"The year was 1699. High in Castle Fantom, two sworn
     enemies engaged in mortal combat. But for one valiant
     hero, the fight would end in a cruel twist of fate..."
 

    In 1699 whilst doing battle with the evil Baron Von Skelter, the Duke de Fantom
    was magically imprisoned in a painting hanging in Fantom Castle. Three hundred
    years later a thriving metropolis - Metro City - has sprung up around the ruined
    castle. And on the dawn of this new millenium we join a feisty feline detective, 
    Tabitha Wildcat, and her associates MacDuff  mouse and Lindbergh pigeon who
    are on the trail of Metro City's meanest gangster, an arachnid called Marmagora
    described as "a black widow spider many many times over!" Tabs and her friends
    take a wrong turn into the castle and inadvertently release The Duke de Fantom
    from captivity. This strange masked hero is a fish-out-of-water, a debonnaire
    courtesan with a penchant for the ladies and a deft hand with a blade, though
    as we soon learn, he holds no knowledge of such modern jiggery-pokery
    as microwaves and television sets...

       

    When pressed by the three detectives, The Duke reveals his past in more detail:
   
       "I was the last of my family. He was Baron Hugo Von Skelter,
      madman, twisted by devilish experiments in alchemy, set upon
      the path of evil, determined to rule the world. Victory for him
      would mean that the last person to oppose him had gone!..."

    So what devilish device did Von Skelter use to imprison The Duke?
    
        "The Crystal Of Malevolance, a stone so powerful that it could
       change worlds!"

    Right you are, then. But the burning question is what was he after?

      "Von Skelter wanted from me the Ring Of The Phantoms, a
       ring one thousand years old whose powers had helped my
       family oppose evil down the ages..."

    Cheeky MacDuff sums up his past in one line:

        "You were frozen in there like Han Solo in Star Wars!"

    Free once more, The Duke joins our modern trio in their battle against Marmagora
    and her cronies who have used the very same crystal of malevolance to bring
    Von Skelter forward in time and finish the fight. By the end of the first episode
    our Duke has finally defeated the Baron and retrieved not only his magic ring,
    but also his sword called Touche which flies to his hand when called, and has
    been with him all of his nine lives. And when The Duke reveals his full perfumed
    name to be 'Phillipe L'Entrique Elan de Chanel, Count Givenchy Duke of Fantom'
    MacDuff rechristens him Fantomcat, or FC for short. Although the Baron may
    have been felled, Marmagora is still hanging around and the battle will continue
    another day - or indeed, for 26 episodes...

    Fantomcat is, of course, a take on those beloved saturday morning serials
    with our titular star combining elements of Errol Flynn, Zorro and even French
    anti-hero Fantomas. The animation for the show was actually produced on the
    continent by Alfonso Productions of Spain. There's some welcome wit and
    repartee here, but the production is perhaps not quite as nimble, nor as sharp
    as it might have been. Still, it tickles your toon buds at times...

 

    Some Fantom facts

    • Fantomcat's cloak is also magic and can render him invisible when required...

    • McDuff speaks with a broad scouse accent. His real name is Claude and
       and he once had a girlfriend called Leandra. Apparently he doesn't like holes,
       because they give him the creeps...

    • Lindbergh, meanwhile, speaks only in a manic gobbledigook of Pidgin English,
       similiar indeed to Clunk in those Hannah Barbera Dick Dastardly toons.
       Lindbergh supposedly can't stand heights and hates flying...

    • Marmagora's assistant bug is a fauning over-eager fly called Vile...

    • In episode two Marmagora hires The Monk, a praying mantis who can
       disguise himself like a plant and is said to be the world's most patient hitman....

    • And in that same episode we see MacDuff on a research mission, leafing
       through a tome entitled The World's Hitmen, Volume 1 in which we see
       caricature photos of Jeremy 'The Axeman' Paxman and a bulldog called
      Jolly Jack Prescott - the former being a spoof of the famous BBC presenter,
      and the latter of course referring to the infamous Labour MP John Prescott...  

 

 
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