By Bill Teck

There’s a practically Spanglish tv show, populated with great Latin characters with thick, cool accents, on the WB (Channel 11) Saturday mornings at 10:30. But you may never read about it in Hola or El Diario.

Mucha Lucha, the new Saturday morning cartoon show created by Lucha Libre culture junkies Eddie Mort and Lili Chin and produced by Warner Bros. Animation, is the first all-Flash animated series on television. It features two 11-minute episodes brimming with jokes and Simpsons-level inventiveness, and it’s fast, funny and wildly entertaining. Lucha takes place in a strange nuevo-luxe world with "El Santo"-style Mexican wrestling masks on everything from clocks to a golden masked sun, and follows the adventures of three "mascaritas" in training. It’s a delight of surreal excess and ingenuity, but it’s also thrilling because it’s a look at what Latin tv should be–and won’t be for years.

The three main characters–Rikochet, Buena Girl and The Flea–study and live the "Code of Masked Wrestling," but episodes expand from insider Mexican references to broad comedic yarns with titles like "Anger of Cindy Slam" and "Mask Mitzvah." With squarely Latin characters bouncing between English and Spanish, a cartoon is yet again–and for a new generation and a new minority–doing things that live-action television can’t. Or hasn’t.

Mucha Lucha also raises the question of why the larger Latin tv outfits like Univision and Telemundo can’t seem to put out something like this. The answer is, of course, dollars.

For Latinos who speak fluent English and are not held captive by the Univision and Telemundo perfecta, tv-watching is a mainstream affair. According to the Nielsen ratings, the top 10 shows watched by Latinos are exactly the same as the top 10 shows watched by the general market. In contrast, of the top 10 shows watched primarily by African-Americans, only two are the same (and one of those is Monday Night football).

English-dominant Latinos don’t embrace Spanish-language tv because so much of it has traditionally been subpar–novelas or broad comedies that would make most anybody grimace. Nevertheless, many ad agencies servicing the Latin market insist that the lion’s share of ad dollars be spent in Spanish-language media, telling their clients that Latinos prefer to be advertised to in their own language. Either ignoring the affluent/ upwardly mobile Latino market or simply leaving them to be targeted in the general market ad buy, they ensure that there’s very little funding to create programming at a level a person used to English-language tv can enjoy.

Seen by some as a bold experiment, Telemundo’s largely Spanglish second network mun2 (or Mundo Dos, literally "the second world") is truly just that, just another world of Latin programming. It’s filled with shows that have English-language titles and hosts who go back and forth between languages. At its best, it produces a show like one I caught recently that was all American hiphop, unflinchingly acknowledging African-American culture and hiphop as part of the Latin experience. Sort of an MTV-style version of Brown, Richard Rodriguez’s compelling book.

But English-language programming for Latin viewers threatens those ad agencies that control marketing dollars to Latinos. Although this kind of programming reaches a young bilingual audience, it challenges a core message many of those agencies have used to prove their invaluableness: that Spanish-language media is the only route to the market.

In reality, focusing so heavily on the Spanish-language market can actually hurt a product. The movie Selena, produced by Moctesuma Esparza, made a profit because most Latinos knew of the film (not the subject matter, with which they were well familiar) from general-market sources. Entertainment Tonight, for example, ran a story on young girls trying out to play Selena as a child a full year before the film’s release. For Price of Glory, the next big Latino film to emerge, the distribution company New Line spent its ad budget buying Spanish-language tv and radio–and the picture sank.

The point is, Latinos who go to the movies go to the same movies as everybody else. But those who watch only Spanish-language tv don’t go to many. For one thing, speaking primarily Spanish in the U.S. limits their ability to earn, so that except for small pockets of affluent Latin Americans in places like Florida, not many Spanish-dominant Latinos have much in the way of disposable income. Meanwhile, bilingual Latinos, whether in San Antonio, the Bronx or Miami, turn to Entertainment Weekly rather than, say, People En Español, so they’re more likely to read about and go see My Big Fat Greek Wedding than Tortilla Soup.

So where would you put your ad dollars? If you said Entertainment Weekly, you must not run an ad agency.

Treating Mucha Lucha like a tv show, a very good one, that just happens to feature only minorities, the WB promo team has figured out the secret to a lucrative and traditionally hard-to-target market. It’s not promoted as what ad execs would deem "ethnic programming." Instead, taking a page from the way J.Lo and Ricky Martin have been spun, the marketers of Lucha are working the general market, rather than the old watch-this-’cause-you’re-Latin approach. The marketing for Lucha includes a website (www2.warnerbros.com/lucha) where kids can build their own wrestler, and a CD on Warner Music Latina with progressive stuff like the show’s title theme by Chicos de Barrio and "Cumbia Poder" by the alternative artist Celso Pina. It’s aimed at kids but also gives adults a wonderful primer on some of the more exciting music going on in the Latin rock scene. The approach (again, think Ricky Martin) acknowledges that if the show catches on with a broad audience it will also hook hip, upscale Latinos–and they, proud of the mainstream success of a Latin-based program, may become the advertisers’ most loyal supporters.

Mucha Lucha is populated exclusively with Latino characters, it’s specific about ethnicity in a way few shows (even on the WB) have been since Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, but it’s universal at the same time (and in much the same way Fat Albert was). That’s a lesson Latin tv, and the ad agencies on whom it depends, have yet to learn.