Hong Kong Phooey may sound like the name of a Transformers spin-off movie starring Michael Bay’s racist robot twins, but it’s actually a mid-70s Hanna-Barbera cartoon about a dog with karate moves. Luckily the dog didn’t have bucked teeth and a racist squint, or we’d have another controversy on our hands. The show’s name just sounds vaguely racist, but it’s no more racist than a blacksploitation kung fu movie. Actually, that may not have been the best way to make my case…

Whatever the original Hong Kong Phooey cartoon was, it’s about to become a movie. We’ve heard rumblings of this for awhile and now THR confirms not only that it’s happening, but that they’ve hired one of the writers of Family Guy, David Goodman, to script it.

That doesn’t mean you should expect random, raunchy asides in which our hero character stubs his toe or fights a giant chicken. This has the stink of an Alvin and the Chipmunks style family movie. They’re planning it as a live action/CGI hybrid which probably means actors interacting with a computer generated dog in a kimono.