(Epitaph)

4/5 Stars

Daniel Dumile, Brian Burton, Dennis Coles, Thomas Calloway, Talib Greene. Now if that isn’t an all-star line-up for a hip-hop album…

Doesn’t ring any bells? Perhaps you know them better by their pseudonyms: MF Doom, DJ Danger Mouse, Ghostface Killah, Cee-Lo and Talib Kweli, respectively.

Impressed yet? You should be, because Danger Doom’s debut, “The Mouse and the Mask,” is a hip-hop cocktail party of the scene’s brightest stars, brought together under the bizarre theme of Adult Swim cartoons.

MF Doom, who broke out with last year’s collaboration with producer Madlib “Madvillainy,” is infamous, at least partially, for channeling Marvel Comics super villain Dr. Doom in his metal-faced stage persona. Danger Mouse became a hip-hop household name through his unauthorized mash-up project “The Gray Album” (a mixture of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album). Many Adult Swim cartoons borrow liberally from past Hanna-Barbara productions (Aqualab and Space Ghost, in particular). In this way, collaboration between the three is a match made in mixed media heaven.

Doom and DM have met before, with promising results. The supervillain dropped a verse on Danger’s remix of Zero 7’s “Somersault.” Earlier this year, Doom appeared on a track on the Gorillaz album “Demon Days,” which was, coincidentally enough, produced by Danger Mouse.

But those tracks, as blissful as they may be, were only the honeymoon for the First Couple of Cartoon RappersL it is “The Mouse and the Mask” that finally meets the demand for an extended alliance between the hottest producer and rapper the underground has to offer.

Shoutouts to Space Ghost and Scooby Doo supplant Biggie and Pac, and there’s a whole track called “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” but for the most part Doom sounds like his normal virtuosic self.

His lyrics, as usual, straddle the line between abstract imagery, Shakespearean references (at one point mentioning “the beast with two backs”) and intricate self-aggrandizing wordplay; if anyone can “eat a rapper for lunch and spit out the chain,” it’s the metal-faced supervillain.

We even get a few peeks into Doom’s murky mythology. On “Old School” he mentions how he used to enjoy watching his late brother DJ Subroc (co-member with Dumile in old-school trio KMD) breakdance.

The outro on “Basket Case” features Doom’s plaintive spoken defense of his attire: “just because some people wear a mask, doesn’t mean that they did nothing automatically...”

Demo versions of album highlight “Sofa King” featured a soulful organ groove, replaced on the album by a denser and more exciting soundscape of shimmering violins and flutes, over classic breakbeats and superlow bass.

The biggest problem with the beats is that they are regularly punctuated by asinine interludes featuring Adult Swim cartoon characters.

Sure, hip-hop legends like De La Soul have been known to pull off entertaining skits (“Brain-Washed Follower” is a stand-out example), KMD’s albums are peppered with them, and even “Madvillainy” features a somewhat light-hearted paean to the glories of “grass.” But having almost every track either begin and/or end with a skit seriously impacts the repeat listening capacity of the album.

The guest appearances are also less impressive than they should be given such a pedigree of talent. Talib’s rhymes on reminisce-fest “Old School” is decent, but the sunny beat feels more appropriate to a Kweli album and the prominent hook feels sorely out of place on a Doom album. Atlanta legend Cee-Lo, who lends his Southern-fried crooning to “Benzi Box,” has stolen tracks from the likes of Jay-Z and Outkast with his ridiculous flow, and his rapping skills are sorely missed here.

As at any good soiree, the guests leave sated with business cards and plans. Cee-Lo is collaborating with Dangermouse on an album named “Gnarls Barkley,” due early next year, and Iron Man-lover Ghostface (who drops the best guest verse of the album on “The Mask”) and supervillain Doom have plans for a collaborative project (tentatively titled “Iron Man meets Metalface”) as well. Here’s hoping they drop the gimmicks on future projects, and that Adult Swim fans new to the hip-hop savants assembled here explore more of their extensive back catalogs.

—Staff writer Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu.