Subscribe!Piggsburg Pigs! (1990)
First episode title: Mummies from Outer Space
How familiar with the show am I?: I hadn't heard of it.
It will not surprise you to hear that Piggsburg Pigs exclamation mark is about a town inhabited by anthropomorphic pigs, but it appears to be only half about their everyday lives and half about facing various supernatural threats - the opening sequence shows them doing things like surfing at the beach and playing baseball, but also walking through a dark forest and running into a vampire and a Frankenstein's monster, among other things. And this episode is a perfect example!
A dark forest. It's not night, as we'll know when we see the sky - the forest is just that dark. A light comes down from the sky and the camera pans up to show a spaceship falling, and it crash-lands in the forest. And inside the spaceship are a bunch of vertical glass tubes, like cryogenic suspension chambers or something, each containing... a mummy. A standard bandage-wrapped mummy, although the shape of their heads and their exposed hands hint that something alien is under there. Why are the aliens mummies, you ask? You will get no answers here. I thought at first they were going to do the whole "Egyptians turn out to have got alien inspiration" thing, but nope, they don't even mention Egyptians the whole episode.
One mummy in the middle is wearing a red gem on a kind of necklace that none of the others have, so I'm going to assume that mummy is the leader. The gem glows, and then the tube opens and the mummy bursts out, growling. He's quickly followed by some of the other mummies, and in a deep voice he asks for a damage report. The aliens appear to speak English, but when one of them turns on a monitor to read the report, the screen displays miscellaneous shapes as writing. There's some damage to various parts of the ship, so the leader orders some of the mummies to repair it while he and some others go out to look for "a being to inhabit"...
The mummies go outside and look out over the town. All of the buildings in Piggsburg seem to be barns or giant haystacks, as though this pig-dominated world has somehow developed out of one where pigs were associated with farms. What happened to the humans...? The mummy leader says that, if this first fusion succeeds, from there they will take over every being that lives on this planet. I wonder how many mummies are actually on that ship?
So, to the town itself, where we finally get some pig action. Inside a barn labelled "Gym", young pigs in PE uniforms are doing... well, various ordinary gym exercises and sports. You might have expected some more pig-themed activities, but not this time. All their gym shoes are two-toed trotter-shaped ones though, which is a funny little touch. Once everyone's in their ordinary clothes, we'll see that all shoes are like that in this world.
In one corner we see one large blond pig boy, a shorter one with brown hair and a backwards cap, and... a duck wearing shorts and a sweatband? The duck's a lot smaller than the pigs but still more humanoid than a regular duck, although he can't speak and seems to be a pet. The bigger pig is posing in front of a mirror trying to look as muscly as possible, but when he exhales his belly pops back out again.
Portley: I got Arnold Schwarzenhogger's body!
Pighead: Yeah, and you'd better give it back - you're getting it all flabby!
These two are brothers, hence the bickering. Portley starts lifting weights and saying that he needs to get in shape for the "Slop Hop" because he's going to take Dotty as his date, but Pighead complains that he wants to take Dotty because Portley took her last time. What, are there not enough girls to go around in this town?
That's when Dotty herself shows up. She has a bow on her head and wears purple. She looks like someone was asked to design "the girl pig", more or less. She's come to tell them that she won't be at the dance because she needs new clothes. I would ask why she would wait until so close to the event to check if she has sufficient clothing, but I must admit I've done the same myself in the past.
After a gag where Pighead suggests she could borrow some clothes from him - even apart from the fact that he's unlikely to own any clothes a girl would want to wear to a party, they're not the same shape at all - Dotty says she doesn't have time to buy anything before the dance because she needs to babysit Piggy, Pokey, and Prissy. Are they her younger siblings? They might just be the children of a neighbour. Either way, they need watching.
Predictably, Portley and Pighead both offer to babysit in place of her, so that she can go shopping and therefore go to the party. Dotty gives them each a kiss on the cheek and then says "Me and Lorelei will meet you after school. Your brother Bo said he'd give us a ride." So I suppose Bo promised them a ride to look after the kids and it's now going to turn into a ride to the clothes shops? Or did he already promise to take them to the shops, and getting Portley and Pighead to babysit was sneakily Dotty's plan all along? Also I love how she has to tell them that Bo is their brother. Unless they know another Bo, it's clearly just for the benefit of the audience!
A single shot of the mummy leader advancing towards the town, in case you'd forgotten that aspect of the plot, and then straight back to Piggsburg, where Bo is now driving everyone in a car that looks like it's made of farmyard equipment riveted together. The driver's compartment is just a barrel! In the front are Bo, who's a redhead in a red jacket, who makes me question whether the three brothers could possibly be genetically related given their three different hair colours; Dotty; and a blonde girl we can infer must be Lorelei. In the back are Portley and Pighead and the duck. They arrive at the haystack-house of the three kids that need babysitting, and the girls make some comments that suggest the kids are quite a handful - Lorelei reminds them not to let the kids near the chainsaw!
