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Bonkers (1993) |
Category: DuckTales |
First episode title: Going Bonkers
How familiar with the show am I?: Yet another show I had no familiarity with before this project.
A spin-off from an anthology series called Raw Toonage, Bonkers is a show about a world where "toons" live alongside humans, and cartoons are filmed with cameras as if they're live-action movies. And one of those toons, named Bonkers, ends up partnered with a human police officer as they investigate crimes.
Yes, it's obviously inspired by Who Framed Roger Rabbit, except without the main gimmick of that movie because the humans are now animated characters just like the toons are. But does it work?
We start with a pan across Hollywood to a posh mansion, outside of which a crowd is cheering for "Bonkers! Bonkers! Bonkers!" Bonkers himself is walking through the crowd towards the mansion. He's an anthropomorphic bobcat, orange with black spots and a striped tail, and a flop of inexplicable blonde hair on top. Like any respectable old-fashioned toon, he also wears gloves, and at least in this scene his only other adornment is a pair of shorts, like Mickey Mouse.
An old man that appears to be a stereotypical butler tells the crowd that Bonkers has no time for autographs and pictures and such, but Bonkers interrupts him and does everything he can to please the crowd, soaking in their admiration. A lot of these classic sorts of toons that he's a reference to often have voices that are meant to be impressions of comedians, so I don't know whether Bonkers' wacky-sounding voice is one of those or just meant to be generically cartoony.
Bonkers then rushes into the back seat of a limousine, which drives off, but the butler runs alongside the car to throw him all the things he's forgotten - jacket, script, and "dog", a little red creature named Toots with a trumpet-shaped mouth that makes honk noises. What exactly makes it a dog? Then he tells the driver, Jeeves, to take him to the studio. That butler seemed like more of a "Jeeves" to me, though!
The car arrives at the cartoon studio, where Bonkers' face is on a big billboard at the entrance, showing us he's basically the star of the entire company, like a Mickey Mouse figure. Bonkers steps out of the car as a red carpet is laid out for him, and all the security guards cheerfully greet him as he walks into the building. He reaches the make-up room... and the two people waiting for him there are the versions of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare from Disney's Alice in Wonderland! This is a Disney show, so they can of course use their own characters however they like, but picking these two in particular is a little random. They powder and blow dry him and then change his outfit, to just a green top with no bottoms. They apply something to his ears to stiffen them in a different shape, and then the make-up chair acts like an ejector seat and fires him away!
Next we see a fancy office full of Bonkers merchandise and with a big picture of Bonkers on the wall. There's a bow-tie-wearing businessman at the desk, referred to as W. W. Wacky, who is laughing to himself about how much money Bonkers makes him, and how his shows "drop an anvil on" the competition, an appropriately cartoonish phrase. But then he calls in a nervous bespectacled underling, who informs him that Bonkers' show is no longer popular, muscled out of the way by a show about karate superheroes. Angered, Wacky storms out of the room. First of all I wonder whether Wacky is meant to be based on any particular cartoon executive the writers and animators know. Second, I wonder whether this concern about which kinds of cartoon will be popular was all too real for them!
On set, where a street with fake building fronts has been set up in front of the cameras, Bonkers prepares himself to start the scene by pulling a big hammer out of hammerspace and whacking himself over the head with it. I guess to a toon that's like slapping yourself in the face to wake yourself up a bit. A director shouts "Action" and the scene begins, with Bonkers carrying a bunch of flowers across a busy road, dodging cars in cartoonish ways. From what I've accidentally learned while looking this show up, this is part of an actual original Bonkers short from Raw Toonage - so we're getting to see a bit of the in-universe making of a show that actually aired in real life, kind of! I guess that explains the ear thing, as his character design must have changed since then.
Right when a truck is about to hit Bonkers, the scene is cut, and Bonkers calls for his stand-in. A rabbit called "Fall-Apart", who already has plasters on him, gets put in a Bonkers suit and shoved unwillingly into the scene, to enact a stunt where the truck hits him and he gets the truck's bumper in his mouth, widening his face comically. The scene over, the Bonkers suit comes off to reveal that Fall-Apart's face didn't actually get wider, he's just holding the bumper in his mouth under the suit. Bonkers congratulates him on the scene, and Fall-Apart's nose falls off, giving the impression of an old teddy bear.
