Disney Cartoons

Handy Manny: Wilmer Valderrama's Disney Cartoon

Disney is perhaps the easiest of all the major animation studios to track on home video, largely because the studio has never sold any of its films to another studio, and has handled the distribution of all but a few (now obscure) live action releases to the home video market. Excluding arguments over Disney's genius (in terms of sales and marketing, at any rate) policy that limits the availability of the studio's output on video and DVD, the studio has been at or near the forefront of presentation since their inital release of Dumbo on Beta, VHS, CED Videodisc, and Laserdisc over 20 years ago.

In this article I am going to tell you about a new animated handyman in Preschool Town, and his name is "Handy Manny."

Disney’s colorful new animated series “Handy Manny” are shown on the Disney Channel’s Playhouse Disney, and it’s gaining popularity among the sippy-cup set.

Wilmer Valderrama (“Fes” from “That ’70s Show”) is the voice of "Handy Manny" or Manny Garcia, a bilingual handyman who lives in the town of Sheet Rock Hills. In each episode, a citizen of Sheet Rock Hills calls on "Handy Manny" to make a repair, and Manny answers, “Hola! Handy Manny’s Repair Shop. You break it, we fix it. This is Manny speaking.” With the help of his tools, each of which is a character with a cute name and a distinctly unique personality, "Handy Manny" overcomes any obstacles and gets the job done.

The tools are a motley bunch: Pat the clumsy hammer; Turner, a grouchy flathead screwdriver; Felipe, an ambitious Phillips screwdriver; Dusty, a motherly saw; Stretch, a tape measure who is a bit of a perfectionist; Rusty, the fearful wrench; and Squeeze, a curious pair of pliers.

Other regular characters include Kelly, a friendly hardware store owner, and Mr. Lopart, a nerdy candy store owner with a comb-over hairdo and a cat named Fluffy that has the same coif. The mayor of Sheet Rock Hills, featured in one episode in which Manny was called on to fix a broken stoplight that was causing a major traffic jam, is a Hispanic woman named Rosa. I appreciate that the show's creators thought to include a woman in a position of authority, especially a minority woman.