AGENT ELVIS.

It’s 1968 and Elvis is bored with making rubbish movies and TV specials. He’d rather be a vigilante and take down drug dealers with Scatter, his cocaine-snorting, NASA-trained chimp. Meanwhile, his housekeeper Bertie is dating Captain Kirk…

Co-created – mind-bogglingly – by the King’s ex-wife Priscilla, the new animated Netflix series Agent Elvis is off-the-scale insane. It has a crazy logic of its own, is extremely violent and incredibly profane: “Fist me sideways!” is one of the more polite examples. Elvis himself is beautifully drawn, in his physical prime at 33, and entertainingly grumpy about the shifts in American popular culture in the late 1960s – for instance, he grumbles to a colleague to “turn that psychedelic drug shit off” when the radio plays The Doors’ ‘Hello, I Love You’. He’s equally unimpressed with the current state of Hollywood: “If I wanted to hang out with a bunch of stoned hippes, I’d return Dennis Hopper’s phone calls.”

The voice talent involved is top drawer. Respected character actor Matthew McConaughey supplies Elvis’s Southern drawl, as well as being involved on a creative level as one of the executive producers. Johnny Knoxville, late of crazy reality stunt TV show Jackass (2000-01), is the voice of good ol’ boy factotum Bobby Ray, while Kaitlin Olson is CeCe Ryder (yes, I saw what they did there), a hyperactive, dysfunctional secret agent in an Emma Peel catsuit. Ocean 11’s Don Cheadle – yes, Don Cheadle – is behind the rampantly bisexual Commander of The Central Bureau (TCB. Think about it…). Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks even shows up as CeCe’s slutty mum.

The visual style is like Batman on acid. There are extreme close-ups of flying fists and the screen splits into comic strip panels during action scenes, while the animation is reminiscent of Sin City (2005) in places – the characters turn to silhouette and go into slo-mo at violent moments. The visual mayhem is soundtracked by an eclectic selection of Elvis songs, from ‘Viva Las Vegas’ to ‘There’s No Room Rhumba in a Sports Car’.

The overall vibe reminded me of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), particularly the collision of pop culture and alternative American history. In Agent Elvis’s world, JFK is alive and well and living in Monte Carlo, the murders at Altamont were caused by a secret sonic weapon and The Commander was responsible for Jim Morrison’s overdose (a plaque on a bathtub in The Commander’s HQ reads “Project: Shit Poetry”). In Star Trek, the transporter won't work because Scotty is “a drunk Scottish bastard.” Genius.

The in-jokes are wonderful, too. A fight on a jet plane references the climactic ruck on a jet plane in the James Bond film Die Another Day (2002) – a Russian villain is sucked into one of the engines, just like OO7’s opponent Gustav Graves; drug dealer ‘Cleopatra’ looks just like Cleopatra Jones (Tamara Dodson), from the 1973 film of the same name; Elvis, Scatter and Bobby Ray take off on Harley-Davidson motorcycles  for Altamont in the style of Easy Rider (1969)… there are many more and they get gradually more outrageous as the series goes on. It’d spoil the fun if I revealed what they were.

Agent Elvis has a genuine love for the late-1960s Elvis and a turbulent but vivid period of American history. My partner Carolyn says it’s all true: she’s convinced Elvis isn’t dead and went time travelling, mainly because of a Roman statue she saw which has the King’s jawline and quiff, and come to think of it, time travel is the only thing missing from Agent Elvis. Series Two, perhaps?

Who’s to say Carolyn’s wrong?