Episode 1: Beyond the Farthest Star

It’s a Trektacular start for the crew of the animated Enterprise as they face off against every sci-fi cliché known to man, Romulan and Klingon! A dead sun with a monstrous secret! An ancient spacecraft with a deadly surprise! An alien lifeform with bad intentions! And it’s up to Captain James Tiberius Kirk to recklessly lead his people into all these dangers!

The absurdly limited animation technique that Filmation employed only served to ratchet up the tension aboard the Enterprise as Kirk was relegated to two distinct facial expressions. One was talking (i.e. his lips moved). The other was his sneaky look (his eyeballs moved from side to side). No matter what the evil alien menace had up its sleeve, you felt sure that Kirk was up to something no good as well every time he looked here and there, even if it was just to glance at Spock while he babbled incoherently about magnetic forces. By the time they haul out the rusty trusty “slingshot” trick, you’ve already signed up for the entire mission of 22 episodes.

Episode highlights: Kirk rolling out of the way of a laser blast; Scotty pinned in a hatch.

Episode 2: Yesteryear

Yesteryear? I’m calling it Besteryear! Proving that the first episode was merely the warm up, Yesteryear gives us so many classic moments in Trek that you’d have to have a transporter malfunction split you in two to catch them all! When Kirk and Spock return from their jaunt in the time stream (uh-oh!) they find out that some scummy Andorean is now the First Officer on the Enterprise and no one but Kirk even remembers who Spock was! Sounds like someone needs to go back into the past and fix things up straight away!

Spock does the only sensible thing and goes undercover as his own cousin back to the time of his youth when his life was saved in the desert by his cousin that looked just like the adult Spock! That might be enough high drama for the regular old hour-long series, but this is the Power Bar of Trek shows, so they throw in generous helpings of Spock’s father Sarek, his beloved mother whatshername, and a very heavy ending where Spock has to confront the moral quandary of euthanasia. No, Spock! Don’t do it! Don’t remove Kirk’s feeding tube!

Episode highlights: Kirk ordering the Enterprise’s “wardrobe section” to provide Spock with some clothes for his role as his own fake cousin; a young Spock being bullied by Vulcan kids for being a half-breed – they taunt him because he can’t do a nerve pinch and call him an “Earther”; Spock’s pet sabre-toothed bear.

Episode 3: One Of Our Planets Is Missing

Kirk demonstrates the sort of leadership acumen that won him Top Gun honors at Starfleet Academy when he delegates saving the Enterprise from a big cloud of red space gas to Spock. But that doesn’t mean that Kirk isn’t still the MAN when he needs to be. These cartoon tales of the Final Frontier may only run 22 minutes, but that’s still plenty of time for Kirk to advocate violating the Prime Directive, order the self-destruct sequence to be engaged, and ultimately dump the responsibility of actually getting something done on the apathetic Spock.

This go round, we have our self some crazy living swamp gas that’s floating around eating up everything in its path. With a Federation planet in its crosshairs it’s up to Kirk and company to come up with something that Spock can do to avoid any further interstellar unpleasantness. After the Enterprise gets eaten by the gas, the crew has to find a way to communicate with it to make their escape and save the planet. Thank goodness for that handy-dandy Universal Translator!

Episode highlights: Space gibberish abounds as Bones spews something out about enzymes and Scotty worries about an indicator going below two anti-klicks when he’s not busy coming up with a scheme that involves cutting a chunk of antimatter with the ship’s tractor beam and transporting it aboard the ship while it’s contained in a force field; the crew looks at Kirk like he’s a Cardassian skunk-rabbit riddled with bloodfleas when he suggests that they blow up the space cloud’s brain.

Episode 4: The Lorelei Signal

One of the best aspects of Trek is when it not only entertains, but also educates. Sure, there’s the Rules of Acquisition that all latinum-loving folks live and breathe, but I’m also talking about episodes such as this one. In an adventure so fraught with mystery and danger that Kirk puts us all on Yellow Alert barely two minutes into our mission, we learn what most men already know, but could always use a refresher course on. And that’s that women will suck the life right out of you.

Of course this is Trek, so in this case it’s literally true. Finding themselves on one of those planets where hot blondes in low cut togas are always trying to enslave hunky astronauts, Kirk, Spock, and Bones get fitted for snazzy red headbands and have their lifeforce drained so badly that Kirk and Spock end up looking really old and shriveled. It doesn’t really seem to make Bones look that much worse. Uhura takes command of the ship and has to take an all-hottie security detail with her to get their men back from these alien sluts!

Episode highlights: Spock tossed like a rag doll by an alien babe; Scotty sitting in the captain’s chair singing a lengthy Scottish folk song; Spock declaring that the odds for a plan to reverse their aging by reprogramming the transporters to re-pattern their molecules like they were before they were turned old are 99.7 – 1 against success.

Episode 5: More Tribbles, More Troubles

This fifth episode is easily the best so far as Kirk finds himself embroiled in all sorts of trouble ranging from a starving planet, crabby Klingons, all the way up the titular Tribbles. It all begins with a snooze-inducing escort mission involving a couple of robot grain ships. When Kirk notices a Klingon battle cruiser attempting to blow up a scout ship, he practically falls over himself get in on that action. He quickly regrets it though when Scotty finally gets the pilot of the scout ship beamed aboard and discovers that it is none other than Cyrano Jones, interstellar traitor and general nuisance (Kirk’s words, not mine).

As distasteful as Cyrano is, it’s the pack of tribbles he has with him that makes Kirk throw up inside his mouth. As any Trek geek will tell you, tribbles are little round puff balls who multiple like crazy. These tribbles are slightly different though. They’re all pink and get really fat. And guess who went and beamed all that grain on board from a robot ship when the Klingons started attacking? And guess whose starship is caught up in the Klingon’s new paralysis ray? But as you might expect, it’s Kirk who has the last laugh when he pulls one of the dirtiest tricks ever seen in the Federation by beaming a ton of lard ass tribbles over to the Klingon ship! Wah, wah, wah, waaaaaah!

Episode highlights: The whole freaking thing! Kirk’s willingness to use the robot ships with the much-needed grain to ram the Klingon ship; a running gag where Kirk has to swat increasingly larger tribbles off of his chair on the bridge; Scotty explaining transporter problems are due to “decalibration of the integration parameters.”

Episode 6: The Survivor

The series finally stumbles as episode six serves up a hum drum tale of an alien with the ability to impersonate other crew members. The original The Thing was already more than twenty years old when this first aired back in 1973, so the gimmick was tired even then. Making matters even more pedestrian is that the alien turns out to be a spy recruited by the Romulans in a scheme to trick Kirk into violating the Neutral Zone. Don’t these space goobers realize that if left to his own devices Kirk will violate the Neutral Zone three or four times a week?

They try to lather on some pathos by using the abominable coincidence that the person the alien is impersonating when the Enterprise rescues him was the fiancee of a crew member. Small universe, huh? The alien itself is an upright red octopus and after a little sabotage he has a heart to heart with his not-quite-ex-fiancee that turns him into good guy after all. He even decides to impersonate a deflector shield to help out. All of it will put you into a deep Khan-like sleep.

Episode highlights: The alien disguised as Bones giving the fiancee relationship advice; forced comic banter between Bones and Spock at the conclusion of a very long 23 minutes.

