Kevin saves the day

• Published date: 31 January 2023
• Publication title: Signal

IF the thought of watching yet another show or movie about superheroes has you wishing someone would swoop in and save you, well, you’re not alone. I want to get up, up and away from my couch at the mere sight of yet another wise-cracking, Spandex-clad do-gooder. After being caught in the endless churn and boggy glut of caped crusaders and masked heroes for well over a decade, I’m beginning to see the Joker’s point. I too want to watch the superhero world burn

It’s not that the quality has dropped. Marvel, certainly, and DC, occasionally, know how to make an entertaining product. I’m usually entertained by them, I’m just not enthused about them.

The simple reason is that there are just too many coming out too frequently. I’m so far behind Marvel’s interconnected timeline that weaves its various movies and telly shows into one impenetrable story, that to jump back in now would require doing a chunk of homework on Wikipedia just to understand what the heck was going on. This is something I’m never going to do.

The official medical term for this condition is Superhero Fatigue and it’s left me not feeling super, man. Some people swear that Amazon’s super violent, dark dramedy The Boys is the anti-superhero show that will cure me. But the way I see it, bad superheroes are still superheroes. And, right now anyway, I’m finding superheroes to be just a bit meh. This leads us to Koala Man on Disney+. Like The Boys, this is a superhero satire.

But unlike that show, it’s animated and its titular superhero doesn’t have any superpowers. He’s just some dude fighting crime in a goofy mask.

In this respect, the show is similar to 2010s action-comedy Kick-Ass, in which an ordinary teenage comic book fan decides to become a superhero, and 2010s dark comedy Super, in which an ordinary man spiralling into crisis decides to become a superhero.

So, right off the bat(man), Koala Man is 13 years late to the party as the concept here is exactly the same.

Kevin, an...