Lil' Pimp
Who's the pimpin'est nine-year-old on the whole Internet?
If a pimp-off were held tomorrow, and all available nine-year-olds attended in full street regalia, the clear winner would have to be Lil' Pimp, the star of a new series of Flash-animated shorts on multimedia content site MediaTrip.com. More significantly, "Lil' Pimp" is also the first Flash cartoon ever to cross over onto the big screen. The weekly Web series is slated to become a full-length motion picture to be produced by Revolution Studios, led by former Disney executive Joe Roth.
What's the secret? Black culture + white culture has always equalled zesty dollops of humor, a fact used and exploited by successful comedians ranging from Chris Rock to Robin Williams to Eddie Murphy. So when an animated series teams a cute, articulate kid and his pet gerbil Weathers with a pair of streetwise pipe-hitting ghetto pimps, the mix is packed tight with comedic potential. "Lil' Pimp's" creators, Peter Gilstrap and Mark Brooks, exploit the culture clash for all it's worth.
"Lil' Pimp" manages to take a team of characters that could conceivably get stale after a couple of episodes and push them into ever-stranger and more amusing situations. In "Return of Infiniti," arch-nemesis Bobbi Infiniti moves in on sacred street turf with a band of sinister ho-bots, whose mechanical charms threaten to take business from freckle-faced Lil' Pimp and his pimp pals Fruitjuice and Nagchampa. This prompts some of the best dialogue of the series, as Lil' Pimp tries to relate to the situation at hand.
Lil' Pimp: At Disneyland they have a robot of Abe Lincoln... but he won't have sex for money.
Sweet Chiffon: Why the hell would anyone pay to have sex with a robot of Abraham Lincoln?
Nagchampa: Shit. He was a damn good president. You got to admit that.
In "Ho-bay.com," Fruitjuice and Nagchampa decide that the Internet is where tomorrow's top-notch ho action will be, and they team up with venture capitalists to launch Ho-bay.com. But Lil' Pimp's vision of the company as a provider of e-business infrastructure clashes with the old-school pimpin' service economy paradigm, and hilarity results as motivational speaker Tony Robbins is brought in to chair the corporation before its IPO.
It's good stuff. "Lil' Pimp" features solid writing, serviceable Flash animation and excellent voice-acting. And while the series has its kinks (Weathers, the Tourette's Syndrome gerbil, never quite lives up to his awesome potential), it's one of the most reliably funny spots on the Web. And while it has the potential to cross over into "South Park" crudeness and violence, the creators stick to the high road of good writing, more or less.
Web content may never pay off, and everything good may eventually crumble, leaving nothing behind but pornography and pathetic volunteer webzines. Until that day, there will be professionals doing professional work like "Lil' Pimp."
— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)
