Chief Quimby is
Inspector Gadget's
chief of
police. Chief Quimby's character is an
homage to
Mission: Impossible. Quimby shows up to give Inspector Gadget his missions at the beginning of each episode. He is always disguised as some inane part of the room such as the
stove or as some sort of animal.
The basic opening scene from the show would be as follows. Quimby delivers the mission to Gadget in the form of a
self-destructing note. Gadget would then read the note aloud thus informing the audience of the mission at hand. Just as Gadget would finish reading the part of the note that was the
warning that the note would self destruct in x amount of time he would crumble the note and toss it away. As
luck would have it, each time that Gadget threw away the note it would land inside Chief Quimby's disguise and/or hiding place. As Gadget would walk away to
thwart the evil
Dr. Claw and his
MAD agents, Chief Quimby would be engulfed in a
cartoon explosion leaving him blackened by soot and disheveled.
On occassion, the Chief would show up in other parts of the episode but the only other recurring part he played in the series was at the
end. He would always show up a moment too late with
reinforcements and just in time to bust the MAD agents.
As a side note, Chief Quimby was played by
Dabney Coleman in the 1999 live-action movie version of
Inspector Gadget and was voiced by Maurice LaMarche in the cartoon.