Dial 'M' for McGowan

Okay, this one's going to take a bit of explaining. First off, it requires some knowledge of the splendid Hannah-Barbera cartoon Dexter's Laboratory. (You know, one of their new wave of things which isn't ever so desperately cack. Remember The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo? Ugh.) In one of the show's early episodes, the eponymous hero of the piece uses his scientific cleverness to transform a regular, run-of-the-mill, cute little lab chimp into a turbo-charged, evil bloke-pummeling superhero called, quite practically, Monkey - and from there on, the character crops up in his own occasional segment, entitled Dial 'M' for Monkey, in which the super-powered simian takes on a selection of appropriately daft villains, and beats them all up.

With me so far?

Right. Well, as you might expect, the Crazy Lizard team thought this to be fantastically entertaining, and it just so happened that Mat McGowan had six hours' worth of the programme on video, recorded during a Dexter's Lab marathon on the Cartoon Network some months earlier. So, after stocking up on ice cream and crisps, we all sat down to watch the entire thing in one go, like a big bunch of idiots.

A little over six hours later, I found myself staggering home in a state of insanely cheerful dishevellment, overloaded with sugar and fried potato, and utterly unable to get superhero monkeys out of my head.

Anyone who's seen Algebra Theme Park will know what happens when my head gets crammed with obscure information, and in this instance, a fusing of ideas occurred. Y'see, it was more or less at this point in time that we'd all been speculating about which animals we associated with the most (Chris was deemed to be somewhat mole-like, you'll recall), and by an astonishing coincidence, Mat had been likened to a small, happy orangutan, because he was a bit on the hairy side, had a comparably laid-back and friendly disposition, and liked the idea of being an ape. Accordingly, something somewhere went 'Ping!', and shortly thereafter the world was introduced to McGowan, super-ape extraordinaire! Drinker of Tea, Eater of Biscuits, Wearer of Slightly Undersized Costumes, and Red-Hot Player of Crazy Tazi, with his own special banana phone so that those in peril might contact him in their hour of need! Go McGowan!

It's probably just as well he never found the tape with Donkey Kong Country on it, really.

As it happens, it was this that inspired the creation of Gareth, the big, hairy, rugby-playing gorilla from Wales - it just seemed logical that if we were going to have a heroic orangutan zapping about the place, he'd need some suitably large and fearsome baddies to fight . And what could be better than a big, hairy, rugby-playing gorilla from Wales? Called Gareth? Eh? Eh?

Well, I thought it was a good idea.

Matthew Smith

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