Spin It! (A Talespin Retrospective)

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5--Episodes

XLIV: "Captains Outrageous"

Kit sponsors his friend Oscar Vandersnoot for membership in the Jungle Aces Secret Midnight Club, a backyard boys’ club made up of young would-be aviators; however, each member must experience an adventure in order to join, and Oscar, who’s been carefully sheltered by his wealthy mother, is unable to meet this requirement. Kit hatches a plan to create an adventure for Oscar, by allowing him to accompany Baloo on a cargo run and encounter “air pirates” (to be portrayed by a disguised Kit and Wildcat); to add further spice to Oscar’s experience, Kit and Baloo allow him to think that the Sea Duck will be transporting a top-secret anti-pirate weapon (really a rigged-up propane tank) on this run, instead of merely vegetables. However, Don Karnage, whose men have been shadowing Oscar with plans for kidnapping and ransom, gets wind of the “secret weapon” and decides to pull off a “two for one” capture of the boy and the weapon, thus turning the faked pirate attack into a real one and involving Oscar in a much bigger and more dangerous adventure than Kit intended.


“Captains Outrageous” was edited by Karl Geurs and penned by the distinguished comic-book writer Jan Strnad, whose last contribution to the show was one of the seven “preview” episodes, the memorably dramatic “Stormy Weather.” “Outrageous” is much lighter in tone than “Weather,” but it’s still a very good episode, an entertaining comic adventure with lots of laughs but also some genuine thrills, and a very likable and well-handled guest character in the person of Oscar Vandersnoot. Despite the episode title’s allusion to Captains Courageous, Strnad does not make Oscar a spoiled brat in need of a sharp lesson, unlike Harvey Cheyne in both the book and movie versions of Courageous. Nor does he depict Oscar as exaggeratedly dorky or pathetic, unlike Doofus on Original Ducktales or Honker on Darkwing Duck, who were likable and could even be heroic, but who always remained caricatures to some extent, even when they were being heroic. Instead, Oscar, despite his stereotypical poor-little-rich-boy appearance (glasses, short pants, etc.) comes off as simply a normal kid, taking into account the circumstances of his sheltered upbringing. He’s shyer and more timid than average, but still has a natural childish sense of wonder and longing for adventure, which only needs encouragement to blossom. His ingrained timidity and suppressed adventurousness are both communicated by a variety of good verbal and visual touches—including his repeated question to Kit (“Was that an adventure?”) over the course of the episode, his resigned but wistful melancholy when the Jungle Aces turn him down (“If it was my club, I wouldn’t want me either”), his fascinated reaction to his first glimpse of the Sea Duck, and his initially terrified response to the Duck’s aerial stunts, which gradually subsides as Baloo cheerily reassures him.
 

As a result, Oscar’s eventual transformation from mild-mannered bystander to active hero, as he predictably but entertainingly saves the day after all hope seems lost, does not feel as arbitrary as such zero-to-hero arcs often do. Since he came off as genuinely human, instead of a mere caricature, in the earlier part of the episode, his turnabout fells not like a sudden metamorphosis but rather a believable possible development of his personality. It also feels right for him, despite his initial explosive entrance on the scene during the finale, to rely on his wits to defeat the pirates, tricking Karnage into a disastrous test of the “secret weapon”; in real life, your typical shy and withdrawn kid is often quite intelligent, and it makes more sense for Oscar to prevail in this fashion instead of improbably turning into a little tough guy. Incidentally, this is one episode that should be watched in the DVD version, if possible; many of the ToonDisney-derived prints floating around online cut out a few key shots of a box of matches which are utilized in Oscar’s climactic rescue of the other characters, making the scene partially incomprehensible. I’m not sure whether Disney Plus preserves the episode uncut or not.

Strnad’s writing deserves a lot of credit for the successfully non-cliched portrayal of Oscar, but, as in other child-centered Talespin episodes, the casting and voice work also is entitled to a share of the credit (as Matilda pointed out on her comments on “Flight of the Snow Duck”). Oscar is voiced by ten-year-old child actor Ben Ryan Ganger, whose mild and solemn delivery and slight speech impediment (he pronounces “r” as “w” on occasion) are perfectly suited to the character and helps immeasurably to help him feel like a real kid rather than a caricatured one. The leader of the Jungle Aces (a rather overbearing young hyena who’s unnamed here but will be dubbed “Ernie” in a later episode) and the other members of the club are also voiced by real children, in keeping with Magon’s usual excellent policy for casting juvenile roles.


The regular characters are as well-handled as guest-character Oscar is. Having Kit effectively act as Oscar’s big brother is a nice idea which feels consistent with Kit’s similar relationship with Molly in other episodes, and his energetic organization of the planned fake adventure is also a good example of his typically active and eager personality. Baloo’s interactions with Oscar are also very nicely characterized, with Baloo promptly awarding the youngster a “cool”-sounding nickname (“Slick”) and otherwise doing his affable best to help him loosen up and gain confidence; as in Baloo’s interactions with Molly, we see how easy it is for him to make friends with kids on an avuncular basis, uncomfortable though he is when forced to assume a more parental role (as in some of his interactions with Kit). Becky has less screen time, but her attitude to Kit’s whole fake-adventure scheme is also on point, with Kit convincing her to sponsor the scheme by pointing out the business advantages of befriending the wealthy Vandersnoot family, but Becky still responsibly insisting that Oscar’s mother must approve his accompanying Baloo on the cargo run. Wildcat has some nice bits too, getting rather confused as Kit rehearses the planned fake pirate attack and later, during the climactic action scene, calmly conducting repairs on the fly as the Sea Duck plunges dangerously towards the ocean.


Don Karnage makes his first appearance in the production order since “Plunder and Lightning,” and is at his insane and quotable best--treating his followers with his usual condescension (“Congratulations! You have not done a terrible job”), gleefully subjecting Kit and Wildcat to an eccentric form of “torture” (“You force me to do terrible things I enjoy doing anyway!”), and introducing himself with in grandiose but mangled phraseology (“Miserable Baloo-type person! It is me, my glorious self, Don Karnage!”). Strnad doesn’t just use Karnage’s egoism for comedic effect, however; he also ties it neatly into the plot, with Karnage’s eventual defeat occurring partly because Oscar is able to convince the pirate chief that only Karnage himself should be privy to the “secret” of the anti-pirate weapon, causing Karnage to order his crew to stand down at what proves to be a critical moment.


Appropriately for an episode centered on a character discovering the thrill of aerial adventure, the airborne action scenes in “Outrageous” are exhilarating, from the Sea Duck’s energetic looping and rolling as Baloo puts her through her paces for Oscar’s benefit to the more serious chase sequence mid-way through the episode, with the Sea Duck being pursued by the pirates’ planes through the skies and into an ominous cave/tunnel. Best of all is the climactic action scene, with the Sea Duck and Oscar separately plummeting towards the ocean as Baloo tugs on the controls with increasing desperation, Wildcat works to get the stalled plane restarted, and Kit does some emergency cloud-surfing in order to rescue Oscar. As in other standout action/suspense sequences on Talespin (like the climactic mid-air rescues in “Mommy for a Day”,“It Came from Beneath the Sea Duck”, and “Plunder and Lightning”), the editing and especially the music play a big part in making the climax of “Outrageous” feel properly urgent and dramatic.  The musical score is also used to excellent effect earlier in the episode during Oscar's first flight on the Duck, creating a soaring, exuberant sensation.

 
 
At the risk of belaboring a point I’ve already made several other times in this series of reviews, the great strength of “Captains Outrageous” is one of the greatest strengths of Talespin as a whole, in that it humorously but sincerely employs a tried-and-true storytelling device (in this case, the emergence of a sheltered youngster from his shell in the face of danger) and adapts it to the particular needs of the Cape Suzette world—tailoring the tale to the quirks of the regular characters (Baloo, Kit, Karnage) and thus making an old story feel fun and fresh, without any self-aware riffing or snarky “subversion” of expectations.

Up Next: "For Whom the Bell Klangs"

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5—Episodes

XLV, XLVI: “For Whom the Bell Klangs”, Parts 1 & 2

Deep in a remote desert region, archeologist Katie Dodd has just located an ancient bell which provides the final key to the fabled lost city of Tinabula. However, the sinister criminal Thaddeus Klang is hot on her trail, in hopes of getting his hands on an ancient sonic weapon which made the people of Tinabula fearsome conquerors in their day. The vacationing Baloo and Louie become entangled in this dangerous quest for Tinabula, aiding Katie despite initial disbelief in her story of the lost city, and provoking the wrath of the merciless Klang.


Written by Mark Zaslove and edited by Jymn Magon, “For Whom the Bell Klangs” is an entertaining and exciting pastiche of the Indiana Jones movies and the older “hero pulps” (such as Doc Savage) and movie serials that inspired them (as far as serials are concerned, “Bell” particularly echoes Adventures of Captain Marvel, with its ancient doomsday device, and Perils of Nyoka, with its archeologist heroine). The episode also recalls some of Barks’ treasure-hunt tales—particularly “In Ancient Persia,” which also featured a modern-day villain trying to unearth a lethal ancient secret—although Tinabula, a “whole city based on tones, notes, harmonics” is more fanciful than anything that Barks would have come up with. That said, the concept of the sound-based city, fanciful though it may be, is carried off nicely, with the use of specific notes of music to unlock particular entrances or uncover particular secrets figuring interestingly in the plot at multiple points. The impressive and extensive background art also succeeds in making the abandoned but imposing city feel like a real place, while the surrounding red cliffs resemble some real archeological locations in North Africa and the Middle East.
 

Also like Barks’ stories, “Bell” pluses the standard movie-serial adventuring by using comic and fallible characters as its protagonists rather than the standard adventure hero; Baloo and Louie fulfill the functions of a hero while still remaining their usual selves—bantering, bickering, and sometimes bumbling their way through their hair-raising adventure. Their one-upmanship as they compete for the attention of Katie (who, of course, turns out to be romantically uninterested in both of them) evokes Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in their Road movies—probably intentionally, since Magon specifically referenced the Hope/Crosby dynamic in one of his pre-Talespin brainstorming sessions for “The B Players”, and since a subsequent Talespin episode “Road to Macadamia,” explicitly paid homage to the duo’s movies. However, “Bell” never veers into the fourth-wall-breaking plotlessness of the Road films; Baloo and Louie’s steady exchange of quips and insults, and other humorous sequences like their encounter with the mirages (reminiscent of Barks’ “McDuck of Arabia”), provide a leaven of humor in serious moments but do so without negating the sense that the characters are genuinely in danger.

 

Katie, a serious-minded and fiery vixen (in the zoological sense, not the vulgar one) voiced by Ellen Gerstell, makes a good counterweight to Baloo and Louie’s incorrigible rascality without seeming dull. The archeologist who serves as the font of exposition and the principal target of treasure-seeking villains is almost a mandatory plot device in this type of adventure story, but her determination to uncover the lost city, her anger when Klang tries to steal her discovery, and her awe as she explores Tinabula all help to make her seem like a real person who’s really interested in her profession, not just a plot device. Zaslove and Magon also manage to avoid making her either a helpless victim or a Lara-Croft-style “badass”; she’s just a determined and capable archeologist caught up in some extraordinary happenings.


Katie’s first meeting with Baloo and Louie, in which she snappishly tries to convince them of the existence of Tinabula while they condescendingly crack jokes, is a little too abrasive in tone and puts none of the three protagonists in a particularly pleasant light, but after this rocky start their interactions become more enjoyable; her subsequent put-downs of their flirtatious antics at a restaurant come across more humorously, and any residual abrasiveness or boorishness vanishes from their group dynamic once the adventure properly gets underway. The finale, which has the wily Louie conning Baloo into letting the ape shoulder the dangerous task of scaling a bell-tower to trigger Tinabula’s self-destruct mechanism, Baloo using the Sea Duck to rescue Louie from the ensuring destruction, and Katie using her one of her Tinabulan bells to get the Duck out of the collapsing city unscathed, like the finale of “Plunder and Lightning,” provides a good example of the protagonists functioning believably as a team without the teamwork coming off as contrived; Louie’s physical and mental nimbleness, Baloo’s superb flying skills, and Katie’s archaeological knowledge all play a part in the thwarting of Klang and preservation of the three good guys.


That said, “Bell” is not really a strong character piece in the fashion of “Plunder and Lightning” or other episodes like “Her Chance to Dream,” “Old Man and the Sea Duck,” or “Stormy Weather.” While the personalities of the protagonists are strong, they’re subsumed into the two-parter’s many serial-style action setpieces—the rooftop pursuit of Klang’s henchmen after their kidnap of Katie, the attack of Klang’s monstrous scarab beetles on the Sea Duck, the Part One cliffhanger which has the staked-down Baloo and Louie swallowed by a sandstorm, Klang’s unleashing of the sonic weapon on a column of quasi-British colonial troops, the several chases through Tinabula, and the climactic city-destruction scene mentioned above. All of these scenes are exciting, effectively animated, and balanced enough with dialogue scenes or comedy bits that they don’t cancel each other out, but they definitely dominate the two-parter, which is why, despite its double length, I find less to analyze in “Bell” than I do in many standard-length episodes. That’s not a knock on the episode, simply an acknowledgement that it succeeds at what it set out to do—namely, translating serial/pulp-style adventure into a Disney funny-animal format; as a fan of the old serials myself, I’d be the first to admit they weren’t, as a rule, very heavy on characterization.
 
 

The villain of the piece, true to the tone of the piece, is a megalomaniacal Master Criminal in the venerable tradition of the best serial and pulp arch-fiends: Klang, a black-cloaked cobra (with metal prosthetic arms and lower jaw), who's backed by a (literally) faceless squad of red-robed goons and some fierce trained giant beetles.  Klang is the most imposing and serious of the show’s one-shot villains; even when subjected to occasional comic indignities (like getting run over by his stampeding henchmen or kissed by Louie when the latter is disguised as a dancing girl), he retains an aura of menace. This is due in large part to Klang’s voice actor, the redoubtable Tim Curry, who, as with his later portrayal of Taurus Bulba in Darkwing Duck, manages to give the character the larger-than-life aura which an arch-villain needs without descending into self-indulgent ranting. As Klang, Curry adopts a suave but arrogant hiss of a voice and adds a slight German accent to his usual British one; his arrestingly sinister vocals have just the unselfconsciously bravura note needed to make Klang’s threats (“They will pay painfully!”) and boasts (“A weapon that will make the world mine!”) sound genuinely intimidating instead of hammy or cliched. Klang’s last scene leaves the door open for him, like old-time supervillains such as Fu Manchu or John Sunlight, to return, but he never did (except in fanfiction); this scene also, as Aldwayne pointed out in his comments on “Polly Wants a Treasure” much earlier in this thread, indulges in a visual gag which rather blurs the show’s usual anthropomorphism lines, but which doesn’t bother me as much as the omnipresent parrot did in “Polly.” If nothing else, the bit adds a perhaps unintentional Biblical echo to Klang’s fall from power, with him quite literally being forced to go on his belly and (presumably) eat dust as punishment for his evildoing.


In keeping with its inspirations, “For Whom the Bell Klangs” is not the deepest or most memorable Talespin saga, but it’s great fun to watch, thanks in large part to the way it respects the genre to which it pays tribute (serial/pulp adventure) and the genre to which it belongs (funny-animal adventure), and combines the two handily—using humorous, quirky, and cartoony touches to enliven the two-parter, but without undercutting the old-fashioned high-adventure feel that Zaslove and Magon obviously—and successfully—aimed for here.



Up Next: "Jumping the Guns"

[Matilda]

Katie Dodd and Darkwing Duck’s Beatrice Brute’ are my two favorite animated scientists!