Episode 7: The Infinite Vulcan

Even a story by Chekov (the starship navigator, not the Russian playwright whose name was spelled Chekhov) can’t halt the mid-season slump we’re mired in. Recycling another sci-fi movie gimmick (this time it’s killer plants) just as the previous episode did, Chekov dresses it up with an eye-rolling plot about a superman from the Eugenics War who is working with a race of intelligent plants to create an army of clones to enforce peace throughout the galaxy. The superman chooses Spock to clone (no doubt irritating Kirk), but it will be at the cost of Spock’s life!

I was fuzzy as a Bolian mind-caterpillar as to some of the specifics of all this, especially the part that had these clones end up as giants or how these bratty plants were going to help out, but Kirk is nonplussed by these plot questions and invokes the legendary IDIC concept to the giant clone Spock to save everyone’s bacon. IDIC is a Vulcan idea standing for Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations which means something, but since I’m not some pointy-eared spacer, I don’t know what. Luckily, CloneSpock knew all about it and saved the day.

Episode highlights: Uhura warning Scotty about dilithium crystals getting drained and Scotty not slapping her molecular pattern to Antares-7 and back; Kirk ending the episode with a racist comment about Sulu being inscrutable.

Episode 8: The Magicks of Megas-Tu

Another fairly hideous episode hampered by a story that doesn’t make any sense or provide much entertainment until the end. The Enterprise is patrolling the very center of the galaxy in hopes of discovering whether matter is still being created there like it was when the galaxy first began. They encounter a powerful storm and are forced to take refuge in its eye. It is here that they meet up with Lucian, one of those half-man, half-goat guys you always find at the center of the galaxy.

Kirk learns that in this part of the universe which is beyond known time and space, magic is real! You just have to believe! Spock declares such an event to be logical for this place. If Bones or Scotty had said that, I would have pronounced them as suffering an acute bout of space-stupor, but coming from Spock it makes perfect sense. Much mumbo-jumbo abounds regarding a race of wizards who came to Earth centuries ago to help us, but got run out by the Salem witch trials. Inevitably, humanity is then put on trial to prove we aren’t still such stinkers.

Episode highlights: Spock drawing a pentagram on the floor of the Enterprise to practice magic; Sulu using his magic powers to summon a hot babe; Kirk and a wizard dueling with magic.

Episode 9: Once Upon A Planet

After the last three episodes, we could all use some shore leave and so it is that we find ourselves on the very functionally-named Shore Leave Planet. Kirk and company are looking for some R&R, but it isn’t long before Bones is getting himself chased by the Queen of Hearts and her playing card minions! Oh no! Pleasure planet gone wild! Computer that runs things turns surly and kidnaps Uhura to his underground lair! I’m sure it had nothing to do with trying to shut up her awful singing while she was on the surface.

While Kirk concocts a plan to get inside the computer’s hideout, the Enterprise is also somehow at peril while orbiting above the planet. As Scotty is surprised to discover, his shipboard computers are building a new computer which is trying to take over the ship! Alls well that ends well though as Spock, Uhura, and Kirk prattle mindlessly about how awesome it is that the computer in charge of the planet can get to meet all these alien races doing its job. This episode marks four dull space turds in a row.

Episode highlights: Pink pterodactyls attacking crew look exactly the same as pink pterodactyls attacking crew in previous episode; Bones, Sulu, Alice, white rabbit, and two-headed dragon enjoy picnic together at end of adventure.

Episode 10: Mudd’s Passion

The slump is over! Harry Mudd returns (from the original series) to wreak havoc on the crew of the emotionally repressed Enterprise when his love potion gets loose and turns everyone into a bunch of space horny toads! Does it even matter what the set up is? As soon as Nurse Chapel’s inexplicable crush on Spock is used to initiate the sexiest threat ever to Starfleet, it’s just one galaxy-class sized classic moment after another! There’s Chapel giving Spock a lap dance! There’s Kirk and Spock hugging each other! There’s Mudd making himself a fake I.D.!

Once Spock gets affected by the love potion, there’s no stopping this installment! Spock rages when Mudd kidnaps Chapel and worries about Mudd harming a hair on her pretty head! Spock demands to beam down to the planet immediately to save her! Spock refers to one of Kirk’s plans as nothing more than stupidity! By the time Kirk is feeding the love potion to a giant monster, your only regret is that this isn’t a two part episode!

Episode highlights: Montage of stunned looks by crew members as Spock lusts after Nurse Chapel culminating with an alien crewman making a wolf-whistle; crew too busy in transporter room slow dancing to transport Kirk and crew from out of danger on planet’s surface; Kirk somersaulting out of the way of giant monster’s oncoming foot.

Episode 11: The Terratin Incident

It’s the Incredible Shrinking Kirk! This is another episode that starts off with Kirk in the middle of a really boring mission and instantly abandoning it once he sees something with more manly potential. In this case, it’s a mysterious radio transmission from a planet containing a single word from a two century year old language. Let’s see: survey burnt out supernova or investigate some strange planet’s choice of drive-time radio? These are the kind of decisions they can’t train you for at Starfleet Academy.

Turns out it was the right decision because before you know it, the Enterprise’s dilithium crystals get all busted up, the ship gets probed by strange rays and everyone starts shrinking! This results in some blather about double helix molecules being compressed and that they won’t be able to run the ship anymore once they hit about one centimeter in height. Kirk instinctively knows that the exploding planet holds the solution as well as the best possible action possibilities so he beams down there and discovers a shrunken city ripped straight out of Superman comic books! Luckily, the very act of beaming down engorges him back to the man-sized captain we all cherish.

Episode highlights: A shrunken Uhura climbing suggestively on the control panel; Nurse Chapel whining about some stupid mice shrinking so much they got out of their cage; Nurse Chapel tripping over a toothpick and falling into a fish tank.

Episode 12: The Time Trap

The slump is back! The Enterprise’s investigation of a Bermuda Triangle in space fails to inspire much more in the crew than by-the-numbers last ditch planning to escape it. Kirk follows a Klingon ship that has disappeared in the area and discovers that there is some sort of pocket in time that traps starships. Spock effortlessly agrees with the logic Kirk displays when Kirk rambles on about continuums and the like. The survivors of the starships have formed a kind of United Nations that governs the area and they forbid violence.

With Klingons milling around, violence is what you’re going to get though! But first Kirk decides that it would be best to work together with the Klingons to get out of this pickle while the Klingons decide it would be best to plant an explosive pellet on the Enterprise to blow their wimpy cooperating butts to kingdom come. Happy endings all around when Kirk finds out about the pellet and immediately tells Spock and Scotty to go take care of it while he relaxes on his nice, safe, faraway-from-the-pellet, captain’s chair on the bridge. You’ll feel like you got your foot caught in a time trap when you watch this one.

Episode highlights: Bones and a Klingon getting into a squabble over a girl at a dance.

Episode 13: The Ambergris Element

This is another one of those missions where Kirk is checking out some supposedly deserted planet that is actually full of sea monsters and an underwater race of humanoids. It’s all a good excuse to finally take out the Enterprise’s sub and cruise around the ocean depths instead of sitting around on the bridge listening to Scotty try to explain the latest reason you’re out of dilithium crystals. Even when you’re getting heaved around to and fro by a big red fish-dragon instead.

