Danger Mouse (1981 TV series)

Danger Mouse is a British animated television series produced by Cosgrove Hall Productions for Thames Television. It features the eponymous Danger Mouse who worked as a secret agent and is a parody of British spy fiction, particularly the Danger Man series and James Bond. It originally ran from 28 September 1981 to 19 March 1992 on the ITV network.
The series spawned a spin-off show, Count Duckula, which aired between 1988 and 1993. A revival under the same name aired on CBBC from 2015–2019.

Plot

Danger Mouse is a secret agent with the British Secret Service, and together with his sidekick Penfold is repeatedly ordered by Colonel K, the head of the Secret Service, to save the world.
They work underneath Scotland Yard on Baker Street in London, hidden inside a red pillar box. Their arch-enemies are Baron Silas Greenback and his criminal organization, who try to achieve world domination by unconventional means such as stealing all famous buildings, or creating giant robots, etc.
A special role is played by the off-screen narrator, Isambard Sinclair, who accompanies the action by commenting on it sarcastically, talking to the characters or musing about his private life.

Characters

Main

Danger Mouse – A white mouse with an eyepatch. Often called the world's greatest secret agent—so secret, in fact, that his codename has a codename. His catchphrases include "Good grief" when he becomes upset or shocked, "Penfold, shush" when his assistant makes a foolish remark. He was originally going to be brown; however, the creators thought that he and Penfold needed to be different colours.
Ernest Penfold – A timid, bespectacled hamster, and Danger Mouse's reluctant assistant and sidekick. He is often mistaken for a mole; however, Brian Cosgrove has stated Penfold is supposed to be a hamster. Penfold stands just over half the height of Danger Mouse, and always wears thick round glasses and a crumpled blue suit with a white shirt and a yellow and black striped tie. In the first episode, he is codenamed the Jigsaw "because when he is faced with a problem, he goes to pieces."
Colonel K – Danger Mouse's boss; often mistaken for a walrus, it was revealed in an issue of Look-in magazine that he is, in fact, a chinchilla. During the last two seasons, he became more absent-minded, tending to frustrate both Danger Mouse and Penfold with his tendency to ramble nonsense. A running gag in the later seasons is that he botches the usage of the phrase "over and out" multiple times.
Baron Silas Greenback – The recurring villain and Danger Mouse's archenemy; a toad with a wheezy voice, although, sometimes, he was referred to as a frog. Known as Baron Greenteeth in the unbroadcast pilot episode. Commonly known as the "Terrible Toad". In the US, "greenback" is slang for dollar bill in many regions; this adds to the sense of his commercial greed. Allegedly, he turned to a life of crime as a schoolboy when other children stole his bicycle and let all the air out of its tyres.
Stiletto 'Mafiosa – Greenback's henchman; a crow. He always called Greenback "Barone", Italian for "Baron". In the original British version, he speaks with an Italian accent. When the show aired on Nickelodeon in the U.S., it was changed to a Cockney accent "to avoid offending Italian-Americans". In its U.S. VHS release and later in all subsequent TV reruns, his original Italian accent was restored. Greenback repeatedly berates and abuses him for mistakes. In series 5, he is more incompetent and klutzy that Greenback usually has to whack him with his walking stick, and in series 9, Greenback uses a "hit box" that whacks Stiletto on the head with a mallet.
Nero – Greenback's pet. A fluffy white caterpillar. He is a non-speaking character, although his noises and laugh are supplied by David Jason's voice sped up. Readily understood by Greenback and, less frequently, by Stiletto. He does not have any superpowers, except In the season 5 episode "Nero Power", where he temporarily exhibits the ability of telekinesis. In the special features of Danger Mouse cartoons, audiences were informed that Nero is actually the mastermind of Greenback's schemes.
The Narrator / Isambard Sinclair' – The unseen narrator, who occasionally interacts with the characters, sometimes to the point of halting the plot for one reason or another. In a series 6 episode, he accidentally sends Danger Mouse and Penfold back in time with his broken mike. He often voices his disdain for the show and his job towards the end of the episode and through part of the closing credits.
Supporting
Professor Heinrich Von Squawkencluck – An inventor mole, first appearing in the series where he was engaged in hormone experiments to grow chickens to enormous sizes. He invented the Mark III, Danger Mouse's flying car, and the Space Hopper, his personal spacecraft. He speaks in a broken German accent. Penfold is naturally leery of the professor, as he often winds up on the wrong side of his experiments.
Flying Officer Buggles Pigeon – Another of Colonel K's agents, who comes to the aid of Danger Mouse and Penfold in the episode "Chicken Run", and appeared in several episodes afterward.
Agent 57 – A master of disguise, appearing initially as an earthworm. Agent 57 has disguised himself so often that he forgot his original appearance. In the series 6 episode "The Spy Who Stayed In with a Cold", he gained the ability to change shape to resemble any character or animal whenever he sneezed, but when he shows Danger Mouse his original form, Danger Mouse is horrified.
Leatherhead – Greenback's other crow henchman. Even less intelligent than Stiletto, he appeared in several of the early episodes, where he spent most of his time reading comic books.
Count Duckula – A fame-obsessed vampire duck who wants to appear in television. However, his utter lack of anything approaching talent makes his attempts to "entertain" rather terrifying. This resulted in a spin-off series, titled Count Duckula, starring the Count himself. The two versions of the character differ, however; the character featured in Danger Mouse is not a vegetarian, makes far greater use of his vampiric magic, and has an accent consisting of a lisp and a stutter, as well as occasional stuttering and duck-like squawks and quacks.
J. J. Quark – A space alien who recurs in series 6. He speaks with a Scottish accent and claims possession of Earth based on a cosmic charter granted to his great-great-great-great-grandfather. He has a robot assistant named Grovell, who always grovels whenever his name is mentioned, much to Quark's frustration.
Doctor Augustus P. Crumhorn III : – A mad scientist wolf, he recurred as Danger Mouse's adversary starting in series 9. In the episode, "Penfold Transformed", he lists his full name as "Aloisius Julian Philibert Elphinstone Eugene Dionysis Barry Manilow Crumhorn", omitting both Augustus and the III. He and Greenback were at odds; once Crumhorn kidnapped Penfold and Penfold managed to escape simply because the two villains were too busy quarreling to notice his absence.
Production

