When it comes to Roger's alter egos on American Dad, the list is almost endless. He has hundreds of them, each with their own lives that he has to keep straight. But one of his best characters features Steve as his sidekick. Although the duo takes themselves very seriously, they somehow manage to get even less done than usual.
Wheels and the Legman are Steve and Roger's respective detective personas. Steve plays a wheelchair-bound detective named Squirt "Wheels" Cinnabon. On the other hand, Roger plays the Legman, Wheels' detective partner and closest ally in their war on crime -- not that they ever solve any cases.
The crime-fighting duo first popped up in Season 3, Episode 5 after Steve and Roger watched an episode of a fictional detective TV series called Tex and Mex, inspiring them to form their own detective partnership. The problem was they both wanted to be Wheels and had established their own elaborate backstories. From there, the ensuing fight caused them to break up and form new partnerships with other people.
Eventually, Roger relented and became the Legman, which allowed them to reform the duo. To date, Wheels and the Legman have appeared in five episodes of the series. While they have become a solid running gag, not to mention one of Roger's best recurring alter egos, their efficacy as detectives is dubious, to say the least.
The adventures of Wheels and the Legman largely work out the same way. Each time they find a case, Roger and Steve spend so much time arguing about the nuances of their partnership and respective characters, they quite literally get nothing done at all. The only reason they ever solve cases is because Roger usually committed the "crime" in the first place.
To make matters worse, Roger and Steve are incredibly defensive of their intellectual property. In Season 11, Episode 3, Hayley regressed to being a six-year-old. For some reason, Jeff Fischer and Klaus thought it would help if they became knockoff versions of Wheels and the Legman called Fish and the Jeffman. They didn't even get through their own title sequence before they received a notice that Roger was suing them for copyright infringement.
American Dad is filled with running gags, but the Wheels and the Legman bits are some of the funniest, serving as an outrageous parody of traditional detective team-ups like Starsky & Hutch. They are terrible detectives who accomplish absolutely nothing except killing time for Roger and Steve. But their pointless arguments are hilarious and often lead to them discovering horrible things that Roger forgot he even did, often while under the guise of a completely different alter ego like the notorious Ricky Spanish.
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