Guys like Kirk and me wouldn’t normally sweat a little set-to with some otherworldly demon of the deep, but we draw the line at getting turned into a fish-man! Kirk and Spock go missing for five days after getting the snot beat out of them by the sea monster and in the meantime the mermen turn them into water-breathers! From there, it’s a routine race against time to get the venom from the sea monster that can restore them to human form. Features standard issue blah blah about how surface dwellers hosed the merman eons ago. Whatever. I’ll try to remember that the next time I pee in the ocean.

Episode highlights: Kirk with webbed hands; Kirk complaining about not being able to command the Enterprise from an aquarium.

Episode 14: The Slaver Weapon

Do you hate Captain Kirk? Sure, we all do. Tired of Bones and his bad attitude? Annoyed at Scotty for all his accented babbling about rerouting this and bypassing that? Have I got an episode for you! Spock, Sulu, and Uhura go it alone against a bunch of war mongering cat people who are after an ancient device that could possibly be used to do something really bad! Though things begin routinely enough with Spock and company transporting a mysterious box to a Federation location, it all goes sour when Spock displays a distinctly Kirk-ian flair by taking a detour to another planet where it seems a second mysterious box is!

It all ends up being a dastardly trap set up by these cat people. The weird boxes come from a time long ago when the Slavers ruled the galaxy. Sometimes there’s a really good prize inside of them like an antigravity gizmo and other times it’s something cruddy like a disruptor bomb with the pin pulled. Sort of like the secret toy surprise in a box of delicious Cracker Jacks! These boxes also give off signals when another is nearby and the cat people have been hanging onto their empty one waiting for some rube like Spock to roll by.

Episode highlights: Uhura bemoaning the fact that she doesn’t run the 100 yard dash as fast as she used to; Spock telling Sulu to think of a vegetable to antagonize the meat-loving aliens.

Episode 15: The Eye of the Beholder

What if some alien species looked down on us like we do with all the crappier lifeforms on Earth? What if we were no more than a beast to be caged and observed, to be put on display for everyone’s entertainment? That’s right, Trek fan! It’s space zoo time! Another comfy sci-fi short story standby finally makes it’s appearance in this series. I think it’s a mark of the excellence of this show that they held off all the way until the 15th episode to phone it in with this particular plot.

The Enterprise is investigating the disappearance of some Federation geeks on one those Class M planets that look really sweet from orbit, but turn out to be overrun with sulfur pits, dinosaurs, and intelligent aliens with their own deadly agenda! After being captured by these things that look a little like giant snails, Kirk has to figure out a way to escape from the zoo his crew finds itself in. In a shocking twist, Scotty actually saves everyone’s bacon when he beams down with his new pal, a young alien that Kirk accidentally beamed up (whoops!), and everything gets worked out.

Episode highlights: Bones gets trapped beneath the tail of a giant dinosaur; those pink pterodactyls make their third appearance in the series.

Episode 16: The Jihad

Finally! A mission where Kirk is in a jam and has to save the entire universe because he’s supposed to and not because he got bored and blundered into something that looked more interesting than whatever survey he was charged with conducting! A race of bird-like aliens has had an object which the brain pattern of their chief religious figure was inscribed on stolen! Being an ancient warrior race who only found peace through the teachings of this great bird, they know only one recourse to solve this situation – galaxy-wide war!

Kirk, Spock, and an assortment of loser aliens form a commando team whose double-secret mission
is go to the planet where the artifact is located and recover it for these birdbrains before the Federation’s starships become awash in heaps of bird-doo. But wait! With the fuse lit to this space powder keg, they have to contend with a saboteur from within! A saboteur with motives so fiendish, that the only way to avert a jihad is for Kirk and Spock to call upon all their null gravity battle training and tag team this sneaky bastard into submission!

Episode highlights: Kirk getting hit on by a white trash member of the team at the beginning of the mission; Kirk getting hit on by a white trash member of the team in the middle of the mission; are those the same pink pterodactyls making their fourth appearance in this one?

Season 2

Episode 17: The Pirates of Orion

Spock goes and catches himself a fatal disease thus delaying Kirk’s diplomatic mission to somewhere or other (much to Kirk’s delight, no doubt). That pointy-eared rascal’s green blood is the reason he is so affected while red-blooded Earthers like Kirk and Bones are okay. He only has three days to live, but the nearest serum is four days away! At maximum warp!! There can be only one solution – space rendezvous! But before they can complete their space rendezvous, the ship carrying the cure to the Enterprise gets hijacked and has all their booty taken from them by pirates!

The rest of the story details the efforts of Kirk to track down these scum of the starways through an explosive asteroid belt before finally making contact with them. Negotiations ensue with Kirk and the head pirate agreeing to an exchange on the surface of an asteroid. Meanwhile the head pirate and the second head pirate negotiate amongst themselves for a deadly doublecross that not only sees them attempting to blow up Kirk and the Enterprise, but themselves as well!

Episode highlights: Spock fainting on the bridge; the head pirate attempting suicide on the bridge; Kirk and Bones laughing about it all at the end of the episode.

Episode 18: Bem

Captain Kirk finally seems to be reaching his breaking point as he finds himself in yet another improbable and hard-to-follow jam. Saddled with the most annoying guest-alien to date, Kirk and Spock get themselves captured by some lizard people who keep them in wooden cages causing Kirk to moan to Spock about how come they always find themselves in this sort of trouble. Spock’s logical Vulcan response? It’s fate, Captain! Err, I think all that green blood must have drained from your head.

The alien Bem is along with Kirk and Spock as an observer and is nothing more than a pointless pain in the M-class butt. If he isn’t using his bizarre segmented body to pickpocket the phasers and tricorders from Kirk and Spock underwater, he’s getting himself caught on purpose by savages, and then he’s threatening suicide for some mistake he claims he made. I found myself as exasperated as Kirk was with all this incoherent yammering and scheming and was pleading with Kirk to set his phaser on “kill” and just hand it over to good old Bem.

Episode highlights: Kirk whining to Spock that he (Kirk) should have been a librarian; Bem constantly referring to himself in the third person.

Episode 19: The Practical Joker

You can practically hear Kirk begging for some action as he makes his Captain’s Log about their survey mission which is three days ahead of schedule. One can only imagine the contented sigh of relief he must have breathed when those three Romulan ships ambushed the Enterprise and sent her into a mysterious energy cloud in retreat. But things aren’t exactly what they seem when during the celebratory dinner they have after running away from the Romulans, Kirk and the crew find themselves afflicted with one the galaxy’s most feared conditions: dribble glasses!

Thus begins one of the greatest of all Trek episodes wherein we see Kirk and the rest of his uptight buddies cut down to size by a mysterious practical joker. But who is responsible for the Enterprise turning into the wackiest starship in the Alpha Quadrant? As Kirk says, while it was funny for awhile, now it’s getting old and friend is turning against friend. And Sulu, Bones, and Uhura exercise the intelligence of a single-cell Tellurian dung beetle when they decide to visit the holodeck in the midst of all this wackiness. This already classic episode gets bonus points for shoehorning a holodeck malfunction into the proceedings.

Episode highlights: In what has to be the highlight of the entire series, Kirk complains about how when he picked up his uniform from the cleaners someone had written “Kirk is a Jerk” on the back of it – and he went ahead and wore it anyway!

Episode 20: Albatross

Unremarkable tale about how Bones went and killed a bunch of aliens with some plague 19 years ago and now the aliens want to put him on trial. As Kirk, Spock, and Bones are about leave this planet after delivering medical supplies, Kirk gets served with an arrest warrant for Bones. Displaying his Starfleet-trained tact and diplomacy, Kirk immediately denounces the aliens’ justice system as a “kangaroo court” and sets about conducting his own investigation for the real killers.

