MADISON TAYLOR

The product of a 5-year-old’s imagination.

Picture your mind at age five. Now picture your five-year-old mind coming to life on a television screen. Fox TV’s animated series Axe Cop is living proof that all the whimsy and ludicrousness contained within a child’s mind can successfully and hysterically be brought to life.

Five-year-old Malachai Nicolle’s axe-slinging, mustachioed hero first chopped his way into night time television on July 27. Initially the star of an online comic strip invented by Malachai and his older brother Ethan, Axe Cop storms onto the screen as a valiant, no-nonsense defender of the people with a ‘stache that would put Tom Selleck to shame.

Aside from his spectacular lip ornament, Axe Cop’s essence can best be captured in his tendency to don a spandex cat suit while fighting crime by moonlight, his bizarre relationship with his pan-pipe playing sidekick Flute Cop and his subtle yet delicately understated catchphrase: “I will chop your heads off!”

If first impressions alone aren’t enough to warrant a few appreciative chuckles from you, the gruff booming voice of Nick Offerman giving life to the shamelessly juvenile dialogue is sure to do the trick. Best known for his role as Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation, Offerman possesses both the facial hair and the deadpan humour vital to playing Axe Cop.

The show combines the absurd graphical characteristic of anime with the epic, ass-kicking feel of a Marvel movie. Add a dose of whimsy and a few tons of childish comedy, and you have the makings of a winningly light-hearted and amusing cartoon.

Just like anything else however, Axe Cop must be taken with a grain of salt. It is after all a comic-based cartoon invented by the mind of a five-year-old boy.

Do not expect sophisticated, droll jokes worthy of Frasier. This is not a show meant for the pompous or faint-hearted. There will be talking piles of excrement (literally – his name is Mr. Doodoo). There will be decapitated zombies and babies with unicorn horns. But herein lies the beauty of Axe Cop: it requires no pretence of refinement or maturity. Instead, it chooses to expose and celebrate its viewers’ infantile sense of humour.

Axe Cop allows us to regress to the simple, sandbox-digging, nose-excavating days of our youth in which nothing was funnier than a well-timed joke about bodily functions. No, it is not a great work of comedic genius. No, it is not a stirring metaphor for human existence. Taken as it is however — a simple, in-your-face funny series thought up by a prepubescent boy — Axe Cop is undeniably brilliant.

Hats off to Malachai Nicolle for digging up the immaturity and peculiarity that we thought (or hoped) was forever lost in masses of textbook citations and term paper deadlines.

Revel in the silliness every Saturday night at 11p.m. on Fox.

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Photo: Fox Broadcasting