To ostensibly aid in their detective work, Stanley usually changes into some sort of goofy disguise much to the chagrin of his older brother Henry.

As the voice of the title character, Keye Luke is (to date) the only actor of Chinese ancestry to play the part in any screen adaptation.

The program was sharply criticized by Katheryn Fong, Community Coordinator of the Chinese Media Committee of Chinese for Affirmative Action, an advocacy group based in San Francisco, for continuing "to isolate generations of Chinese-Americans as being 'different'" and keeping the same "detective intoning stilted, fortune-cookie English spoken in proverbs".

CBS President Robert D. Wood responded by calling the show "a lighthearted escapist program for youngsters", emphasizing the stereotypical Asian-American tropes of filial piety and intelligence as positive contributions with the hope "that CBS' Chan might begin to replace some of the abrasive imagery created by the old Charlie Chan character".

Fong called this attitude a "great tragedy ... convincing many people that this kowtowing caricature is acceptable" and drew an analogy with a hypothetical cartoon about Adolf Hitler: "If CBS did a cartoon called 'Hitler's Haus' along the same lines of 'respect' and German pragmatism as your interpretation of Chan's wisdom, would that begin to replace some of the abrasive imagery created by the old Hitler and make him more acceptable to Jews?"