On another planet in the system that was ravaged by the plague, Kirk encounters an alien who claims that Bones actually saved him from the plague all those years ago! Star witness in tow, Kirk is surely salivating at the prospect of presenting one of those Perry Mason-style defenses with surprise evidence and last second revelations, but is thwarted when the plague hits him and everyone on his ship! Only Spock is unaffected and must bust Bones out of jail to find a cure for everything and simultaneously clear the good doc’s name!

Episode highlights: Plague causing Uhura to turn white; Spock complaining that Bones is derelict in his duty to dispense vitamins to the crew.

Episode 21: How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth

This one sputters along purely on impulse power. Not only boring due to the interminable yammering going on between Kirk and the flying serpent pretending to be an ancient god, the episode also is quite contrived. Remember Ensign Walking Bear? You know him, he was the guy who took Sulu’s spot. In a single episode. When the story needed a crew member familiar with the ancient legends of the Mayans and Azetcs. Ugh.

Things go from boring to contrived all the way on up to painfully self-important as we endure one those “earthlings are all grown up now and don’t need help from their ancient Gods anymore” storylines that by law must include Kirk and Bones quoting Shakespeare at the end of the episode. Throughout it all though, Kirk is still Kirk, saving the day by both busting up this wannabe-God’s intergalactic zoo and talking him to death.

Episode highlights: None really, unless you count Kirk chastising Bones for back talking the god. Or Spock snootily informing Bones and Kirk that when aliens visited Vulcan, it was the aliens that left smarter. Weak, weak episode.

Episode 22: The Counter-Clock Incident

The second season and the entire series come to a rather dismal end with “The Counter-Clock Incident.” Kirk’s busybodying once again endangers the lives of the other 400 odd people on board the Enterprise as he tries to prevent an alien ship from flying into a supernova with his ship’s tractor beam. The Enterprise is unable to disengage its tractor beam as both ships enter the supernova and end up in one of those reverse universes that’s scattered around the bottom of black holes and tears in the fabric of the time-space continuum.

In the reverse universe, Kirk finds that everything runs backwards compared to our own universe. The Enterprise flies in reverse, the sky is white, the stars are black, and people are born old and get younger. Not much of any of this explored though as most of the time is devoted to some hair-brained scheme to start a supernova that the Enterprise could travel through to get back home. I guess the drama is supposed to come from the fact that the crew is turning into babies, but with two old Starfleet fogeys on board (one of those lucky coincidences that this show traffics in), it doesn’t take a Denebian stink goat to smell the ending of this one a parsec away.

Episode highlights: Bones hitting on the elderly doctor on board. (I told you it was dismal.)

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Johnny is the little Nancy-boy of John and Sally. For reasons that remained fuzzy, Suzy and Johnny were being dropped off at Suzy’s mom’s plantation and John was going back to Atlanta without them. This proved to be a bit traumatic for the wussy boy because he starts bawling and begins plotting his grand escape. Johnny takes off down the dirt road and wanders by a group of folks that are singing about Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit. He’s momentarily entranced by the singing, but moves on down the road and sees Uncle Remus telling stories about the various animals that inhabit these parts.

Uncle Remus sees Johnny hiding behind the trees and tells the people who come looking for him to just tell his mother that Johnny is with him. He talks to Johnny after they leave and Johnny tells him that he’s running away. Uncle Remus offers to go with him, but gets him to delay his trip until the morning since it is so late.

While Remus is stalling him, he busts out his first Brer Rabbit story. He tends to let loose these tales whenever little Johnny needs to be taught a lesson about life and such. I guess that’s better than putting his cigarette out on his head or something like my step dad used to do.

The first story just happens to be about when Brer Rabbit tried to run away from his swanky little pad in the briar patch. It ended up with him trapped by Brer Fox, and it was only through a bit of tomfoolery lifted straight out of Tom Sawyer and his whitewashing gag that Brer Rabbit was able to escape, piss off Brer Fox, and make Brer Bear look like a boob. Somehow the point of that story was that you can’t run away from your problems. I personally didn’t get it, but little Johnny did, so he decided to stay put at the plantation.

With Crisis #1 passed, it was time for Crisis #2. This involves Johnny getting a cute little puppy from the white trash that live just down the road. There’s two older boys that are threatening to drown the doggie because it’s the runt and they have a little sister (Ginny) that saves the dog by giving it to Johnny. Since Johnny has a mom whose own husband would rather live in Atlanta without her, she says that they ain’t having no white trash dog named Teenchy and that he needs to get rid of it. Johnny naturally gets rid of it right to Uncle Remus.

These two little hilljacks want their dog back and start bothering Johnny for it. It doesn’t help Johnny that before he got the dog, he showed up around those parts wearing a fancy lad’s velvet outfit complete with lace collar! God, mom! Why don’t you just tape a sign on his forehead reading “Sissy – Please beat the piss out of me!”

What’s Johnny to do about the dog and the local bullies who want him back? Naturally, Uncle Remus remembers when Brer Rabbit was in just such a fix and Johnny uses this story to outwit the mouth breathing brothers who are after Teenchy.

These two young punks figure out that they were played like a moonshine jug and go tattle to Johnny’s mom. She finds out that Remus was harboring this dog and tells him not to tell any more stories to Johnny.

With Uncle Remus on suspension, the drama ratchets up, because it is now Johnny’s birthday party and it promises to be a real gala. Johnny gets his mom to invite Ginny, in spite of her inferior breeding. (This movie gets a bad rap for being racially insensitive when it’s really the low class white family that look like dopes.)

Ginny’s mom makes her a new dress and Johnny comes over to get her. Her brothers follow and push her in the mud causing her to get dirty and cry and causing Johnny to become the Incredible Hulk in a red velvet suit!

Before Johnny gets clubbed with a big stick, Uncle Remus steps in to save the day. Despite his suspension, another Brer Rabbit story is told involving the Laughing Place. After this story, Johnny’s mom shows up and Ginny narcs them out about the all-new Brer Rabbit story they just heard.

Remus gets himself suspended again and this time he knows to get while the getting’s good because he packs up his crap and gets ready to leave the plantation. The movie then becomes Brer Awesome once Johnny gets his ass planted by a crabby bull and Johnny almost visits that big Laughing Place in the sky!

The movie presents a homey, magical version of the old South that surely never existed and the sets look like something you’d see at a Disney theme park, but the relationship between Johnny and Uncle Remus felt genuine. The animated sequences are vintage Disney and it’s fun to see Uncle Remus interact with the animated animals as he tells the stories of Brer Rabbit. The combination of live-action and animation that Disney would return to periodically in the years to come is very well done and one wishes that Disney would give this the release it deserves so we could see it with a pristine print. Overall, I would have to say that this movie was pretty satisfactorial.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The movie is told through a grown up and off-screen Jeremiah going through a scrap book that he kept of his misspent and sheep-obsessed youth. We learn Jerry wasn’t always some sick freak who slept in the barn with his lamb. In fact, before he loved that sheep, he was in love with a horse!

He used to cut out pictures of famous racehorse Dan Patch and put them in his scary little scrap book, but Dan Patch doesn’t really play any part in the story except that Jerry names the black sheep that is born on his farm after him. At this point, Jerry descends into total madness and starts changing the pictures in his scrapbook from horses to sheep!

