Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp

I remember this one when it was passing on the french CBC Network. A good and funny french-Canadian dubbing (among those voices: Ronald France, Benoit Marleau and Elizabeth Chouvalidze) who made those chimpanzees much more funnier.

However, it's this spoof of all spy and psychedelic series (James Bond, the Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the Monkees among others) which makes this series worth to watch. It maybe bad and dumb for others, but leave your seriousness at the door when you'll watch Lance and Mata Hairi make the move on the Baron, the Dragon Lady and all the CHUMP villains...

A.P.E. rules again. And like the Baron says at the end of each show: we'll meet again ! P.S. and that Ed Sullivan spoof, it is so funny !

I don't know where to begin...

This is welded into my childhood memories, more so even than Thunderbirds (tt0057790). This is pure anarchic, demented children's teevee that simply will never be made again. Ever. As a species, we have become so jaded with multimedia that we forsaken our innocence and no longer play with with wisps of imaginative folly and allow them to run free and unrestrained.

This is another '60s styled espionage show (Man from UNCLE, Avengers et al.) - except with a cast entirely of chimpanzees. That are in a psychedelic band as a cover. This will never happen ever again anywhere in the universe. But it happened then. It brought so much joy to my eight year old mind. And it still does.

Plebs now will watch it and dismiss it with a hipster "meh". Your loss. Contextualize and imagine. This was made in a world on the brink of annihilation. This is how we reacted - absurdist farce delivered with a chimp middle finger salute. Bravo.

I absolutely loved this show when it came out in 1970, and I would be thrilled to have the episodes on DVD. It was clever, campy and utterly silly - qualities which some viewers may not fully appreciate. How could you not laugh at Ed Simian and the bad banana jokes? The parody of the spy-show genre was dead-on. Exotic locations (chimps skiing is a sight one never forgets), cool gadgets, villains with accents - this show had it all.

Of course, in today's world the chimps would be computer-generated so as not to upset the animal rights folks, and therefore the charm of the original would be totally lost.

When I asked people about this seldom seen and forgotten show,I noticed I get a strange look. However,I vividity remember this show as a child back in the early 70's when it was shown mostly on Saturday Mornings. This was a show that had a combination of "The Monkees" mixed throughly with key elements of Robert Vaughn's spy spoof,"The Man From U.N.C.L.E" (in which you had a chimpanzee in the Robert Vaughn role and a man in a gorilla suit played the head agent in the Leo G. Carroll role)for good measure and believe me it didn't last long when it premiered in the fall of 1970. The series was cancelled that same year.

It may have been fun back in its heyday but executives at the network as well as kids weren't buying it one bit since it was pathetically stupid as one of the worst children's TV shows of all time--second to another monkey show called "Me And The Chimp"(case in point-kids were watching it). The show back in its day was part of ABC-TV's(which the show originally ran)grand and sometimes lame lineup of live action and cartoon shows which were mostly shown on Saturday Mornings under the supervision of the head of children's programming for ABC at the time--the late producer-animator Chuck Jones which in point had shows like during his tenture were "The Curiousity Shop","Make A Wish","The Funky Phantom","Goober and the Ghost Chasers","The Jackson Five",not to mention the animated shows like "Lassie's Rescue Rangers" and he also

had under his belt "The Superfriends"(the first two seasons only) and his own short lived series called "Chuck Jones Presents".

PS-THe producer of Lancelot Link was Alan Landsburg who produced several shows under his tenture which included the Leonard Nimoy documentary "In Search Of...","That's Incredible!",and the sitcoms "Gimme A Break",and "Kate and Allie".

This television show is not only amazing, but has actually shaped my entire adult life. When I was nine years old, I was shipped off to a remote Aventist commune in Waco, Texas, and kept there until I turned 21. In this commune, we were given few luxuries, with activities mostly consisting of frolicking outside and shooting firearms at stray dogs and cats. But one of the scarce luxuries we were given was a dvd recording of this very show, Lancelot Link. As children, we would all pretend to be the characters from the show, walking around with our fists on the floor and screeching at anyone we saw. I remember our group's leader David would always turn the show on and laugh, and would even sometimes shoot his gun into the air out of laughter. This show alone made my life in the compound enjoyable, and I still wonder to this day what became of the fun little compound that my youth was spent at.

When I left the compound in 1992, I went out into a strange, foreign world of which I had little contact with. The only idea of the outside world I had was from this show, Lancelot Link. Because of this, I chose my lifelong profession; chimpanzee wrangler. Basically, if you don't already know, a chimp wranglers job is to wrangle chimps. We usually use large nets, shaped similarly to butterfly nets that you would see, but will also occasionally use net guns, or pieces of meat on enlarged fishing poles. We go around from city-to-city and find stray chimps, usually escaped from circuses or homes or nightclubs, and wrangle them into our special chimp-pen, where we return them to their original owners. One day however, as I was doing my job, a perculiar chimp drew my attention. We had been called to retreve it, and had located it in a dark alleyway. I looked at the chimp, and noticed something strange. The chimp was wearing a trenchcoat and a really cool little hat. I thought to myself, is this Lancelot Link??? And this brings me to a realization, that has forced me to take a star off of my review. Lancelot Link is not particularly sneaky or secretive. In fact, he sticks out like a sore chimpy thumb in a crowd, making him a terrible secret agent. For this reason alone, I am forced to make the tough decision to rate this show a 9/10. I love Lancelot Link, but it is totally unrealistic, simply because Link is not very sneaky.