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Monster by Mistake (1999)

Originally posted on 11 April 2026

First episode title: Fossel Remains

How familiar with the show am I?: I was unaware of it.

Is this the first episode?: A pilot aired three years before the show proper began - as per usual, I'm ignoring that pilot in favour of the first regular episode.

A boy called Warren got a curse put on him by some kind of demon, and now he turns into a big blue monster (or back to human) every time he sneezes. And he tries to keep this fact a secret from everyone, except for his sister and the ghost who lives in the attic. Yes.

Monster by Mistake title card

Characters in this show include:

Warren, the boy who becomes a monster whenever he sneezes, because of a magic gem. He uses this to his advantage when he can, but it's not always intentional.
Tracy, who owns a spellbook and is trying to use it together with the gem to break Warren's curse. She hasn't succeeded, but she has learned some magic spells in the process.
Johnny, the ghost who lives in Warren and Tracy's attic and who they also try to keep secret from everyone. He plays the trumpet and can turn invisible.
Billy, a classmate of Warren's who knows that he is the monster and is desperate to catch him and prove it.
Ms Gish, their teacher at school.

In this episode, Warren and Tracy's mother inadvertently sells Tracy's spellbook at a rummage sale. The kids and Johnny follow the old man who bought it, Warren using his monster form to stop a bus (driven by their father) so that they can hitch a ride, with Warren on the bus's roof, but Billy sees him on the roof and begins following them in turn. The old man goes into a museum, and Warren and Tracy end up wandering around an Egyptian exhibit where they run into Ms Gish. She enthusiastically wants to show them around but they manage to shake her off - Billy isn't so lucky, running into her and getting dragged away towards the Ancient Greeks.

Monster Warren waves at Billy from the roof of a bus

The kids arrive at the office of the old man, who is Dr Fossel, the museum's head of palaeontology - he is recording some notes on tape about Pickford Man, a very tall Neanderthal-like skeleton he has in his office. They ask him about the book and he refuses to sell it back to them, being very interested in what exactly it is, being written in some kind of ancient language. He kicks them out, but then starts reading part of the book out loud - Tracy sees that the jewel is glowing in her bag and knows that Fossel must be casting a spell, even if unintentionally, and they rush back just in time to see the stray spell bring Pickford Man to life! The reanimated skeleton shocks Fossel, who in his surprise accidentally throws the book towards it, and it runs away with the book.

The skeleton comes to life

While Warren and Johnny go after the skeleton, Tracy tries to explain to Fossel what he's done without giving too much away about the book and the jewel. Fossel is very covetous, but when he remembers his skeleton is on the loose, he agrees to help. Tracy asks him what words he had just read out of the book so that she can work out how to reverse the spell, but he starts to panic and can't remember the exact words. Warren transforms into monster form to go after the skeleton, but then Billy and Ms Gish are getting near and he has to pretend to be a statue to avoid them. In the ensuing antics, Billy ends up seeing Johnny too, and Ms Gish ends up with a helmet on her head and stuck in one of the exhibits. Fossel eventually remembers that his tape recorder has been on the whole time and would have picked up him saying the spell, and he arrives in time to allow Tracy to reverse the spell before the skeleton could harm Warren.

Tracy has the book and the skeleton is walking towards her, as monster Warren looks shocked

The thing that immediately strikes me about this cartoon is how ugly it looks, unfortunately. Late 90s era CGI was already quite imperfect - think of the human characters in the first Toy Story - so you had to be really good to make it work, and the people who did this were not. Look how they avoid having to properly show Warren turning into the monster:

Tracy pours some pepper so that Warren transforms into the monster

I don't know why Johnny the ghost has such a thing about playing the trumpet - maybe it's something to do with who he was before he died. In the very first scene here, he's playing along with Warren, I guess just to help establish that that's his thing as it's never relevant again in this episode.

Johnny and Warren playing trumpets

The kids' mother's behaviour around the rummage sale seems very inconsiderate - we see that it's more than just the book that she's taken without her kids' permission. Their dad seems pretty oblivious, being convinced not to check why his bus stopped just by Tracy telling him he needs to stay on schedule.

Speaking of the bus, it's really weird that Tracy doesn't just talk to Dr Fossel while they're both on the bus - in fact, he seems to disappear for a while during that section, and then suddenly Tracy is desperate to catch up to him again once they arrive at the museum. Was there some ambiguity during the story planning as to whether he was going to be on the same bus as them?

Once they get into the museum and encounter a mummy exhibit, there is the one joke in the episode that I did find quite funny. Bear in mind that Johnny is a ghost:

Warren: What are mummies?

Tracy: They're dead people wrapped in sheets.

Johnny: Sounds like a party I went to last week.

Johnny saying 'Sounds like a party I went to last week.'

Fossel's attitude in the episode is weird. He has a very "obviously evil" vibe the moment they start talking to him about the book, which remains right up until Tracy asks him to help stop the skeleton, at which point he becomes perfectly nice all of a sudden. There are natural ways to go about such a change of heart, but the writers didn't use them here!

Fossel picking up a bone and saying they're his life's work

I guess the name Pickford Man is meant to be a reference to the infamous Piltdown Man hoax fossil. From context it sounds like Pickford is the name of the town where this cartoon is set. The skeleton itself is not a very exciting villain and it's unclear why a mindless skeleton would be so eager to keep hold of the book.

Billy would be a pretty irritating character if I had to see him any more than this one episode. He's a very stereotypical "bully"-type character. I did find hilarious this little dance he does when he thinks he has Warren trapped, though:

Billy's funny dance

It was very obvious that the tape recorder was going to be the solution to everything because it was front and centre in the shots where Fossel was reading from the book. It didn't even occur to me that he wasn't still intentionally recording himself, until he failed to remember the spell!

Anyway... I'm sorry, this cartoon has very little to redeem it in my eyes. None of the characters are likeable and the plot is not engrossing at all.

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