By Carly Mallenbaum
Picture Scooby-Doo and the gang, but replace Shaggy with Mike Tyson, and Scooby with an alcoholic pigeon. That’s the premise of Adult Swim’s new animated series “Mike Tyson Mysteries” (9:30 p.m. Monday), a nod to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon.
“We took over the whole Scooby-Doo façade, but Scooby-Doo’s crew’s not in it,” Tyson explains. The former heavyweight champion of the world, ex-convict and star of stage (and now TV) lends his voice to his animated likeness.
Joining Tyson in the fact-finding Mystery Mobile (a riff on Scooby’s Mystery Machine) is Tyson’s adopted Korean daughter Yung Hee, voiced by Rachel Ramras. Then there’s the foul-mouthed Pigeon (inspired by Tyson’s love of the bird — “I have around 2,500 pigeons”), voiced by comedian Norm Macdonald, as well as Marquess of Queensbury, an 18th-century ghost, voiced by “Community’s” Jim Rash.
The crew follows Tyson’s lead in solving cases sent via carrier pigeon, like the mystery of how a Pulitzer Prize-winning author should end his new book. (Spoiler: The author turns out to be a centaur without writer’s block, as predicted by Tyson.)
“That type of mystery-solving cartoons is something that I grew up on. [‘Mysteries’] sort of takes that and runs with it,” says Rash, who agreed to take part in the “funny and smart and awkward and weird” show after learning his former Groundlings castmates, Ramras and producer Hugh Davidson, were involved.
Tyson signed on because “I didn’t have nothing better to do.” Now he’s excited, showing off his “Mysteries” action figure. “Just to think that I’m selling kid products right now, I’m truly grateful to God. … This is almost like a dream come true.”
Gannett News Service
