It seems nothing the pundits can say will have any effects on the soaring prospects of Skunk Cabbage. Introduced a mere eight months ago, the "Li'l Stinkers" have stormed the imaginations of a huge number of Lunarian children, and are now ready for a system-wide release. Reports from retailers confirm that for the first time in many a year, sales of Gideon Peppy products were eclipsed by the SC Kids during the month of October. Full figures for November are not yet available. But it seems a safe bet that Li'l Stinkers toys, clothing, software, and other tie-ins will be the hot items this Xmas season. Quote from Gideon Peppy (with a chuckle): "It don't have me chewin' on my lollipop." He pointed to growing cries of outrage from Mars to the Cometary Zone from concerned parents' groups worried about the coming onslaught of SC Kids. Peppy refused to comment on rumors that he himself had been behind some of those protests.
More likely to put toothmarks on his Tootsieroll is the continuing failure to soar of his much-touted new series Sparky and His Gang. Ballyhooed on the Peppy Show for three months before its August launch, Sparky remains mired in the mid-forties, with a dismal 12.4 share. With the fifteenth episode currently lensing at Sentry/Sensational, rumors are that the sixteenth stanza is on hold, while (guess what?) staff changes are contemplated. Say, there's a bunch of WTF? scribes soon to be pounding the pavement, G.P. They'll work cheap.
(For daily show and theatrical numbers, key MORE)
from The Straight Shit Starpage:
Year in Review: sub-Kid-vid
"Anybody Wanna Buy a Sparky Action Mug?"
by Bermuda Schwartz
I've been telling you for two hundred years now, so why do I think you'll all of a sudden start to listen? Ever since those old phosphor dots began to chase each other across the magic glass of the kinescope in the dear departed 1940s, two things are the only things that sell on TV: good stuff, and crap. Neither one is a guarantee of success. Plenty of shows have aspired to be good, but were kidding themselves. They've all long since vanished. And some actually were good, and they're gone, too. As for crap... who can fucking tell with crap? Myghty Mytes shambled onto the screen midsummer, stinking of crap, and by the end of the month it was in the crapper. Skunk Cabbage smelled just as rank, and by Yuletide the Komical Korpses had trailed their slime into every third-rate geraldo's studio on the planet. Kids were sleeping in "Li'l Stinker" coffins, at a thousand dollars a pop, gluing trademarked live worms to their cheeks.
Who can figure it? Not me, not the pundits nor the critics nor the reviewers nor the scholars shaking their heads with dismay. Crap is crap. Some will turn out to be popular crap, and if I knew how to tell the difference I wouldn't be here writing about it, I'd be fucking rich.
But oh dear, I hear the pundits say. One of the few quality shows getting regular viewings—and of course I'm referring to CEW's What the Fuck?—is taking a nose-dive in the ratings. Woe is us! Civilization is darn sure to perish any day now.
Crap. WTF? used to be quality, but have any of you over twelve years old actually looked at the thing lately? I'm telling you, this old ragbag is starting to make Zippy the Zombie look animated. Folks, WTF? is over the hill. It is stale. Look for it at your local mortuary. Sure, it used to be good, but there's another cardinal rule in TV-land, and it is that nothing lasts forever. WTF? is pushing thirty years old. Bye-bye. Adios.
Quality? Well, like it or not (and I don't, much) the Peppy Show will do for an example. What Peppy does, he does well. The characters are funny, the writing is sharp. Kids love him. What can you say? English teachers aside, most educators give Peppy good marks—and how long's it been since anybody listened to an English teacher?
What's that? You say Peppy's show is only ten years old? And he's where in the ratings? Gosh, maybe civilization has a few more months to live.
But that brings us to the topic of today's lesson, children, and that is, what happens to shows that can't seem to decide whether they want to be trashy, or terrific? That brings us to a disastrous effort from the Peppy mill called Sparky and His Gang.
What are we to make of a gobbler like S G? To think of it as an actual turkey is an insult to flightless barnyard poultry everywhere. A genuine turkey knows that it is a turkey, and can therefore work at being the best darn turkey in the coop. S G arrives at your television like a gift-wrapped dead mackerel. You try to figure out, is this fish, or fishwrap? All you know at first is that it smells, vaguely, fishy. And at least part of it is garbage.
It would be pointless to devote a lot of time to a feather-by-feather analysis of this albatross around Gideon Peppy's neck, and I won't subject you to one. Just a short comment, then, and a brief explanation.
Comment: PRESS HERE for HyperText SoundByte©
"Whooooooo fuckiiiiiiing caaaaaaares?"
Explanation: the key to caring about what happens in a show, and I'm talking any show here, from Hamlet to Skunk Cabbage, is believable characters. Characters that bear some resemblance to humans we have known, who display some known human traits. (Exception: the birth-to-five audience, who will watch anything brightly colored and moving; viz. Barney's Boulevard.) Of all the brightly colored, loud, frenetically moving clusters of phosphor dots that call themselves Sparky's Gang, only Sparky himself seems to have anybody at home where a heartbeat should be. Sparky is so good, in fact, so appealing and funny and touching, that I went right out and bought myself a Sparky souvenir coffee mug. But by the time the coffee was cold, so was everything else. I don't think the mug is going to be collectible—even though it is almost certain to be rare—because we buy and treasure these nostalgic bits of pop culture to remind us of something. Something that mattered to us. And I must report to you that, five minutes after the show went off the air, I couldn't remember anything about any of the amorphous collection of rug weasels known as Sparky's Gang, not even their names.
And that is really too bad. Because it is obvious that somebody put a lot of thought into the character of Sparky himself. As played by young Ken Valentine, Sparky is at the same time wonderfully carefree and charming, smart and stalwart. He is the sort of child we all would like to have been, or failing that, to have been friends with. He makes us eager to join his gang, which makes it all the more appalling that his actual band is such a bunch of radishes. He should have been the core of a group of similarly smart, resourceful moppets, united by his undeniable charisma.
But even if Gideon Peppy hires some writers who can do character, Sparky would not yet be out of the woods. Or into the woods, for that matter. The fact is, nobody on this show has a fucking clue as to where the woods is, or if in fact there are any fucking woods. By that I mean, characters need a milieu. A story must happen in a time and a place. There must be a background.
I've watched four episodes of Sparky so far. One show per month, like the curse. In the first one the Gang was battling pirates on the open seas, for no reason that I can fathom other than that there was a full-scale pirate ship available on the Sensational back lot. In the next show the gang was in present time, and in the third, in no universe I could identify. Some pitiful gallimaufry was advanced to explain these temporal and spatial dislocations, but by then I'm afraid I was far advanced in a diabetic coma.