[djnyr]

Matilda: In regards to Katie Dodd, she's another example of how, just as Talespin did a good job of making its kid characters seem real, it also usually managed to make its female characters three-dimensional and interesting, rather than (if you'll excuse me beating a dead horse) turning them into clones, cyborgs, improbable super-ninjas, immortal beings, or other inhuman types, the way New Ducktales routinely did.  

XLVII: “Jumping the Guns”

Don Karnage, ever seeking a way to get past the cliff guns which defend Cape Suzette, sees a new opportunity to do so when Baloo starts making airborne sandwich deliveries, transporting lunches from Louie’s establishment to the cliff guards. Karnage’s pirates hijack the Sea Duck while Baloo is at Louie’s, and, using the plane to gain unsuspected entry to the cliff ramparts, are able to take the guards out of action and capture the guns. It will be up to Baloo, Louie, and an elderly former cliff guard named Barney O’Turret, to recapture both the Sea Duck and the guns and save Cape Suzette from an impending invasion by Karnage and his Iron Vulture.


The high-stakes plot and the spotlighting of a frequently seen but never previously explored area of Cape Suzette (the cliff defenses) make “Jumping the Guns,” on paper, sound like a top-notch episode, but instead it winds up feeling oddly inconsequential. Written by Julia Lewald and Steve Roberts, and edited by Duane Capizzi, it gets off on the wrong foot with its opening sequence, a series of protracted blackout gags involving Karnage’s repeated attempts to sneak the Iron Vulture past the cliff guns—disguising it as an ocean liner, painting it “the color of invisible,” and surrounding it with a fake storm-cloud—only to be routed each time, with the cliff guards registering blasé amusement at the pirates’ futile persistence. This gives rise to a problem that also frequently arises in many post-Barks Beagle Boy stories, including some of Rosa’s—namely, treating a prominent and supposedly formidable set of recurring villains as nothing more than predictable, mildly irritating nuisances, like mice in the pantry or leaks in the roof. While on the subject of Air Pirate/Beagle Boy comparisons, I should note in passing that the name of the principal cliff gun used to repel the pirates is “Big Bertha,” which Rosa used as the name of Scrooge’s office cannon, deployed to bedevil the Beagles; I would love to know if this was an intentional allusion to the Duck comics or a coincidence (the nickname originally derives from a type of German World-War-1-era howitzer).


Admittedly, the complacency of the guards is later punctured by the pirates’ successful capture of Big Bertha and the other guns, just as Scrooge’s complacency about the Beagles in Rosa’s “Cash Flow” was destroyed by the Beagles’ raygun-assisted invasion, but in both cases I think the villains’ own incompetence is overstressed to such an extent in the opening scenes that the complacency of their targets feels more justified than it should. The repetitious gag sequences (especially the absurd “love boat” ocean-liner scene, in which the pirates aren’t even thwarted by the guns but rather by their own navigational incompetence) make Karnage seem more pathetically deranged than cunningly deranged, and deflate the visual menace of the Iron Vulture (which is usually given much more dramatic entrances into an episode—as in “Captains Outrageous,” just a few episodes back in the production order).

With “Jumping the Guns” opening as it does on a heavily stressed note of nonthreatening silliness, it’s hard during the balance of the episode to feel that the stakes are as high as they’re supposed to be; contrast “Plunder and Lightning,” where the pirates were used for humor but also were effectively built up as a menace, making their incursion into Cape Suzette felt like an apocalyptic event. Admittedly, “Plunder and Lightning” had a movie-length runtime in which to build up its villains, but even standard-length episodes like “From Here to Machinery” or the above-mentioned “Captains Outrageous” were able to make the pirates feel like more of a threat than they do here. My own preferred alternate opening scene would have been to have a cargo plane being chased by the pirates and about to be herded into the Vulture’s maw, only for the cliff guns to open fire on the airship and allow the plane to escape into the safety of the cliffs, causing Don Karnage to explode in comic frustration; this, or a similar scene, would have served the purpose of reminding the viewers of the existence of the cliff guns without making the pirates appear so toothlessly inept.


The depiction of the pirates improves as the episode continues; Karnage’s scheme for seizing the guns by using the Sea Duck as a Trojan horse is a good one, and is actually executed successfully by Dump Truck, Mad Dog, and, oddly, a recurring background pirate (a corpulent cat briefly identified as “Hal” in another episode) who is spotlighted for the first and last time, being given a thick-witted but sardonic voice by Jim Cummings. However, even though the pirates up their game, there’s little corresponding improvement in the episode’s sense of urgency, mainly because of the way the good guys’ efforts to thwart the scheme are handled during the episode’s midsection. Baloo, Louie, and Barney’s long climb up the cliffs is so deliberately paced (which does make it feel appropriately arduous) and is also so filled with gags—the scene with the unlikely phone booth, a couple of clashes with a grumpy mountain goat, and several falls down the cliff face—that between the slowness and the slapstick it’s hard for the story to gain much of a sense of momentum. Things finally pick up for the finale, with Baloo flying the Sea Duck inside the Iron Vulture and evading pirate gunfire, while Louie also dodges bullets in an effort to open the airship’s hatch, and the fumbling Barney, manning Big Bertha below, tries to score a hit on the Vulture with the scant remaining ammo; this sequence does actually convey some suspense and mounting excitement, unlike most of the scenes preceding it.
 
 
Barney, the episode’s principal guest character, rather epitomizes the episode’s half-steam feel; when I read the initial synopsis of the episode, before actually viewing it, I was anticipating—given Talespin’s usual track record in imparting “heart” to its episodes—that Barney would be depicted as a once-respected but over-the-hill veteran cliff guard who makes a last return to glory, rather like Barks’ Barko, when the younger guards and their modern technology are incapacitated. Instead, the character is played strictly for laughs; he’s an elderly pig (voiced by Jack Angel) who confidently assures Baloo and Louie that he can do practically anything, but always qualifies his remarks by admitting that he hasn’t actually climbed a mountain/fired the guns/etc., but has “seen it done a million times.” He eventually triumphs not by drawing on reservoirs of old skills, but by sheer dumb luck. The character, and the “million times” catchphrase, are amusing, but nothing more than amusing; with just a little tweaking, his humorous aspects could have been retained and a bit of pathos and dignity added as well.


Obviously, Lewald and Roberts can’t really be held responsible for not writing the episode I envisioned in my head, but I still think they left a lot of points on the table (as my law school professors used to say) by not making more of both the strong plot setup and the guest character. The fact that I was expecting so much more from the episode, though, is something of a backhanded compliment to the Talespin crew’s strong track record. The episode isn’t bad by any means; the regulars are in character (even if Karnage is a little more stupid than usual in the opening scenes) and the action and humor are enjoyable if not very memorable; also, the cliffs are depicted via some very impressive background art, and the design of the gun-station area, with its crazy, roller-coaster-like runway system, is quite visually impressive. It’s just that one expects the Talespin crew to make something more out of such a promising outline.  

Up Next: "Sheepskin Deep"

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5—Episodes


XLVIII: “Sheepskin Deep”

Baloo’s grade school class reunion is scheduled to be hosted at Louie’s, and Baloo is eager to attend—but can’t, because of an embarrassing fact: he never actually graduated. His determination to see his childhood pals again drives him to re-enroll in the Cape Suzette grade school, in order to earn a diploma that will allow him to attend the reunion. Kit attempts the difficult task of keeping Baloo’s nose to the classroom grindstone, while Rebecca, unaware of Baloo’s scholastic pursuits, begins to suspect him of moonlighting for another employer, as his cargo runs become more erratic than usual while he tries to juggle classwork with his regular job. His school attendance thus becomes equally erratic, and Mr. Pomeroy, the irascible school principal, quickly becomes annoyed at this and other disruptive behavior; however, Pomeroy agrees, in lieu of expelling Baloo, to award him a diploma on condition that he pass an equivalency test—which leaves Baloo frantically cramming for the make-or-break exam.


Dean Stefan, who wrote “Vowel Play” earlier in the show’s run, returns to pen this episode, with Ken Koonce and David Weimers doing editing duties; Stefan’s script strikes the same didactic note as “Vowel Play” did, but with less of the quirky humor and colorful plot devices that made “Vowel” enjoyable in spite of its somewhat heavy-handed “learn to spell, kids” message. “Sheepskin” is more mundane, and as a result, its message—“stay in school, kids” is a bit harder to swallow painlessly, particularly in the first half of the episode, in which Stefan resorts to some very awkward contrivances to tee up his moral. In the first place, it’s somewhat hard to believe that Baloo, who, after all, works in a skilled profession subject to licensure, and who presumably did his own navigating before he met Kit, never even graduated grade school; Koonce and Weimers’ own “On a Wing and a Bear” indicated that he at least started high school. Making him a high school dropout would have felt a little more believable, but Stefan was clearly determined to use grade school instead, both to make the episode’s classroom setting more directly identifiable to young viewers and for the sake of some rather obvious gags (like getting stuck in a desk) that could be derived from Baloo incongruously trying to fit into a kids’ classroom.


Pomeroy’s introduction of Baloo to the class, and the class’s reaction to Baloo, also doesn’t ring true; the principal tells the students that Baloo is “old, uneducated, and accomplished nothing in his life”, which is hardly a fair way to describe the best pilot in Cape Suzette. Even if you took this statement as reflecting the principal’s own prejudices rather than reality, the kids’ acceptance of the statement and their resulting vows to stay in school so as not to wind up like Baloo, don’t feel at all true to life—at least some of them would undoubtedly regard Baloo as a cool role model due to his piloting exploits and his general personality; in real life, good-natured and irresponsible adults like Baloo are less likely to be regarded as a dire example of failure by young kids and are much more likely to hit it off with them instead, as demonstrated by Baloo’s interactions with Molly and with Oscar Vandersnoot in other episodes less burdened by messaging.


However, like many of Talespin’s weaker episodes, “Sheepskin” improves as it goes along. Baloo’s disastrous attempt to use the Sea Duck’s propellors to pound the erasers is a nice character-specific riff on a familiar school-themed gag, and Kit’s efforts to tutor Baloo by using aviation metaphors, although a bit didactic, is also amusing and leads to a good funny-in-context punchline (“Don’t you ever do math in my plane again!”). Although, as aforementioned, the episode is nowhere near as quirkily humorous as “Vowel Play,” there are still some quirky touches to be found as the episode proceeds, such as Baloo’s eccentric cargos and their destinations—rubber baby bottle stoppers for the Bambino Island Baby Clinic; bowling pins for the Upper Geezerland Lawn Bowling Society. I suspect that the episode’s editors, Ken Koonce and David Weimers, had something to do with these gags, since they’re very much of a piece with Koonce and Weimers’ characteristic goofy verbal jokes in other episodes; I sometimes find Koonce and Weimers’ whacky wordplay jarring, but here it’s a welcome distraction from the didacticism baked into the plot. There are also a few very quick cameos by characters from previous episodes during the course of Baloo’s delivery runs—including Clementine from “Citizen Khan,” and the pygmy crocodile tribe from “The Bigger They Are, the Louder They Oink.” Rebecca’s reaction, when she finally confronts Baloo about his “moonlighting” and finds out what he is really up to, is another nice touch; instead of chewing him out for studying on company time, she congratulates him for going back to school and gives him time off to prepare for his exam. While this scene was obviously intended in part to undergird the episode’s message, it also works as a genuinely good character moment, showing us the sharp-tongued, the responsible, and the kindly sides of Becky’s personality in a single scene.

 
Allen Oppenheimer’s gruffly exasperated vocal performance as Pomeroy imparts some liveliness to the proceedings as well—particularly in the finale, in which Baloo, having flunked his equivalency test by one question, is able to cure his failure and graduate after all by dragging the astounded and irritated Pomeroy on a visually striking flight into a snow-capped mountain range and using some impromptu aerial snow-blowing to show him that, contrary to the textbook assertion that nothing grows on Mount Neverest, there are actually kumquat trees up there. This climactic scene qualifies and improves the pat and banal “stay-in-school” message with an important addendum: namely, that knowledge gained from practical experience can sometimes be superior to knowledge derived strictly from “book learning”; “Sheepskin” is very much the better for that bit of nuance. Without it, I would be tempted to name the episode as the show’s single weakest entry, a disguised PSA in the style of some Saturday-morning cartoons, but by nuancing their message, Stefan and his editors compel me to similarly nuance my review; while “Sheepskin” is not a terribly interesting episode, it is interesting enough not to merit dismissal as completely flat or predictable.

 


XLIX: “In Search of Ancient Blunders”

Baloo, accompanied by Wildcat, delivers an ancient hieroglyphic tablet to the desert realm of Aridia. The tablet holds the key to locating the pyramid of King Utmost, which contains the lost national treasures of Aridia. Mira, an archeologist who is also the Aridian minister of culture, hopes to unearth the pyramid in order to open a national museum, while Don Karnage and his band are equally eager to seize the pyramid’s treasures for themselves. Baloo and Wildcat are soon drawn into the search for the pyramid—which, when found, proves to be a most unusual one, having been erroneously constructed upside-down. The mummy of the foreman responsible for this mistake now haunts the pyramid, having been cursed by King Utmost, as penalty for his architectural blundering, to repel all intruders from the pyramid and guard the “shameful secret” until the pyramid can somehow be placed right-side-up.


Written by Steve Roberts and edited by Duane Capizzi, “In Search of Ancient Blunders”, like the same team’s earlier “Flight of the Snow Duck,” has a very fanciful and somewhat physics-defying central gimmick (here, the inverted pyramid), but is an entertaining and well-executed episode nevertheless. The episode also bears a certain resemblance to Roberts’ later enjoyable Darkwing Duck episode, “Adopt-a-Con,” in that both that episode and “Blunders” feature several examples of what GeoX, in his “Adopt-a-Con” review, described as “Abrahams-Zucker-&-Zucker-ish use of intentionally dumb/silly throwaway jokes.” Wildcat’s response to Baloo’s “kitchen sink” remark and the “fire at Will” bit aboard the Iron Vulture, are two good examples of this type of humor in “Blunders”; these and other jokes are handled in a quick, deadpan, throwaway fashion that prevents them from feeling labored or jarring—instead, they provoke chuckles without derailing the pace of the episode, which, after setting up the plot in the first few scenes, sets off at a very swift clip, going from a restaurant brawl with the pirates to the discovery of the pyramid to several chases with the mummy to an elaborate airborne finale.


Despite their superficially similar subject matter, one Disney Afternoon episode that “Blunders” does not resemble is “Sphinx for the Memories,” from Original Ducktales; the ominousness and genuine supernatural eeriness of “Sphinx” are entirely absent here. Although the inverted, maze-like pyramid interiors are strikingly designed, full of interesting backgrounds and lighting effects (courtesy of Walt Disney Japan), they don’t have the otherworldly aura of the ruins of Gar-Babble in “Sphinx,” while the mummy in “Blunders” is nowhere near as scary as the one in “Sphinx,” being treated as almost entirely a comic menace. The scene in which the mummy relentlessly smashes a pillar and then a ladder to pieces as he attempts to get at Baloo, then bursts back into action after being buried beneath a pile of rubble, is as close as he gets to being frightening; for most of the episode, he simply roars loudly and furiously but blunderingly chases the characters around, in the manner of a monster in one of Hanna-Barbera’s funny-animal cartoons. Chris Barat ranked “Blunders” as superior to “Sphinx” in his review of the latter, which perhaps inflated my expectations the first time I watched “Blunders”; while I can still appreciate and enjoy the episode, there’s no way I would put it on the same level as the much more carefully paced and plotted, and much more atmospheric, “Sphinx.”
 

