Our heroes' adventures range from basic comic book hero parody (as with a giant-headed intergalactic villain named Lactose the Intolerant) to more out-there fare like an episode where our duo are drafted into acting as marriage counselors for the Olympian gods ("Zeus, you're blocking!") after the Greek deities' marital discord wreaks climactic havoc on Earth. In "It's Dangly Deever Time," the star of an old Howdy Doody-styled puppet show crawls out of the teevee from rerun perpetuity, bringing evil versions of a variety of recognizable Golden Age of Television kid show icons with him. Though Purcell and his fellow scripters significantly toned down the violence of the original comics, they definitely worked to maintain the absurdist flair of the Sam & Max universe. "My mandate," Purcell states at one point during his Comic-Con interview, "was keeping the weirdness quotient up to snuff." In this, he arguably succeeded.

The 'toon's writers also managed to sneak in jokes that probably were beyond the ken of the younger Fox Kids audience members. In a prison-set Christmas episode, for instance, we see a "Do Not Open Until Christmas" label covering Max's derriere as he stoops to pick up a conveniently placed bar of soap off the floor. In a sequence set outside the city sewers, Max jubilantly describes all the baby alligators he saw down below. "They're buoyant and log-shaped," Sam states, "but I don't think they're alligators."

As with the comics, the tone in Sam & Max is noisy and ultra-frenetic, yet also oddly sweet at times. Still, this is not a show to watch if you're worried about waking anybody in the house. I view a lot of my review discs on Saturday mornings while my loving spouse is still asleep, so if I have any one criticism of Shout's DVD set, it's with the absence of subtitles or closed captioning. So there I was, sitting in the living room, torn between my desire to hear all the choice lines and my wish to let my wife sleep late on the weekend.

Guess which need ultimately won out?