Is it just me, or does this show seem to be politically incorrect? In the family scenes, the family wears clothes and talks in plain English. However, Taz is naked and only growls and spits. This gave me the impression that he is supposed to be mentally retarded.
i think you're reading into this show way too much. If you did watch the show though you would see that taz's family are the aberration, in fact on occasion various family members have eschewed the falsities of their proto suburban life and just gone all out for it like Taz does.
Taz is the champion of the piece for he refuses to conform to a proto surbanite ideal.
As utterly ludicrous as this thread seems, according to Wikipedia the Downs Syndrome charity of South Australia took offence to how Taz was depicted (although there's no citation so I don't know how reliable that information is). If it is true, surely it is more offensive that the representative of the charity has pointed at a clearly innocent portrayl of a cartoon character and gone "that reminds me of someone with Down's Syndrome"! Keep in mind, Taz himself was created decades before the other characters as an exaggerated representation of a real tasmanian devil. To have had the rest of his family behave exactly like him would have made for an unbearable and unimaginative show. Rather than being portrayed as having any kind of mental illness, Taz was reimagined as a kind of extreme version of a problem teenage son.
And to be honest, I can't believe I've just written all that!
I have a feeling that people like 'labattfreak' would love it every cartoon was about socially functional people going about their trivial lives with nothing funny happening at all.
And now I really want to know how Taz reminded them of someone with Down's Syndrome.
Even if you could argue that Taz was retarded, it is not like he necessarily had Down's Syndrome.