Jerry lives with his pinched up old granny who is always on Jerry’s back about saying his prayers, taking his vitamins and doing his homework (was his grandma Hulk Hogan?) and constantly tries to sabotage his budding love affair with Danny. I guess it was his granny’s rejection of his lifestyle choice that caused him to delve into a fantasy life within the scrapbook that was represented by these dumb animated scenes.

I was surprised by how little animation was in this already brief movie. There was maybe three or four different sequences and they tried to teach Jerry life lessons about not giving up and stuff. You had Christopher Columbus sticking it out to discover America, you had this Scottish king named Robert Bruce talking to a spider about not being a quitter (that worked out well, right? I mean, what with Scotland being its own country and all now), and this brainiac owl hosted all this blarney.

The animation looks fine, it’s just that the content is so generic. Let me put it this way: even if you’ve never seen Song Of The South, you probably have a good idea who and what B’rer Rabbit and all his B’rer friends are. You probably wouldn’t be able to pick any of the animated characters from this movie out of a police line up, even if the line up was made up purely of animated sheep, owls, and Robert Bruces unique to this film.

When these cartoon things aren’t happening, the movie eventually decides that it’s going to be about Jerry figuring out a way to take Danny to the county fair to enter him into some type of sheep beauty contest. His problems are multi-fold as Granny doesn’t believe in county fairs (she must be Seventh Day Adventist), Jerry doesn’t have the money to go, and Danny keeps running away (maybe Danny is tired of bad touches masquerading as grooming).

Jerry (with the help of his abysmal animated daydreams) sets about solving these problems. To get the money, he goes out and finds a big tree full of wild honey. This was a disappointment because I was sure that at some point Jerry would be getting chased by a swarm of killer bees, but that never materialized.

As far as Danny running away, Jerry finally chases him down in the swamp. That only leaves Granny to deal with. It turns out that sheep aren’t the only things that can get “lost” in the swamp!

Jerry arranges for Granny to have herself a little accident in the bog and the next thing you know, Jerry’s telling everyone she’s off on a trip to the city to visit her sick sister and he’s dressing in her clothes and talking to himself in her voice. Wait a second – that may have only happened in one of my cartoon daydreams. She may have just eventually given in to get Jerry off her back.

At the county fair, Jerry and Danny have their big showdown with all the fancy sheep and the movie crosses us up by having Danny lose, but just when all is lost, the judges bust out a very special award (pink ribbon – need I say more?) that they haven’t awarded in four years.

I can’t recall what the award was for, but they make a big deal out of how you have to “use what you got” or some bogus feel-good junk all the liberals think we need to pour on kids to improve their self-esteem. Whatever happened to the America I grew up in where we weren’t afraid to tell kids that they suck?

Burl Ives is the best thing in this movie, but he was squandered in the older, buddy role. He didn’t get to sing that much and other than the classic Lavender Blue, the material they gave him was cornpone garbage that Hee-Haw would have rejected.

Bobby Driscoll who was so good in Treasure Island and didn’t screw things up in Song Of The South will irritate you with his toothy, wide-eyed, goober performance. (His best moment is when he briefly rails against God when Danny is lost in the swamp.)

Even Danny the black sheep was a disappointment, showing zero personality and doing little more than running around and busting through screen doors, though he did butt a guy in the ass at the fair. But other than that, this movie didn’t pull the wool over my eyes. Or was it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Or were they closing the barn door after Danny had already run away to the swamp? Whatever, just crate that smelly animal up and ship him to the market already.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Alan-A-Dale is depicted here as a rooster which causes the viewer to make an unfortunate comparison to Rock-A-Doodle which is also about singing rooster. Don Bluth, who worked on Robin Hood, directed that one and it makes you wonder what’s up with a guy that would use Alan-A-Dale from this movie as an inspiration for another film. It’s not healthy to be that obsessed with singing roosters.

The action begins long after Robin has formed his band of Merry Men since the first bit of business involves Robin and Little John dressing up as women fortune tellers to rob Prince John as he and his coach travel through Sherwood Forest. How come when a guy has to go into disguise, it always involves granny panties, lipstick, and falsies? Whatever happened to a pair of glasses and a fake beard?

This particular operation (like all of Robin Hood’s schemes in this film) is pretty forgettable and run of the mill and leads to the people of Nottingham getting taxed even more heavily than before. (Thanks Robin. Hope you at least had fun wearing heels.)

Following that debacle is perhaps the worst sequence where these little animals are playing and lose their ball or shuttlecock or whatever it is that 13th century talking British animals played with and they have to go on the grounds of Prince John’s castle to retrieve it.

The animals run into Marion and her attendant Klucky (a fat chicken or “fat chick” in today’s parlance) and the talk soon turns to love and Robin Hood. Marion and one of the little rabbits that idolizes Robin play act like they’re a couple and – I can’t continue or I’ll dry heave all over the keyboard. Let’s just skip to the big archery tournament.

I didn’t really hate the tournament as much as I did most of the rest of the movie, but that only lasted until the tournament degenerated into one of those deals where all the characters are running after and into one another while background music that sounded like surf music played. I thought it was Alan-A-Dale, not Dick Dale!

And even when I despise a movie like I did this one, I’m a big enough fellow to give it credit for what it got right so I can honestly say that it was quite refreshing that when Robin went undercover this time, he kept the leather bustier in the closet and showed up disguised as a stork!

All of this left Prince John a bit peeved and it wasn’t long before Friar Tuck got himself imprisoned for high treason by the Sheriff and is scheduled to be executed at dawn. Of course all this happened only after we had to gag on a particularly noxious scene involving some little bitty mice giving their last farthing to Friar Tuck’s church.

Robin hits the streets as a blind beggar to get the lowdown on this and eventually re-hits the streets as a vulture guard, while Little John disguises himself as the Sheriff (now, those disguises actually make some sense) and proceed to bust not only Friar Tuck out of prison, but the entire population of Nottingham!

Seems that they had all been locked up after they couldn’t meet their ever increasing tax burden. I think that was the least Robin could do, since it was always his smart-aleck doings that embarrassed the Prince and the Sheriff into raising taxes.

Perhaps realizing the reekiness of this movie, Disney then wrapped things up really fast and the next thing you know Robin and Marion are married and all the bad guys are breaking rocks in their prison stripes, King Richard having returned to reclaim his throne.

This was a very trying time for the people of England, but more so for the people of home video who paid more than a farthing to sit through this.

A rotten script that never developed Robin beyond a fox in a green hat and that relegated Marion to about two scenes, while spending entirely too much time with the big lummox Baloo the Bear, I mean Little John, completely scuttled this version of Robin Hood.

The script also presented us with a story that felt like episodes of a continuing series (can you imagine the horror?) with Robin Hood constantly outsmarting the bad guys followed by the bad guys taking it out on the townspeople.

Almost completely absent was Robin and his Merry Men kicking it in the forest. Where were the scenes showing us why Robin inspired loyalty? Why he was a great leader and a lovable rogue? Why Marion loved him? And where was Will Scarlet? I love that guy!

You know, it’s been about a billion years since Errol Flynn owned the role of Robin Hood back in the Triassic Era, but no one has ever come close to capturing the essence of what the story demands of the character: he needs to be dangerous and tough enough to live on the run and tempt the wrath of the British military, but likeable enough to be a folk hero that regular folks don’t fear.

