Nerding Day: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (The Animated Series)

What do I wish I could bring back from my childhood? A closer sense of community? Nostalgic places that have gone out of business? My Grandma Florence? All good answers, all wrong. If this were Family Feud, you’d have three X’s and Steve Harvey would have made fun of how your family is dressed. No, I think the one thing I wish I could bring back from my childhood are animated shows for kids based on movies that were definitely not made for kids. Folks, they had a Robocop animated series. There’s a scene in the original movie where a man is melting and explodes when he gets hit by a car and that’s one of the less graphic moments. It got its own show for the youth of America.

That said, it does make a little sense that Ace Ventura: Pet Detective would be turned into a kids’ show. One that would run for three seasons on CBS and Nickelodeon. One of three Jim Carrey-themed cartoons to exist at the same time (both The Mask and Dumb and Dumber were also cartoons, as we all know). Also Ace Ventura was rated PG-13, not R, and a lot of kids loved it. I know, because I was a kid when it came out, and I loved it. It’s full of catchphrases and funny voices you can repeat to make people think you’re funny without you doing the work of being funny. Just ask… my wife*! (*We divorced twelve years ago)

But, looking back, ehhhhhhhhh, maybe Ace Ventura: Pet Detective wasn’t great for kids? First off, yes, the original movie’s entire plot pivoting on trans jokes is both hack and morally shitty. Just like how the second movie is kind of racist! That alone didn’t add much good to the world. But even beyond the very large problem with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, it’s also full of jokes about fucking. Like, it’s kind of a lot. One of the earliest scenes in the movie involves Ace getting a clearly high-quality, if somewhat chaotic just-off-camera BJ.

I also now realize that if adult me had said all this to childhood me, childhood me would’ve said, “Shut the fuck up” and punched me in my stomach, so who knows who’s right in this situation?

Anyway, we got an Ace Ventura: Pet Detective animated series about a year after the movie came out. And, I’m going to be honest, the basic idea of a children’s procedural about a detective who rescues animals is fun. Each episode is its own case with some recurring characters here or there and some people from the movies now played by different actors for far less money. Ace gets notified about some pet-related crime, works on the mystery, and comes up with a Clue-style solution at the end, usually involving vast leaps of logic that come out of absolutely nowhere.

And you know what? Rewatching it, it’s weird how close it comes to almost pulling it off. I mean, to be fair, the show also lasted for three seasons, so what the fuck do I know? Half of the shows I’ve worked on haven’t lasted two. But there’s actually something cool about centering Ace Ventura, the character, on being a very, very good detective. It would’ve been easier to write him as a funny moron who stumbles into solutions. I’m giving credit for this because it’s a good choice and sticks to the source material. Everyone thinks he’s stupid for his methods, until he comes up with the solution. It’s much funnier that Ace Ventura is a good pet detective, because it grounds him in actually having value beyond the catchphrases and jokes.

On the other hand, let’s talk about those jokes! I don’t want to be critical - again, there are parts of my IMDB that don’t need to be in my obituary - but man is it rough out there. The actor playing Ace Ventura, Michael Hall (who is actually a Canadian actor named Michael Daingerfield) does a good Jim Carrey impression. But it really, really, really sounds like a Jim Carrey impression. Remember when I mentioned kids in school saying catchphrases in class? That’s about where we’re at. I’m not saying it’s lazy, because doing a high-energy Jim Carrey over the course of three seasons takes work that I couldn’t produce. The material is just a little… rote? It’s the highlights of the movie repeated over and over and over and over again. I can’t emphasize how many times over the course of the series that Ace Ventura says, “Lay-hoooo-zayyy-hurr!” Even moments that don’t warrant it, that catchphrase comes out like a vocal tic. And don’t worry: He talks out of his butt at least twice an episode, as per legal mandate.

Also, my friends, they did not make this show less problematic than the movies. Don’t worry! They don’t have jokes about fucking anymore. Mostly. There is a lot of Ace Ventura humping the air after solving a mystery and some jokes about incest, but what can you do? It’s not an omelet if you haven’t broken some eggs, right? But there’s so much racism all over the place. Some of it is just casual and probably unintentional, like Ace Ventura assuming a wealthy black man in a fancy suit is his parking attendant. Some of it is just crazy and doesn’t matter if it’s intentional, like one episode where a hotel magnate in Australia tries to use crazed koalas to genocide the aboriginal people so he can take their land. He literally uses the phrase “slaughtered.”

