Pakdam Pakdai

Pakdam Pakdai (Hindi name: पकड़म पकड़ाई), also known internationally as Rat-A-Tat, is an Indian animated comedy TV series created by Toonz Animation for Nickelodeon India.

Plot
There is a constant war between Doggy Don and the three clever mice who live in his house. However, with the help of Doggy Don's brother, an ex-army dog, they fight the mice to win back their house.

Why This Show Should be Pakdamned

 * 1) FIRST AND FOREMOST, this show has barely any originality whatsoever, as it is nothing but a very low-budget clone and a complete rip-off of Oggy and the Cockroaches. It was most likely made because Nickelodeon India lost the rights to Oggy in 2012 to Cartoon Network India, and was made as a replacement due to the show's popularity.
 * 2) * The show's premise is an anthropomorphic housepet dueling against a trio of pesky vermin, with his green-furred relative. Sure, not familiar at all...
 * 3) *Doggy Don's name bears a resemblance to Oggy's name, just one letter off.
 * 4) *The characters are carbon copies of OatC, and some of them are based on the worst qualities about them:
 * 5) **Don is a control freak, and even worse, every time the mice bother him even in the slightest way, he rages, and not in a good way. Not to mention he is very dim-witted and most of the time, his idiocy is not that funny.
 * 6) ** Almost all the mice have the same personalities as the Cockroaches, with Lambu (or Larry) being the "sexy" (note the quotes) one like Marky, Motu (or Marly) is the simpleton clumsy 24/7 eating fat like Deedee and Chotu (Charly) has little to no personality besides being the smart one (like Joey with weapons) (more details in RQ#5).
 * 7) ** Colonel is egotistical and loves to laugh at Don. Though Jack from OatC tends to do something selfish too, but not to this extent as what Colonel would do. He even calls Doggy Don "Baby" just like Jack in the Hindi dub of Oggy and the Cockroaches.
 * 8) **Don and Colonel's granny is an abusive relative compared to Oggy's, as she is so strict with the two that she abuses them and beats them up.
 * 9) ** Ballu serve the same purpose as Bob the bulldog, except he beats the characters up on-screen, which is VERY mean-spirited.
 * 10) *The show also lacks any dialogue, but has an Indian version where it's narrated! (since Oggy had a dub parodying Bollywood stars)
 * 11) *One of the mice's laughter sounds much like the audio that plays when Joey and the cockroaches are laughing from OatC.
 * 12) *It also rips off Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes due to the violent slapstick and its sound effects.
 * 13) Much like the Gene Deitch era of Tom and Jerry and Herman and Katnip, it is very one-sided and one-dimensional with the antagonistic mice characters torturing the main characters for no reason and undeservedly winning in the end.
 * 14) Unlikable and idiotic characters, even for slapstick comedy standards, and the main characters aren't any better. In one episode, Don ate a remote so the mice couldn't find it.
 * 15) *The Mice Brothers are unlikable, annoying, sadistic jerks who humiliate Don and Colonel if they even barely provoke them, even worse than both Gene Deitch's version of Jerry Mouse, Herman the Mouse from Herman and Katnip and the Cockroaches combined.
 * 16) *The Doggie Brothers are annoying, lowbrow, ill-tempered, and unlikable mostly to the mice. They even laugh at them when they get hurt or humiliated. Their only redeeming qualities are that their designs are fine and they are sympathetic characters.
 * 17) The animation is cheap and terrible, especially for something made in 2013. All of them feel janky, with minimal movement, poor use of motion blur, and smear frames (which also add to the clipart feeling)
 * 18) Very poorly-written episodes that often feel that there is little to no story at all.
 * 19) Quantity Over Quality: The show lasted way too long for a widely hated mockbuster cartoon show, having a total of 5 seasons and 351 eight-minute episodes, showing how Toonz Animation is blind to the negative criticism of the show.
 * 20) Tons of extremely illogical, terrible, and downright nonsensical scenes that make absolutely ZERO sense whatsoever even by slapstick comedy standards are scattered throughout the show, perhaps even more so than any other cartoon show ever existed. Not even the most illogical of bad cartoon shows or movies like George of the Jungle (2007), Teen Titans Go!, the Gene Deitch era of Tom and Jerry, The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show, Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" or Looney Tunes' The Larriva Eleven for example would go this far with such illogical nonsense for the sake of cheap comedy. Examples:
 * 21) *The scene where the whole world sinks due to rain.
 * 22) *The mice brothers cooking food using explosives.
 * 23) *The scene where characters land from a plane or from space towards the earth without killing themselves (no joke).
