Dennis and Gnasher (1996)
First episode title: Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
How familiar with the show am I?: I watched it a lot as a kid, but mainly the handful of episodes I had on VHS - I wasn't sure if I'd seen this one before, but I might have. I used to read the comics a lot more.
Dennis the Menace is a character from the Beano, a British comic book, and he's unrelated to the American character of the same name (who coincidentally debuted on the same day!). He has spiky black hair and a red and black striped jumper, and he causes as much trouble as he can for everyone around him. He also has a similarly spiky dog called Gnasher, who gets to share title billing in this particular incarnation.
So as I've said, I've watched a lot of this show - even if I hadn't seen this particular episode, I would have strongly recognised the opening sequence. It's one of those ones that's made of clips from the actual episodes, so I recognise plenty of moments from other episodes too. And that theme tune is going to be stuck in my head once more!
The opening scenes take us around a town, with emphasis on how peaceful and happy it is - birds are chirping, a postman is emptying a postbox, and two women are cooing over a baby in a pram. The local policeman, Sergeant Slipper, greets someone "Morning", but we're about to see that's wrong - an alarm goes off on a watch in his pocket, saying it's 3:59 (PM of course) and flashing up a picture of Dennis, and he starts shouting a warning to everyone around that Dennis is almost out of school! With a show like this, that doesn't have a continuing plot, episodes tend to mostly be made so that they can work in any order, but this first part seems to be deliberately made to establish Dennis's reputation as a troublemaker, perhaps for people who weren't already familiar with the character.
The next thing we see is Dennis speeding along on rollerskates (the same shot I clipped from the opening, above). Dennis spots the postman, sharpens his own hair into spikes, and barrels into him, shoving him into the postbox! As you might be able to tell from the episode's title, hair is going to play a critical role here, so it's good to firmly establish Dennis's spiky hair as an important part of him.
As Dennis speeds ahead, the postbox rolls down the street with the postman inside, and now the two ladies have to rush to stay ahead of it too - one jumps into the pram with the baby, and the other pushes! Even so, the postbox gets dangerously near, and the woman not in the pram ends up on top of it, while the other woman has to wheel herself along! Is there a named trope for when you have a group of people all speeding along, some on a vehicle or moving object, others desperately trying to stay ahead of it or else they'll be flattened? We saw it before in the Crazy Claws segment of Kwicky Koala, with the minecart. It seems like it must be a classic cartoon set-up!
Next we meet Gnasher. This shot also seems intended to establish him for the first time - he gnaws a tree into the shape of several bones, and then says his catchphrase, "Gnash!" It's just meant to be a dog bark that sounds like that - no talking animals in this show! Well, not in this episode.
This must be in their front garden, as Dennis arrives and Gnasher licks his master's face. Then Dennis's Mum calls him inside, saying that his father wants a word with him. The comic book canon has changed multiple times over the decades, but at this time I believe the characters' names were literally Dennis's Mum and Dennis's Dad - after all, that's all the identification they need! Also, I believe Dad's Hitler-like moustache is quite intentional, given his role as the strict authority figure.
Dennis makes himself known to his father by bursting through the newspaper he's reading, which is weirdly just lines and blank squares even though it's shown in close-up, and then Dad tells Dennis that he and Mum have made a decision, as Dennis looks around and sees that all escape routes are blocked. Dad breaks the news - Dennis needs to have a haircut! Well, you know the things kids hate the most - bathtime, bedtime, clothes shopping, and haircuts. Dennis yells so loud in response, we zoom out to the whole Earth shaking!
On the street, Sergeant Slipper briefly wonders what the noise was. Slipper's name, by the way, comes from the fact that, in the earlier years of the comic, Dennis would routinely be punished for his misbehaviour by Dad whacking him with a slipper. Once hitting your children as punishment became less socially acceptable, that aspect was phased out, so this show's usual deliverer of punishment is named Slipper as an acknowledgement of what he's replacing. I say he "briefly" wonders, because it's at that moment that the whole pram-and-postbox-and-frightened-women arrangement comes down the street towards him!
As Dennis's parents drag him out of the house, he brings up the example of Samson losing his strength when his hair was cut. I'm surprised Dennis would know a Biblical reference like that! Dennis says it'll make him a wimp like Walter, and then that's when we meet his neighbour Walter, a snobbish spoiled boy who likes to antagonise Dennis. This was a bit of a revamp of his character, since it used to be that comic book Walter's only crime was being a "softy", as Dennis would put it - in short, as values changed, people started to see Dennis's bullying of Walter as homophobic. So this cartoon makes him more explicitly dislikeable.