The nose lands at the feet of W. W. Wacky, who has just walked on set and is shouting at everyone to stop, and tells them all that their contracts are cancelled. As well as Bonkers, Fall-Apart, and the two Alice in Wonderland characters, there are a bunch of other miscellaneous animal characters - I wonder if any of them were part of the original Bonkers shorts? Wacky tells them all they're being replaced by a new show, and on cue a group of G.I. Joe-like army tough guys ride through in a tank. I guess he pivoted to action like the rival studio, but I find it funny that the show I'm comparing the replacement to is from ten years earlier, so it's way too late for this to be the latest trend!
There's a bit where Wacky makes the toons turn in all their mallets and anvils and such, and then he marches out of the studio, Bonkers following him and begging him to change his mind, but to no avail. All the toons end up outside the studio gates, and the big sign with Bonkers' face on it, which apparently itself knows what comedic timing is, falls from its spot and lands on top of Bonkers, making him see stars. A crane puts a sign showing one of the army guys in its place. It starts raining, the weather mirroring the characters' mood as all the toons look upset, and Toots walks over to Bonkers, who hugs him.
A zoom in to a drain that has rain pouring down it takes us down into the sewers. A figure in shadows is trying to draw something on paper and complaining that he's not getting it right. All of the fingers on this character's right hand are pencils, which he's using to draw, and his left hand's fingers are sharpeners, which he keeps using on his pencil fingers. Yes, it's weird.
A hunchbacked little green man, who he refers to as Mr Doodles, walks into the room to serve him his dinner, and also informs him about Bonkers being fired. This clearly amuses the ominous figure, but he also refers to himself as Bonkers' biggest fan. What is he about exactly?
He picks up Mr Doodles and empties the shavings from his sharpener fingers into Doodles' pocket. Since the pencils are his fingers, that's kind of like forcing your fingernail clippings on someone... Ew. He says that he has a mission for Doodles, drawing a picture of Bonkers and two of the other toons, and then there's an extreme close-up of the villain's face, showing purple hair, goggles, a big red nose, and big teeth in a terrifying grin. He's clearly some kind of animal, but what kind isn't obvious yet.
Back on the rainy street, all the toons are walking together, Bonkers' friends telling him that they'll stick with him no matter what. As he tells them that he would completely understand if they went off on their own, vacuums emerge from a skip, a manhole, and a postbox, and suck all the other toons up into them, leaving just Bonkers and Toots! Bonkers doesn't see this, so when he next turns around to them, it seems to him like they immediately went along with what he said. It's both funny and sad. The depressed Bonkers walks into a park...
...And elsewhere in the same park, a police officer is searching the area, grumbling to himself about how the police chief doesn't recognise his talent. He's a big guy with a little moustache, and he's looking for a mugger that's apparently been lurking in this park. We are then immediately shown the mugger, a man in a long coat holding a gun that itself has eyes... and he's heading towards Donald Duck! Yes, the Alice characters aren't the only Disney stars to show up in this cartoon, and Donald is obviously the biggest star here, played by his contemporary voice actor (Tony Anselmo) who we also heard in DuckTales. Of course, there aren't many people who could do Donald Duck's distinctive quacking voice very well.
Donald is singing to himself casually when the mugger, who is now hiding in a bush, suddenly grabs him. Donald cries out, and Bonkers overhears it, recognising the voice. So he approaches Donald, only seeing him in front of the bush and having no idea of the situation that he's in. He raves about how much he loves Donald's work, introducing himself (full name Bonkers D. Bobcat) and saying he's idolised Donald since he was an extra - as if someone who looks like Bonkers could be an extra! That is one distinctive design, and cartoons don't work like human actors! Bonkers starts begging Donald for a part in his next cartoon, and the mugger, whispering, angrily tells Donald to get rid of him. But Bonkers takes Donald's stammered response as uncertainty over casting him, so he tells him he'll demonstrate his act to convince him!
Bonkers jumps into a bin to change into an outfit of a Canadian Mountie, with a flat horsehead on a stick as his mount, jumping around as if he's actually riding it. Donald, looking behind him, says something about "a ten" - I'm not sure but maybe the idea is he's telling the mugger what money he has on him? Bonkers interprets it as full marks and thanks him, telling him he has a "heart of gold", and the mugger mishears and tells Donald to hand over the gold. It's just one of those bits where there's a lot going on, you know? Bonkers then says that his gun impression sounds real, and he starts using his fingers like guns - we can hear the sounds of someone making gun noises and gun sound effects played over them, as if to imply that a toon can just make such sound effects happen with their mouths.