Instead, “Blunders” more closely resembles some of the episodes of the recent Legend of the Three Caballeros show, particularly the minotaur sequences in “Labyrinth and Repeat,” in its emphasis on fast-paced humor and action and its more casual—but not mocking—attitude towards the supernatural. That last point is key in the success of “Blunders”, giving it some heart despite its generally light tone: although the mummy is not presented as truly frightening, the characters still regard him with credible alarm instead of seen-it-all sarcasm, and his curse is fleetingly but sincerely treated as a real burden, not just a joke, despite the rather absurd circumstances of its origin. The finale, which has the mummy and our heroes teaming up to thwart Karnage’s attempted airlift-theft of the pyramid, is genuinely rousing, with the mummy ultimately managing to not only defeat the pirates but free himself from the curse as well. The visuals here, as in the pyramid interior scenes, are striking, and the action is good and distinctive, with the Sea Duck trying to maneuver around the Iron Vulture’s guns while attempting to sever the cables attaching the pyramid to the pirates’ airship—even if the physics of the Vulture’s lifting of the pyramid are, like the pyramid’s design itself, rather questionable.
 

The regular characters are all in good form, with Baloo grumbling wryly about his strange adventure and being reluctantly heroic at each stage of the adventure (witness his deflated “Yeah, right” when Mira reminds him that they must save the pyramid). Wildcat provides a funny contrast to Baloo’s attitude by cheerfully glorying in their odd adventure (“I’ve been jumped by pirates, chased by a crazed mummy, lost inside an upside-down pyramid, and now I’m being shot at!” “Yeah, I’m having a great time too; thanks for bringing me along, Baloo”); it’s also an appropriate touch to have the perennially off-center mechanic immediately feel at home in the similarly askew pyramid. Karnage is appropriately cunning and crazy by turns; his gamut of reactions to the mummy—first scornfully refusing to believe it’s real, then suavely but nervously attempting to bargain with it, then imperiously ordering Mad Dog and Dump Truck to attack it while he himself retreats—are particularly good. Gibber, Karnage’s mumbling aide-de-camp, makes his first appearance in some time, joining Mad Dog and Dump Truck in an impersonation of waiters which Baloo surprisingly sees through almost immediately (Roberts similarly played against expectations by having Darkwing actually recognize a lame disguise in the abovementioned “Adopt-a-Con”).


Mira, the only non-regular character other than the mummy, is another likable female Talespin guest star (her name is pronounced “Myra,” but according to Gregory Weagle, whose fellow-fan Mark Lungo has a copy of the original script, it’s spelled as I have it here). A female fox archeologist, voiced by Liz Georges, she avoids being a mere repeat of her fellow vulpine archeologist Katie Dodd in “For Whom the Bell Klangs”, since she’s not only designed differently, but also differs in personality from the tough and serious-minded Katie, being chatty, cheerful, enthusiastic, and slightly eccentric (as when she turns herself upside-down to read an upside-down inscription). However, Mira is not lacking in her own form of toughness; her felling of Dump Truck with a well-placed piano shows that she can handle herself quietly but efficiently in a dangerous situation, and the climactic rebuke/pep-talk she delivers to the mummy is priceless in its brisk straightforwardness (“What is your problem? . . . You can stomp around all day growling like an idiot, or you can give us a hand! . . .That pirate’s stealing the pyramid! Are you going to let him get away with that? . . . Then get out there and do your thing!”) The character, who is popular in the Talespin fandom, has been given the fanon surname of Foxworthy, but that sounds too quasi-British to really seem to fit with her Aridian (read: Egyptian) nationality--which, incidentally, serves to unobtrusively differentiate her treasure-seeking from Karnage’s, by establishing that she’s not seeking to uncover the pyramid for wealth or personal fame but rather to help her country by bringing its ancient glories to light.


“In Search of Ancient Blunders”, in its emphasis on comic action, its somewhat off-the-wall sense of humor, and its similarly off-the-wall sense of physics, has a more nonthreatening and kid-friendly feel to its archeological adventures than some of the Disney Afternoon’s more serious and atmospheric trips to ancient desert lands, such as those in “For Whom the Bell Klangs” or the previously discussed “Sphinx for the Memories”--but it’s still a lot of fun, serving up a light and breezy take on the Egyptian treasure-hunt saga while still respecting said saga’s traditions.



L: “Waiders of the Wost Tweasure”

Baloo and Kit travel to the kingdom of Walla Walla Bing Bang to deliver a cargo of souvenir paperweights for the coronation of the new ruler, Princess Grace. However, there is a pretender to the throne, Grace’s shady cousin Rudolf, and the rulership of the realm will hinge on which claimant manages to first locate an ancient royal treasure, the Ruby Rings (or is it Wings?) of Queen Maureen. The Princess is offering a reward for the finding of the Wings (or is it Rings?), and has recruited her old schoolmate, Airplane Jane, to find the artifact. Jane is an former flying pupil of Baloo’s who became skilled enough to defeat her erstwhile teacher in an earlier air race, and Baloo decides to try to beat Jane to the reward and simultaneously reburnish his credentials as top pilot. However, he and Jane will ultimately be forced to put rivalry aside to deal with the machinations of a third treasure-seeker, the sinister Prince Rudolf.


Written by Mark and Michael Edens and edited by Ken Koonce and David Weimers, "Waiders of the Wost Tweasure" combines a treasure-hunt plot with a character-based one, but both plotting strands remain somewhat incompletely developed. Jane, a brash and breezy hippo voiced by Susan Silo (an expert voice actress who began as a face actress back in the 1960s), is a potentially interesting foil/frenemy for Baloo; she partly resembles him in her cheerfully uncouth personality, but is rather more ambitious, with a stronger competitive drive (Baloo grumbles that “she’s always trying to prove she’s better than me”); there’s also a hint of repressed romantic attraction between the two, mainly during their interaction at the costume ball (when both fail to recognize each other) and their interchange at the fadeout. The pair’s tit-for-tat exchange of insults and tricks, as they alternately cooperate and try to outsmart each other, is amusing, but the basis for their mutual hostility is not established as effectively as it could have been—at least where Jane is concerned; Baloo’s embarrassed flashback to his defeat by Jane in the "Armadillo Air Rally" provides credible motivation for his desire to one-up her, and fits with what we’ve seen in other episodes of his pride in his flying prowess and his hidden insecure streak.

Jane, on the other hand, isn’t given quite as clear a motivation for her desire to one-up Baloo—which is a mistake, since, as a stranger to the audience, she should be fleshed out a little more in order for us to make it easier to regard her as Baloo’s equal, morally speaking, rather than as a mere antagonist. Her introductory scene, in which she buzzes the Sea Duck in her own plane, makes her seem rather unnecessarily overbearing, since she’s already bested Baloo before the episode began and has no real reason to taunt him further at the moment. Once Baloo starts tossing insults at her during this scene, and when he later plots to intervene in what was, after all, her treasure-hunting assignment, it becomes easier to view the rivals on more of an equal moral footing, but I would have preferred the Edens to clearly establish that Baloo was unjustly dismissive of Jane’s flying abilities in the past (a few additional lines in the opening scene could easily have made this point), which would have given her a much more understandable motive for her aerial hot-dogging in her opening scene—and for some of her harsher behavior during the later race-for-the-treasure scene; for instance, she’s the first one to break the two rivals’ temporary truce (by shoving Baloo out of the Sea Duck after landing).


Jane’s cheerful query when she saves Baloo from a fall during the climax by some skilled maneuvering of the Sea Duck (“What do you think of my flying now?”) belatedly suggests that she is indeed partly motivated by a desire to force him to acknowledge her talent, but the line would have worked even better if Baloo had actually been shown scoffing at that talent at the outset of the episode, rather than more generically insulting her appearance (“What are you gonna do, stand beside [Princess Grace] and make her look good?”). I’m tempted to speculate that the Edens may have originally had Baloo specifically mock Jane’s flying ability during the opening scene, only for Koonce and Weimers—always fond of exaggerated vaudeville-style putdowns—to remove it in favor of a more over-the-top insult without realizing that in doing so they weakened the finale—in which, after working with her to thwart Rudolf, Baloo takes pains to complement Jane’s handling of the Duck; the finale still works, but it feels a little like the payoff to a missing scene.


The Baloo-Jane conflict, however, is developed more fully than the court-intrigue/treasure-hunt side of the plot, which is pretty perfunctory, albeit funny enough; Walla Walla Bing Bang (its name an allusion to a popular fifties novelty song by the pre-Chipmunks Ross Bagdasarian) and its people are amusing but flat caricatures; their national accent--pronouncing “r” as “w” in the manner of Elmer Fudd, hence the spelling of the episode title--allows for some comic confusion about whether the lost treasure consists of ruby rings or ruby wings, but makes it very difficult to take them seriously from the start, and none of them are really individualized in any other way. Rudolf is a standard one-note villain (albeit one with an amusing voice, alternately suave and irascible, provided by the great Dan Castellaneta), while Grace (voiced by Victoria Carroll) is pretty much a cipher. Thus, it is hard to really care who winds up on the throne—unlike in Original Ducktales’ excellent “Duck in the Iron Mask,” where you could actually care about the wronged ruler of Monte Dumas and his people; the Edens almost seem to have been aware of this, since they go out of their way late in the episode to establish that Rudolf is not really a member of the royal family, thus making Grace the rightful ruler by default. The treasure which provides the key to the throne is also a cipher (albeit a visually appealing one), with no explanation of why it confers the right to rule or how it got lost in a cave full of booby-traps in the first place. However, depicting Grace, Rudolf, and the other inhabitants of Walla Walla Bing Bang as swans was an inspired visual idea; it humorously complements the Euro-Classical Swan Lake-style design of the national costumes and the capital city, and also makes a subtle allusion to the fact that the real-life Princess Grace (Kelly) starred in a royal-themed costume drama titled The Swan. Prince Rudolf’s blimp, which battles the Sea Duck at the climax, is another neat visual touch, a gigantic wooden airship which resembles something you might see in a Jules Verne adaptation.

 
The animation, by Wang Films, is one of the episode’s strengths, serving up almost non-stop visual business to keep the eye occupied even during dialogue scenes (like the gyrations of Baloo and Jane’s planes during the opening bickering session, or Baloo’s fumbling eavesdropping attempts while Princess Grace is briefing Jane on the Ruby Wings). Baloo and Jane’s race through the caverns which hide the Ruby Wings, and their encounters with the numerous traps therein, are also lively and filled with non-stop gags and bits of business, albeit much of it is rather on the excessively cartoony side (particularly the collapsing front door). The climax, with the Sea Duck battling Rudolf’s blimp in the skies above the mountains, is nicely executed, with some nice visuals of darkened peaks and lakes. The verbal humor is serviceable as well, although one of the best of the episode’s best bits of humorous dialogue is also partly visual—the scene that has Baloo and Jane, in a pantomime horse costume, communicating with Rudolf (who mistakes them for his henchmen) via the hoof-tapping technique of a real performing horse, a nice quick moment of absurdist comedy.
 

Kit, the only regular in the episode other than Baloo, has fairly little to do, being sidelined in the second half by getting stuck inside a suit of armor; although this is an obvious and rather arbitrary contrivance to allow Baloo and Jane to function as a team of rivals for the remainder of the episode without the presence of a third wheel, it is enjoyable to see Kit involved in a bit of comic business—reminding us that, canny as he may be in many respects, he’s still a kid with a kid’s fallibility (something many post-Barks writers fail to do when depicting the Nephews).

Overall, “Waiders of the Wost Tweasure” is a fine episode, with the novel setting and rapid-fire visual humor making it consistently fun, although one is left feeling as if more could have been done with it; Jane and her dynamic with Baloo could have been fleshed out a little more effectively, and the Walla Walla Bing Bang aspects of the plot could have been fleshed out a lot more effectively.


Up Next: “Baloo Thunder”

(Only fifteen episodes left; at this rate, I may even get to "Jolly Molly Christmas", the second-to-last episode, by Christmas time!)

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5—Episodes

LI: “Baloo Thunder”

Baloo’s old friend Professor Buzz, a scientist in the employ of Khan Industries, has developed a top-secret aviation project, which Mr. Perry, a treacherous Khan executive, is plotting to purloin and deliver to rival corporation Miniversal. Buzz stumbles onto this plot, but Perry deflects suspicion by accusing Buzz himself of being a Miniversal agent. The maligned and harried scientist is thus forced to abscond with the project to keep it from being stolen, which unfortunately lends color to Perry’s accusation and causes Shere Khan to offer a reward for Buzz’s capture. Baloo and Kit come to Buzz’s aid, seeking to help him clear himself and protect the top-secret project—a new wingless, rotor-driven flying machine which Buzz is thinking of calling either a “helicopter” or a “cusinart.”


Blue Thunder was the title of a 1983 Roy Scheider action film, involving the hijacking of a police helicopter prototype by a test pilot trying to prevent it from being used for evil purposes—hence, the otherwise inexplicable title of this somewhat similarly-plotted episode. Written by Steve Sustarsic and edited by Mark Zaslove, “Baloo Thunder” is the least interesting of Sustarsic’s four Talespin episodes, the others being “Golden Sprocket of Friendship”, “Save the Tiger”, and "Bygones" (not yet reviewed); the first was a neatly-plotted comedy which provided lots of humor while also allowing us to see the Thembrians in a new light, the second was a darkly humorous and surprisingly deep character study, and the third was a rousing adventure with mythic overtones. “Thunder”, however, is simply a straightforward humorous action piece, one which doesn’t engage in any real exploration of the regulars and which relies on a somewhat lightly-sketched guest character to give its plot a sense of stakes. Sustarsic obviously realized that the audience would have no reason to care whether Khan’s business empire was plundered by a rival, and thus introduced Buzz as a sympathetic human victim endangered by the corporate tug-of-war. However, while Professor Buzz—a diminutive but peppy bird given lively voice by Kenneth Mars—is quite likable, he’s not really individualized beyond standard eccentric-scientist traits; his oddball inventions and his mild, good-natured, frequently absent-minded personality all make him somewhat reminiscent of Gyro Gearloose—but, unlike Gyro, who was developed as an individual in his solo stories, Buzz is simply not given enough time on stage for him to feel like more than a collection of quirks and a source of gadgetry; he’s Gyro as Gyro would have been had Barks never developed him beyond the stage of “Gladstone’s Terrible Secret,” “Hobblin’ Goblins,” and the Think-Box story.


Buzz’s friendship with Baloo, with whom at first glance he would seem to have little in common, is also not really developed; Baloo simply states that “I’ve known him all my life,” but we’re not told how or why they first became buddies (a quick flashback, or even a few more lines—perhaps a reference to Buzz having helped to design the Sea Duck for Baloo) would have helped make their bond feel like something more than a mere device to pull Baloo into the plot in the same way Mickey’s many unexplained friendships with various one-shot professors were used to jumpstart plots in the Fallberg/Murry serials. Thus, while we want to see Buzz cleared, his plight doesn’t have the same impact or impart the same sense of urgency that it might have if he had been a better-developed character, or if his friendship with Baloo had felt less arbitrary—or, better yet, if a regular character had filled his place in the plot instead; with some rewriting, Baloo himself could have been placed at the center of the story, by having him be recruited by Khan as a test pilot for the helicopter, then learn of Perry’s plot and steal the helicopter to protect it, just as Buzz does in the actual episode (this would have made “Baloo Thunder” resemble Blue Thunder even more closely, though, which might have been something the production crew wanted to avoid for legal reasons).

All that said, while “Baloo Thunder” is a lot less involving than it could have been, it’s not a bad episode by any means; its plotting is structurally sound, its pacing is swift, and its lengthy climactic action scene is excellent, with first Perry’s henchmen and then Khan’s air force pursuing Baloo in the helicopter as he tries to evade them while simultaneously figuring out how to operate the unfamiliar craft; the sequence is at once funny, suspenseful, and novel, beginning in an enormous cavern and taking the action to the streets and skyscrapers of Cape Suzette, in yet another example of how the Talespin crew consistently found ways to put fresh spins on aerial action scenes. The ornate, rather Art-Deco-ish design of the helicopter further enhances the visual element of this sequence; in addition, I appreciate the nod at-historical accuracy in presenting the helicopter as new technology, which it would indeed have been in the quasi-1930s era of Talespin, although of course the idea of rotorcraft flight had been around for a long time, and there had been several successful proto-helicopters developed during the 1910s and 1920s. Baloo’s joy at getting to fly the new aircraft, despite the testing circumstances, is also a nice character touch.

