via Adult Swim/fandom
Adult Swim was a weird, Wild West of cartooning back in the 2000s. It was a time when peoples’ acid hallucination-based dreams could get multiple seasons, provided it was a cheap-to-make cartoon.
Heck, one cartoon famously got greenlit for 20 episodes without so much as a pilot. It just coasted in on a pitch. That show? It was Minoriteam, by Adam De La Pena. This show was so offensive, it was banned in 2020 for racial stereotyping and hate speech.
Despite it all, Minoriteam had its poignant points beneath the surface. It’s 2025 and racism has become a major part of our political sphere. Maybe it’s time to look beneath the surface and actually dive deep into the most hated show of Adult Swim’s history.
My review of the show might shock you.
The premise of Minoriteam was a simple one that got warped pretty hard.
The show’s pitch was actually something I would have bought at first glance: it was a team of superheroes fighting racism. The problem is, each of the members of said superhero team was supposed to be a racial stereotype of some sort in their “super form.
Meet the Minoriteam.
Let’s start with actually getting to know the superheroes that upset everyone at Cartoon Network and beyond.
Fasto was the fast black guy. He sounded like Chris Tucker, was attracted to white women, and was all about the booty. In his daily form, he was a feminist professor.
JewCano was the Jewish guy who had the powers of a volcano and the powers of “Jewish faith.” He spoke with a mild Israeli accent in his super form and had a beard and yarmulke.
Nonstop was the Indian/South Asian guy and had a flying carpet. He was also immune to bullets and fire because he had “lead lined skin.” When he wasn’t “turbaned up” as a superhero, he was a pro skater named Dave Raj who happened to be a pothead.
El Jefe was the Latino superhero and had a super-powered leafblower and a sombrero. In his real life, he was a billionaire not unlike Carlos Slim. In super form, he could only speak Spanish, even though he understood English.
Dr. Wang was the Chinese superhero. He was unique because he was disabled and his superpower was having super smarts. In his day-to-day, he was a laundromat owner. The laundromat doubled as Minoriteam’s HQ.
Jane, a female college intern. She often had the best common sense, but was often ignored by the team members. She was also highly underutilized, which (kind of) was a joke about how everyone doesn’t realize that feminism has a lot to do with fighting racism.
You might notice that LGBTQIA+ people aren’t represented in this team, nor are Native Americans. I’ve always wondered why the creator of the show did that, or why there weren’t more minorities involved, such as Native Americans, Arabs, or an openly trans person.
I always figured that they were going to be added later. It was only the first season, after all. Then again, it really doesn’t seem like the people who made this show really put much thought into it.
Who were they fighting?
Here’s where I saw a lot of promise: the villains. The main video was White Shadow, an Illuminati-like talking pyramid whose main goal was to promote racism to promote his own wealth and power. He had a massive network of racist sidekicks, including:
Racist Frankenstein. This dude was mostly an homage to Solomon Grundy, but actually played up the way that a lot of racists subtly dogwhistle by not wearing the color black. He hated anything that was black in color, including pen ink and hair.
Corporate Ladder. This was a talking stepstool that, you guessed it, was a symbol of how corporatism often harms minorities or exploits them.
Balacktus. This is a “blaxploitation” form of Galactus. He came from a planet of all-black people.
Dirty Cop, also known as Cop. He was an homage to all the racist cops who end up locking away minorities just because they’re corrupt and hateful. This is really poignant because Minoriteam members often worked with the police to lock up evil doers.
Standardized Test. This is a way of showing how standardized tests have a negative impact on people of color, especially back then when essay writing was part of it.
Corporate Loophole. This was a villain who was meant to represent how often corporations use loopholes in the law to avoid coming to justice or doing the right thing. People of color often end up bearing the worst of the brunt.
They also had several White Shadow characters that were racial stereotypes — most notably a leprechaun, a prissy white girlfriend, and an Italian mobster.
Was it really that racist and sexist?
