Cynical Cinema

 ”It’s amazing how much you and Fonzie have in common!”

The fourth season of Happy Days begins with three episodes centring around Pinky Tuscadero and a demolition derby.  Demolition derbies must have been a much bigger deal in the 1950s than they are today, since there were actually people who traveled around from derby to derby, making a living.  Or, at least, there were on Happy Days.  The Fonz, you see, is reunited with his former girlfriend, Pinky Tuscadero, who is some kind of motorcycle daredevil who is in town to be the celebrity performer at the demolition derby.  And they rekindle that old flame after fighting about whether or not girls should be allowed to participate in smashing up cars and so forth.

Anyway, Pinky Tuscadero is the female version of the Fonz.  Where he says Ayyyy, she does this thing where she slaps her hands together and snaps her fingers.  Both are irritating.  Both of them are tough as nails, both use the same turns of phrase, both talk exactly the same, and they both like the exact same things in life.  Amazingly, although all the signs were there, nobody investigated the possibility that in fact, Fonzie and Pinky were brother and sister.  It seemed pretty obvious to me right away.  But no one checks, because they allow them to experiment with the idea of getting married.  (Of course they don’t - the Fonz needs to keep being the Fonz, and so forth.)

I have always said, marrying someone who is exactly the same as you are is not usually a good idea.  Fonzie dodged a bullet here, because after a week, it would have felt like he had married his sister.  As Mrs. C says, “it’s amazing how much you and Fonzie have in common!”  And she is right.  It is because they are siblings, separated at birth.  Gross.  And one more thing about Pinky.  If she’s so tough and Fonz-like, and wants to be one of the guys and do demolition derby stuff, what’s with all the pink?  She has pink everything, all her clothes and her helmet and her car and even pretty much her hair.  There is something powerfully un-tough about the colour pink.

Just like there is something powerfully un-tough about guys who comb their hair.  I have made fun of this habit in Grease before, and I got into it with my girlfriend a little while watching Happy Days yesterday.  She was saying that Henry Winkler, as the Fonz, was incredibly sexy.  And I was saying that this made little sense to me.  I have no doubt that in 1977, Henry Winkler could get laid absolutely everywhere he went, just like the Fonz.  And just like John Travolta at the time of Grease, and Ted Danson in 1990, and so forth.  Here is my theory:

If a succesful TV show sets up a character as the one who can “get any woman, anywhere, any time”, then I assume that in real life, that actor gets to do the same.  Women want to sleep with the Fonz, because he sleeps with every woman.  And Sam Malone.  And whatever Travolta’s character’s name was in Grease.  But there might be nothing specifically attractive about those characters otherwise.  I believe this - if Family Matters had left the Steve Erkel character exactly as he was, but women were falling all over themselves to have sex with him, then Jaleel White would have been living life like it was one long wet-T-Shirt contest.  It makes no difference who or what that character is, it matters what the script says they do.

My girlfriend still disagrees.  She thinks the Fonz is the sexiest thing since…well, Travolta in Grease.  All that hair-combing and quasi-tough-guy posturing.  Leather jackets and blue jeans and combs for the hair.  Ah well, it makes no difference anyway.  The Fonz IS cool, the show IS cool, and it’s funny.  I just can’t handle a full season all at once.  And I certainly can’t handle that much pink.  Happy Days, Season Four, comes out December 9th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Last year, at about this time, Alliance Films released a box set called the Original Christmas Classics. It contained Christmas shows and movies with which we are all, I’m sure, familiar. The claymation stuff - Rudolph, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, the Frosty movies. It was a really nice nostalgic set. This year, Alliance is releasing The New Christmas Classics on a similar box set on November 4th. This time, the content of the box is decidedly less familiar. George of the Jungle, Casper The Friendly Ghost, Gumby, and Fat Albert are not generally thought of as Christmas Classics. At least, not that I’m aware.

The first series in the box is Gumby. This is the first time I have ever seen Gumby, a show from the 1960s about a weird little dude made out of clay with a pointy head who travels into books with his weird little clay horse friend. In this manner, the two manage to travel through history, observing the events as they take place and in some cases affecting the outcome. The books they enter are sometimes classics, like A Christmas Carol, and other times they are books that have never existed. Like The Big Snow Hill. The first episode appears to have nothing to do with Christmas at all, it is about Thanksgiving and the Mayflower. The second episode sees the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. This episode features some 1960s-style questionable history and attitudes toward Indians, and the theft of a bunch of corn.