 
 
The comedic elements of the episode are less distinctive, but enjoyable, with some of the comedy arising from Buzz’s revolutionary but erratic inventions (like an overly violent electric toothbrush) and other strange gadgets (such as the enormous booby-traps surrounding his secret hideout, which are something you might see guarding the Money Bin in an Italian Duck story), some from a series of blackout gags involving Baloo’s bumbling attempts to get past Khan’s fearsome secretary Mrs. Snarly and make a personal appeal to the inaccessible tycoon, which make me think of various Duck gag stories involving Donald’s efforts to infiltrate the Bin for one reason or another. The final gag also echoes many Duck stories, but in a more unfortunate way: Baloo receives a reward for returning the helicopter, but is then promptly forced to hand it right back to Khan to pay off various damages, leaving the bear sobbing at the fadeout. While it’s quite in character for Khan to shaft Baloo in this way, I have the same problem with this that I do with the numerous Duck stories in which Donald is shafted by Scrooge at the end through no fault of his own; both Baloo and Donald do plenty to deserve a comeuppance in many stories, but here, as in too many post-Barks Donald tales, Baloo isn’t at fault at all, and the final gag thus feels arbitrarily mean instead of funny.


Khan himself remains on the periphery in this episode, but is his usual aloof and ominous self, whether grimly responding to the news of the helicopter theft (by quietly crushing a flowerpot) or reacting with dignified irritation to his coarse-voiced and abrasive opposite number from Miniversal, a much more stocky and boorish tiger named Mr. Sultan (voiced by Corey Burton). Michael Bell, as the double-dealing leopard executive Perry, delivers a simultaneously suave and tough-sounding vocal performance which makes the one-shot villain a little more distinctive than he could have been; he’s also distinguished by the fact that, unlike other treacherous Khan employees such as Sheriff Gomer or Dougie Benson, he doesn’t seem at all afraid of Khan, making him appear that much more formidable as a villain. Mrs. Snarly, whose species is indeterminate (perhaps some kind of rat?) is voiced by Jennifer Darling in the funny-but-intimidating tones of the mechanically polite but stonily implacable receptionist-secretary we’ve all had to deal with at some time or other.


“Baloo Thunder” may be below Sustarsic’s usual Talespin standard, but it’s still a well-executed action-comedy, providing a spirited humorous take on a familiar action-adventure plotline—“rescuing the victimized scientist and his valuable MacGuffin”, and even giving the MacGuffin—i.e., the helicopter—a much more significant part to play in the action than is usual in such stories.

Up Next: "The Road to Macadamia"

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5—Episodes

LII: “The Road to Macadamia"

Baloo makes a cargo run to the desert kingdom of Macadamia, and is accompanied by Louie, who intends to pick up a supply of chocolate nuts for his restaurant. On their arrival in Macadamia, Trample, the royal chancellor, denies Baloo payment for his cargo delivery and likewise denies Louie his intended cargo pickup, assuring them both that “the kingdom is broke.” Distrusting Trample, Baloo and Louie sneak into the city to investigate further, and discover that Trample is plotting against Amok, the King of Macadamia; the Chancellor has been secretly embezzling the national funds, and is attempting to force Amok’s daughter, Princess Lotta Lamour, to marry him, by promising to lend the King enough money to put his impoverished kingdom back on its feet. Baloo and Louie both become smitten with the Princess, and start competing for her favor by trying to help her find a treasure cache that will obviate any need for accepting Trample’s offer, while the Chancellor plots to rid himself of the two brash outsiders.


Written by Len Uhley and edited by Karl Geurs, “Road to Macadamia” is a lightweight but delightful episode, an exuberant full-fledged homage to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s “Road” movies which manages to capture the spirit of those films without merely copying them and also without modifying the regular Talespin characters to map more closely onto the episode’s inspiration. Baloo may have Crosby’s laid-back caginess, and Louie may have Hope’s wisecracking breeziness, but, in keeping with their portrayals in other episodes, Baloo is more excitable than Bing, and Louie more canny than Bob; they’re not mere analogues for other people’s characters, but their usual selves, which is why the episode succeeds as a homage rather than a mere imitation.  


Although the episode has its cartoony moments, like Trample playing a record to convince the King that the city is in revolt, or the series of blackout gags early on in which Baloo and Louie try to infiltrate the city (including a Bugs-Bunny-style tunneling incursion), it remains more grounded than the typically surreal Road movies, with a simple but basically logical plot, and never actually breaks the fourth wall until the final amusing gag--and even then not in an obtrusive fashion. Some of the gags, like Louie’s fortune-teller act (obviously inspired by a scene in The Road to Utopia) and Baloo and Louie’s variation on the Hope/Crosby “patty-cake” routine as part of their failed attempt to fell some guards, directly reference the Road films, but most of the gags are original, and many of them are of the visual sort that would not have worked anywhere but in animation—like Baloo and Louie’s comedic manhandling of Trample under cover of Louie’s act, the duo’s encounter with a cobra in their bedroom, or the boisterous climactic fight in the throne room, with our heroes swinging through the air on drapes. The verbal humor is also sharp, and virtually non-stop, with Baloo and Louie trading banter (Baloo: “Handle with care, boys; I’ve been known to tip heavily”; Louie: “Not in my lifetime”), rattling off snappy patter (“That seer without peer, the Great Louie!”), and exchanging comic insults (Baloo: “An out-of-the-body experience—no wonder, with a body like his”; Louie: “Better out of my body than out of your mind”).


Princess Lotta Lamour, voiced by Kath Soucie, of course constitutes another reference to the Road films—namely, to Hope and Crosby’s regular female co-star, Dorothy Lamour. Like most of her namesake’s characters, she’s more sensible and purposeful than the flippant rogues she’s forced to ally with, but is not above mixing in comic shenanigans—pretending to be a statue alongside Baloo and Louie, or beaning bad guys on the head. Her reaction to Trample’s sinister marriage proposal is also fun, abruptly switching from flowery protest (“I will never marry Chancellor Trample; he is a loathsome festering carbuncle on the face of our beloved kingdom”) to blunt threat (“Touch me and you’re dust, buster”). Like the prior object of Baloo and Louie’s competitive attention, Katie Dodd, she’s a fox—while her father, the muddle-headed King of Macadamia, is a rabbit, voiced by Howard Morris using his enjoyable Ed Wynn impression.  I take it from this that the offspring of mixed-species marriages must resemble one parent or the other (I'm assuming the Princess' mother was a fox too), which actually makes sense given what we've seen in other episodes--there's plenty of inter-species attraction in Talespin (Louie flirting with Becky, Becky dating Covington, Baloo and Louie pursuing Katie or, in this very episode, Lotta), but we never see any hybridized animal characters walking around.  


Chancellor Trample, a sly and unctuously mannered vulture, is voiced by Jim Cummings; Michael Rye, who voiced the villainous Duke Igthorn on Gummi Bears, is credited in the on-screen voice cast, and some sources identify him as the voice of Trample instead. However, Trample’s voice is deeper than the nasal Hans-Conried-ish voice Rye used for Igthorn, and sounds more like a variation on the oily British-accented villain voices Cummings used for characters like Covington in “Molly Coddled” and Fat Cat on Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers; there’s also one moment (when Trample is shouting orders offstage), in which the Chancellor sounds like an unaccented Don Karnage—making it pretty clear that Cummings is delivering all or almost all of Trample's lines. Since there are no other significant speaking parts in the episode that Rye could have played, and since the Trample role seems like a natural for him, my guess is that he was initially cast in the part and then, for health or scheduling reasons, either partially or entirely replaced by Cummings (who would already have been on hand anyway to voice Louie).

The Walt Disney Japan unit outdoes itself when it comes to the animation in “Macadamia”, engaging in visual flourishes (like the shadows under Baloo and Louie’s hat brims during the desert sequence, the heat haze which overlies our heroes’ first sight of the city, the shimmering moonlight during the garden scene, and the dazzling golden light of the treasure chamber) that may have been unnecessary from a strictly narrative point of view, but which add some visual flair to complement the humorous flair of the writing. The Arabesque city of Macadamia is nicely designed too, and incidental characters—such as the scrawny peasants seen perpetually chasing an emaciated chicken in the background, or Trample’s hulking rhinoceros guards—are drawn and animated with cartoony exuberance.
 
Just as “For Whom the Bell Klangs” captured the spirit of the old-time movie serial while remaining true to the Disney funny-animal spirit, “Road to Macadamia” captures the freewheeling humorous tone of the Road comedies without merely mimicking them—and, again like “Klang,” succeeds so well in its goal that there’s not much else left for me to say. Like its Hope-Crosby inspirations, “Macadamia” is too resolutely lighthearted to generate much analysis—but does generate a great deal of entertainment.


Up Next: "The Sound and the Furry"

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5--Episodes

LIII: “The Sound and the Furry”

A shady, fly-by-night mechanic who calls herself “Crazy Edie” has captured a quartet of strange animals—small furry gremlin-like beasts with surprising strength, which are capable of dismantling planes and other mechanical contrivances in a matter of seconds. Controlling the creatures via electronic collars, she slips them inside plane engines and forces them to inflict damage, then collects exorbitant repair fees from the owners of said planes. Edie takes off for Cape Suzette, planning to run her scam on a larger scale at a big air race; however, she loses the gremlins en route, and their cage floats to the dock at Higher for Hire—where Wildcat finds it, releases the gremlins, and becomes their fast friend. Unfortunately, Edie recaptures the gremlins soon after, and begins wreaking havoc at the race—but, due to the unintentional interference of Wildcat, fails to insert a gremlin inside the Sea Duck, which causes Baloo to become the race’s only finalist and leads the other contestants to believe that he sabotaged their planes. It falls to Wildcat, and to the gremlins themselves, to clear Baloo and put an end to Edie’s scheming.


Written by Julia Lewald and edited by Duane Capizzi, “Sound and the Furry” is a low-key and very likable episode, the best of Lewald’s contributions to Talespin; it's better-structured than "Jumping the Guns", and, unlike “All’s Whale that Ends Well” and “Feminine Air”, is not burdened by any awkward attempts to drive home a moral; instead, it merely tells an unpretentious, warmhearted but humorous story centered around Wildcat and his friendship with the gremlins. Said story could easily have become excessively cutesy, but although the gremlins are ostentatiously cute in design, Wildcat’s lovable but entirely unsentimental personality defuses any potential sentimentalism; he’s cheerful and kindly, but entirely matter-of-fact, in his interactions with his furry little friends, never gushing over their cuteness or sobbing over their plight, but simply chatting with them amiably, making some of his characteristic off-the-wall remarks (“I’ll name ya . . . Homer; I like Homer, ‘cause it rhymes with wrench”) and trying to help them as best he can; even when he races to their rescue at the end, furiously pursuing and then jumping into Edie’s escaping aircraft to save the gremlins from her clutches, there’s no overwrought exclamations or dramatic posturing on his part; he goes about his heroism with the simple, dogged, slightly clumsy earnestness of a child.


The gremlins’ anthropomorphism level is rather ambiguous, in that they can’t talk to humans but clearly seem sentient, being able to convey information through energetic squeaks and physical pantomime—but this ambiguity works for what, after all, are quasi-mythical creatures. Their above-mentioned cuteness, though extreme, is appropriate enough, since it quickly establishes them, through visuals, as innocent and lovable despite their destructiveness and likewise sets them visually apart immediately from the decidedly un-cute Edie, underscoring the idea that they are unwillingly being compelled to wreck things for her. Incidentally, I call them “gremlins” mainly for convenience’s sake; although their plane-dismantling abilities evoke the gremlins of aviator legend, they are never given an official species name—even though Wildcat does dub them “lobsters,” an amusingly bizarre misnomer arising from the cage they’re floating in when he first finds them.


Crazy Edie is an appropriate villain for this small-scaled story, a crafty crane con-artist whose harshness, sarcasm, and sneakiness make her a good contrast to the kind and guileless Wildcat (as in the amusing “Queen of Sheba” bit), and whose schemes are not too clever or grandiose to be believably thwarted by Wildcat’s intentional and unintentional interference. Billie Hayes voices her with humorously villainous gusto, making her sound folksy ("Waal, I'll be dipped!") but cunning; her greedy, klutzy alligator Al, a combination of pet and accomplice very like Jambalaya Jake’s sidekick Gumbo on Darkwing Duck, adds an additional funny touch to her scenes. The large, blocky helicopter-type craft which Edie, Al, and the captive gremlins travel about in, and in which the final clash between Wildcat and Edie takes place, is visually distinctive, but perhaps slightly surprising in a show that presented a helicopter as new technology only a few episodes back (in “Baloo Thunder”); I’ll simply assume that Shere Khan put several helicopter models on the market immediately after the events of that episode, and that Edie was an early adapter (or, more likely, stole her copter from an early adapter).

Baloo, the only other regular in the episode, has fairly little to do other than react with bemusement to some of Wildcat’s remarks and the antics of the gremlins, participate in the air race, and suffer a “greasing and spooning” (in lieu of tarring and feathering) at the hands of his angry and misguided fellow-pilots. Still, although the spotlight remains mostly on Wildcat, Edie and the gremlins, Baloo has a few good lines and character beats—such as getting much more upset about the pilots’ threat to damage the Sea Duck than his own rough treatment at their hands, and trying to defend Wildcat from the pilot mob with a plea that comically sums up Baloo’s generally kindly but baffled attitude towards his incomprehensible mechanic: “Don’t harm him; he’s crazy.” The air race in which Baloo competes, a wild obstacle course which includes a leg through a cavern, a long plunge down a waterfall, and another stretch under the sea, provides some memorable visuals, even though the whole sequence feels a bit like filler as it has no real direct bearing on the plot.  Still, Baloo's flight through the obstacles is enjoyable to watch—particularly the bit with the cannons firing custard pies, which puts me in mind of the numerous custard pie jokes in Barks’ stories. The enormous aerial platform from which the obstacle racers take off provides further visual interest. That recurring but generally peripheral character, Wiley Pole, is visible as one of the other air race contestants, but has no distinguishable lines.
 

Neither the funniest nor the most action-packed of Talespin episodes, “Sound and the Furry” nevertheless combines sufficient measures of humor and action, with an additional measure of underplayed sentiment, to emerge as a charming effort, a “little” episode that thoroughly entertains and provides a good showcase for Wildcat as well.



LIV: “Destiny Rides Again”

After making a cargo delivery in a remote mountain village, Baloo and Kit take a little vacation time to see the sights; however, Baloo’s careless donning of an odd llama-eared hat leads them into an unexpected adventure. An old fortune-teller named Una hails Baloo as “the Great Llama,” the prophesied hero who is to find and destroy the Idol of Doom, an ancient and dangerous talisman which was created by an evil sorcerer centuries ago and secreted in a lost temple. Although Baloo laughs at the idea of this foreordained “destiny”, a series of odd incidents ultimately leads him and Kit to the idol’s hiding place—with El Gato, a local bandit who covets the idol’s power, hot on their trail. With the idol thus at risk of falling into evil hands, Baloo, very reluctantly, is forced to accept his destiny, and must attempt to put an end to the idol’s menace.

