Rickety Rocket is staggering at first sight, even more staggering is that it graced Saturday morning television as late as 1979.

The difficult thing about racism is that its tough to discriminate between someone who's a racist and someone who's just an idiot. A person may attribute their bad service at White Castle to racism, which is very tough to quantitate when dealing with a place with such consistently bad service. As a society, we have assigned the name 'racist' as about the worst title you can place on a person, and in exchange for this, the word 'racist' should hopefully be used mainly in the quantitative sense. Rickety Rocket is racist. It may be racist like someone with Down's syndrome who just watched Birth of a Nation, but its racist nonetheless. Any ten-year-old could identify this as Amos and Andy style characters animated in outer space.

I tend to think that this show wasn't made as an intentional slight towards Afro-Carribbean people. Its just people who really weren't thinking about what they were doing, and simply created caricatures of the caricatures on TV at that time. However, this is the only Hanna Barbera mystery team show where the female team member is dumb, ugly and sexually aggressive. The leader is a fast talker, their spaceship is made of junk, and features giant oversized lips. It was as if they someone looked at Sanford and Son, and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and thought to themselves: black people in garbage equals comedy!