Elsewhere, the police officer overhears the gunshots and exclaims that it's the mugger, while at the same time, the mugger shouts at Donald to tell Bonkers not to shoot, not being able to tell from inside the bush that Bonkers doesn't have real guns. The cop sneaks up behind the mugger, grabs him, both of them and the bush roll forward and the resulting ball gathers up Donald and Bonkers too, and all of them roll down a slope together and end up at the entrance to the park, just as a news van arrives and a reporter gets out. In the pile of bodies, Bonkers, apparently still not realising that he's gotten mixed up in a real dangerous situation, grabs the cop's handcuffs and uses them on the mugger to demonstrate a trick he used in one of his police cartoons. The cop sarcastically tells Bonkers that he should be a cop, and Bonkers takes him seriously and just seems stunned that someone would think that.
The reporter has seen Bonkers apply the handcuffs and she immediately starts reporting to camera that Bonkers has saved Donald's life from a mugger. Then she says that today's top news story is that the Chief of Police is going to present Bonkers with a citizen's award, as if she could somehow have that news when the thing he'd be getting the award for has literally just happened! In the process she refers to Donald as "Hollywood's most beloved duck". If this was Roger Rabbit he'd have Daffy to compete with, but of course, in a purely Disney cartoon, no-one is bigger than the Disney characters.
So we cut to the police chief's office, where he's giving a medal to Bonkers, still in his Mountie outfit and accompanied by Toots, who's sticking out of his shirt.
In response to the chief's praise, Bonkers downplays his achievement, saying that he was just doing what he did in his cop cartoons - except he only lists the cartoons' names, things like "The Shanghai Cops" and "Scotland Yard 511", giving the chief the impression that he has actually worked as a cop in all these different places. He withdraws the medal and instead offers Bonkers a job, telling him he's been thinking of starting a "Toon Division" of the police force. Bonkers, who if you'd forgotten is currently desperate for a job, excitedly accepts, either not realising there has been a misunderstanding or choosing to take advantage of it. Most of the episode gives me the impression it's the former.
Later, in an elevator in the same police building, the cop from the park is clearly rehearsing something he wants to say to his boss to try and get a promotion, reading it out from some sheets of paper. He's trying to make the case for how good a cop he is, mentioning his twelve years of service, but also the fact that he watches so many Columbo reruns and the Dick Tracy movie. Now, Bonkers is a fake cop who only knows about the business from cartoons, but it seems that the real cop gets all his knowledge from TV and movies, which is hardly any better!
The chief of police happens to walk into the lift while he's practising, embarrassing him while he's in the middle of proclaiming that he can be the next Sherlock Holmes. The chief refers to him as Pickle, and he clarifies that his name is "Lucky Piquel". But the chief continues to get it wrong anyway. It turns out he actually is there to promote Piquel to detective! He puts a detective's badge on Piquel's shirt right where his existing badge seems to be, and Piquel reacts in pain as if a pin had gone through it or something? It's a little unclear. They take the lift downwards as the chief explains to Piquel that he'll be getting an undercover car and an incredibly experienced partner, but his summary of the partner's credentials makes it very obvious to the audience that he's talking about Bonkers and still using the list of cartoons as a résumé.
They walk down a further set of stairs after leaving the lift as the boss explains he's taking him to his new undercover office. There's a bit where Piquel looks back up at all the stairs he's gone down and comments "Must be deep undercover", and when he says "deep" he lowers his voice and sort of clenches his fists upwards like a strongman? I get why the lower voice but I feel like maybe the visual acting is referencing something I'm not getting. I'd love to see what the script said. They reach the door to the office, in a dilapidated area which the chief points out is the last place anyone would suspect the top detectives would be hiding, and then hands Piquel the key to his new life...
Piquel excitedly unlocks the door, and then his expression turns to shock when he sees Bonkers in the room. Bonkers is now wearing a police uniform, but it's a more vivid bright blue than Piquel's and has no bottoms, of course. It's Bonkers' turn to be excited as he bounds over to Piquel to shake his hand, while Piquel stands there stunned, the chief taking this reaction as speechless gratitude rather than horror.