I think Disney should just give up on trying to make a kid-friendly Robin Hood movie, mainly because Flynn’s version still fills the bill. There’s plenty of action, color and funny moments and it never gets too heavy or slow so that kids will get bored.

In contrast, this DVD probably isn’t even safe to have in your home because one of the “bonus features” involves a sing-along with that “Oo-de-lally” and there’s always a chance that your kid will accidentally activate it and well, remember, punch a pillow or a wall, but never punch a child.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

It’s a hodgepodge of stories where Fritz is apparently imagining his life in different scenarios. These scenes are partly designed to be shocking and partly designed to be topical. Thus you get scenes of Fritz hanging out with Hitler and also flying to Mars.

Fritz has apparently recovered nicely from the substantial injuries he suffered when that power plant blew up at the end of the first movie because he is now out of school and married to this fat broad who does nothing but criticize him for everything he does (drugs) and doesn’t do (work).

As this skank rants and raves about how Fritz needs to go down to the welfare office, his astral self floats out of his body and out the window and on down to the street where he encounters a Puerto Rican guy. Fritz farts in his direction thereby setting the tone for the biting social commentary and satire that is to follow.

Later Fritz meets a guy who is living in a trash can and introduces himself as God. He claims that he’s had the job for three years. This would have meant that he started back in 1971 which probably goes a long way to explaining why that decade was better left forgotten by real Americans everywhere.

After his encounter with a down and out God, Fritz finds himself back in Nazi Germany. What he’s doing there besides trying to generate cheap shocks is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t take long for him to fall into the job of being Hitler’s orderly.

I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant precisely, but it seemed to have an awful lot to do with both Fritz and Adolph standing around talking about the number of balls each of them had. Did you know that at one time Fritz had three nuts? That’s what I call character development!

Fritz ends up back in his neighborhood talking to the guy who runs the pizza place and telling him about this fat chick he’s been screwing and it turns out that it’s that guy’s wife. This is what passes for an interlude because we’re suddenly treated to a rather extended music video that finds Fritz imagining what a cool cat he was back in the 1930s!

This was a bit of a “multimedia” experience that mixed animation with footage of FDR and other old time stuff while Fritz danced around in a top hat and tails. As terrifyingly inept and nonsensically painful all of this was, the worst part of the movie was yet to come.

Fritz then goes down to the local pawn shop and to pawn his toilet, but the pawn shop dude is understandably a bit reticent to conclude the transaction. Eventually he agrees to trade Fritz’s toilet for an astronaut’s helmet.

Since he’s got the helmet, this allows Fritz to explore the burning issue of the United States’ manned space program. Luckily for us, Fritz isn’t really caught up in the politics of it all, since he just ends up humping some other astronauts while they’re flying off to Mars.

Fritz really comes crashing to Earth though in his last segment when he clumsily attempts to deal with the race issue. New Jersey has been turned into something named New Africa and all the blacks in America have moved there and Whitey is outlawed.

Fritz is an errand boy who is summoned to the White House and President Kissinger has him deliver a message to the president in New Africa who of course resides at the Black House. Fritz gets enmeshed in a plot to assassinate that president and is set to be shot before a firing squad.

There’s also some truly wicked satire where Kissinger rolls into New Africa on a golf cart and announces his country’s surrender even though New Africa was about to surrender so they could reap some reparation monies. Take that establishment pigs, whatever that means!

The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat fails to be anything other than self-indulgent and doesn’t even try to tell a story. I guess you could say it’s about what happens when you settle down and give up your independence and have to put up with your crummy family instead riding your hog across this great country of ours and are left with only your dreams.

And if all Fritz has left is his dreams, what do they tell us? That no matter what Fritz does, he’s always destined to attempt political and social statements, but fail miserably? A pointless, obnoxiously unsubtle collection of unconnected shorts that make you wish Fritz used up all his nine lives in the first film.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Despite that, it’s easy to say that it isn’t nearly the Christmas disaster that their previous snow job, Mickey’s Once Upon A Christmas since this time they manage to include some material that wasn’t generated by their “straight to video” division.

Specifically, you’ve got one short from the fifties featuring Pluto and Mickey Mouse and then you have the A Christmas Carol featurette they did in the early eighties. These two segments are the highlight of the disc, but it’s questionable as to whether their thirty or so minutes of material justify purchasing this.

This particular night at the House of Mouse (Mickey’s nightclub) is Christmas Eve. We arrive just as they’re finishing up for the evening and everyone is preparing to go home, presumably for Christmas. I say presumably because of the make up of the crowd.

The House of Mouse is one of these multicultural clubs where characters from all the past Disney animated films gather to relax. You can see the Beauty And The Beast crowd, the Cinderella crowd, the Mad Hatter, and the likes of Eyeore there. I even saw Pete’s Dragon!

Old Man Winter though has gone and snowed everybody in at the House of Mouse and you know what that means! Time for an all-night show of shows with a distinctly Christmas theme!

Aside from everyone being snowed in and forced to sit through these things (I’m guessing most of them were pretty wasted by the middle of the first segment – I know I was), you have the story line of Donald being all “bah humbug” about the holidays and his best buddy Mickey trying to give him some holiday cheer by torturing him with these stories.

And in fact, Donald (and his three nephews) were the subjects of the first little bit involving the building of a snowman and some problems Donald had ice skating. Crudely animated and indifferently scripted, this tale immediately lost my interest as it became evident that it would merely be one of these cartoons where the characters would get chased around a lot.

The next segment, Pluto’s Christmas Tree is instantly recognizable as coming from an earlier time when some effort was put into the backgrounds of the drawings and the characters looked like they actually had some depth to them and the colors didn’t seem as garish.

To be fair, this cartoon is basically one where Pluto just chased Chip and Dale around Mickey’s Christmas tree. There is actually some imagination here though with bits like a chimpmunk hiding as one of the Santa candles on Mickey’s mantle and Mickey trying to light him up.

Following that is a version of The Nutcracker with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy and it goes on too long and features Donald in mouse ears and buck teeth as the bad guy, making him look Count Duckla.

It’s narrated by John Cleese and they try to go for that “too cool for school” bit where the narrator is a smart aleck who interacts with the characters, but it isn’t terribly smart and certainly isn’t funny.

Finally they get to the meat of this thing and pull out Mickey’s Christmas Carol. Released back in 1983 along with The Rescuers re-release, it ended up being nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Short category.

Also making appearances are Donald, Goofy, Daisy, Minnie, Jiminy Cricket, Uncle Scrooge, and even the evil Pete! This is a pretty quick and dirty retelling of Dickens’ story and its twenty five or so minutes go by really fast.

The animation looks good, there’s actually a story, all-star cast, and no horrible musical numbers to mar the Christmas action. A definite winner.

Once Scrooge gets finished becoming warm and fuzzy, we make one more unwelcome trip back to the House of Mouse and everything is wrapped up with one of the worst sugary songs about the season or giving or friendship or whatever that I’ve ever had the displeasure to endure.

Obviously, your enjoyment of Mickey’s Magical Christmas will depend on your tolerance for the stuff on it that stinks, but if you’re just interested in seeing Mickey’s Christmas Carol, you’re best bet is to hunt down Mickey Mouse in Living Color – Volume 2 where you can see it in all its widescreen glory.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

And if that seems like a decidedly un-Christmas-y spirit to be in, then you haven’t endured this cheaply made, cynical holiday cash in, particularly the segment featuring Goofy and his extreme sport loving son Max.