“Destiny Rides Again” was the first of two Talespin episode written by Cathryn Perdue, who later worked frequently on Goof Troop and the notorious Quack Pack; Jymn Magon was the editor. Perdue is a little over-reliant on the catch-all solution of "destiny" to move her plot along at a few junctures, particularly in the scene in which the idol flies after the Sea Duck of its own accord after Baloo has attempted to jettison it; I’m not convinced, even within the parameters of this plot, that the idol would so doggedly adhere to the person who is destined to destroy it. However, the whole “destiny” theme does provide a good means of emphasizing one of Baloo’s key personality traits—namely, his reluctance to play the hero (“This really is your destiny!” “No, I’d say this is nature’s plan to ruin my weekend”)—a reluctance which, like that of Donald in Barks’ stories, is both amusing and provides a nice catharsis when the character finally takes heroic action (here exemplified by Baloo’s response when El Gato starts using the idol to rain destruction on the village: “That tears it; let’s buzz that buzzard”). The episode recalls several early Barks stories not only in its reluctant-hero theme, but also through a few other plot elements—the string of comical apparent misfortunes which leads our heroes to the idol (which recalls the many seemingly unfortunate but really lucky happenings featured in Barks’ Gladstone-centric stories), and also the way in which Kit keeps acting as a sort of questioning chorus, thoughtfully suggesting to the doubting Baloo that his destiny may be real, in the same way the Nephews kept reminding Donald of things like the power of a rabbit’s foot or the importance of good deeds in early Barks ten-pagers.

For the most part, the pacing and structure of the episode is solid, with the opening scene—in which a sky-surfing Kit nearly collides with a giant condor—providing a good bookend for the finale, which has El Gato riding the condor as he attacks the Sea Duck in the exciting climactic battle; similarly, El Gato’s use of a non-anthropomorphic crow as a hench-critter earlier in the episode helps to provide a bit of foreshadowing to his later use of the condor, by demonstrating that he makes a habit of utilizing birds for dirty work. Baloo’s electrifying use of the llama bracelet (given him by Una) to finally defeat the condor could have been foreshadowed a bit more, but the moment manages to avoid feeling utterly out-of-left-field, since it’s established early on that the bracelet has magical properties (we see it emitting blue sparks at several earlier moments), and since Una specifically states that it will “lead and protect” Baloo; we see it leading him (by getting caught on a cart which drags him out towards the lost temple) earlier in the episode, so having it protect him as well at the climax feels to some extent like a payoff of Una’s foretelling—even if, like the idol's adherence to Baloo, it also feels a bit overly convenient.

 
A much bigger structural flaw is the completely pointless extended comedy scene in which El Gato and his crow look for Kit and Baloo’s trail—two minutes' worth of Looney-Tunes-inspired slapstick (complete with a cliff plunge straight out of the Wile E. Coyote playbook) which serves no purpose in the plot, makes the villain appear far too inept, and really doesn’t mesh with the rest of the episode, in which El Gato is presented as a fairly formidable antagonist; although amusing in spots, the sequence is so out of place that it really should have been excised during the editing process. The slapstick gags involving Baloo’s efforts to destroy the apparently indestructible idol work much better, since they feel entirely in-character for Baloo and advance the main thread of the plot; Baloo’s ultimate solution to the puzzle of destroying the idol is also amusing, and clever in its simplicity. The rhyming incantation used to channel the idol’s power (beginning with “Idol of doom, storm and fire…”) gives rise to a series of entertaining variations on the basic form of the verse, from the ominous (“Idol of doom, storm and fire, blast that hill, ‘tis my desire”) to the humorous (“Idol of doom, storm and fire, flatten that creep like a bicycle tire”).

The temple backgrounds, the surrounding Andes-like peaks, and Una’s stony village all evoke a quasi-Peruvian atmosphere and give the episode a visually unique identity, distinguishing the locale from the tropical islands, Art Deco skyscrapers, Thembrian tundra, and desert wastes more typically used as backdrops to the show’s action. The physical design of Una herself is partly cribbed from that of Helga in “Balooest of the Bluebloods,” both of them being stocky rodents with (unexplained) peg-legs, but her facial design is quite different, as is her voice (provided by Mitzi McCall, who drrramatically rrrolls her "Rs" with gusto); her character goes beyond being merely the cryptic-fortuneteller archetype to become more of a wise-woman/good-witch figure, as she not only gives Baloo mystic warnings but provides him with practical help (the bracelet) as well. El Gato, voiced by Jim Cummings, is a fun one-shot villain overall (despite being undercut, as mentioned, by the unnecessary and prolonged Looney Tunes riff); in both design (he’s a brawny feline, as his name indicates) and growling voice he comes off somewhat like a Latin American version of Pete.

As one might expect from a script by a newcomer writer, “Destiny Rides Again” diverges a bit from the standard Talespin track both in good ways (the unique locale) and not-so-good ways (the sometimes overly careless reliance on hand-wavy magic). However, it still partakes of the show’s usual strengths (probably thanks in part to Magon’s editorial presence)—good action, engaging humor, and good individualized character touches for the regulars--not only Baloo’s skeptical and comically grudging attitude towards his “destiny,” but also Kit’s coolly delighted air (“Well, what do ya know, I got her unstuck!”) when he actually gets to fly the Sea Duck during the finale, and some other nice moments of friendly banter between him and Baloo. One of the best of the latter bits is the fadeout scene, which simultaneously puts a good humorous capper on the “destiny” theme, unobtrusively reaffirms Baloo and Kit’s familial bond, and promises a return to the characters’ more usual haunts while engaging in one last striking visual evocation of the episode’s unusual setting—thus finishing up on a high note despite a few shaky moments along the way.


Up Next: "The Incredible Shrinking Molly"

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5--Episodes

LV: “The Incredible Shrinking Molly”

Rebecca, Molly, Kit, and Baloo go to the theater to see a monster movie, which supercharges Molly’s typically overactive imagination to such an extent that she dons her Danger Woman outfit and sneaks out to investigate a weirdly-lighted building across the way from Higher for Hire, after convincing herself that said building is the laboratory of a mad scientist. Unfortunately, the building really is the lab of a mad scientist, one Dr. Zibaldo; Molly accidentally stumbles into the path of his shrinking ray and finds herself reduced to tiny size. Baloo, Rebecca, and Kit go looking for Molly, and, after realizing what has happened, are able to convince Zibaldo, who is insane but quite amiable, to help them search for the little girl—a search which entails the shrinking of Baloo, Becky, and the Sea Duck; the two adults use the miniaturized plane to scour the lab floor for Molly, battling a fierce rat and a horde of angry hornets in the process, while Kit remains at full size in order to keep Zibaldo focused on the eventual task of, hopefully, re-enlarging everyone.

Written by Chuck Tately and edited by Mark Zaslove, “Incredible Shrinking Molly” is a memorable and highly enjoyable episode, one which takes the hackneyed shrinking plot, a staple in virtually every cartoon series, and executes it with panache and gusto, adding some distinctive wrinkles to make it feel fresh and fun—the best of these wrinkles being the shrinking of the Sea Duck, which allows Baloo and Becky to quickly navigate their dangerously over-scaled surroundings without the perpetual running and hiding that usually becomes the lot of shrunken protagonists, and even permits them to go on the offensive against menaces like the hornets and the rat, while still leaving them vulnerable to danger—much as the Micro-Ducks’ flying saucer in Barks’ ”Micro-Ducks from Outer Space” allowed Scrooge and company to engage in both fight and flight while trapped in the miniature world. The typical shrinking story tends to be a survival drama, (like the Ducktales adaptation of “Micro-Ducks” or Rosa’s “Incredible Shrinking Tightwad”), with any would-be rescuers on the periphery, but the deployment of the Sea Duck in “Incredible Shrinking Molly” turns the episode’s plot into more of a shrunken rescue mission than a shrunken quest to survive, sharpening the pace and avoiding some standard cliches (such as the characters spending time on seeking improvised implements or vehicles to use in their new diminutive state). Having the Sea Duck miniaturized along with our protagonists also allows for some unique aerial action scenes, such as the plane’s takeoff from Zibaldo’s desk, its headlong flight through a rathole, or its dogfight with the hornet swarm.
 
The Sea Duck’s shrunken flight is not the only source of memorable visuals in the episode; the Walt Disney France production crew, which handled the animation for this episode, indulges its penchant for shadows, lighting effects, and emphatic, near-manic movement to full extent, an approach which gives the episode a weird and sometimes eerie tone which nicely complements the mad-science trappings and accentuates some genuinely scary moments involving the hungry rat (which is animated realistically and more than a little frighteningly). The black-and-white Frankenstein take-off at the beginning is another nice visual touch, with the animators including a neat homage to Kenneth Strickfadden’s sparking and arcing lab-equipment props, which figured in the original 1931 Frankenstein film as well as many other old movies. Zibaldo’s own lab is filled with similar Strickfadden-style gadgetry, but there are some visual continuity errors in its depiction; the control panel is shown to be normal-sized at some points, but is drawn so gigantically at other points that in one scene we’re momentarily confused into thinking that Kit and Zibaldo have been shrunk as well when we see them fiddling with the outsize equipment, which is not supposed to be the case. Disney’s UK animation unit, which rarely worked on Talespin, is credited with additional animation for the episode, which makes me wonder if these visual disparities are the result of pick-up shots by the British crew. There’s also one odd verbal continuity error, with Kit surprisedly asking Zibaldo “You have rats in here?” after Kit has already chased the rat around the room a few scenes previously.

 
As in his script for “Louie’s Last Stand,” which furnished plentiful action while providing some strong character touches, Tately in “Shrinking Molly” does not lose sight of the characters in the midst of all the shrunken perils and weird scientific gadgetry. Molly receives her first focus episode since “Flight of the Snow Duck”; as in that outing and in many of her other appearances, her imaginativeness and courageousness are stressed, with her enthused rather than frightened reaction to the monster movie and her later nervous but curious exploration of Zibaldo’s lab feeling entirely in-character, while her characteristic willfulness is also on display (here epitomized by her sneaking out to investigate the lab after being forbidden to do so by Becky, and justifying her disobedience with the childish excuse that Becky may have told her not to go out, but didn’t say anything about Danger Woman going out). Her grumbling about being ignored because she’s “little” has less connection to her established traits from prior episodes, and was clearly included mainly as a thematic complement to the shrinking theme—but it feels like the type of complaint a six-year-old might easily make, and works much better than Webby’s sudden, random bemoaning of her small size in Ducktales’ “Attack of the Fifty-Foot Webby” (justly ridiculed in Chris Barat’s view of that episode)—partly because Molly feels more like a real little kid, partly because Molly, unlike Webby, actually is physically smaller than all the other regulars, and partly because Molly (due to Janna Michaels’ limited schedule) appears on the show so sporadically that the audience is likely to share the feeling that she’s frequently overlooked. The size theme also ties into the finale, in which Molly is able to save the day by using her smallness to her advantage, sneaking past the accidentally-enlarged rat to activate the machine that will return the menacing rodent to its natural size. In addition to providing a capper to the “advantage/disadvantage of smallness” motif, the finale neatly allows Molly to make amends for precipitating the episode’s crisis in the first place, preventing her from coming off as a mere nuisance who needs rescuing by permitting her to take rescuing action herself.

Rebecca also receives a good showcase here, receiving more to do than in any episode since “Save the Tiger.” Her comical and her admirable aspects are both on display, as in her vehemently irritated interchanges with the befuddled Zibaldo; her extreme ire, as she shouts at the doctor and shakes him, is funny, but at the same time very relatable and easy to sympathize with, as we know it’s prompted by her concern for Molly. She also gets a great heroic moment in which she not only drops herself out of the back of the Sea Duck on Kit’s sky-surfing rope (as in a similar scene in “Mommy for a Day”) but also uses it to soar directly past the monstrous rat, in order to snatch Molly out of the beast’s clutches—a moment that’s all the more impressive given her earlier freakout when encountering the rat in its much less frightening normal-sized form. Her dialogue with Baloo as she goes about this dramatic rescue is both emotional (“That’s my daughter!”) and funny (“Hold on!” “Believe me, I'm not planning to let go!”), again highlighting both the humorously acerbic and the (literal and figurative) “Mama Bear” sides of her personality. Baloo’s character beats in the episode are also an interesting study in seeming inconsistency, which, as with Becky, make him feel rather more like a real person than otherwise; he’s terrified by the monster movie and extremely nervous about going to Zibaldo’s lab, but becomes quite cool and collected as soon he sees his way to using his trusty Sea Duck to resolve the situation, even wisecracking in the face of the hornet onslaught.
 
 
Kit is in good form as well, interacting in a believably breezy big-brother way with Molly at the beginning and later trying hard to keep Zibaldo on track, while Zibaldo himself comes close to stealing the episode. The mad doctor’s visual design—a diminutive fox with enormous glasses—is amusing enough, but it’s his vocals—provided by Dan Castellaneta—which really make him memorable; Castellaneta gives Zibaldo the same inimitably crazed-sounding voice he later used for Megavolt on Darkwing Duck, and uses it to extract maximum humorous value from the mad doctor’s ravings (“I'm not mad! Of course, I'm not thrilled about you being here, either...”) and ramblings (“You know, I once tried to develop an English muffin; it had nooks but no crannies...”). Although he makes Zibaldo sound consistently loony, Castellaneta somehow manages to make him sound harmless and even likable, which was less frequently the case with Megavolt. Joe Torcivia, on his blog, regretted that Zibaldo never made a return appearance, and I would tend to agree; thanks to Castellaneta, the character is a lot more memorable than the blander scientific eccentric Buzz, who did make a return appearance.

The final gag, in which Zibaldo rants about his newest idea for an invention (“Television!") and is scoffed at by Baloo, only for a television test pattern to appear superimposed over the fadeout, is too wink-winky for my taste, and the aforementioned continuity errors are a problem, but “Incredible Shrinking Molly” is nevertheless a lot of fun, a fast-moving thrill ride with effective characterization to boot. It’s sheer coincidence that I posted this review on Halloween, but in some ways "Molly" is a very Halloween-ish episode, in that the mad-science theme, the horror-movie opening, the shadowy visuals, the genuine scariness of the rat, and the air of exhausted relief that settles in once everything and everyone is back to normal at the end, evoke the atmosphere of nocturnal madness and fright ultimately giving way to a reassuring dawn which characterizes so many good Halloween tales.

 

Up Next: "Paradise Lost"

[Matilda]

Yes! A very appropriate episode to review on Halloween! This made for fun reading after the trick-or-treaters stopped coming tonight. And by the way: the trick-or-treaters who came to my house tonight all got *full-size* Donald Duck comic books, the Fantagraphics release for this year's Free Comic Book Day--I was able to procure 50 of them through my local comic book store to use as treats. I figure that's a nice way to get them into the hands of many kids who would never go to a comic book store, not even for Free Comic Book Day!

I am putting this episode on my list of things to watch on Disney Plus for Halloween in future years, along with the Vincent Price and Alice Cooper episodes of The Muppet Show.

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5--Episodes

LVI: “Paradise Lost”

A swaggering safari guide named O’Rourke recruits Baloo, Wildcat, and the Sea Duck for a trip to a seemingly barren valley in the Mogabi Desert—a valley which flowers into a lush prehistoric forest, complete with dinosaurs, when an ancient river flows through the valley once every hundred years. O’Rourke plans to arrange for the river to irrigate the valley permanently, explaining to Baloo that he hopes to turn the forest into a dinosaur park; O’Rourke is to serve as tour guide and Baloo and the Duck are to provide transportation for the crowds of paying tourists. Baloo, with visions of buying back the Duck again dancing before his eyes, eagerly forms a partnership with O’Rourke—but O’Rourke’s real plan is to make a figurative and literal killing by shuttling wealthy sportsmen to the valley for dinosaur big-game hunting; Baloo balks at this bloodthirsty scheme, but it’s Wildcat, who’s fascinated by the valley’s dinosaurs and quickly bonds with them, who actually manages to put a stop to it.

