I actually own two or three original production animation cels from this cartoon series! My favorite character from the show was Colleen, pretty much because I have a thing for attractive female furry characters, and she was the regular attractive female furry character of the show! While she is definitely very easy on the eyes, and I normally find femme fatales with foreign accents to be extremely alluring, in Colleen's case I kind of found both her accent and her personality to be a bit too abrasive for me. So while I liked her enough to go out of the way to purchase the before-mentioned animation cels of her, she doesn't hit my top 10 list of all-time favorite cartoon furry femmes or anything like that.
I have to say that being reminded of this show makes me a bit nostalgic for the cartoons of the early to mid-1990's again. Somehow the environment of the Warner Bros. Animation Studios of that time period allowed for some both very serious and very adult cartoons get produced for children compared to today's fare. On one side you had some kids cartoons that were packed with more adult-oriented jokes and some very sexualized characters, such as "Hello Nurse" and "Minerva Mink" from
Animaniacs (and even Colleen to a much lesser degree-- you can't argue that her feminine curves and bust were put there by accident), and on the other side you had some very serious an violet crime dramas such as
Batman: The Animated Series. In a way it was almost like some childrens' 90's cartoons were echos of the animated shorts that were made for adult audiences back in the 1940's. You could see curvy cartoon characters such as Minerva Mink being homages to characters like Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood." After all, the two characters' animated shorts even had some of the same plot points and situations. With crime dramas, Batman the Animated Series was just as serious in tone and violent as some of the 1930's and 40's gangster radio shows that I like to listen to, such as
The Shadow. It was actually great growing up with cartoons like this as a kid because they didn't talk down to you or insult your intelligence-- they were well-written, clever, pulled few punches, and told stories that had enough reality in them that you could really relate to them and get involved.
Unfortunately, it seems that thanks to certain terrible national events occurring in the late 90's and early 2000's that the pendulum of public opinion has swung the other way, and cartoons being produced for children for the most part have become very politically correct, non-threatening, and conservative again. Now we have the much more subdued "Batman: The Brave and the Bold," which is nowhere near as dark and gritty as "Batman: The Animated Series" was, and if you had a character like Minerva Mink slink across your high-definition television screen in this day and age there would probably be advocate groups protesting that she is promoting a negative female stereotype to young girls and completely missing the satire and the humor of the character. *sigh*
Sorry to go off on a bit of a tangent there, but Warner Bros. Animation really was on a roll with all of their hit animated shows in the 1990's, and you just can't bring up
Road Rovers without reminding me about how good all of the shows during that time period were. In fact, that is probably why Road Rovers only got 13 episodes-- it was against so many other great cartoons during the heyday of Warner Bros. television animation that it probably had a hard time standing out. If the show debuted against weaker competition, it probably would have fared much better and had more episodes, and I would have gotten to see more of Colleen as a result!
