Kenny Starfighter is a low-budget Swedish children's comedy miniseries from 1997.
The series begins by establishing that there has been a galactic war called "The Zongo War", in which a rebel army gathered its forces to defeat Emperor Zing. However, Zing's potent collection of dangerous chemical formulas went missing in the process, with several galactic heroes attemtping to find them without success. Kenny Starfighter is the most recent of these galactic heroes, who visits Earth in order to find these formulas and thwart Dr. Deo's evil plan to use these formulas to turn every planet in the galaxy into giant deodorant-rollers. However, Kenny can't do this on his own, and usually needs help from a quartet of roughly 15-year old children named Marcus, Tyrone, "Burken"note and Sofia.
Since 2017, the series has been part of SVT's open archive, meaning that the series always can be watched in its entirety (provided that you live in Sweden) on SVT's website.
In 2009, a prequel movie named Kenny Begins was released, following Kenny's time at the Galactic Heroes Academy and his very first venture to planet Earth. A sequel series with the subtitle Dr. Deo Strikes Back begun airing in September 2022, taking placing 25 years after the events of the 1997 series (mirroring the real life time gap between the two shows) and introduces us to Kenny's cousin Penny Starfighter who goes searching for Kenny after he disappeared from the public eye.
Kenny Starfighter contains examples of:
- Affectionate Parody: The series regularly plays with recurring tropes in sci-fi films.
- AI Is A Crap Shoot: Downplayed with the Memorymatican; while not homicidal, she is very sarcastic and prone to insulting her creators.
- Big Bad: Dr. Deo.
- Rutger Oversmart in the prequel movie.
- Catchphrase:
- Kenny tends to greet people with "Wolli-Bolli!" and uses "Ischlo-Pischlo!" (both made-up terms) as a curse.
- Hempo 2 often responds to others' suggestions with "(X)? Damn good!"
- The Chew Toy: The Hempos whom gets hurt alot.
- Clothing Damage: In one episode, Kenny's suit gets a noticable rip; however, it turns out that the suit can repair itself.
- Cool Starship: Subverted. Kenny's ship is a bus with wings, and other starships include a flying Volvo, a rocket-telephone kiosk, and, in The Movie, a flying garbage dumpster.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Kenny can't tell left from right or a washing machine from a lifeform, but when things get serious, he really knows how to kick ass. He is also the first to figure out the identity of the Big Bad, to everyone's surprise.
- Dirty Cop: The local head of police is the kind that complains about not getting a cut of the profits when he "finds" an illegal gambling joint.
- Down in the Dumps: After Kenny crash-lands his space-bus on Earth, it gets towed to a dump.
- Emperor Scientist: Ensuring that Emperor Zing's formulas don't end up in the wrong hands is Kenny's original mission. The truth serum/brainwashing drug/turns people into green goo-chemical weapon mähälium is just one of the weapons among them.
- Evil Genius: Dr. Deo is supposedly very cunning and manipulative, and knows alot about Zing's formula.
- Extreme Omnivore: Burken happily eats anything that looks even slightly edible, including wall insulation (which he claims "tastes like strawberries").
- Glad I Thought of It: One of the Running Gags in the series is Kenny's sidekicks suggesting "How about we do X?", and Kenny responding with "No, let's do X". It's not clear if he consciously is trying to steal their ideas, or if he didn't listen to a word they said to begin with.
- Improbable Weapon User: Kenny uses a hair dryer equipped with lasers as a weapon when things get serious.
- Heel–Face Turn: The Hempos after being saved by Kenny from Deo.
- Hollywood Science: Subverted, Kenny tries to get an analysis of an unknown substance, only to be informed by the Memorymatican that analysis takes ten hours to complete.
- Hospital Hottie: The local school nurse wears a nurse outfit revealing most of her legs and some of her cleavage, although the effect is diminished by her fangs and creepy eyes.
- Human Aliens: Played straight, not a single non-human is seen.
- Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: The Hempos, who repeatedly bully Kenny and the kids; they are so incompetent at harming the protagonists that they almost always only get themselves harmed by their efforts.
- Karmic Butt-Monkey: The Hempos are a bunch of punk-bullies and they get themselves harmed alot.
- Luke Nounverber: The titular Kenny Starfighter.
- Manipulative Bastard: Dr. Deo plays both Kenny and other galactic heroes like pawns.
- Only Sane Man: The kids. Everyone else is either stupid, insane, evil, or a combination of all three.
- Parental Bonus: While the series was aimed at kids, it included some quips only their parents would get, such as the German teacher referencing the Bader-Meinhof groupnote when Marcus claims to have joined Buddhism.
- Posthumous Character: Emperor Zing is heavily implied to be dead, and the fundamental plot is Kenny making sure his research doesn't end up in the wrong hands.
- Punny Name: The Galaxy Police officers that came before Kenny include Lonny Lowlife, Fatso Butt and Lenny Fartrider.
- Right Man in the Wrong Place: Kenny is actually pretty competent when called upon to do straightforward action-heroics; the issue is that the search for Emperor Zing's formulas requires him to use a whole slew of other skills he doesn't have as well.
- Stripperiffic:
- The school nurse.
- The fake girl on Sun Planet also qualify.
- Lampshaded in Kenny's conversation with a laundry machine where he describes the female teachers back at the Galactic Heroes Academy walking around nearly naked due to their skimpy uniforms.
- Teleporter Accident: When Kenny tries to get out of Marcus's washing-room by teleporter, he gets split in half and his legs run off.
- Trouser Space: Characters are often seen pulling various unlikely things like syringes, rapiers, and an orchid out of nowhere.
- Wham Shot: A humorous version, but still. When Penny finally meets Kenny the end of episode 1 of the 2022 sequel (and doing a near shot-for-shot recreation of Rey's meeting with Luke Skywalker at the end of The Force Awakens), Kenny pulls down his hood to reveal he now sports a dorky bowl cut - which earlier in the episode had been established as a severe punishment in Myltan culture and a sign of disgrace.
- What Do You Mean, It's Phlebotinum?: To Kenny's people, chocolate soda is an extremely powerful fuel.
- We Will Not Have Pockets in the Future: Kenny keeps everything in his toolbelt or strapped to his chest or back.