In this instance, it turns out that Walter was the one who suggested to Dennis's parents that Dennis could use a haircut, and he teases Dennis about it, while holding up his own little dog, a poodle called Foo-Foo. This elicits a growl from Gnasher. Once everyone else is out of earshot, Walter even openly says that this is all to make Dennis a laughing stock!
Walter: Grown-ups always listen to reason. Don't they, Foo-Foo?
The next shot is of a barber's - another pair of parents are thanking a large bald barber called Mr Brown for cutting their son Jimmy's hair, and they say they'll be back "tomorrow, as always" for his next cut! That made me laugh out loud. Jimmy has almost no hair left - it seems that Mr Brown is only satisfied when no hair can be seen at all.
Dennis and his family arrive, Brown calls over his assistant Mabel so she can see how much hair this boy has, and Dad addresses the barber as Mr Brown but Dennis calls him Slasher Brown. On my first watch, I assumed Dennis was just giving him an insulting nickname, but he's consistently referred to that way for the rest of the episode, including by himself!
Slasher continues to get excited about the prospect of cutting all that hair for a bit, but the whole thing gets interrupted by - guess what? - the return of the pram and the postbox! Slipper has now joined the woman who's trying desperately to stay on the rolling postbox, and Dennis and Gnasher manage to leap into the pram, escaping Slasher! I absolutely love that that bit from the start just keeps coming back for more. Gnasher pulls the brake, and the pram gets lifted up onto the postbox, Dennis and Gnasher jumping free as the postbox continues to roll with everyone and everything else still on it!
The act ends with Slasher putting up a Wanted poster with Dennis's face on it, and announcing that this poster will soon be up in barber shops everywhere, as he puts a copy into what looks like a fax machine. It's 1996, everyone!
We come back from the break to see that, indeed, barbers are putting up Wanted posters of Dennis. The barbers are all identical - bald like Slasher, but much thinner than him. They already feel like some kind of sinister cult here, and it's only going to get worse.
Slasher phones Dennis's parents to get them to turn on the TV, and this is a fabulous bit of silliness. The show that comes on is "Barbers' Most Wanted", like barbers hunting for people is a regular enough occurrence to need its own TV show. They say they're looking for "Dennis", because he never gets a surname in anything, and apparently that's enough to identify him. And then, the host says he'll be showing a re-enactment of an interview he had with Slasher Brown, and the actors in the re-enactment don't look or sound anything like either of them! The re-enactment Slasher has a cowboy hat and a Texan accent for no reason at all! What? I love it!
The next thing we know, Dennis wakes up in Slasher's barber shop, Slasher gloating that it's already over, and Dennis sees his own shaven reflection and screams... but luckily, it's all a dream. It would be a bit of an anti-climax otherwise!
Dennis and Gnasher have been hiding in the family's garage, where Mum and Dad apparently never thought to look. Dennis pronounces "garage" in what I'd think of as the American way (over here we pronounce it to rhyme with "carriage"). He emerges from the garage, however you say it, in a kind of soapbox car pulled by Gnasher, who's able to get him going pretty fast!
I suppose it's only the morning, but maybe it's Saturday now, because, over at Slasher's, Jimmy has been brought back for his next daily haircut. Dennis flies past, running over Slasher's foot and yelling about "freedom from haircuts", and Jimmy recognises him from Barbers' Most Wanted - does everyone in town watch that show?
Dennis: Round one to us! No barber is a cut above Dennis and Gnasher!
Getting the title of the show in there, I see. Time passes, and, at Slasher's shop, he keeps getting phone calls from other barbers about children refusing to have haircuts, all following Dennis's example!
It's back to the TV for the Channel 1 News, but the newsreader announces it as a "Barbers' Most Wanted update". So that show is bleeding into the news, now? He reports that Slasher Brown has called a meeting of the "World Barbers' Federation in Geneva". I'm not sure how he got there so fast, but anyway, in this scene the barbers seem even more cult-like, greeting each other "Snippety-snip-snip" and ominously plotting to catch Dennis and broadcast his haircut to the world. Apparently Slasher Brown is the only barber in the world that doesn't look the same as all the others! Which unfortunately gives the impression that all barbers are white.