Written by Jeffrey Scott (who previously scripted the well-done “My Fair Baloo”) and edited by the dependable Karl Geurs, “Paradise Lost” is an episode that should have been outstanding, and which I really wish I was able to like more than I do. It has some excellent ideas (such as the Brigadoon-like nature of the valley), and some memorable moments, but also has several flaws which make it something of a misfire, albeit an interesting one. One of the flaws is the way Scott somewhat heavy-handedly stacks the deck to make his lost world feel like a completely benign paradise, carefully keeping tyrannosaurs and other major predators offstage, and having almost all of the dinosaurs we see (such as the brontosaurus which Wildcat befriends by feeding it jellybeans) act like big friendly dogs rather than wild animals. Scott was evidently afraid that even acknowledging the dangerous potential of the dinosaurs would undercut the theme of bloody-handed humans invading a jungle paradise, but I think he could have put his point across regardless—perhaps by drawing a parallel between O’Rourke and the predator dinos, while demonstrating that the hunter’s greed and scheming brain make him worse and more dangerous than any of the natural predators.

If Scott was bound and determined to present the valley fauna as entirely innocuous, then it would have been better to have made said fauna entirely imaginary beasts (such as the Yenkara in “Mommy for a Day”) who could have been as harmless and cute as the story demanded, rather than taking real creatures and somewhat implausibly cute-ifying them. With a Yenkara or some other cuddly mythical beast involved, scenes like Wildcat telling fireside stories to a peaceful and attentive group of beasties or Baloo getting angry at O’Rourke for bringing a gun to the valley for “protection” would feel more believable.  As it is, since we’re dealing with real creatures, at least some of whom certainly have the potential to be dangerous, both scenes come off as improbable—mainly the second one; while it’s in-character for Wildcat not to be afraid of the dinos, it feels wrong for the pragmatic and often panicky Baloo to be so adamant that no firepower is needed even when the characters are surrounded by prehistoric monsters.

That said, there’s a mythic resonance to the fireside scene and some of Wildcat’s other interactions with the dinosaurs—they evoke the motif of the Holy Fool, the simpleton whose pure simplicity and charity makes him impervious to all dangers. Scott manages to hit this mythic chord, while still mining plenty of humor from Wildcat’s typically peculiar dialogue—such as the fractured fairy-tale he tells to his fireside audience of dinos (“And then, Snow White said, ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow Little Miss Muffett off her tuffet.’ Humpty Dumpty picked her up, but he didn’t know what a tuffet was, so he couldn’t put her back together again—no way”). Scott also extracts genuine pathos from Wildcat here, a rare phenomenon where the comically oblivious and perennially cheerful mechanic is concerned; his farewell to his gradually fading dinosaur friends, after he has dammed up the river in order to make them and their forest vanish before O’Rourke and his hunting party arrive, is genuinely poignant, as is the scene of him sitting alone in the newly-barren wasteland after everything has disappeared. Taking a character who, alone among the show’s regulars, is almost invariably content with his lot, and having him believably experience longing and loss in this fashion, was an excellent dramatic idea, and it’s carried off very well—even though Scott unfortunately undercuts it in the episode’s final scene. Unlike Libby Hinson, who appropriately ended “Her Chance to Dream” on a note of wistful melancholy, Scott allows Wildcat to reopen the river and revive the valley once more at the very end, a conclusion which drastically weakens the impact of his self-sacrifice earlier in the episode; if Scott was determined to end the episode on an upbeat note, it would have sufficed to have Wildcat bring a small sample of the valley’s earth and water back with him to Cape Suzette, to create a tiny lost world of his own with it, as we see O’Rourke do at the beginning of the episode.
 
 
Wildcat’s final restoration of the lost world is also a problem for practical in-story reasons, not just artistic ones; although Scott, through Baloo’s dialogue, tries to assure us that O’Rourke is taken care of “for good” (he loses the medallion which he used as a map to the valley), it’s hard to believe that O’Rourke won’t be able to find the now-flowering valley on his own again, despite the loss of the map. I suppose you could assume that O’Rourke will be permanently eliminated, either legally or extra-legally, by his irate hunting clients (who accuse him of bilking them once they find the valley empty, and drag him away while talking about turning him into a hunting trophy), but that still wouldn’t prevent others from stumbling onto the valley. Scott appears to have hoped that the feel-good visual of the flourishing forest (beautifully rendered by Walt Disney Japan) at the fadeout would impart enough of an emotional glow to dispel such fears, but one is still left doubtful and concerned about the future of the valley and its dinosaur inhabitants.

O’Rourke is a good and unusually realistic villain, a cool and confident tough guy who’s more smugly amoral than gleefully evil; Jim Cummings gives him a tough, gravelly, but basically non-comic voice which matches well with his personality, and his visual design—he’s a bison—imparts a nice ironic touch by making this ruthless hunter a member of a species famous for being over-hunted. I do question whether O’Rourke’s plan to use the valley as a hunting ground rather than a safari park would really be more profitable in the long term, as he claims, but I can see that the hunting scheme would involve much less overhead and, if the price per hunter was high enough (one of his clients indicates he’s paid ten thousand dollars for his trip), he probably could get rich much quicker than by putting in the spadework to create a full-fledged park. O’Rourke also holds the nefarious distinction of being the only Talespin heavy, perhaps the only Disney funny-animal heavy, to actually inflict a gunshot wound on-screen; he fires at and injures a pterosaur which is trying to rescue her baby from him. The mother pterosaur doesn’t die, of course (Wildcat tends to its wound in a subsequent scene), but the moment is still pretty shocking and helps to viscerally drive home the idea that O’Rourke and his hunting scheme pose an existential threat to the dinosaurs. 
 
As in “The Sound and the Furry,” which similarly spotlighted Wildcat and his love of animals, Baloo has comparatively short shrift in “Paradise Lost,” but his initially delighted and subsequently dismayed reaction to O’Rourke’s feigned and real plans provide him with some good moments, demonstrating both his weakness for get-rich-quick schemes and his fundamental good-heartedness. The other regulars are absent, save for Louie in the opening scene.

“Paradise Lost” aims high but fails to entirely hit its mark; the excessive cuddliness of the dinosaurs, and the more serious flaw of an ending which tries to have its cake and eat it too, prevents it from attaining the same heights as episodes like “Old Man and the Sea Duck” or “Her Chance To Dream,” but it’s too memorable to be dismissed as a complete failure, even though it’s not a complete success.



Up Next: The Thembrians make their final bow in “Flying Dupes”

[djnyr]

LVII: “Flying Dupes”

A pair of Thembrian munitions magnates plot to make the High Marshal believe that Cape Suzette attempted to assassinate him, hoping to anger him into declaring war and boosting their profit margins as a result. Baloo is the patsy selected to fly the bomb to the High Marshal’s summer home, in the belief that it is a goodwill present; the conspirators’ idea is that Baloo will be intercepted at a checkpoint and caught with the bomb before reaching the High Marshal’s closely-guarded retreat, but they reckon without Baloo’s caginess and the desperation of Colonel Spigot. Spigot is in a panic because the High Marshal has ordered all Thembrian Air Force personnel to take new flight tests—and Spigot himself has never actually learned how to fly.  Baloo learns of this from Sergeant Dunder, and capitalizes on the Colonel’s panic by offering him flying lessons, in exchange for Spigot conveying Baloo through Thembria’s air vectors. The conspiring munitions magnates, who require an alive and angered High Marshal, not an exploded one, for their war scheme, become alarmed at Baloo’s unexpectedly unimpeded progress and begin trying to halt it, while Baloo, Spigot, Dunder, and the bomb draw ever nearer to the High Marshal’s residence.


Martin Donoff, who previously scripted the excellent Thembrian episode “Flight School Confidential”, returns to Thembria and to Talespin for this entry, with “Flight School’s” editor Duane Capizzi returning as well. Unlike “Flight School,” which was part comedy and part character study of Kit, “Flying Dupes” is more in line with most of the other Thembrian episodes, being pretty much purely farcical, albeit—again, like most of the other Thembrian episodes—an engaging and fast-paced farce, with amusing character interactions. “Dupes” carries forward some character dynamics established in “Golden Sprocket of Friendship,” the last Spigot-focused episode. Baloo, who, in “Sprocket”, was able to manipulate Spigot through the latter’s fear of the High Marshal, does so again here with smooth-talking ease; at this point, the power differential between the two characters is interestingly altered from what it was in the early Thembrian episodes, in which Spigot was typically able to bully Baloo with the full power of the Thembrian state; Baloo now has learned how to use that state power to exert control over Spigot. Another character development introduced in “Sprocket,” the genuine friendship between Baloo and Dunder, is reaffirmed here, with Dunder not only cluing Baloo in to Spigot’s need for flying lessons but subsequently acting as Baloo’s sidekick and co-conspirator in the attempt to reach the High Marshal, and working with him to manipulate Spigot. Dunder’s placidity and cautious common sense make a great contrast to Baloo’s audacious con-artistry, and they’re a lot of fun to watch as a team—as when they’re impersonating dancing girls to hoodwink Spigot midway through the episode; Baloo throws himself into the impersonation with an exaggerated voice and mannerisms, while Dunder is extremely deadpan about the whole thing (as with his ad-libbed “singing”) and also remains calmly gloomy about the risk being run (“The Colonel will kill us when he finds out who we are”).

 
Baloo’s interactions with Spigot are also fun, with Baloo trying to mask his exasperation and occasional panic while jollying Spigot along and trying to let him “fly” without causing disaster. Spigot himself spends the episode veering between insecurity (“Top secret! It has nothing, repeat, nothing to do with flying lessons!”) and blustering, self-deluded overconfidence (“Now, Spigot, flying ace, will…”); this shifting between nervousness and bluster is essential Spigot, and ultimately the thing that makes the character work both here and in the show as a whole. Pure insecurity would have made the Colonel seem too pathetic, while pure bombastic egoism would have become tiresome; the continual fluctuation between the two, however, makes Spigot seem human and even relatable at times despite the extreme comical exaggeration of his personality; we’ve all felt that emotional oscillation, albeit maybe not to such extremes, and all suffered from some form of the “impostor syndrome” which besets Spigot here.
 
The aerial action and slapstick shenanigans which surround Baloo, Spigot, and Dunder’s flight towards the High Marshal are nicely executed, from the visual gags involving Spigot’s use of plumber’s plungers to allow him to reach the Sea Duck’s pedals, to the above-mentioned dancing-girl charade, to the dogfight with the Thembrian air force (amusingly equipped, as in other episodes, with bathtubs in lieu of bombs), to the comedic travails of the harried munitions magnate (voiced by Chuck McCann) who frantically pursues the trio in hopes of preventing his bomb scheme from working too well. The macabre and absurdist verbal humor which characterizes most Thembrian episodes is on hand as well, particularly in the scenes with the High Marshal (“Spigot, you are the only one who has clearance to disturb me at my summer home. But don’t, or you will be shot.”) Donoff and Capizzi manage to unify all these myriad comic elements of “Flying Dupes” around the theme of deception; the title takes on a double meaning, with the conspiring munitions magnates using Baloo as their dupe while Baloo in turn uses Spigot as his dupe—and by doing so causes the initial deception to backfire on the conspirators, effectively making them their own dupes.
 
“Flying Dupes” would be the final Thembrian episode of Talespin, and it fittingly proves a good curtain call for Spigot, Dunder, and company, echoing and building on their prior appearances to give them, and their nation, a worthy and funny sendoff.




LVIII: “Stuck on You”

Don Karnage, triumphantly descending from the Iron Vulture via rope and basket to demand Cape Suzette’s surrender, after finally managing to evade the cliff guns, suffers an unexpected collision with the Sea Duck, in which Baloo is transporting a cargo of super-glue. Baloo and Karnage’s ensuing fight finds Karnage getting the upper hand but declining to finish off Baloo when the latter is helpless; the fight thus continues, but ends when they are accidentally drenched with the glue and become hopelessly stuck to each other. They’re forced to cooperate as they go in search of a solvent for the glue, with Baloo promising not to give Karnage away to the Cape Suzette authorities in return for the pirate’s earlier mercy towards him—which, in turn, imposes an obligation on Karnage not to give Baloo away to the Don’s own men when the pair subsequently fall in with the Air Pirates.
 
“Stuck on You” opens with some dodgy logic (if it was so easy to evade the cliff guns by simply flying above their range, why didn’t Karnage conquer Cape Suzette long ago?), and the main basis of the narrative also relies on a rather thin premise—namely, the idea of a glue so strong that it not only can adhere people to each other, but also will become permanent if the victims are not unstuck after a few hours (this latter device was obviously inserted solely to provide a ticking clock for the characters to race). The whole glue idea appears to have been lifted by writer Len Uhley from a Flintstones episode, “Glue for Two”, which had Fred and Barney getting similarly stuck together; had Uhley and editor Jymn Magon stopped there, the episode would have been a pretty contrived piece of sitcom-style slapstick.

However, Uhley and Magon exploit the goofy premise not only for the expected knockabout comedy, but also utilize it to deliver an interesting character study of Don Karnage, expanding on an aspect of the pirate’s personality previously spotlighted in “Plunder and Lightning”, on which both men worked—namely, Karnage’s need to see himself as a dashing, swashbuckling “noble pirate”, not just a mere mundane criminal. His reaction when Baloo, hanging helplessly from the back of the Sea Duck, taunts him with cowardice, is fascinating; he falters as he’s about to deliver a coup de grace with his sword, and then pulls the bear back into the plane to fight him man to man, exclaiming “Ha, now I win fair and square!” This is surprising, but feels completely in character; of course, a “noble pirate” would prefer to vanquish his enemy in hand-to-hand combat, not ignominiously finish him off while he’s already at a disadvantage. There are some fans who have complained that this display of sportmanship does not square with Karnage’s attempt to flat-out execute Kit in “Plunder and Lightning”, but the two scenarios are entirely different; Kit, from Karnage’s point of view, was a traitor who had betrayed him not once, but twice, while Baloo is an open enemy; it feels entirely consistent for the pirate chief to treat the one ruthlessly and the other chivalrously.

Uhley doesn’t simply use Karnage’s sense of honor as a convenient plot-setup device to place Baloo in debt to the pirate, either; he continues to pursue the idea throughout the episode. At the midpoint, when the glued-together Karnage and Baloo encounter the pirates aboard the Iron Vulture, and Karnage’s attempts to conceal Baloo make him appear so insane that his men decide to mutiny, Karnage in a fit of desperate exasperation reveals Baloo to his crew, after having promised not to—demonstrating that his honor and his ego are so inextricably intertwined that a threat to the latter can cause him to jettison the former. The final scene, in which, after the glue has finally dissolved, Karnage protects the hiding Baloo from his men and allows the pilot to depart in peace (“Well, we did have a pact, and we are both men of honor, yes-no?”), puts a perfect cap on the twists and turns of Karnage’s honorableness, showing that he clearly realizes that his behavior aboard the Vulture was a lapse of honor for which he owes Baloo amends—but, true to character, failing to admit his lapse or come within a mile of an apology. His reassertion of his authority over his rebellious followers in the same final scene (“I will figure out an appropriately appalling punishment later”) is also a great moment, and makes one feel like cheering, villain though he is—it’s simply a joy to see him regain his familiar captaincy after his reversal of fortune for the bulk of the episode (to paraphrase Barks, “So Don Karnage gets the Iron Vulture back, and things are again as they were”).
 