Development

The show was created by Mark Hall and Brian Cosgrove for their production company, Cosgrove Hall Films. Danger Mouse was based on Patrick McGoohan's lead role in Danger Man. The show was intended to have a more serious tone as seen in the pilot episode but Mike Harding gave Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall the idea to make the series silly. "The characters had got stuck in reality and were doing James Bond type things rooted in the solid real world," said Harding, "I argued that once you invented a Mouse Secret Agent then all of creation and a good chunk of not creation was his oyster. In other words we could be as barmy as we wanted." In an interview with The Guardian, Cosgrove said "We reckoned a secret service mouse foiling the plans of an evil toad – Baron Silas Greenback – was suitably ridiculous."
Cosgrove and Hall brought in Brian Trueman, who was working as an announcer on Granada TV, as the main writer for the series. For the voice of Danger Mouse, they picked David Jason after they saw him in Only Fools and Horses. For the voice of Penfold, they picked Terry Scott, who was known for the show Terry and June.
On 4 June 1984, the show was the first animated show to appear on Nickelodeon in the United States, and quickly became the second-most popular show on the channel after You Can't Do That on Television, as it appealed to both children and adults with its quick-witted English humour. It was often described by American audiences as a British equivalent of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, due to its gentle satire of politics and outrageous plots.
It returned to terrestrial television after the BBC purchased episodes of it to broadcast in its daytime schedules with its first broadcast on 12 February 2007 on BBC Two.
The show was expensive to make, an episode sometimes needing 2,000 drawings thus footage was reused while certain scenes were set in the North Pole or "in the dark" as a cost-cutting measure. This time-and-money saving device was cheerfully admitted by both Brian Cosgrove, who conceived the character and the show, and Brian Trueman, who wrote almost all the scripts from the beginning.

Reception and legacy

During the cartoon's run, it reached a peak viewing figure of 7.2 million viewers on 3 January 1983, with average figures being around 3–4 million per episode.
In 2001, the show was ranked third in Channel 4's 100 Greatest Kids' TV Shows. In 2008, it was named the 62nd-best animated series by IGN, who considered it one of the first British cartoons to become popular with American audiences.