I've given Ralph Bakshi the benefit of the doubt every time I've watched one of his movies, but I have to say that there is no excuse for Hey Good Lookin'. I know that the original cut of the film is locked away in a Warner Bros. vault somewhere. I know that the film underwent major revisions due to studio demands. But Hey Good Lookin' is an animated travesty. It's an ugly, uncomfortable, and generally unpleasant experience. But whereas such qualities aided films like Coonskin (1975) because the entire works were racial and social commentaries, in Hey Good Lookin' they add nothing and leave the audience feeling queasy and empty. The story is a meandering mess about two 1950s greasers, Vinnie Genzianna and Crazy Shapiro. One of them is a Fonzie-esque playboy and the other is clinically, violently insane. Try and guess which is which. Through a series of muddled, confusing, and cluttered events, they find themselves drawn into a "rumble" with a black gang known as the Chaplains. One of the film's biggest failures involves its animation. Everything, with the exception of a few shots of rotoscoped dancing, is animated in the overtly cartoon-ish manner of Wizards (1977). But whereas that film at least had a few moments of relative restraint, I can't remember a single moment of Hey Good Lookin' where the characters weren't constantly flailing about like Tex Avery fever dreams while screaming incoherently. The racial and economic commentary that was so essential to Bakshi's other films is either phoned in or unceremoniously dropped. Sorry, Mr. Bakshi. But you can't win every time.
3/10
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