Thanks to this sturdy character-based throughline, the plentiful slapstick comedy in “Stuck on You” avoids feeling like the episode’s only reason for existence, even though it does dominate much of the episode. Though more than a little surreal at times, said comedy is quite funny, with Baloo’s efforts to hide Karnage from an aghast Becky (who concludes that Baloo must be going crazy), and Karnage’s efforts to hide Baloo from the other pirates, giving rise to lots of rapid-fire physical business (such as one character’s hands pretending to be another’s) and funny unconvincing verbal excuses for apparent bodily transformations (“Oh, yes, well; that is because I--I have been working out!”) The reactions of Karnage’s crew to his apparent demise (after his initial collision with the Sea Duck) are also funny, and interesting as well, in that they reveal the power dynamics within the pirate crew—after a perfunctory "moment of silence," Dump Truck and Mad Dog briefly compete for the title of new captain, but Dump Truck immediately intimidates the slyer but wimpier Mad Dog by virtue of sheer brute force, while Gibber promptly attaches himself to Dump Truck in the capacity of whispering consigliere, just as he was under Karnage.

It takes considerable writing skill and a strong feel for the characters to make something more than a generic farce out of a premise like that of “Stuck on You,” but Uhley, and Magon, fortunately bring just those qualities to the episode, not only milking respectable amounts of humor from the premise but also managing to expand on an interesting facet of their principal villain, without rendering him any less villainous or any less funny.



Up Next: "Bygones"

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5--Episodes

LIX: “Bygones”

While in the process of evading the Air Pirates, Baloo rescues a pilot drifting in the sea; the castaway claims to be Rick Skye, a famous flying ace who led the legendary Squadron of Seven during the Great War. The Squadron vanished twenty years ago, along with the shipment of silver it was supposed to be transporting, leaving the otherwise stellar reputation of Skye and his outfit under a cloud. The rescued pilot, who is the same age that Skye would have been at the time of his disappearance, appears surprised to learn that twenty years have passed, and is saddened when he learns that the Squadron is presumed to have stolen the silver. Baloo, who’s been fascinated with the exploits of the Squadron since he was a kid and still reads comic-book tales about their exploits, half-believes that the purported Skye is who he claims to be, while Rebecca is suspicious that the stranger is up to something shady. Her suspicions are apparently confirmed when Skye makes off with the Sea Duck, sending the angry Baloo in pursuit. Both Skye and the Duck are captured by Don Karnage, forcing Baloo to rescue them from the depths of the Iron Vulture; after their escape, Baloo finally comes to believe Skye’s story, and promises to help him recover the silver and the honor of the Squadron—but, to do so, they will have to face off again with the irate Karnage and his gang.

In my previous entries in this series, I mistakenly stated that Steve Sustarsic only scripted three Talespin episodes, forgetting that he (along with Mark Zaslove as editor) was also responsible for “Bygones.” I think I made this error because I have a default tendency to think of it as a Libby Hinson episode—which should give you an idea of the high quality of “Bygones”; it’s a toss-up whether it or “Save the Tiger” ranks as Sustarsic’s best contribution to the show. “Bygones”, like Hinson’s “Old Man and the Sea Duck”, taps into the romantic and mythic side of aviation—specifically, the mystique of the World War One flying ace, a figure who, both during the war itself and in subsequent histories, was often compared to the knights of Arthurian legend, due to the individualized nature of early aerial combat and the unspoken codes of chivalry (such as never shooting a parachutist) that developed among the aces on both sides. This “modern knight” image carried over into pulp-magazine series like G-8 and his Battle Aces and the later comic-book Blackhawk series, both of which focused on bands of aerial brothers under the command of a stalwart leader. The Squadron of Seven is clearly cast in the mold of the Battle Aces and the Blackhawks, and also harks further back to the Arthurian roots of the flying-ace mythos, with the preservation of Rick and his Squadron into the “modern” era echoing the “Return of Arthur” legend; Skye’s determination to remove the stain from the Squadron’s honor further evokes the knightly ethos. Zaslove and Sustarsic successfully capture the power of this myth by respecting it; there’s no overlay of irony or deflating mockery in the depiction of the Squadron, and the audience is instead encouraged to share in Baloo’s respect for the old-time flying heroes.

While the subordinate Squadron members don’t appear till the finale, and are not really individualized (other than visually; they consist of a colorful variety of species—porcupine, penguin, goat, hippo, aardvark, and skunk), their leader Rick Skye is given a full-fledged and appealing characterization. Voiced by British actor Simon Templeman, and drawn a little like an ursine Peter Lawford, Skye is very much the archetypal British hero—confident and jaunty, but in a quiet and offhand way; frequently curt and reserved, but also possessed of a wry sense of humor (as when he recounts the story of how he inadvertently shot himself down once during the war). Templeman’s vocal performance does an excellent job of giving Skye a stiff-upper-lip attitude while simultaneously conveying warmth and intense determination beneath the surface. His interactions with Baloo are very interesting, with Baloo first regarding Rick with puzzlement, then with hero-worshipping fascination, then with anger, and then finally friendliness, while Skye for his part eventually drops the aloofness he displays during his earlier interactions with the cargo pilot and reciprocates the friendship. This eventual formation of a bond between two characters who are opposites in so many respects (one American, sloppy, and carelessly irresponsible, the other British, militarily dapper, and highly responsible), but who share a passion for aviation further strengthens the flying-ace mystique which underlies the episode, providing unspoken reinforcement for the idea that a knightly brotherhood of the skies not only exists, but that its ties can transcend other barriers. 

Since the knights of the skies deserve a suitably formidable dragon to slay, it’s appropriate that Don Karnage is depicted more menacingly here than in any episode since “Plunder and Lightning”; there are still many funny bits involving the pirate crew when Baloo is sneaking around on the Iron Vulture, and Karnage’s rantings are still as nuttily amusing as ever (“That is why we must shoot at everything that is not in sight!”), but the Don’s ferocity is also emphasized, with his pursuit of Baloo at the beginning of the episode coming off as more angry and vindictive than usual, while his disbelieving arrogance and irritation when the Squadron attacks him at the climax is almost scary. The animation—by the French unit—is an important factor here; as in the first half of “Plunder”, the French crew tends to draw Karnage as toothier, more deranged-looking, and more vicious-looking than the other animation teams do, which accentuates his menace.

Taking this approach to Karnage makes him and his crew feel like worthy opponents for the Squadron in the climactic battle—one of the most memorable, and the most violent, action scenes on the show; even though (obviously) no one gets killed, we see more bullets fired and more planes crashing and exploding than in any of the series’ other dogfights, as the outnumbered but seasoned Seven (with an assist from Baloo and the Sea Duck) battle both the pirates’ air fleet and the mighty Iron Vulture itself. The music score is particularly outstanding here, incorporating the show’s wonderful central “flight” theme with other protracted dramatic musical passages. Although overshadowed by the climactic scene, Baloo and Rick’s earlier white-knuckle escape from the Iron Vulture—which concludes with them crashing through the front observation window—is memorable as well.
 
 
“Bygones” is one of the handful of episodes is which Baloo is not teamed up with any other regular over the course of his adventure; Kit is entirely absent, and Becky and Wildcat never leave the docks of Higher for Hire. This was an intelligent decision, since the prominent presence of another good guy would have merely interfered with the relationship between Baloo and Rick, which is the heart of the episode. Becky fulfills the function of skeptical naysayer, trying to persuade the puzzled but hero-worshiping Baloo that “there is no Rick Skye”; in other episodes like "Spy in the Ointment", we’ve seen Baloo as the pragmatic one and Becky as the more starry-eyed of the two, but it makes sense for the roles to be reversed here, since one would expect Baloo to have a lot more emotional investment in an aviation hero than Becky would. Wildcat provides some funny moments of comic relief, like his background tussle with a tire and his rapid construction of a makeshift plane for Baloo to pursue the stolen Sea Duck in (“Since I only have half the parts, it should only take half as long”).

Again drawing comparisons to Hinson’s best episodes, Sustarsic closes out “Bygones”, after the climactic battle, with a supernatural twist, albeit a more ambiguous one than those seen in Hinson’s “Her Chance to Dream” and the aforementioned “Old Man and the Sea Duck.” The revelation of just how Skye and his men were preserved at first glance seems like a piece of questionable superhero-comic logic, imitating as it does the icy mechanism of Steve Rogers’ post-WWII hiatus, but the Squadron’s final scene suggests that something more than impromptu and improbable cryogenics is at play here; one of Skye’s men breaks into Rick’s chatting with Baloo as if he’s reminding him of something (“Uh, captain…”), which prompts Rick to take his leave, in an interchange which conveys a lot by what it doesn’t say, as Rick cheerily but slightly evasively offers some glib excuses to Baloo in response to the latter’s pleas for him to return to Cape Suzette; ( “I’m afraid it’s time for us to go. Ah, low on fuel, you know…besides, we wouldn’t fit in…we’ll be all right”). The thinness of these excuses, the unconvincing way in which Rick makes them, and the cryptic reminder which prompts them, all suggest that the real reason for the Squadron’s refusal to return to the land of the living is entirely different; the impression we’re left with is that Skye and his crew are, in effect, living ghosts—dead men who’ve been granted a miraculous chance to return to life to redeem their honor in one last burst of glory, but who know that they cannot take advantage of their revival for any other, more mundane purpose. The final image of the episode drives home the point that something incalculable and supernatural has occurred, with Baloo’s “Squadron of Seven” comic book, seen at the start of the episode, somehow changing (like a benign version of the photograph in the final scene of Kubrick’s The Shining) to chronicle the Squadron’s final battle and recovery of the silver.

One of Talespin’s most action-packed episodes, “Bygones” is not ultimately remarkable for action alone, but also for the mythic framework in which that action is set, which elevates the episode far above the level of a mere thriller such as Sustarsic’s own earlier “Baloo Thunder”, and transforms it into something far more rousing and haunting; the episode would be Sustarsic’s final contribution to the series, and, like Rick Skye and his Squadron, he couldn’t have gone out on a better note.


Up Next: "The Ransom of Red Chimp"

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5--Episodes

LX: “The Ransom of Red Chimp”

Louie’s aunt, the wealthy and eccentric champion aviatrix Louise L’Amour, stops at Louie’s island for a visit while on her way to an air race. Her aerial expertise and her fun-loving ways immediately endear her to Baloo, but Louie is frustrated by the jovial chaos she brings to his establishment and embarrassed by her habit of calling him “Louis.” In the meanwhile, the Air Pirates get wind of Louise’s arrival, and decide that the “rich lady” is a prime candidate for kidnapping and ransom. When Louie tricks his aunt into leaving early for the impending race, the pirates seize their opportunity and capture Louise and her plane. Louie, blaming himself for the abduction, recruits Baloo to form a rescue party—but a rescue ultimately proves unnecessary; Louise’s boisterous and unflappable personality quickly causes as much disruption to the Iron Vulture as she brought to Louie’s place, while her romantic weakness for men with accents causes extreme embarrassment for Don Karnage, making the pirate captain eager to abandon his ransom scheme.

Written by Libby Hinson and edited by Karl Geurs, “Ransom of Red Chimp” is one of two Hinson episodes (the other being “Balooest of the Bluebloods”) which is pure farce, as opposed to the more dramatic stories she usually delivered for Talespin. “Bluebloods” was jumpstarted by a scenario (Baloo leaving Higher for Hire) which felt like it really should have been given more narrative weight (and which was apparently explored in greater depth in Hinson’s original draft), creating an impression that the episode’s comedy, enjoyable though it was, had crowded out the more interesting aspects of the story. “Red Chimp”, on the other hand, does not rely on any such weighty change to the show’s usual status quo, and as such it’s easier to simply enjoy the comedy without feeling that it’s obscuring a less comedic but more compelling plot.

Although “Red Chimp” is pure slapstick comedy from beginning to end, Hinson arranges the episode’s series of comedic sequences in a way that leads skillfully up to a climactic comic turnabout; Louise’s rollicking behavior at Louie’s during the episode’s first half not only furnishes an excuse for a lot of energetically animated visual gags, but also serves to establish that Louise is far from the “weak, helpless and rich” victim that the pirates believe her to be. This introductory rambunctiousness, juxtaposed with Karnage’s overweeningly complacent attitude towards the kidnapping scheme (he lazily oversees it from a beach chair outside his lair), gives us a sense of comic anticipation as we wait to see Karnage’s overconfidence shattered. The subsequent shattering is unfolded in humorously escalating fashion. We see Louise's gradual disruption of the subordinate pirates, intercut with Karnage's ransom negotiations with Louie, and then see Karnage subsequently discovering the extent of the disruption by stages, as he first nearly gets run down by the drifting Iron Vulture, then witnesses the chaos sewn among his crew, and then suffers an attack on his own personal dignity as Louise starts to amorously pursue him around the Vulture—ultimately causing the pirate chief to pay a ransom himself to rid himself of his troublesome “captive.” Admittedly, this climactic comic reversal is easy to foresee if you recognize the O. Henry allusion in the episode’s title, but that doesn’t diminish the fun of arriving at the reversal or the basic comedic soundness of said reversal.
 
 
Karnage and his Air Pirates do come off as more bumbling here than in any other episode (even “Jumping the Guns”), but, like Pete and the Beagle Boys, they’re the type of villain who can wear different aspects in different types of plot, and in any case their depiction in “Red Chimp” actually feels less humiliating than the opening of “Guns,” since it’s one thing for them to be regarded contemptuously by their regular enemies (as in “Guns”), but quite another for them to be thrown out of whack by a highly unpredictable stranger. In that regard, the episode reminds me of some of the Western Publishing Madam Mim tales, specifically the ones in which she would affably but chaotically disrupt the Beagle Boys’ capers; a similar dynamic arises from Louise’s interactions with the pirates, particularly when she is air-racing with them in the interior of the Iron Vulture and instructing them on the proper way of threatening a victim and pleading for mercy (the “Har!—Mercy!” practice squad which the pirates form up is genuinely hilarious). Louise’s amorous pursuit of Karnage towards the end also recalls some of the Mim stories which featured Mim romantically hounding Captain Hook or other villains like the Blot.
 
Both in her antics on the pirate airship and in her earlier carryings-on at Louie’s, Louise verges on becoming the generic All-Purpose Whacky Eccentric, akin to the non-Kinney/Hubbard Western Publishing depictions of Fethry, but there’s enough of a connecting thread running through her pursuits (racing and similarly energetic pastimes seem to be her chief interest, along with a romantic weakness for accented men) to prevent her eccentricity from seeming utterly arbitrary. Her behavior at Louie’s place (dancing, indoor skiing, racing gorilla birds), although chaotic enough to make us sympathize with Louie’s efforts to cut her visit short, is also good-humored enough to keep her likable and prevent her from seeming as aggravating as pesky-relative characters sometimes do. Incidentally, having Baloo hit it off with Louise while Louie reacts with exasperation is an interesting and logical character touch, making the point that while Louie and Baloo generally share a breezy and freewheeling attitude to life, Louie, who after all is a successful business owner, is the more responsible of the two; it makes sense for him to be flummoxed by disturbances to his establishment, and it makes equal sense for Baloo to be blissfully free of any concerns about an orderly business routine, whether his own or someone else’s.
 
Jim Cummings pulls triple weight in this episode, not only voicing Louie and Karnage as usual but also providing Aunt Louise’s voice. Though broadly cartoony, his vocal performance as Louise is not as completely caricatured as such cross-gender voice work often is; he not only achieves a higher pitch without going full falsetto, but also (appropriately) gives Louise a Southern accent to match Louie’s own New Orleans accent without making her sound simply like a female copy of her nephew.

While not comparable in terms of depth or drama to Libby Hinson’s other Talespin contributions (saving the abovementioned “Balooest of the Bluebloods”), “Ransom of Red Chimp” easily succeeds at being what it’s supposed to be: a boisterous comedy which makes apt and amusing use of O. Henry’s surefire comic premise of the boomeranging kidnap plot.