There is barely time to react to all this before the chief gives them their first assignment. He announces that Bubba Bear is missing - Bonkers reacts with over-the-top shock followed by bursting into tears, the chief remarking on how he likes to see an officer who has sympathy for the victims, while Piquel has no clue who they're talking about.
So the chief explains to him that he's a famous cartoon star, known for his loud obnoxious laugh, who had recently lost his job. I guess all the comedy shows are going through the same troubles that Bonkers' show had. The chief shows Piquel a black and white photo of a cartoon bear in a hat and comically large bow tie. His general design looks pretty Disney - I'm reminded of Baloo from The Jungle Book - but the neckwear brings to mind the characters of Hanna-Barbera, who, if you don't already know, tended to have something around their collar to make it easier to animate the head separately from the rest of their body. Their most famous bear character is Yogi, who wore a regular tie, but Snagglepuss the cat did have a bow tie. We cut to Bubba running in fear along a sewer tunnel, jumping up and almost making it out of a manhole before being dragged back in, the green hand of Mr Doodles closing the manhole up again behind him...
Back in Piquel and Bonkers' new office, now that the chief has left, Piquel is using a stick of chalk to divide up the entire room into halves, right down to the drawers on the desk, while saying that they need to decide who is the senior partner of the two, and offering himself up for the role. Do real police partners get to just choose which of them is in charge? Bonkers gladly goes along with Piquel being in charge and says that Piquel can take the whole desk too, as Bonkers has brought his own office supplies - at that moment, a bunch of cartoon objects with faces burst in through the door, including a desk, chair, lamp, ruler, and pencil. Bonkers says that they were all in a cartoon called "Kindergarten Precinct", which should be a sign to Piquel that Bonkers is actually a cartoon star, but he doesn't pick up on it.
Then the new partners are driving along in a police car while another pair of anthropomorphic objects, a beacon light on the top of the car and a radio under the dashboard, keep incessantly talking and driving Piquel crazy. Bonkers explains that they were from a cop show and that he had found them in an unemployment line, continuing the theme of traditional toons not having a place in the current cartoon landscape. I wonder if Bonkers himself, who we know has done plenty of cop shows, was in the show they were from.
They arrive at Bubba's house and Piquel crashes the car into a lamppost outside, possibly due to the distraction from the toons, but maybe he's just a bad driver. Piquel marches in through the gates of the house, and then we see inside - Mr Doodles is holding a hanger with Bubba's shirt and bow tie on it. He picks up a phone and nervously tells his boss that he has Bubba's costume but that Bonkers is here. The reason they need Bubba's outfit is not yet explained in this particular episode, unfortunately.
The mysterious pencil-fingered villain is happy to hear that Bonkers is here and demands for him to be brought to him. We finally see him in a shot that isn't such an extreme close-up, so we can now see his floppy ears and protruding front teeth - he seems to be a rabbit! Doodles doesn't know how he's going to capture Bonkers now that he has "police protection" - obviously he doesn't know Bonkers is now working as a cop himself - and the rabbit tells him to find a way, scraping his pencil fingers down a sheet of paper which Doodles reacts to as if it was fingernails on a blackboard. The villain tells Doodles not to disappoint him and Doodles flees, scared, as the camera conspiciously zooms in on a pile of what looks like sawdust or sand left behind where Doodles was standing. How odd...
Piquel walks right up to the door of the house ready to knock, only to notice that Bonkers is tiptoeing from spot to spot behind him, sneaking up on the house. He pops up inside Piquel's shirt and claims that he's sneaking over to the scene of the crime like Sherlock Holmes. That's not exactly the behaviour I associate with Holmes but OK. Piquel reminds him that this is Hollywood, not London, and Bonkers decides this means he should charge in like Dick Tracy, dashing straight into the door and knocking it down. He lands on his face, but it worked!
Both cops comment on how untidy it is inside, suggesting a struggle. Piquel tells Bonkers to watch out for the banana peel that's on the floor, and Bonkers can't help his compulsion to be toony - he runs right at it, slides around on it, right through the brick wall of the house and back in again, creating two holes! His body wasn't enough to make a hole like that in the door, but of course a stunt like this would run on cartoon physics: if it's funny, it's allowed! Bonkers crashes into Piquel, knocking him out of the house and into a flower-bed - Bonkers sees this and thinks Piquel must suspect that the gardener did it, even though he clearly couldn't control his own trajectory.
