“The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police” Created by Steve Purcell; Based on the comic book “Sam & Max: Freelance Police” also created by Steve Purcell; Starring Harvey Atkin, Robert Tinkler, and Tracey Moore; Originally aired October 4, 1997; Run time 10 – 22 minutes.
Sam, a bear, and Max, a rabbit, originally came into being in the 1987 comic book “Sam & Max: Freelance Police by Steve Purcell. The characters were adapted to the small screen ten years later as part of the Fox Kids lineup.
The series takes its art style and premise directly from the comic books. The story follows the two titular characters as they take on missions assigned by The Commissioner, an off screen entity who calls in Sam and Max when all goes awry and everything else fails. The pair are joined by The Geek, a teenage girl and technical genius who works in a lab in the Sub-Basement of Solitude cooking up gadgets for Sam and Max to help them with their missions.
The first and last episodes ran a full twenty-two minutes but the remainder paired two ten to twelve minute episodes, each with their own adventure. Their missions took them to the world’s strangest places, the center of the earth, Mt. Olympus, and beyond to the Moon and alternate dimensions.
In the pilot episode, (included below) “The Thing That Wouldn’t Stop It” the pair are called to the Sub-Basement of Solitude when The Geek is attacked by a many tentacle, shape shifting creature from another dimension coming out through the refrigerator. Sam and Max seemingly thrive on chaos and danger, rushing headlong into disaster as if it is the very air they breathe. The universe also employs some classic cartoon physics in as much as characters can be smashed or blown up without suffering any lasting harm.
Sam and Max enter a portal in the refrigerator that takes them to an alternate freezer dimension filled with scarecrows guarding frozen corn and housed made of hotdogs. There they find three men taken hostage by the creature within and must find a way to defeat the monster, save the men, and most importantly, restore the fridge to normal working order.
There’s something special about “The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police” in the way it deals with its characters and the way they speak and interact with their world. It can only be described as the nineties distilled into its purest form. Sam and Max brought home a Gemini award for best animated series but was unfortunately cancelled shortly thereafter, after only two seasons.