Cartoon crossover a dull ride

Based on the popular National Public Radio series “Car Talk” -- although “based on” may suggest more of a resemblance than exists between them -- “Click & Clack’s As the Wrench Turns” is the first PBS cartoon to be geared toward a general audience. (That is to say, not aimed at a 4-year-old.) I’m not sure this was a niche crying to be filled, but in any case it was not crying to be filled with this.

On the face of it, it’s a weird enough idea that one might expect that someone involved in the project had in fact been struck by an authentically weird idea, something more strange and fabulous than the merely unusual transformation of a pair of public radio personalities into a cartoon characters. I like “Car Talk,” in which jolly auto mechanics Tom and Ray Magliozzi -- also known as Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers -- field calls from listeners, crack wise and get along like siblings who have shared a room for too many years. It has a kind of party atmosphere.

But apart from some crossover in personnel -- the radio show’s writers also write the cartoon show -- and the presence of the title characters, who have been made into the boobs that they sometimes pretend to be, “As the Wrench Turns” is a different creature. Created and executive-produced by Howard K. Grossman -- not a “Car Talk” insider -- whose last recorded production credit, as far as I can make out, is the 1988 Donald Sutherland film “Apprentice to Murder,” it has none of the spikiness or improvisatory heat of the radio show. As a cartoon, it is remarkably short on energy, though handsomely enough drawn -- except, oddly, for the cars, which is either some sort of incredibly subtle joke or just unaccountable.

In its extrusion of the real into the unreal, it’s conceptually reminiscent of the cartoon series built around the Beatles, the Osmonds, the Jackson 5 and the Harlem Globetrotters back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The animated Click and Clack are not stars of NPR but rather are barely getting by at PBS. (Crowds protest the very existence of their show.) Having failed to raise any money in the network fund drives, they are told to come up with $5 million or hit the road. (Somehow, and without explanation, this $5 million becomes crucial to saving the network itself.) In a “Producers”-like scheme, they run for president in order to use nonrefundable campaign contributions to pay off their debt.

They practice kissing babies, get their stump speeches wrong (instead of promising universal health care, they promise universal joints), and finally meet the other candidates in debate. One, called Perry Varicator, sounds like Richard Nixon and says that the problem with homelessness is that people are too picky (you offer them a ranch house and they want a colonial); the other, called Phil Lander, has nice hair like JFK and a plan to end the war in Iraq by replacing soldiers with yard signs. Tom/Click wins the day when he says that a mechanic would make a good president because “mechanics make mistakes but unlike politicians we have to fix our mistakes.” That is about as acute as the political satire gets.

The leads have been given a multicultural back line, which does not seem to be a comment on rote diversity in television but yet another example of it. Fidel is a Latino smoothie in an Armani suit; Crusty, a black ex-professor from Harvard (He reads books! Knows facts!); Stash, a burly Eastern European who no speak the English good.

For satire, you are better off with “The Simpsons” or “South Park,” and for simple fun you can stick with “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Although the project was pitched from outside PBS, its studied inoffensiveness seems to reflect the network’s essential dilemma: Striving to placate gasbag politicians on the one hand and attract money-tendering crowds on the other, it is driven toward the safe middle path.

There is an occasional line that was worth the saying, and you could view the show as some kind of brave leap in the dark. But overall “Wrench” is as mild as weak tea and as tepid as weak tea that has been forgotten on the kitchen counter.

And there is a dog in it. But at least it doesn’t talk.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Click & Clack’s As the Wrench Turns’

Where: KCET

When: 10 to 11 p.m. tonight

Rating: TV-G (suitable for all ages)