Disgruntled, Piquel starts to ask Bonkers exactly what police department he had come from, on the verge of discovering the confusion that led to this mess - but then the chimney of the house starts to tremble, Mr Doodles lurking behind it having clearly done something to it, and bricks start to topple down towards the heroes! Bonkers pushes Piquel into a pond, saving his life, while Doodles flees the scene. Obviously those two didn't see Doodles, and Piquel is convinced it was just the state of disrepair the house is in that caused the collapse, but he is still grateful to the bobcat for saving him. At least until Bonkers kisses his face and then clings to his leg.
Piquel sneezes due to his dunk in the pond, and Bonkers, whirling around him, outfits him with a blanket, hot water bottle, and thermometer - all the accoutrements of the common cold - and tells him he needs to rest at home, shoving him towards the car. Once Piquel is in the car, he asks Bonkers if he can give him a lift home, and Bonkers bursts into tears, saying that they took his home away. Now, we didn't actually see that - was that big mansion owned by the cartoon company or something? I can understand how he eventually wouldn't be able to keep up the money to maintain that house and the butlers and everything, but he literally just lost his job! Piquel offers to take him back to his house instead, to introduce him to his wife and child, and Bonkers immediately snaps back into loony cartoon mode, excitedly reacting as if Piquel had just told him he could stay permanently, even telling him to think of him as his "orange, fuzzy son"!
Piquel parks the car in his driveway and once again crashes it. We're not shown anything that would be distracting him this time so maybe he really is just that bad of a driver. His daughter goes to answer the door - she has red hair, big round glasses, and a silver hairband whose colour made me mistake it for a pair of headphones at first. She calls out to her mother that her father is home, but the moment she opens the door she gasps at Bonkers, ignoring her father completely and dragging Bonkers into the house to tell him how much of a fan she is. The mother has a Southern accent and asks Bonkers for his autograph.
Finally it dawns on Piquel that something strange is going on here. He asks his family how they both know Bonkers, and his daughter shows him her stack of tapes of Bonkers' cartoons, including all the cop shows. Realising that all these former jobs of Bonkers' were fictional, Piquel asks Bonkers when he was a cop for real, and Bonkers happily says that he's never been one before. Quiet at first, Piquel just walks over to the phone, calmly picking up the phone and saying he needs to speak to the chief and say that this has all been a mistake. But when Bonkers asks what's wrong, he blows up:
Piquel: YOU'RE NOT A REAL COP!
Bonkers starts tearfully begging Piquel not to send him away and to keep him on as his partner. In the middle of it he interrupts his own sobbing to add a Bugs Bunny style aside comment telling him not to be influenced by the fact that he saved his life. It's the only self-aware moment the otherwise clueless-seeming Bonkers has in the whole episode, and sort of makes me think twice about whether he really hadn't realised there had been a misunderstanding all this time.
But anyway, Bonkers continues to beg, and both Piquel's wife and daughter also insist that he needs to keep Bonkers around, until eventually he relents. In response, his family start kissing him on the cheeks, and once he's managed to get them to stop, Bonkers gives him a big one on the lips! Piquel hands Bonkers a police manual, telling him to study it and saying he'll properly show him how to be a cop the next day. Bonkers says he'll have the book "rememberised", a rather Tigger-like way of expressing it to my ear.
Bonkers leaves the house, although I'm not sure where he's off to since it's established he doesn't have anywhere else to stay. But Doodles is watching him from a nearby bridge, using a payphone to speak to his master, telling him that he can see Bonkers and will make sure to get him this time.
Villain: I trust you will keep that promise, Mr Doodles. Or what I have in store for Mr Bonkers... will happen to you!
That's the end of part one of a two-parter! And I want to know what happens next!
This was definitely an amusing show. It's hard to praise the concept when it's so blatant what it's ripping off, but the execution is good, and it avoids the pitfalls that could make a character like Bonkers annoying. And I love all the acting, especially Piquel. He and Bonkers are both played by Jim Cummings, a very prolific voice actor who we'll be hearing many times in these cartoons, even if I don't mention him every time. You'll know him as the modern voice of Winnie the Pooh and Taz.