Yes. Yes it was. But at the same time, I always found it to be an oddly roundabout way of addressing a lot of elements of racism that people didn’t really discuss back then. Minoriteam was good at subtly showing off how racism takes roots and how it harms everyone.
Unfortunately, the show did it in a way that showed the worst possible stereotypes of each race — and they also patently ignored women and LGBTQIA+, making it a pretty slanted way of showing it off.
Much of the point of Minoriteam got lost among pretty hateful jokes or came at the expense of women’s welfare. I mean, they had one episde where JewCano has a nightmare that his parents find out about his black girlfriend and have a conniption.
In many episodes, women were treated as sex toys or props. This was particularly true of white women, who often acted as sexual fetish material for Fasto. (At one point, they were stuck in the internet, and a White Shadow ad for raceplay porn pops up — starring Fasto and a white woman. Not a good look!)
The reviews came in and the show tanked.
I mean, it takes a lot for a boardroom to do a full 180 on a show once it’s out. However, that happened with Minoriteam and it’s easy to see why. From a premier that was talked up with special commercials to a catastrophic debut, it’s hard to imagine a show crashing out harder than this one.
The reviews say it all:
“But if you’re not in the exact right mind-set — some perfect cocktail, I’m guessing, of gender, age, and chemical enhancement — the show isn’t particularly funny. In a sense, that’s because it’s not offensive enough. We’re well past the point where shock value was enough to make ethnic humor work. We need something crazy enough to make us gasp, whether in disbelief or in recognition.” — Boston.com
Or this one:
“Overall, Minoriteam is a brainless, toothless, atrocity and is better off left untouched. I’m glad De la Pena came back with the funny, but short lived Code Monkeys.” — ritonobono, IMDB
Despite this, I don’t want to hate the show.
The purpose of Minoriteam was to fight racism, often by pointing out the absurdity of stereotypes. Even then, it was done in such bad taste that Adult Swim quickly shoved it under the rug. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not even that funny, though I’d argue that it’s more of an experience than it is a comedy.
The network also buried evidence of it for years. In 2020, they officially banned the cartoon from the network due to the rise in racial tensions. Not going to lie, that’s actually very hard to do with a platform like Adult Swim.
Our political atmosphere is different these days and sometimes we need something extreme to make a point.
We have a lot of people brainwashed into hating their neighbors and racism is boiling to a fever pitch. There are lots of people in America who genuinely believe in the stereotypes pushed by Republicans.
In a weird way, Minoriteam used those types of stereotypes against racism. The show revealed how insane they were and also taught about how racism is often based on fear and how racism is pushed by the wealthy to encourage division among the poor.
In 2025, this kind of show might help pull people teetering into radicalization back down to reality. The type of racists who end up hitting up Q-Anon boards are not going to watch careful, poignant stories about racism like The Color Purple.
No, that would make them lose their cool over the “woke” nature of it. Minoriteam did not make any qualms about being politically incorrect. Quite the opposite: they reveled in it while talking about real-life issues.
Here’s my verdict.
Had the writing been a bit better, had it been released a little later, and had there been more work on the show before it hit the air, Minoriteam could have been a very successful, very powerful show. However, this didn’t happen and it was a major loss for all involved.
It was abundantly clear that executives didn’t watch a pilot, otherwise they would have been able to fix the show’s issues. The fact that women and LGBTQIA+ people weren’t involved in the main show character lineup is also a sign that, sadly, it was a product of the time.
As is, it was a pretty carelessly thrown together show that ended up angering more than it did making people think. The writing didn’t work, though the comic book-style animation looked great.
Did it deserve the hate that it received? Maybe. It all depends on whether you think the ends justify the means with Minoriteam’s goal. With that said, I’d love to hear your opinions on this cartoon. Was it worth the hate, or was it oddly prescient? Tell me in the comments below.
Psst…Have you seen my more esoteric writing on Sayzio.com yet?
