Cowboys of Moo Mesa
Saturday, July 5th, 2008Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa is an American animated television series for children created by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book artist Ryan Brown. Like “Turtles”, I would watch it but didn’t like it all that much.
First broadcast on September 12, 1992, the television series ran for two seasons, spanning 26 episodes, before the show was canceled on May 26, 1994 with Disney’s acquisition of ABC. The series was then broadcast on Toon Disney from April of 1998 to April of 2001.
Like many cartoons during its time, The C.O.W.-Boys dealt with a mutation of some kind; in this case, an irradiated meteor struck the late 1800s western plains creating a miles high mesa shrouded in clouds. Everything trapped on top of the mesa was “cow-metized” by the light from the “cow-met” and “evolved” into a “bovipomorphic” state. Inspired by old tales of the Wild West, this new bovine community developed to the point where they emulated that era’s way of life, including the requisite ruffians and corrupt sheriffs. However, their knowledge of Wild West living was limited, and as such, many things about their culture had to be improvised to ‘fill in the blanks’.
The series focuses on trying to keep justice in the frontier territory. The lawbreakers were too much for the corrupt regulators of Cowtown - Mayor Bulloney and Sheriff Terrorbull - to handle by themselves. Helping them out, whether they wanted it or not, were a group of peacekeepers known as C.O.W. Boys, short for “Code of the West.” Led by bull Marshal Moo Montana, the C.O.W. Boys also included the Dakota Dude and the Cowlorado Kid. The muscle-bound Marshal and his deputies had their hands full with various ruffians and outlaw gangs that plagued the otherwise peaceful town.