LXI: “Bullethead Baloo”

The boys who make up Kit’s “Jungle Aces” club decide to rechristen their group “the Bullethead Brigade”, in honor of a popular new comic-book superhero of that name (“Head of Steel! Fists of Granite! Brave defender of our planet!”). Kit is unhappy with this change, and tries to convince his friends that pilots like Baloo are just as heroic as Bullethead; Baloo, however, misunderstands the situation and mistakenly comes to the conclusion that Kit wants him to be more like Bullethead. Determined not to let Kit down, Baloo gets his friend Professor Buzz to create a rocket-pack and flying suit just like Bullethead’s, and attempts to stage a superheroic deed which promptly goes awry, leading not only to embarrassment but danger--in the form of Dr. Axolotl, a mad scientist whose prototype robot, M.E.L. (“Mechanical Electric Laborer”), has been summarily rejected by Khan Industries and who is out for revenge on Shere Khan; when Baloo, as Bullethead, accidentally thwarts an attack on Khan by M.E.L., Axolotl programs the robot to target not only Khan, but “Bullethead” as well.

Written by Steve Roberts and edited by Duane Capizzi, “Bullethead Baloo” works both as an action-comedy and a character piece, with Baloo’s arc in the episode effectively highlighting an aspect of his personality we’ve seen before in “Stormy Weather” and “Plunder and Lightning”—namely, his well-meaning but frequently clumsy efforts to play parent to Kit, and his fear that he will fail in this role. Here, this fear leads him to misunderstand Kit’s query as to whether he’s as brave and tough as Bullethead; this leading question is simply intended by Kit to boost Baloo in front of the erstwhile Jungle Aces, but Baloo immediately assumes that Kit wants him to be more like Bullethead and vows not to let him down—a confused overreaction which feels perfectly in character for someone who’s still trying to adjust to the unfamiliar responsibility of being a surrogate dad. Kit’s arc in the episode rings true, as well; he holds out for the superior heroism of pilots in general, and Baloo in particular, in the face of his friends’ superhero fandom, making him all the more embarrassed when Baloo’s attempt to impersonate Bullethead is exposed and subjects them both to ridicule. His subsequent outburst—“You made me look bad in front of my friends! You made pilots look bad! I don’t want to be a pilot anymore; I’m joining the Bullethead Brigade!”—is harsh and a little painful, but is exactly the type of response you’d expect from a kid in that situation; Roberts also makes it clear that this is only a temporary flare-up of temper by having Kit start worrying about Baloo’s safety almost immediately afterwards, as the latter resumes his Bullethead gear to stop Dr. Axolotl.

It would have been easy for Roberts to take a much more simplistic approach to the character-based elements of the story, by having Kit be genuinely enamored of Bullethead’s fictional superheroics and having an unjustly unappreciated Baloo show him that pilots are the Real Heroes (TM), akin to the entertaining but occasionally heavy-handed “Where No Duck Has Gone Before” episode on Original Ducktales. Instead, he avoids such a pat and formulaic approach by having Kit’s disappointment with Baloo be prompted not by a sudden obsession with a superhero but rather by the humiliation arising from Baloo’s own misguided effort to play superhero, and by having Baloo, instead of simply hanging about feeling unappreciated until it’s time to save the day, actually bring about the very disappointment he was attempting to prevent through his well-intentioned blundering—making both characters feel more complex and more real. While dodging formula, Roberts still manages to make the point that you should stick to your strengths instead of trying to be something you’re not, without ever spelling it out; he neatly accomplishes this by having Baloo ultimately defeat M.E.L. not as the rocket-powered Bullethead but as the skipper of the Sea Duck, outflying the airborne robot in a very nicely-animated (by Walt Disney Japan) chase through the nocturnal streets and skies of Cape Suzette. Similarly, Axolotl’s own final defeat comes from his effort to operate the somewhat user-unfriendly Bullethead rocket-pack, making the point that high-tech gadgetry can be as much of a nuisance as it is a help.
 
 
Although Roberts mines Buzz and Baloo’s trial-and-error usage of the tricky rocket-pack and flight suit for several pieces of slapstick business, he also evokes (greatly assisted by the animation team) a nice sense of old-time comic-book/pulp wonder and excitement through some of Baloo’s flights as Bullethead, particularly when the bear finally gets the outfit working smoothly and happily murmurs “Solid!” to himself as he soars up the side of Khan’s office skyscraper. The special music cue used as Bullethead’s “flight theme” perfectly complements this and other rocket-pack scenes. The Bullethead outfit is obviously inspired by Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer comic; the Disney live-action version of that comic would of course have been in development at the time "Bullethead Baloo" was made. Like the Rocketeer costume, it also harks back to the getups of earlier science-fictional heroes, particularly the Rocket Man and Commando Cody characters from Republic Pictures’ late 1940s/early 1950s movie serials.

The retro look of the Bullethead suit is complemented by the similarly retro design of the implacable robot M.E.L., which manages to avoid looking like a duplicate of the equally retro-looking Auto-Aviator from “From Here to Machinery.” Speaking of which, Khan’s obvious lack of interest in acquiring M.E.L., even before the unreliable automaton starts wreaking havoc in his office, feels like a nice callback to “Machinery”; of course Khan would be leery of investing in more robot tech after the Auto-Aviator debacle. M.E.L.’s creator, Dr. Axolotl is voiced with gusto by Roger Bumpass, later well-known as Squidward on Spongebob Squarepants; he lends a lot of deranged comic energy to the scientist’s crazy one-sided arguments with M.E.L. (“Can’t dust, can’t use a door, can’t kidnap Khan—can you do anything right?!”), vengeful rants (“Mad, am I? Mad? That’s what they said at the insane asylum!”) and obsession with his own genius (which Baloo cleverly exploits during the climactic sequence). The manic animation of the character matches well with Bumpass’ voice work; as to his design, he’s either a salamander or a lizard; his name would suggest the former, but in appearance he looks more reptilian. 

Kenneth Mars returns as the absent-minded Professor Buzz, who feels less like a human MacGuffin and more like a character here than in his debut in “Baloo Thunder,” mainly because he’s not asked to carry the main weight of the plot and instead functions as a supporting player in the episode’s story; his professional interest in M.E.L. is a nice touch, his attempt to impersonate a robot as part of Baloo’s superheroic charade is amusing, and several of his dialogue exchanges with Baloo are quite funny, particularly the “Kidnap Khan” bit in which they puzzle out M.E.L.’s objectives. Khan’s secretary Mrs. Snarly, also introduced in “Baloo Thunder,” pops up here again as well, while the Jungle Aces, from “Captains Outrageous”, play a larger role in the proceedings, with child actor Whitby Herford again voicing their hyena leader, Ernie—a rather obnoxious youngster who gets a suitable comeuppance in this episode when M.E.L. mistakes him for Bullethead. As a side note, I find it interesting (as well as pleasing from a continuity standpoint) that Roberts incorporated several seeming one-shot characters introduced by other writers (Buzz by Steve Sustarsic, Ernie and the other Jungle Aces by Jan Strnad) into his narrative; since editor Capizzi was also not involved in those characters’ prior outings, I would have to assume that either Roberts or Capizzi viewed their colleagues’ earlier efforts and thought they could make good reuse of their creations, or else that showrunner Jymn Magon suggested that Buzz and the Aces would be good fits for the plot of “Bullethead.”
 
Shere Khan, as usual, makes a strong impression with minimal dialogue; his unshakable solemnity and his coolly disdainful attitude make him a very funny counterpoint to the science-fictional strangeness which surrounds him in this episode. His reaction to Axolotl’s disastrous initial demonstration of M.E.L., and his later dry annoyance when Baloo, in Bullethead guise, is trying to get into his office, are both amusing, but his reaction to his later kidnapping by M.E.L. is absolutely hilarious, thanks to the bizarre juxtaposition of Khan’s imperturbability and the wildness of the situation; in the face of the most undignified ordeal ever visited upon him in the course of the entire show, he still retains his icy cool, only reacting with a disgusted raise of the eyebrow and a few witheringly irritated comments (“I am not amused . . . I am still not amused”) as the robot flies away with him. This would be Khan’s last appearance in the series (not counting the expanded two-part version of “A Bad Reflection of You,” in which all of the Khan scenes were animated and recorded much earlier in the show’s production history); it’s a memorable final bow, and also allows him to once more demonstrate the fair-minded side of his character, as he rewards Kit, Baloo, and the Jungle Aces for his rescue.

“Bullethead Baloo” is arguably Steve Roberts' best contribution to Talespin, its only rival being his “Flight of the Snow Duck.” Funny and exciting, with a strong character-based plot thread to tie the fun and excitement together, and with slightly less wonky physics than some of his other efforts (particularly “In Search of Ancient Blunders”), it’s nicely handled, and very entertaining, from start to finish.


LXII: “Mach One for the Gipper”

Baloo, on his way to pick up a cargo of pickles, encounters acclaimed test pilot Ace London, an old (and annoying) acquaintance who’s fond of touting his own accomplishments and equally fond of taunting Baloo about the comparatively mundane nature of the latter’s cargo-pilot career. London is in a particularly cocksure mood at the moment, having been assigned to test a top-secret new jet aircraft for the Army—but, due to his carelessness, the jet engine winds up getting swapped with Baloo’s cargo while both fliers are stopped at an airfield. Once he discovers the switch, Ace, backed by military flyers, takes off in pursuit of the unsuspecting Baloo, hoping to recover the engine before his blunder becomes known. When Don Karnage also gets wind of the revolutionary engine, Baloo finds himself chased by London and the military on the one hand and the Air Pirates on the other, and ultimately—with help from Wildcat’s mechanical wizardry—must utilize the jet engine himself in order to escape his difficulties.

Written by Cathryn Perdue and edited by Jymn Magon, “Mach One for the Gipper” is a fast-paced and funny episode, and makes good use of a novel central gimmick—i.e., the jet engine, which serves not just as a MacGuffin but as the vehicle for the climactic action sequence, much like the helicopter prototype in “Baloo Thunder.” The humor is more consistently tied to the plot and characters than it was at some points in Perdue’s earlier Talespin effort, “Destiny Rides Again”; there’s no irrelevant comic scene comparable to the protracted Looney Tunes riff with El Gato in that outing. Admittedly, the physics of the finale, in which Wildcat manages to (barely) harness the power of the jet engine, sending him and Baloo on a wild faster-than-sound ride, are pretty cartoony; however, the sequence, wild as it is, comes off as an appropriate finale to the episode rather than a distracting interlude, since it provides a suitably dynamic payoff to the mentions, earlier in the episode, of the jet engine’s potential for reaching revolutionary speeds.
 
Both the climactic jet sequence and the earlier aerial chase scenes, with the military and the pirates alternately pursuing the Sea Duck, are enjoyably lively, and manage to find yet another new wrinkle to vary the show’s airborne action. The jet engine of course provides the added variety in the climax, while the earlier scenes are enlivened by pitting Baloo not simply against one set of aerial opponents, as usual, but instead subjecting him to attacks from two sides. The island-studded ocean and misty cloud banks which provide the visual backdrop for most of the chase scenes add additional visual interest to the episode; the overhead shot of the Duck hiding under lee of an island as both sets of antagonists seek the plane in the mist is particularly nice.
 
The most memorable aspect of the episode, however, is the guest character; Ace London is well-designed from a visual standpoint (he’s a timber wolf with a jaunty smirk and a bomber jacket), but his voice is even better, thanks to the performance of the great Phil Hartman in the role. I’ve vented (in my New Ducktales series) about the inadvisability of using SNL comedians and similar celebrities for cartoon voice acting, but Hartman’s vocal range and comic talent made him the type of celebrity who fit ideally into the cartoon world. His glibly overbearing delivery is a spot-on spoof of the Cool Test Pilot archetype, whether he’s rattling off cocky aerial jive-talk which sounds like a parody of some of the dialogue in Milt Caniff’s Steve Canyon (“This is the ace of the base; my wheels are in place; gimme the nod, and I’ll hit the sod”), or smugly delivering his recurring catchphrase in response to his admirers’ shouts of recognition (“Ace London!” “Ya got that right”). The dynamic between him and Baloo is very similar to that of Gladstone and Donald, as is the final turnabout which sees Baloo finally winning out over Ace, just as Donald would sometimes do in Barks’ Gladstone stories.

Entertaining as the character is, though, on one level he doesn’t quite make sense: unlike Gladstone, whose luck-based success is entirely unearned and who is hated by practically everyone, Ace is a test pilot who’s trusted with big responsibilities and appears to be highly regarded in his field, if not outright adored. Typically, someone doesn’t attain that level of professional and popular success by being a complete jerk and idiot—well, maybe in politics, but usually not in a skilled field like test piloting—and we’re left wondering how on earth Ace ever achieved his standing as a flyer if he regularly makes mistakes like the cargo mixup or his later inadvertent reveal of the jet engine’s existence to Don Karnage (by carelessly talking about it over the radio). I think this is an example of a general tendency in popular culture to simply treat a “Jock’s” success and popularity as self-evidently unearned, rather than admitting that the Jock probably had to do something to get where he is. In the absence of such an admission, Ace remains a funny but not entirely believable figure.

With Ace receiving primary focus, Don Karnage functions as more of an additional complicating factor than the main antagonist this time around, but has some good bits, particularly his irate effort to correct Baloo’s deliberate mispronunciation of his name as “Don Garbage” (“It is Karnage! Don Karnage! Roll the “R”!”) Baloo himself, in addition to his amusing baiting of Karnage and his eye-rolling grumbles about the insufferable Ace (“Do you know Ace London?” “Enough to wish I didn’t”), has a great character moment when Wildcat suggests using the jet engine; his nervously pragmatic side prevails for a minute, but then gives way to his daredevil side and his sheer love of aeronautics (“Are you loco? That thing’s untested! Secret! Dangerous. . . and absolutely perfect!”) Wildcat’s fascination with the engine, and his erratic but ultimately successful efforts to figure out its workings during the course of his and Baloo’s wild ride, also feel perfectly in character for him.


Wildcat’s voice actor Pat Fraley also provides the voice of the mild-mannered badger inventor responsible for the jet engine, while Maurice LaMarche is the blustery bulldog general overseeing the test; the general’s weirdly oversized uniform feels like it has to be a reference to something, but  I’m not sure what. I’m also not sure of the voice actor who voices the more reflective of Ace London's two wingmen (a long-snouted canine of some kind), but his mildly-voiced objections to some of Ace’s bigger blunders (“Well, actually, sir, th-that was your fault”) are funny.

“Mach One for the Gipper” never quite achieves the feeling of comic catharsis that it appears to be going for in its depiction of Baloo’s eventual triumph over Ace, partly because said triumph is largely accidental (being brought about by the unpredictability of the jet engine), and partly because we’re never given a clear idea of how Ace rose to fame in the first place, which leaves us still not quite convinced that he thoroughly deserves his devastating fall from fame, obnoxious and incompetent though he is during the course of the episode. Still, the episode’s humor and action are well-done and Hartman’s spirited voice acting gives an added flourish to the proceedings, making “Mach One” very entertaining even if it doesn’t quite hit the bullseye.



Up Next: We take a step back to the early days of this thread and the earlier part of the show's production history, to cover the finished two-part version of "Bad Reflection on You"--the first draft being the second episode in the production order, but the finished draft being the sixty-third.  

[Matilda]

I appreciate the similarities you see between Louise L'Amour and the Madam Mim of those old Western stories! As with Mim, too, we know that Louise can take care of herself, that she has considerable skills or power. This helps keep Mim and Louise from descending into the pathetic silliness of some fictional older women who are a "handful" and who fall for dashing-but-inappropriate guys and pursue them. In Louise's case, this combination of qualities is what makes the "Red Chief" reversal work. Never underestimate the old ladies! Even if they fall for the wrong guys, they are not as helpless nor as guileless as they appear.