Four of Them

Guys. Guys. If you've never heard of this show, I sincerely feel sorry for you. Organize yourselves a telethon.

Fine. So, it's about these dudes call the Xiaolin Dragons, who chill out at the Xiaolin Temple in China, and it was created by Christy Hui. And the main characters were Omi, this tiny little guy who lived at the Temple his whole life, and he was the Dragon of Water, and was yellow and had this huge head, and a lot of the show was cultural clashes with the three new Dragons who are brought in the first episode. There's Kimiko, voiced by that chick who does every single female voice on every single Cartoon Network/Nickelodean/assorted cartoon ever, a Japanese import who, of course, is always wearing this awesome outfits and fucking around with various technological marvels because, of course, her dad owns the biggest company in the world or something. And then there's Raimundo, who's the best character, even though he is often too stupid to live, he's a Brazilian circus performer or something, he always wears a medallian in his street (non-Xiaolin robe) clothes, and he's the "clown" of the group, but that's stupid to say, and the only reason he's not overtly stereotypical is because I don't think there are any well-known Brazilian stereotypes. And Clay, a Texan cowboy (god) who don't fight girls and is all placid and shit.

They are ruled by Master Fung, a wise old monk. Their mission is to gather all the Shen Gong Wu (huge backstory, kind of badass, but fairly long), and whenever a new one activates, their wise-crackin' dragon scroll-guarder Dojo Kanojo Cho senses it, and they go off to whatever part of the world it's at, where they have to battle some villains to get it, usually wannabe supervillain Jack Spicer and his much more sinister floating-head-ghost Wuya, who in the second season gets her body back and, ah, never mind. Anyway, when they do battle, they must declare (wait for it) Xiaolin Showdown, wherein they yell "Gong Yi Tanpai", which means "Begin the Showdown", but apparently it was meant more as a pseudo-Chinese way of saying "Ready Set Go!", and then they used any Shen Gong Wu they had, and it would be one-on-one, except for when it wasn't.

And it was all kind of ridiculous, because a big schtick of Omi's was that he kept fucking up common idioms, like 'kick your but' or 'Mad skills', and someone, mostly Raimundo, would correct him, and I'd be like, how the fuck does he know them? Because they were mostly American idioms, and the only American of the lot was Clay, who spent most of his slang time on long-winded metaphors involving cattle ranching and cacti. Which brings up, are they all really speaking English, or Chinese, or what? Because so far we got Texan English, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and I'll assume Jack Spicer was American. This shit is weird.

I'll admit, the first season was bad. Formulaic and stilted. But then the second season got cooler, and the third season got hardcore. Especially the series finale.

Did you know childrens' TV shows aren't allowed to have official series finales? Because the executives want kids to keep watching reruns in hopes of a new episode. Dicks.

Let's bring this show back! It's so fucking awesome!

Do I sound especially teenager-ish today? Maybe. More uninhibitedy fangirlish.

Every single episode is on Youtube. Go. Watch. It.

Also, it had the best opening ever: