered in hi def from the original negatives for this release, providing the best presentation ever available. Colors are richly saturated and no defects are apparent, while the original mono sound is encoded in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono.

While I’ve watched and enjoyed plenty of mindless Hanna-Barbera offerings through the years, this one sets a particularly low bar of rehashing one very basic idea much longer than it warrants. Really the only times I even managed a chuckle are when the general temporarily put Muttley in charge of the gang, reversing the power dynamic between the two stars, and when the gang decided to try out a giant paper airplane, which the pigeon defeated by blowing on it. Aside from those rare moments, this flight is entirely on auto pilot.