Then there are episodes with no dialogue, that just see Gumby running around and falling into toasters and cement mixers and then putting himself back together. He and Pokey the horse visit fairy tales involving poor kings and princes and the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is an episode called In a Fix that involves a bunch of strange bird-like clay creatures that hop around. It is a genuinely bizarre collection of Gumby episodes, and of the 12 that are featured on this set, only three are even tangentially related to Christmas. The main theme of the Christmas episodes is Ebeneezer Scrooge, who keeps escaping from A Christmas Carol to wreak havoc on Christmas. Apparently the Grinch wasn’t yet the anti-Christmas villain yet in 1967, so Scrooge became the bad guy. He keeps trying to kidnap Santa, or at the very least discredit him. In one particularly memorable episode, Scrooge uses the word “humbug” as a verb, a noun, a preposition, an adverb, an adjective, and an epithet. Sometimes within the same sentence. Another great one involves a couple of little clay building blocks who drive a tank that shoots lasers. And then there are nine other bizarre episodes of Gumby that may appeal to stoners in some way.

The next series in the set is Fat Albert. And because every single cartoon, ever, does a Christmas episode that rips off A Christmas Carol, this one is no exception. The boys are trying to put together a Christmas pageant at their clubhouse, a shack in the junkyard. The mean old Scroogey owner of the junkyard wants to bulldoze the shack, and hates the kids, and is miserly with money, and is generally a nuisance. A young couple with no job and no money end up in the shack to have their new baby, because there is nowhere else for them to go. There is a Tiny Tim character named Marshall, the son of the downtrodden couple, and there are some standard Fat Albert style cheesy lines. “You remind me of school at vacation time - no class!” Of course, in the end, the old Scrooge sees the error of his ways, and all is mended. There are two other Fat Albert episodes on the DVD, neither of which has anything to do with Christmas. One is about a girl who is embarrassed about her poverty and her rundown house, and the other is about Fat Albert’s friends helping him with his chores so he can go to the zoo and feed an elephant.

Then there is George of the Jungle. This show is reasonably funny, for a kids’ cartoon, and the six episodes here are pretty good. But again, only two of them have anything to do with Christmas. Again, we get the Christmas Carol cartoon cop-out, as George is visited by three goats. Get it? Goats? The Goat of Christmas Presents? You see, he has tried to make Christmas happen for some irritating city girl who lives in the jungle. Not being familiar with Christmas, he gets overwhelmed by the Christmas spirit, and makes every day a Christmas celebration, much to the chagrin of his friends. He is visited by three ghosts. Three ghost goats. Who show him the error of his ways, blah blah blah, and everything turns out fine.

The other George of the Jungle episodes involve a crazy rash George can’t scratch, and a weird baboon who hogs George’s heroism for himself. Although he calls himself a marmoset, he’s clearly a mandril. He has the coloured nose and all. There’s one about a magical bathroom that gets stolen, and all the apes begin disappearing from the jungle. And then there is the George’s Birthday Present episode where George has his first birthday ever. A premise which is virtually identical to the one in the episode where he tries to provide Ursula, the annoying city girl, with her Christmas.

And that brings us to the final series in the box set, Casper. Not the TV series, but a made-for-TV movie called Casper’s Haunted Christmas. This is an 80-minute movie with the computer-generated Casper and his computer-generated uncles taking up residence in Kriss, Massachusetts. Get it? Kriss, Mass? Anyway, after a Randy Travis theme song and the appearance of a ghost who is clearly Slimer from Ghostbusters, we get into the movie. Apparently, some giant green ghost god will revoke the ghost licenses of the uncles if Casper doesn’t scare someone by Christmas. You see, ghosts have to scare people, and blah blah blah. At the very least, in this movie they make the point - Casper does, indeed, scare people all the time when they discover he’s a ghost. But in this case, it is scaring people on purpose that matters. He has until Christmas to do so, or the four of them will be banished to some dark-space purgatory for eternity.

This set-up takes about seven minutes. Which means that the next 73 minutes need to be filled with something. And that something is cheesy, awful jokes. Like the kind I used to see on Hallowe’en cards when we were forced to exchange them with our classmates in the second grade. See if these phrases make you laugh - smellular phone! Shocking days until Christmas! No? Yeah, me either. There is an incredibly painful few minutes of dialogue about “scare mail”, the “ghost office”, and the dead letter department. Basically, it is the same show that Casper used to be when it was a cartoon, years ago, only much worse. And with slightly better animation.

