When I was a kid, one of my favorite cartoon heroes was Underdog. He was like Superman, only not as serious and certainly not as skilled. His city had to have been running out of phone booths, because every time he changed from his secret identity of Shoeshine Boy to Underdog, the phone booth blew up. Super, yeah. But not so talented.

And he talked in rhyme. Everything was a couplet. His questions and answers all rhymed and there was never any explanation as to why he had a quirk like that. Best of all, the character was voiced by Wally Cox, who had the nerd voice down pat and whose underplayed emotions even at critical times were terrifically funny.

The cartoon series started in 1964 and ran for 124 episodes. It was revived again and again in comic book form, and even as a radio show, but never as a movie until Walt Disney films produced it and released it in 2007.

My son watched the movie in the theater and thought it was great. He’s ten, older than I was when I first discovered Underdog. The movie is also live-action (with MAJOR CGI effects) which lends itself to the younger crowd. And it stars a cute beagle as the main character. If you’re a kid, what’s not to love?

I sat down with my son and popped the DVD into the player. Truthfully, I wasn’t expecting much, but I can be a ten-year-old kid with the best of them. When the remix of the show’s theme song came on, I have to admit that I got excited and carried away, and even started singing along (the words that I could remember).

The movie gave Underdog a police dog background that I wasn’t exactly ecstatic about. But it had him screwing up and immediately drawing sympathy, so it worked.

In fact, the story pulls in the origins of so many things that weren’t explained in Underdog’s original cartoon run. Never once did the series tell how Underdog got his powers. It did mention the Underdog Super Energy Vitamin Pill, which gave Underdog a “lift,” and that got edited out to some degree once drug awareness started kicking into the kid’s cartoon. But no one mentioned where the pills came from. The movie takes care of that, but it doesn’t give Underdog the nifty little ring he kept his Underdog pill in.