First up though was a tale featuring Donald Duck and his three delinquent nephews. While strictly average and sporting a story as familiar as the Christmas Day that Huey, Dewey, and Louie are forced to relive over and over, this is the most entertaining part of the movie, though you’re left wishing that the writers had worked a little more imagination into their retread story.

Basically, this is the same concept behind the movie Groundhog Day. The kids wake up on Christmas, play with their presents and have a high old time all day and at the end of the day, one of them wishes upon a star that Christmas didn’t have to end.

This results are predictable: Initially, the three of them are excited about this Twilight Zone-ish development, but rapidly grow bored (didn’t they realize they’d be opening the same crappy presents every day for eternity?) and grow to dread seeing Chip and Dale playing with their new train in their tree house every morning, just like the audience in Groundhog Day grew to dread hearing Sonny and Cher on Bill Murray’s radio every morning.

Sure, they try to freshen things up as the Christmases pile up, but their efforts aren’t terribly impressive. (The only thing they could come up with to avoid their tubby aunt’s kisses was to get dressed up in scuba gear?)

They also replace Daisy’s cooked turkey with a live turkey and this ends up with Donald’s house completely wrecked and Christmas ruined. The boys feel real bad about this and resolve to make the next Christmas Day the best ever.

Uh, why would they feel bad? Wouldn’t every thing be back to normal the next morning? Why the sudden attack of conscience in a world where actions no longer have any consequences because you get a do-over the very next day?

For whatever reason (probably so that all the bratty kids watching will learn some kind of lesson) Huey, Dewey, and Louie finally figure out that a strictly secular Christmas experience isn’t just about getting lots of crappy toys, but is in fact about giving.

While that one was okay and left you wishing that someone had cared enough to add some originality to that worn out, but intriguing idea (surely kids that could live the same day over and over and over would do more than use their toys to make Donald drop breakfast, especially since he did that anyway on the original Christmas), the next story involving Goofy and Max makes you wonder just how punishing the full length movies these two were in (A Goofy Movie, An Extremely Goofy Movie) were.

The story in this one is that Max wants a fancy snow board for Christmas from Santa, but once Pete, his jerk neighbor tells him there isn’t any Santa Clause, he loses his faith that there really is a Santa and more importantly, becomes convinced that he won’t get his precious snow board.

It’s up to Goofy to restore Max’s faith in Santa, though good parenting would dictate that it was up to Goofy to tell Max to quit being such a freaking cry baby and that if your entire existence is based around whether you get a free snow board, then you’re seriously maladjusted.

The final episode is a bit of a letdown since it’s only run of the mill boring. It’s Mickey and Minnie in their version of O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi”. We all know how this one goes down: each of them sells their prized possession to get the other a gift related to the prized possession the other has just sold.

Kids who aren’t familiar with the story might be interested, but for everyone else, there’s nothing new in this version save the crappy Christmas songs that Mickey plays incessantly on his prized harmonica. (You’re just counting the minutes until he has to sell that obnoxious thing.)

In addition to the lackluster stories involved in this thing, the animation featured is likewise lackluster, showing all the effort that Disney’s cartoons churned out for television do. Flat, ugly, and generally looking dashed off, any company that actually had some pride in having a reputation for quality animation would be embarrassed to let this out with its name on it or featuring its characters. The best bit of artwork in this thing is the cover of the DVD, but since that’s all you see until you give them your cash, that’s all they probably care about.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Though I would have preferred to know the legend of the thin mint since to me a candy cane is something I’m always pulling cat hair and stocking fuzz off of, I was willing to give this candy cane business a chance because this cartoon promised a talking mountain goat!

It’s not that I think that talking animals are per se amusing, it’s just that with a mountain goat involved I figured I could count on an endless stream of “butt” jokes. Or at the very least, the goat would somehow eat the prize candy cane that little Timmy was counting on to win first place at the town’s Winter Festival to save the orphanage his adopted grandmother runs.

Well, when I heard the word “god” issue forth from my television at just over the two minute mark, I knew I had been had. Some dirty bastard had gone and hijacked this whole candy cane business to advance his Jesus agenda!

Hey, that’s cool with me – free country all that bullcrap, right? But, come on! Isn’t it just a little much to be waging your cultural war in my Christmas cartoons? I’m here for elves, reindeer, and burgermeisters, not a dang sermon!

The real beauty of all this is that these candy cane activists so intent on imposing their religiousosity on my Christmas are not even very effective at it. At the beginning of things they vainly attempt to establish their God-cred by running a montage of Adam and Eve running around, some old coot in an ark, and an even older coot with a long white beard harassing some kid with his shepherding staff.

After that, it’s thirty minutes of flaccid frontier follies as we watch the mysterious blue-eyed stranger with the wimpy Bible-beard roll into town with his talking horse, talking goat, and simpering orphan boy.

The town of West Sage has a bevy of problems for John to solve as he has to contend with one guy settling for a mail-order bride so his daughter will have a mommy, Jane who is hot for the guy with the mail-order bride, Jane’s mean old sister who is most likely frigid, his orphan boy that needs a home (but obviously not with John since he’s got lots of old west towns to annoy with his wispy brand of Bible thumping), and his mountain goat who is afraid of heights.

Holy crap! That’s a mighty tall set of problems for one quietly confident Christian to solve! But don’t sweat it because John is so wise he even knows when to change the tires on his covered wagon to runners so that it becomes a sleigh right before the big blizzard rolls across the amber waves of grain! Heck, I’ve been unexpectedly rained on enough to know we need more weathermen who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ rather than with the girl who anchors the morning newscast.

But how in the world does John save Christmas, solve all the problems, and mosey on to another (hopefully off-screen) adventure with only the power of a single candy cane? Um, because you unwashed pagans, it’s a candy cane on mission from God!

You think a little thing like a rabid wolf trying to eat Jane who fell into a mysterious chasm in the middle of the prairie is going to stop this Confection of Christendom? Can a simple case of fear-of-heights-phobia stand against the righteous vengeance of this two-tone Treat of Tribulation? (And no, I don’t know what half those words mean – I’m just trying to remember stuff from those Left Behind movies.)

Shockingly, it’s just when it seems that there isn’t any answer that John shows this little girl what exactly is in the crates that he’s brought to the storefront he just bought. (Which doesn’t make any sense story-wise since he’s leaving in the morning anyway, but God works in mysterious ways, right?)

It’s a bunch of freaking candy! YES! He’s going to solve everyone’s problems by giving them bad teeth and making them fat and hyper! Chalk one up for the Big Man Upstairs!

Mr. Godbar busts out his magic candy cane and explains its secret origin to the little girl. Something about how the white is purity and the red stripe is sadness and sometimes you just gots to lick all that sadness away just like our Lord and Savior did!

To bolster his airtight case for the candy cane being a divine instrument, John points out how it looks like a shepherd’s staff and – get ready – if you turn it upside down it looks just like the letter “J”! And do you know whose name starts with “J”? That’s right! Judas! Wait, I mean, Jesus!

The voices of Florence Henderson, Ossie Davis, Tom Bosley, and Malcolm-Jamal Warner humiliate the rest of their bodies in this one which comes complete with songs that get progressively worse as the show goes along.

