'The Wizard of Watts': Cartoon musical accidentally hits cultural bull's-eye

LOS ANGELES — The Wizard of Watts, an animated television musical, was conceived two years ago as a big, fat gob of raucous entertainment wrapped around a nugget of racial commentary.

Then, with its animation already far underway, Ferguson, Mo., became a flashpoint, starting a national debate about race, overzealous policing and the need for officers to wear body cameras. Then came the phrase "I Can't Breathe" and the broader protest against police brutality.

Suddenly, The Wizard of Watts, with its devastated black neighborhoods and army of pigs, took on greater weight. How the musical will be received by viewers at a racially charged cultural moment is anyone's guess — nobody has seen it yet. But when it arrives on Cartoon Network's after-hours Adult Swim block on Saturday, The Wizard of Watts will at the very least become one of those eerie instances of art accidentally mirroring life.

The primary villain in the Magical Land of Oz-Watts, where the story takes place, is a vicious pig clad in riot gear. Water does not neutralize this Oz villain; instead this baddie gets melted with a camcorder. "Oh, no! Not an irrefutable visual record of my illegal actions!" the anthropomorphized pig wails as he turns to mush at the musical's climax.

Even Carl Jones, the director of The Wizard of Watts and one of its writers, was surprised at hitting such a cultural bull's-eye.

"I take pride in tackling things with my gloves off, but animation takes such a long time to produce that you usually don't end up being all that current," he said.

Jones had noticed on social media how blacks were increasingly using cellphone cameras as "protection from police, like as a weapon," he said.

"Nobody was talking about it and so I decided we had to take it on," he said.

Jones, 42, fits into a loose group of rising black writers and directors finding crossover success with comedy that doubles as biting racial commentary. But Jones' style can be particularly over the top.

"I think there is a racial temperature in this country that has reached a boiling point, and the more we as artists can shine a light and make people talk about it, the better off we are going to all be," he said.

The Wizard of Watts is a special episode of Black Dynamite, an Adult Swim series run by Jones that lovingly parodies blaxploitation cinema. Now in its second season, the show, set in the 1970s, stars a heroic brothel owner who runs an orphanage from the same location — the Whorephanage.

Overflowing with sexual imagery and profane language (often bleeped by Cartoon Network), Black Dynamite has featured an albino gorilla named Honky Kong and young black people who discover that slavery existed only after watching the miniseries Roots.

The musical special begins with the pimp hero, Black Dynamite, taking a rare day off. But without his muscle on display in the neighborhood, police start beating residents, who respond with violence. (The thrashings, one character says excitedly, "make me feel like burning down my own community!") Black Dynamite investigates, gets hit with a brick and floats off to Oz-Watts.

There, the pigs terrorize a community of Rodney Munchkings. Trying to get home, Black Dynamite sets off not on the yellow brick road but on a trash-strewn Malcolm X Boulevard.

"Basically, I set out to create a blacker version of The Wiz and this is how it ended up," Jones said, with a hearty laugh.

Some viewers will find The Wizard of Watts in reckless bad taste — Fat Albert this is not. It's not even The Boondocks, the controversy-courting series about two black boys in a white suburb that Jones once helped produce.

But to recoil at the vulgarity would miss the point, said Jon Steingart, a producer of the musical. "What Carl does is fair-minded, it's smart, and, as a fan, I don't see enough of that in comedy," said Steingart, a co-founder of Ars Nova, a Manhattan nonprofit that nurtures emerging playwrights, comics and musicians.

He added, "Carl could write a much angrier story — he grew up in very difficult circumstances — but he understands that his viewers are predominantly white young males." Aimed at men 18-34, Adult Swim has an audience that is about two-thirds male and two-thirds white, according to Nielsen data.