 * 24) Some scenes are even stolen from shows like Tom and Jerry and Oggy and the Cockroaches, which handle such kind of humor much better than this show. Such scenes can easily make one think the show is intentionally terrible and nothing but a low-budget clone.
 * 25) The TDM Ou Mun version suffers poor translation for the Chinese narration as well as the subtitles for text translation.
 * 26) Bad and annoying sound effects, especially on the international versions where the screams are also high pitched, and sometimes the crying ones too. They even overuse stock sound effects and place them at inappropriate times.
 * 27) Dreadful soundtrack.
 * 28) Abysmal voice acting, because it's just noises. There's a narrator in the original Indian version though, which can also make it as hard to watch.
 * 29) *Don's screaming can get irritating and cliché.
 * 30) *Some of the vocal effects used are laughably misplaced due to how unfitting they are on the characters, such as Doggy Don emitting a girly scream in "Don vs Bees", even if it's an intentional joke.
 * 31) The humor is pretty stale, as the episodes sometimes focus only on slapstick humor, and the rest of the jokes can be tedious if repeated over and over, making them boring to watch after a couple of minutes.
 * 32) Lazy editing as there are animation errors everywhere (likely as a rushed production). Sometimes, the screen will outright flash to black when cutting to the next shot.
 * 33) Random copyright infringement:
 * 34) *In one episode, the rats watch a scene from The Jungle Book (1967) without permission from Disney.
 * 35) *Another episode uses a DVD cover of Super Duper Sumos without permission from DiC Entertainment (now known as WildBrain).
 * 36) *Another episode uses Mel Blanc's scream from Looney Tunes without permission from Warner Bros..
 * 37) *Many episodes use June Foray's female scream from Looney Tunes without permission from Warner Bros..
 * 38) *As mentioned before, one of the mice's laughter is the exact same laughing sound as for the cockroaches from Oggy and the Cockroaches.
 * 39) *One of the mice, Motu, has a design too similar to Remy from Ratatouille.
 * 40) There are lots of mean-spirited moments, such as:
 * 41) *In one episode, the mice actually kick Ballu's balls!
 * 42) *In "An Eerie Hustle", they actually KILL Don and feel NO remorse! (In the Hindi voice-over, they say "Today, Doggy Don will have a good sleep inside the ground!")
 * 43) *On top of that, the episode ends with Doggy Don, the mice brothers, and Colonel all DEAD and turned into ghosts.
 * 44) *In one episode, they make Colonel's eyes pop out in a HOSPITAL!
 * 45) Unlike Oggy and the Cockroaches and mh:besttvshows:Tom and Jerry, it overuses toilet humor, unfunny humor, and gross-out jokes, while the aforementioned shows can handle their humor and joke much better than this.
 * 46) The character designs are either bland, weak or out-of-place - the fact this is a cartoon makes them feel as if they're animated clipart characters.
 * 47) The episodes' title cards are incredibly ugly, cheap, poorly drawn, and are drawn way too small to be seen clearly by viewers, especially to viewers who have poor eyesight, or when the show is screened on small-sized television screens or even mobile phones. Not only that, the title card sequences are very boring to look at since they're very silent with no music playing over them.
 * 48) The pacing is atrocious, as most of the time the pacing tends to go way too fast at lightning speed that it gets mind-boggling after a while.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The show overall is so terrible, especially its low production values, that it could be unintentionally hilarious to some viewers.
 * 2) The music isn't that bad.
 * 3) Doggy Don and Colonel have okay designs.
 * 4) Some funny moments here and there.
 * 5) Something original about this show is how Chotu has his own weaponry such as a grappling hook.
 * 6) At least the characters' screen-time is more balanced compared to some episodes from the show it ripped off.

Reception
It is popular in India (due to it being based on another well-loved show) and it won the "Best Animated TV Episode" award at the 2014 BAF Awards, organized by FICCI, for the episode "Safari Don". However, it was panned by critics and audiences around the world, with criticism being targeted at its unoriginality and extremely poor production values. Though it has a rating of 6.5/10 on IMDb, the show's reviews were overwhelmingly negative.

Trivia

 * There was a little broadcasting event going on called " Doggy and Oggy ", featuring this and the show that it ripped off.
 * This was one of the most spammed shows on the network as it airs on Nick India's sister channel, Sonic, for nearly the whole day.
 * Now Zig & Sharko is spammed.
 * It aired in 2020 in TDM Ou Mun in the Chinese province of Macao, and some parts of Guangzhou.
 * It aired on Cartoon Network Asia for a short while.
 * During the year of its release, it aired on Nickelodeon India. In 2014 it moved to Sonic Nickelodeon.