Back in 2012, Danger 5 nearly killed me. Specifically, it was the sit down gun; a shotgun fired into the ceiling by a bird-headed colonel to hurry up a meeting. It’s a simple, stupid joke executed with a totally straight face. Watching it on my laptop in a uni lounge had me in such hysterics that a concerned classmate tried to call my family. Showing him the sit down gun did not help the situation.
To explain Danger 5 is to rob it of its magic. It starts out as a pseudo-60s Eurospy comedy set in an extended second world war, where the Nazis are reduced to cartoonish villains and an international team of heroes tries to kill Hitler every week. The second season transforms itself into an 80s Miami Vice extravaganza of sex, drugs, shoulder pads and assorted bodily fluids.
Out of context, it’s a fever dream. Most people have only seen Danger 5 out of context in gifs like Sensible Chuckle magazine and Ilsa shooting an enemy through a phone. But that doesn’t begin to cover the Nazi dinosaurs, cocktail recipes, poorly dubbed dialogue and the yellow SBS subtitles – and when you put it all together the show is greater than the sum of its parts.
Created by Dario Russo and David Ashby after the viral success of their low-fi web series Italian Spiderman, Danger 5 revels in the budget restraints and dodginess of early television. The same sets and footage are recycled every episode, the miniatures are obvious and the human-animal hybrid characters (of which there are many) are clearly just guys in masks. The acting is hammy enough to cover Christmas for decades and every episode ends with a shoehorned ad for a non-existent product; pre-lit matches or Das Fuhrer: The Board Game, for example.
A lesser show would nod, wink and end up as nothing more than an extended series of gags but Danger 5 commits wholeheartedly to playing it straight and being a TV show in its own right. In each episode our heroes take on Hitler in new and increasingly absurd circumstances, be it mind-control labs, venturing to the lost city of Atlantis or battling robots in a cardboard box metropolis.
The end result is so delightfully stupid that Danger 5 gets away with being one of the least politically correct shows SBS has ever made – the first episode alone features an awful lot of incidental and unfortunate blackface. Danger 5 isn’t so much a show that you “couldn’t make any more” but rather something you can’t believe got made in the first place, a testament to the kind of insanity and commitment to the bit that only SBS would be brave enough to fund.
But the show uses its absurdity to make sharp critiques of spy-genre mainstays, especially surrounding male entitlement. If Danger 5 has a James Bond, it’s the chain-smoking and vodka-sculling Ilsa (Natasha Ristic), whose fight or flight response comes with a third option, also starting with F. The macho team member Jackson (co-creator Ashby) endlessly pursues her in the belief that the love of a good man is all she needs to become his perfect woman. By the second season, he has reached the point of imagining Ilsa as a sexy deer he’s constantly hunting, but one that he can never catch on his own terms.
It’s been more than 10 years since Danger 5 bowed out with a Power Ranger-esque space battle, and co-creator Russo has finally made the jump to the silver screen with the Sydney film festival audience award winner The Fox (which is also showing at the Melbourne international film festival). While its tale of a hapless small-town bloke and the talking fox who turns his girlfriend into the perfect woman might sound a long way from Danger 5, it treads plenty of the same ground, with its talking animals and exploration of male entitlement. I can only hope the sit down gun makes an appearance too.
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Danger 5 is available to stream via Foxtel and Binge in Australia, Tubi in the US and on Netflix in the UK. Find more recommendations of what to stream in Australia here