It’s obvious that this is the work of Satan and really, doesn’t that candy cane seem to resemble a striped, crooked dingus sans nads? I know I was really uncomfortable with all that licking. I don’t recall nothing in my Bible that speaks of licking anything, least of all some demonic-looking phallus. As far as I’m concerned, you can keep your kinky sex toys to your creepy self, John Godbar!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Disney was no doubt smarting from the fact that The Black Cauldron proved an extremely expensive and stinky stew back in 1985. Surely, this cheaper and more conventional tale of a mouse who has to foil the schemes of a rat to take over England with a robot queen built by an expert toy maker, was a very attractive follow up project to try and get back in the black.

Discounting the fact that there is surely a big difference between making a wooden train and an android that has to fool an entire nation, the movie annoys because of the dumb idea that all the mice in England have studiously replicated Victorian society right down to their fictional detectives. Think of it as a holodeck program if Lt. Geordi from Star Trek: The Next Generation had a rodent fetish.

Even if you’re the type of lunatic who doesn’t mind finding rat turds in your Fruit Loops though, you won’t be terribly engaged by this movie, especially the first forty minutes of it, which includes an unfortunate musical number sung by Vincent Price!

The movie opens with a toymaker getting kidnapped and his daughter going to find Basil so that he can try and rescue her father. Along the way she runs into Dr. Dawson, a tubby chap with a moustache who is the Dr. Watson mouse to Basil’s Sherlock. Am I the only one who is less than impressed with someone who writes a bunch of books that mimics Sherlock Holmes, only with mice?

Precious concept aside, this little kid that is looking for her dad will have you looking under your sink for the rat poison, chiefly because of her squeaky voice. Thankfully, she’s captured halfway through and we get to focus on the growing relationship between both single men. I’m not trying to start nothing here, but Basil did convince Dawson to dress up as a sailor and visit a waterfront bar with him.

Being an open minded sort, I’ll admit that the bar scenes were the best. Where else in a Disney movie can you see an animated cat shimmy around in a garter singing about making some guy feel good? Basil and Dawson even had someone slip some roofies into their drinks!

After Dawson’s finishes dancing on stage with Melissa Manchester’s Miss Kitty Mouse, he and Basil head off into the sewer after the evil Ratigan’s henchman, Fidget, who leads them into a trap.

A trap that had Fidget in a bottle dressed up like a little girl! Did I mention that Fidget was a bat with a wooden leg?

Fidget is the real break out star here with his raspy voice and peg leg. There really isn’t a better moment in the film than when Fidget leaves the bar and he’s still singing the Manchester song to himself.

Basil and Dawson manage to escape the Rube Goldberg-esque trap Ratigan devised for them, but before completely leaving that scene, I must remark on the most diabolically twisted aspect of Ratigan’s death trap – he left the record player playing an LP of Vincent Price singing endlessly about saying good bye and stuff! A diabolically evil trap indeed!

There’s a big finale in the gears of Big Ben and the scene marks the first time that traditional animation and computer animation were melded together, thus starting a long and crappy trend in cartoons.

Questionable computer animation aside, the regular animation in this one, particularly the character designs, weren’t very impressive and looked really cheap and flat. Basil, Dawson and the rest looked like Disney characters from those budget conscious TV shows like Ducktales or Rescue Rangers, appearing quite flat and lifeless. Besides, how many ugly brown mice am I expected to have to look at in a movie? At least one of the mice in The Rescuers was white.

The movie also seemed to more interested in hurtling Basil and company from one manic event to the next without any time in between to establish exactly who these rats were. The movie is really one long chase scene, but certainly won’t leave you breathless.

The interplay between Basil and Dawson (homoerotic subtext aside) wasn’t memorable or interesting and you weren’t left with any desire to see these two crack a case again. In fact, you’ll probably feel like firing up one of Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes movies after watching this pallid effort.

Ratigan is an okay villain and Price was an obvious and good choice to voice him, but frankly, it’s the Fidget action figure that you’ll be wishing came with your Happy Meal.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Eventually, he discovers that the ladies flock to a crow (they represent the black folks in this movie) and try to impress him with all their white guilt and classes they’re taking in African studies. He blows them off, giving the enterprising Fritz his opening. He lets loose with a torrent of babble about how his soul hurts and he’s on a quest for meaning and all the other great intellectual challenges that have fueled hours of upper middle class faux-conversations for years. And of course it works!

Fritz hooks up with some broads and he ends up doing some drugs and having an orgy with these women and then the cops show up to bust some heads. Proving that hippie cartoonists only appreciate the sledgehammer approach to social commentary, the cops are literally pigs!

They break up the party, but the drugged out Fritz climbs out of his toilet hiding place and steals one of their guns and shoots up the toilet! Fritz becomes a fugitive and we are treated to a long scene of pure tedium as Fritz hides out at a synagogue.

Fritz finds his way to a bar inhabited by crows and he hooks up with a pool player and they end up leaving together and stealing a car. His new friend takes him to score some joints and Fritz ends up on a booty call with one of the crows. It was while watching him trying to take a bite out of either her breast or ass that I was thinking that Bob Barker was right when he implored all of us to have our pets either spayed or neutered.

Fritz is doing his bit to bridge the racial divide in this country by screwing this crow in an old abandoned bus when he finally realizes what his mission in life is. He goes back to the hood and announces to every crow in earshot that they should throw off the chains of the masters and revolt. The pigs arrive and one of them gets a bottle in the eye and the race riot is on!

Fritz sort of disappears during all this, hiding around a corner as the cops roll in and the US Air Force starts dropping napalm on the hood in an effort to put down the riots. His pal from the pool hall gets shot and his death is one of the stronger moments in the movie, very messy and nasty, intercut with shots of pool balls dropping into their holes until the last one falls and the crow croaks.

As for Fritz, he hooks up with an old girlfriend named Winston and they head out to the coast. In hippie parlance, this is known as “buggin’ out.” Fritz is going there to find out “where it’s at” or something. If this movie was good for something other than watching cartoon characters behave like cast members of The Real World, it was for refreshing myself on hippiespeak.

Fritz gets tired of Winston being a drag and leaves her in the desert and finds new friends in a blue stoner Nazi biker rabbit and his horse-faced girlfriend. This is where Fritz gets embroiled in a revolutionary plot to blow up a power plant. Just before the dynamite goes off next to Fritz at the plant, he realizes that love is where it’s at.

Surprisingly, the movie doesn’t come off as all that dated. After all, we still have all the problems between the races, liberal apologists for it, guys who start rock bands to get chicks, druggie bikers, and idiots who want to blow stuff up to make some obscure political point about how America sucks.

If the movie’s point was to puncture the self-importance of the hippie culture, it did do a good job of that, but I think by now we all realize that it was a collection of spoiled rich kids (these losers are now called Baby Boomers) who weren’t interested in anything except pretending to be smart and getting their kicks.

I’m no fan of the kids today, what with all their gloomy antics and skateboarding all over, but anyone that complains about them not being as “aware” as their tie-dyed ancestors, needs to realize that they are exactly the same as the hippies, just like every generation before and ever after will be. They’re looking to spread their wings, find their own way, get shitfaced and bang as much booty as their roofies will allow them to. The animation in this movie is quite well done, but the movie makes its strongest point by showing these traitor hippies to be the looking-to-get-laid-druggie-scum that all right thinking Americans always knew they were.

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