Ex-champ’s on the case with bizarre animated ‘Mike Tyson Mysteries’

In the animated “Mike Tyson Mysteries” (10:30 p.m. Monday, Adult Swim), the former champ travels the country in a van dubbed the Mystery Mobile and assists strangers with the help of his homeschooled Korean daughter, the ghost of the Marquess of Queensberry and a foul-mouthed, hard-drinkin’, hooker-lovin’ pigeon who used to be a man.

Its inspirations seem equal parts Hanna-Barbera and handfuls-of-barbiturates.

In one episode, Mike and the gang are summoned by carrier pigeon to help Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy finish his latest novel. Another makes a supervillain out of IBM founder Thomas Watson. At some point, Mike goes to the moon. And, while the scenes aren’t taken from actual episodes, the opening credits show him punching out a dinosaur and riding a pterodactyl.

“It was just weird from the beginning,” Tyson recalls. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this is kinda strange.’ ”

But it could have been even stranger.

“People were just shouting out arbitrary things,” producer Hugh Davidson, the Groundlings alum who’s written most of the episodes, says of early brainstorming sessions. “ ‘Oh, he should have a robot!’ ‘He walks around with a toaster, and the toaster talks!’ ”

Ultimately, it was decided to make “Mike Tyson Mysteries” more grounded — or at least as grounded as something can be on Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s bonkers, late-night alter ego.

There’s no rational reason for giving him an 18-year-old Korean daughter. But Pigeon (voiced by Norm Macdonald), who was turned fowl by his ex-wife, plays into Tyson’s well-known love of the birds. He’s raised them since he was 9 and now has about 1,800. The ghost of the Marquess of Queensberry (“Community’s” Jim Rash), the 19th century Scottish nobleman who endorsed the rules for modern boxing, is the not-so-living embodiment of Tyson’s real-life desires to stop thinking just about himself and to help others.

“There’s something naive about it and funny when it’s distilled into this cartoon form,” Davidson says of Tyson’s altruism. ”And it makes him just seem like a half-destructive, out-of-control person who’s trying to do well.”

We’re five years into the era of “Fun Mike Tyson,” a career arc that kicked off with his celebrated cameo in “The Hangover” and has included sitcom appearances, his Funny or Die spoofing of 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain and “Undisputed Truth,” the one-man show that’s played everywhere from the MGM Grand to Broadway to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and revealed Tyson to be a bit of a song-and-dance man. But “Mike Tyson Mysteries” is the first project in which he’s truly let other people make fun of him.

“Now, bein’ an entertainer, I don’t take myself too seriously,” reveals Tyson, who’s called Las Vegas home, or at least one of his homes, for the past 28 years. “Back in the day, I took myself too seriously. Too freakin’ serious.”

Still, Davidson admits to being “kind of terrified” when he first brought some of the jokes he’d written to the man who once threatened to eat boxer Lennox Lewis’ children. “I have never forgotten for one second” how dangerous Tyson could be, he says. “He’s gigantic. He’s strong as can be.”

That initial fear eventually worked its way into the series. “At any second, if someone were to say the wrong thing, the idea that he could go crazy and get you, like a grizzly bear, is the funniest thing on earth,” Davidson says.

Along those lines, one episode has Mike punching out chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov because he mistakes “grandmaster” for “grand wizard” and thinks the Russian is a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

In another, Mike pummels Criss Angel. “He gets mad,” Davidson says. “He thinks illusions are tricks, and he doesn’t like people trickin’ him. So he just runs into a performance and socks him.”

To his credit, Tyson hasn’t rejected anything Davidson has thrown at him, regardless of how silly it may make him look or sound. “It’s bigger than me,” Tyson explains. “It’s about making a success out of something starting from scratch.”

The “Mike Tyson Mysteries” scripts are wonderfully absurd, but Davidson, a writer-actor on Adult Swim’s “Robot Chicken,” credits Tyson with making them better just by being himself. In the beginning, Davidson says he would script some of Tyson’s famous mispronunciations, including pages of variations on “Cormac McCarthy.” Then Tyson got his hands on the word “chupacabra,” the mythical Latin American bloodsucker, and spun comedy gold.

“Sometimes, like, by the third take of a single line, Mike will reorder it in an odd way,” adds Davidson, who’s clearly fond of his star. “And that’s usually the funniest thing. By far. These unexpected phrasings, they’re so good.”

Tyson is having a terrific time with the nuttiness of the very adult show. “It’s craaazy,” he practically coos. “I love this stuff.”

But he’s heard from at least two fans who are less enthusiastic: his 5-year-old daughter, Milan, and his 3-year-old son, Morocco.

“My kids think I curse too much. ‘Daddy likes to curse. You curse too much.’ And I say that’s just for television. ‘It’s a joke. I’m not really cursing. It’s play cursing.’ ”

Mostly, though, Tyson is grateful — the word comes up often, even in a brief conversation — for the opportunity that eluded him when he was on top of the world.

In an era when Mr. T, Kid ’n Play and New Kids on the Block had their own cartoons, and Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson and Wayne Gretzky shared one, Tyson says he was never approached for Saturday morning greatness.

Even if he had been, he admits, at the time he wasn’t responsible enough to show up for work.

“When you think about it and put it in perspective,” Tyson says, “when I was ‘Mike Tyson’ in the ’80s, and I was this heavyweight champ guy — biggest, toughest guy, $20 million fights — comic books wouldn’t touch me with a million-foot pole. Any kind of comics or cartoons. And to think I’m doing it at this point in my life is just so refreshing.”

■ Finishing touches: The restoration the Jerry’s Nugget and Liberace Museum signs for the Neon Museum is the focus of “Restoration Neon” (9 p.m. Monday, KLVX-TV, Channel 10).

■ Special screening: Las Vegas writer-director Malcolm Brooks hosts a public screening of his film, “Searching for Life,” at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Galaxy Theatres at the Cannery.

■ On a personal note: You’re reading this because longtime Las Vegas Review-Journal Features Editor Frank Fertado believed in me. Frank had a great heart and terrible taste in television. He passed away on Saturday, and the world is already a less entertaining place without him.

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567.