Karl Puschmann: Can Koala Man save the tired superhero genre?

Kevin, a middle-aged dad, is Koala Man by night.

Opinion

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 wisecracking, 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 now 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 ordinary man, decides to become a superhero.

The difference is that Koala Man is mildly effective. In the eight-part series, he does indeed often save the day and his beloved small Aussie city Dapto from various criminals. Although his pedantic nature for following the laws of the land has made him less than endeared to the community he’s sworn to protect.

His appearance is usually greeted with a variation of, ‘f*** off, ya dickhead!” by both its residents and its criminals. This sees him utter his fearsome superhero catchphrase in response, “that is not on”.

After another in a series of botched rescues in which he throws eucalyptus oil - because of the connection to koalas - into the eye of a loiterer, the local TV news describes him in less than heroic terms.

“A vigilante nuisance and probable maniac,” the newsreader calls him, during their segment on him.

Kevin is the traditional cartoon dad, a la Homer Simpson or Family Guy’s Peter Griffin. He’s portly, balding, middle-aged and clueless. Although here that’s because his obsession with seeing justice served has made him blind to the wants and needs of his family.

What really sets Koala Man apart is its flag-waving Aussie humour. It’s the cartoon equivalent of a foul-mouthed, Holden-driving, Ocker bogan. There’s an abundance of F-bombs in the script and even the dreaded C-bomb gets dropped with a frequency that’d make anyone, bar an Aussie, blush. It is very funny, obviously.

The show won’t be for everyone. It revels in its weirdness, its crassness and its true blue Aussie-ness. Koala Man may not be the hero we deserve, but he’s definitely the hero we need.