Then, a news helicopter from channel 28 is hovering over the motorway to give a traffic update, only for the reporter to spot Dennis and Gnasher racing down the road. Since when did the UK have channels called 1 and 28, anyway? It feels very "US local channels"-ish. (If you're not British, almost all of our channels are country-wide and the only ones named after their number are Channels 4 and 5.) So their news also switches focus to the Dennis story. I have to say, this whole news section goes on quite a bit and starts to feel somewhat filler-y, especially since it means Dennis himself barely has a role for a little while, other than being the subject of everyone else's comments. Still, there's some fun playing around with words in the news reporters' conversations.
Channel 28 reporter: As I speak, a barber's van is now coming in off the sliproad!
Channel 28 newsreader: What's happening now, as I speak, Bob?
Channel 28 reporter: As you spoke, Barb, and as I'm re-speaking, the barber's van is closing the gap on Dennis!
Bob and Barb - any relation to barbers? Channel 1's newsreader and reporter are also both called Bob. Anyway, the barber's van is shown to have Slasher in it, with Mabel driving. There's also a bit about children "actually leaving their TV sets" in order to cheer Dennis on - if this episode was made today, that joke would be about looking up from their phones, wouldn't it? The act ends with the Channel 1 newsreader introducing "Mr Expert", a man with at least three pairs of glasses (on his eyes, on his head, and in his pocket), who defines children as "tiny people who go to school" and warns that, if Dennis wins, no-one will ever have a haircut again. OK, I do want to see more of this guy.
When we come back from the break, we discover that Walter is also in the barber's van, and he addresses Slasher as Uncle Slasher! So they've been in this together the whole time! I also like the implication of the wording "Uncle Slasher", because there was still a possibility that it was a nickname until now, but that definitely sounds like it must be a name. I did know from some of the comics that Walter's surname was Brown, which registered with me when Slasher first appeared, but I didn't know whether that was established at the time or whether it was even consistent, so I still didn't see this coming.
The focus finally goes back to Dennis as he and Gnasher speed along. They encounter a roadblock in the form of several barber vans accompanied by identical barbers. Dennis throws a bone over them, shouts "Fetch!", and Gnasher is able to take Dennis over the roadblock by jumping after it! It's impressive that he can jump like that, and that he's kept up the skating for so long! Then Slasher's van crashes into the roadblock and there's an actual explosion as the vans collide! You can probably guess that Slasher is not going to be dead, though.
Then the Channel 28 helicopter gets taken over by the barbers! It's not shown how, but Slasher and Walter are on board, wearing some bandages but otherwise looking fine. Slasher gets them to lower the copter enough for him to spray Dennis with his "Mark 5 fixing gel", freezing Dennis in place, allowing the barbers to carry him off! For anyone paying attention, Gnasher vanishes during the incident, but Walter and Slasher notice afterwards and guess that he's probably just run off. Given how the show has gone so far, you would have to conclude that that part's leading up to something!
So now we're back at the barber shop, and Slasher is finally preparing to cut Dennis's hair. Dennis's parents are there, Walter is there, several barbers are there, several news reporters are there! The place really is crowded. Slasher gets some more evil gloating done, and then brings the razor in for the cut... Only for Dennis's "hair" to jump off his head and bounce out the door, with Dennis already bald underneath! It is a brilliant gag, even though you can probably already guess what has happened.
One of the reporters cries out "follow that hair", and there is an unnecessarily long gag where a whole load of reporters and barbers start running after it in the wrong direction, and then all the same people run across the screen the other way to correct their course. Slasher is outraged that he was tricked and blames it on Walter, who he notices has enough hair to cut, and so Slasher chases Walter outside too. It's satisfying to see Walter get a taste of his own medicine!
The "wig" bounces off into an alleyway, and then we have to wait again for the reporters and barbers to run past it, this time including Slasher and Walter. Then Dennis shows up, and just outright breaks the fourth wall, telling the viewers not to worry and revealing he's just wearing a bald cap. And then the wig, as you've guessed, reveals itself to be Gnasher. Predictable, but fun.
The two exit the alleyway... and then the postbox comes back, with everyone still balancing on it! In case you've lost track, that was yesterday in-universe! They've been rolling along all this time! The postbox collides with Dennis and Gnasher, finally stopping and throwing up a cloud of dust, through which Sergeant Slipper tries to grab Dennis as he keeps popping up all over the place.
Overall this was one that was quite nostalgic to me, although it will be even more nostalgic if I go back and watch some of the ones I actually owned on tape. The first episode is missing some key elements of the show, like Dennis's best friends Curly and Pieface. Still, it's as funny and silly as I remembered!