"Somewhere in Southern Israel..."
"In a highly-secure secret base..."
"The Israel Defense Force guards its doomsday weapon."
"This is the story of the most secure place in the middle east."
— The Opening Narration
M.K. 22 was an animated series from Israel that ran for 10 episodes on the channel Bip in 2004. It was a sitcom about the soldiers of an IDF military base that satirized major Israeli events of the time. Basically, think South Park if it took place in Israel.
The show's two main characters are Corporal Shlomi Hanukkah and his nerd friend Itai Shulman. Other characters include the handicapped Michal Levinstein, the ditzy NCO Gabriel Shukrun, and the Israeli Arab Abed Abu Jamal.
Notable for being the first primetime cartoon series from Israel.
This work provides examples of:
- All Jews Are Ashkenazi: Averted, with this being an Israeli show and all. Out of the show's four main Jewish characters, two (Shukrun and Hanukkah) are Mizrahi while the other two (Shulman and Levinstein) are Ashkenazi.
- Armed Farces: Runs off of this trope.
- Big Bad: Abed, who acts as Shukrun's friend, is also a terrorist.
- Brick Joke: At the beginning of the episode "Heavy Water", a female lieutenant named Rinat Gonen Segev is seen in a news report on her being sent to space as an astronaut. The reporter talking to her in the interview mentions that some astronauts have been hit by stray rockets. A rocket hits the space station Segev is in later in the episode, and near the end of the episode she lands on Earth again... only to get hit by a falling rocket piece.
- Content Warning: One appears at the beginning of each episode.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Dudu Tapuach. His criminal record includes attempts to bribe civil servants, elected officeholders and foreign consuls, he repeatedly tries to buy Abed's land to build a luxury neighborhood on even though Abed refuses every time, and the moment he sees Adiso's family, he uses them as menial laborers for a construction project. And once he's committed to a mental asylum for telling Shukrun that Abed trains his sheep as terrorists...Tapuach: [after staring out of the asylum's window] Say, who owns all these lands?
Asylum inmates: [all at once] Mine! Mine! They're mine!
Tapuach: Nevermind. Psychos. - Drill Sergeant Nasty: Gabriel Shukrun, in a sense.note
- The Ditz: Gabriel Shukrun.
- Fat and Skinny: Hanukkah and Shulman.
- Limited Animation: The show used limited joint movement on the characters.
- Make Wrong What Once Went Right: In order to drive the Jews away from Palestine and prevent the establishment of the State of Israel, Abed travels to several different points in time, and tries to kill Moses with a bazooka, King David (before his coronation, during his fight with Goliath) with a rifle, and King Solomon with a thrown axe, and also tries to convince Theodor Herzl to found the Jewish state in Uganda instead of Palestine. All of his attempts backfire, however, causing a Stable Time Loop: the bazooka hits the rock in the desert that produces water for the people, making Moses, who was planning to flee with his brother, a heronote ; the bullet hits Goliath instead of David; the axe cuts the baby from the Judgment of Solomon in half, portraying the inattentive King Solomon as a hero; and Herzl had never thought about founding a Jewish state beforehand and gets hooked on the idea of establishing it in Palestine.
- Mooks: Abed trains many, many sheep to do his bidding.Abed: Every sheep will be a shahid! Who wants to explode first? Who?!
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Part of Abed's Villain with Good Publicity schtick is implied to be this. Shukrun describes his "simple" life using the expression "Eyn Sechel - Eyn De'agot" note , and shoots down Dudu Tapuach's offer of business with him by saying that he doesn't know any English. This is the same Abed who traced Tapuach's ID number and criminal record with only a landline number and operated both a Nuclear Missile launch system and a Time Machine without any problems, and did it all on-screen.
- Short-Runner: Ran for 10 episodes.
- Qurac: Tanjakistan, an ex-Soviet Central Asian republic and home of the Free Armenian National Tanjakistan Army - a rebel group that offers nuclear weapons for sale - appears in the first episode.
- Shout-Out:
- The show has a Content Warning screen used at the beginning of each episode that is patterned after the one used in South Park. For example, both mention that the celebrity voices are just impersonations, and both mention the show contains coarse language, and due to it containing content like that, it's not suitable for anyone.
- In the time-travel episode, the "future" segment has C-3P0 as the anchor and an R2-D2-shaped robot version of Shukrun, plus a Klingon stationed in logistics.
- Villain with Good Publicity: Abed, the Bedouin who lives near the Base. Supposedly, he lives a simple life with his only worldly possessions being his tent and his sheep; In reality, he's a fifth-column operative of a Palestinian terrorist organization, his tent hides a High-tech Supervillain Lair, his sheep (one of whom is a robot) are in the terrorism business too, and he offers his guests "authentic" labane which is actually store-bought and stored in a fridge.
- Women Drivers: In the first episode, "Heavy Water", the (fictional) first female Israeli astronaut is interviewed before take-off. She talks about how how NASA has no room for stereotypes and women are involved in all parts of the organisation, while in the background a woman driver crashes into two parked cars while trying to park herself. This becomes a running gag throughout the episode.
