Watching the paper cutout world of Inferno Cop reminds me of children playing with action figures and overactive imaginations, conjuring up bizarre scenarios where they fight evil, defy logic, and come out on top within a matter of minutes before diving right back in, raising the stakes, and making up a new enemy to fight. Not counting Inferno Cop himself, whose model consists of a skin-tight biker outfit and a floating skull on fire for a head, there are only a handful of different models that play all the various characters, and their voices sound like the strained attempts of three or four people making them up as they go along. The pacing is breakneck, and in every two minute episode there is a fight, started out of nowhere and resolved in the most absurd manner possible. It is a show without a second of spare room that defies all sense of plot or meaning, and yet between the narration and Inferno Cop’s remarks we are kept right with the action at every moment. Most importantly, from the writing to the scenarios to the fights to the resolutions, it is brilliantly hilarious. Young me playing with action figures certainly couldn’t have conceived of anything nearly as funny.
The only real continuity comes from following the loose cannon Inferno Cop on his mission to eradicate evil. We follow him as temporary sidekicks, evil organizations, and crazy setting that range from the Cretaceous period to Hell itself quickly come and go in the rapid flow of events. At two minutes an episode, each scenario has almost no time to play out, and yet they choose to take a four minute episode and squish out every pause and moment to breathe, making an already comical bit even more absurd. This is a show where a boy set on fire turns into a superhero, only to turn himself into turbo fuel for a racecar that itself is Inferno Cop. This is a show where Inferno Cop’s bullet bounces harmlessly off an enemy monster, only to bounce harmlessly off Inferno Cop to blow the monster up. This is a show where Inferno Cop is put on trial and shoots the judge, only to find out that the prosecutor, the mysterious Mr. Judge, was the real judge all along, which lands him a jail sentence he can’t seem to escape from until the prison van drives off a cliff.
Everything begins and ends in the blink of an eye, and yet each episode sets up the next with real consequences. It begins with a street gang harassing a pregnant woman and ends with an Evangelion-esque apocalypse, and I won’t say the two are unrelated. Compared to the usual 2 minute episodes, the last episode is a full 12 minutes long, but only because they decided to needlessly stretch the usual 30 second credits to fill the last 8 minutes. We can almost hear them daring us to close the window, as if they’re hiding an extra scene at the end. By that point I would have taken any extra scene they were willing to give me.