Hanna & Barbera
Dastardly e Muttley - Squadrone Avvoltoi

Dick Dastardly and Muttley first appeared in the legendary cartoon series "Wacky Races," from which, in 1969, this spin-off series of the "Vulture Squadron" originated.

Dastardly is reminiscent of Professor Fate, a character from the 1965 film "The Great Race": same outfit and same wickedness. He leads a ragged squad of aviators who design, build, and fly bizarre airplanes of the most absurd shapes, with the aim of catching the elusive Yankee Doodle pigeon attempting to deliver who knows what information to the enemy. Needless to say, failure is a daily occurrence. The squadron, consisting of four eccentric aviators, follows the orders of a phantom general who is never seen but is heard loud and clear over the phone, with the latter popping up from all over.

All the episodes revolve around the capture of the pigeon, who, time and time again, must "face" (in reality, he doesn't move a muscle, he just waits for the self-destruction of his adversaries) the squadron consisting of aircraft created by the quirky Klunk with his proverbial, undecipherable "chatterbox" talk, understood only by the timid and cowardly Zilly (another team member who often hides his head in his outfit like a turtle at the mere sight of the pigeon) and led by Dastardly and his faithful, but not too much, Muttley. Muttley is actually quite clever and the only one who always manages to avoid crashing with the team, thanks to his tail which, spinning like a helicopter blade, often saves him. The planes that appear one after another are a spectacle and take the most absurd shapes: a giant triple-decker plane holding a baseball bat, a biting plane, a cuckoo plane, two planes holding a gigantic slingshot...

Practically a cult cartoon, signed by the acclaimed duo Hanna-Barbera, worth watching at all costs: as entertaining as few cartoons really are; this "Dastardly and Muttley" is one of the many examples of the great American school of animation, of a completely different caliber and substance compared to the robots and monsters from Japan that would invade the planet only a few years later.

The only "flaw," but which is actually a characteristic of these cartoons, is that one almost always ends up hating the good characters, who eventually win unjustly, making them incredibly annoying: examples include Bugs Bunny and the extremely annoying Road Runner (from "Wile E. Coyote") who will be eliminated (with great satisfaction on my part) only many years later...