Watch out! Mr Magoo is stumbling back onto TV screens after nearly four decades

He’s back and this time he’s even older, blinder and more dangerous. Mr Magoo is making his television comeback nearly 40 years after the short-sighted geriatric cartoon menace was last pensioned off.

The disaster-prone senior who first appeared in 1949 is back in a new revamped series, causing just as much chaos as before because of his continued refusal to wear glasses.

French animation company Xilam have revived the character first created in the US as a subversive way of sending up mean-spirited McCarthy-era reactionaries.

Its chairman Marc de Pontavice told AFP that Magoo’s bumbling brand of slapstick was just the thing to “bring families together in front of the screen.”

And he insisted that there was plenty of life in the character yet.

“He’s not old, he’s ageless. He is wonderfully innocent and optimistic as he goes around creating havoc,” he said.

Both Magoo’s original creators Millard Kaufmann and John Hubley were blacklisted during the Communist witchhunts early in the Cold War and saw the wealthy yet clueless character as a way of poking fun at their tormentors.

But over the years Mr Magoo became a lovably apolitical character who won generation after generation of fans through repeats of the original series.

In the new series the myopic old age pensioner and his faithful companion Mr Cat (who is actually a dog) tussle with a megalomaniac hamster whose dreams of greatness are forever being thwarted by Magoo’s mishaps.

The new 78-part series of seven-minute shows will be screened late next year.

The the first episodes premiered at the MIPJunior at Cannes on the French Riviera on Sunday.