Overall, with a total of 22 episodes of various series in this box set, only 7 of them actually have anything to do with Christmas. Of the seven Christmas episodes, five of them are takes on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you count the Casper movie, six of the seven involve three ghosts. And very few are worthwhile. But the box set could, conceivably, keep your kids entertained from December 1st all the way until Christmas.

Alliance Films is releasing Fat Albert’s Hallowe’en Special on Tuesday, September 30th. That gives you a full month to load up on Hallowe’en-themed cartoon series like Casper and Fat Albert. Like I said about Casper, I’m not entirely sure how many people are going to leap to the store to purchase Fat Albert’s Hallowe’en Special simply because it’s being offered around Hallowe’en time. It strikes me that it may well be a better idea to get a bunch of scary movies and go from there.

However, if you have small children who are not yet of an age where a family viewing of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is appropriate, perhaps this is the ideal product. Fat Albert’s Hallowe’en Special really does work for children. Bill Cosby managed to give this show a certain amount of charm even in the most bland episodes. The Hallowe’en Special comes with two bonus episodes, introduced by a very young Cosby himself, and they are better than the Hallowe’en one. One is about a prankster who gets his comeuppance, and one is about the silliness of superstitions. Just the kind of stuff that educates kids while entertaining them. If, you know, you’re kids appreciate Bill Cosby’s sense of humour.

Two stars for most of us, nine stars, perhaps, for the stoners. You remember your uncle, who used to get drunk at every family occasion and make joke after joke, where the punch line to every single one of those jokes was “rectum? Damn near killed him!”, and who would then walk around saying things like “wow! Is that a wedding cake or the Eiffel tower?” and then he would laugh uproariously at his own jokes? Remember that guy? Imagine being trapped in a room with just him. Now, imagine that various actors, like John Ritter and Suzanne Somers and Scott Baio walked into the room. And you thought - oh, thank God! They can save me from uncle Jasper! Now imagine that instead of saving you from Uncle Jasper and his sense of humour, they found him hilarious, and joined in! Now, imagine you were trapped there for a full hour. That is what watching The Love Boat is like. It may be the worst TV show of all time. Which is why I say that stoners may well enjoy this. It is bad enough to be absolutely hilarious in the right…frame of mind.

Aaron Spelling has built quite the empire out of some pretty awful shows. But none were worse than this one, the TV show where old-timers went to die and new, up-and-coming actors like Scott Baio went to launch their careers. There were three stories to every episode, each story starring actors who I guess were known at the time. Like the mom from Family Ties, or the old dude from Empty Nest. These stories would kind-of intertwine, in that all the characters were on the same cruise. There was a captain for the ship, Captain Stubing, who obviously employed the same philosophy to piloring a ship as did the captain of the Exxon Valdez. That is, he is never seen at the actual helm (it is possible that at the time, Aaron Spelling could not afford a wheel for the show). Rather, he is often seen fraternizing with women and at the bar and at his “captain’s table” in the dining room. There is Julie, the cruise director, whose function seems to be holding a clipboard. And possibly flirting with handsome men. There is a guy named Gopher, who wears a sailor’s uniform, but I have no idea what his job might be. There is a ship’s doctor. I think his name is Doc. But I don’t care.

Wikipedia says that The Love Boat holds the distinction of being one of the very few hour-long TV shows in history to have a laugh track. This is true. And if you’re going to hang your hat on something…even the laugh track, however, is bad. (Or funny, if you are a stoner.) Tha laugh track actually sounds like that nervous laughter that comed from all those around Uncle Jasper when he stars whipping out his poorly-remembered and horribly executed one-man “who’s on first?” routine. hahaha Uncle Jasper…I have to go…stand over there…now…hahaha, very funny though…hahaha. This is the laugh track, as though even that studio audience is embarassed that they are there, but they figure that when the sign lights up, they may as well play along - they’re there anyway. Which is really why I think this series might be perfect for stoners. Once they’ve hit play
, the show’s on anyway…and the remote is so far away…and at least Jaclyn Smith is there…

Just as a curiosity, this is a fairly impressive list here of all the guest stars that have appeared on The Love Boat. I still don’t recommend getting the series - ever - unless perhaps you are a rabid Charlene Tilton fan. Or a stoner.