Now, the episode is against that genocide. The hotel magnate is the bad guy, as has surprisingly proven the case throughout history. But the aboriginal people in the episode aren’t portrayed that compassionately. It’s like if you had a caricature artist draw photos of dying children. It’s not shocking so much as it is strange. The 1990s were a different time, obviously, but it’s wild. Ace Ventura tends to be the nice person in the episode, but yikes. There’s another one where the villain turns out to be a despised family member who was kidnapped and imprisoned in a basement for decades. After the reveal, I was like, “Okay, but can stop on that part for a second? Because that’s scary!”

Like I said, I’m aware it was a different time. Cartoons were fine with doing funny accents from other countries and we were all stronger, more masculine men for seeing them on Saturday morning. No women or girls were allowed to watch Saturday morning cartoons! They don’t understand me at all! Get out of my room! Get out! Get out! Get out!

Wait, did I mention that there’s a lot of shit-eating in the cartoon? I might’ve left that out so far. There’s a lot of just tasting animal shit. It’s not horrendous, it’s repetitive. The same bit again and again and again. And I don’t know why I’m personally annoyed by this part, but it’s used as a clue far too often, man. I want different clues in different cases! Imagine if Sherlock Holmes solved everything by theorizing that damage to a phone’s charging port is proof you’re a raging alcoholic. There are more tools in this toolbox! Use ‘em!

The world of the show is also kinda unclear? It seems both like animals are completely sentient creatures with clear personalities and actions that are understood by humans to have agency and intention. At the same time, they’re basically slaves and treated like shit by humans in every episode? I don’t know why I’m questioning the internal logic of a cartoon based on Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, but I also don’t know why I wake up in the morning anymore. It’s just strange to see animals both be used as props and also weep and cry in fear. Oh God, I think I’m coming to a realization about the real world through a rewatch of a 1995 animated series.

How does Ace Ventura: Pet Detective compare to the other Jim Carrey-adjacent-but-not-in cartoons? Glad you asked, because there’s actually an episode of The Mask called “The Aceman Cometh” in which Ace Ventura is hired by Stanley Ipkiss (i.e., The Mask) to find his dog. The shows have pretty different animated styles and background work, so it’s genuinely fun that they kept Ace Ventura the way he is rather than tried to make him look normal. Also, it’s very clear that The Mask had a bigger budget than Ace Ventura. The animation is cleaner and more intricate and - ahhhh - the undefeated Rob Paulsen does a better job with a Jim Carrey character. I’m sorry, he just does.

It might be the best animated episode of Ace Ventura, possibly because it was actually an episode of The Mask. Ace Ventura figures out the Mask’s whole deal pretty quick and - since he’s already an over-the-top cartoon - is able to keep up with his various goings on and antics and whatnot. Ace Ventura both looks and acts like he doesn’t belong in the world of the other show, so he’s free to break the logic of it in his own direction. I hadn’t seen the episode in a very long while and I’d found drugs since then, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But thankfully, there’s only one or two “Are we the same guy?” moments. They mostly avoid those, which is nice because they’re animated differently and voiced by two different adult men. Why does this paragraph read like I’m in the fifth grade?

Oh, and Tim Curry voices the villain of the week which elevates the whole thing. Ten out of ten, no notes outside of those already given.

Honestly, the Ace Ventura: Pet Detective animated series is an amazing, cross-section of ‘90s children’s entertainment. It doesn’t know what it wants to be, but it’s pretty sure it involves some minor racism and a lot of on-screen shit. It’s imitating a much dirtier film with tons of references to much dirtier things. Do we get a Deliverance joke in the series? You know we do, girl! Kids cartoons were required to make Deliverance jokes! None of us knew what “squealing like a piggy” meant, but it’s something we were told very often by Southern cartoon characters in nothing but large overalls.

It’s just such a strange artifact because it both shouldn’t exist and it makes the most sense on Earth that it exists. They should put it in a time capsule. Historians should study it. It does a better job of explaining where we were going and how we got here than 90% of the art that exists.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Yvonne Clapham, who believes cartoons should not contain war crimes, unless committed by Tim Curry in overalls.

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