Anyway, everyone in the back of the car gets out. Portley and Pighead have changed out of their gym clothes at this point, of course, so we see their usual outfits, Pighead in jeans with suspenders and Portley wearing a vest and a shirt that says "P.U." on it. Piggsburg University maybe? He seems to be a high schooler but there's no reason he couldn't have the shirt.
Hiding behind a nearby bush are two wolves. They also stand upright on two feet, but, unlike the pigs, they are only clothed on their top halves, Donald Duck style. One wolf is short and wears red, one is tall and wears green, and I could swear the voice actors are attempting to imitate the voices of Mario and Luigi from the various Mario cartoons. Wolves, of course, eat pigs, so these two are villains in this show - recurring villains, judging by their appearance in the opening - the short one being the ringleader and the tall one being the idiot sidekick.
The wolves have set up some dynamite next to one of the hay houses across the street, because they really know what a predator animal should do in a cartoon, and they have one of those big plunger detonators on their side of the road. But at that moment, the leader mummy sneaks up behind them! The wolves are fantasising about eating the pigs so they don't notice the mummy until its bandages actually touch them, at which point the short one gets very scared and tells the tall one to do something. Tall boy scurries across the street, picks up the dynamite, brings it back to where the mummy is, and detonates it there and then! It barely seems to affect the mummy but blasts the wolves into the branches of a nearby tree. The short one gets annoyed, but hey, at least they're safe now!
In the house where the babysitting is occurring, two young boy pigs are playing baseball - using the duck as the bat - and one young girl pig is saying that she's going to tell on them. The girl is of course Prissy. She has two pink bows in her hair. Piggy (what a pathetic name for a pig) is batting and wearing a blue cap, and Pokey (pitcher) wears dungarees. There's a confusing animation error where Portley walks into the room followed by another Piggy. Obviously, that's meant to be Pighead, but at first I thought there was a fourth kid we hadn't been told about!
The baseball gets hit into Portley's mouth and he angrily tells them not to play like that with Quackers. Almost as simple a name for a duck as Piggy is for a pig, but at least Quackers is a pet rather than being considered a person in this setting. Portley turns the TV on and puts on "Tarz-ham" - i.e. Tarzan except he's a pig - and the little ones sit down with Pighead and Quackers to watch it while Portley goes off to make a phone call.
Piggy tells Pighead he has to go to the bathroom so they go there together. Pighead opens the door - and the mummy leader bursts out! My favourite line of the episode is when Pighead slams the door shut again on the mummy and says "Oops! It's occupied." Then the mummy crashes right through the door, and Piggy says my other favourite line of the episode, "Suddenly I don't have to go to the bathroom any more!" Yeah, that one's more of an old joke, but it hit me in just the right spot after the other joke.
They run back to the living room where Pighead warns the other kids. The kids hide behind the TV, Quackers hides in an umbrella stand, and Pighead activates the fold-out sofa bed, climbs in, and folds it back in, disappearing inside it. So when the mummy leader comes through and can't see anyone, he proceeds to the kitchen, where Portley is getting something from the fridge. I guess he finished that phone call. Or maybe the phone call was just an excuse while he went and raided the fridge. He sees the mummy and just obliviously says "hi", but then the mummy uses his mystical powers, shooting rays of light from his hands, to destroy the microwave, and Portley realises it's a mummy. So he and his brother are both that slow on the uptake. I hope Bo at least is the sensible one.
The mummy starts shooting rays at Portley, who picks up the frying pan and deflects each one, claiming to be the ping pong champion of Piggsburg. So the mummy then tears a section off one of his bandages and shoots another ray at it, transforming it into a snake with big fangs! I do have to question why the mummies need to take over bodies in order to take over this world. With powers like this, and assuming there are plenty of mummies (which there must be for their plan to work), it seems like they could just kill all the pigs instead! Maybe their mummy bodies are supposed to be wearing out and need replacing, but it's never explicitly mentioned.
Portley takes a watermelon from the fridge. Does it make sense to keep a whole watermelon in the fridge? He throws it at the snake, which slowly swallows it and ends up collapsed with a big watermelon-sized lump in it. OK, maybe in some ways I overestimated the mummies' powers. The mummy chases Portley out of the house...
It turns out the little kids have been watching all this from around the corner, and they realise that the stunned, melon-filled snake could have its uses. Pighead climbs back out of the sofa asking if the mummy is gone, and the kids tell him that a snake ate Portley! Pighead sees the snake and believes them, somehow completely unsuspicious that the lump in the snake is far too small to be his brother. He says he'll take the snake to the Hogspital (you're lucky I'm not relating every single one of the pig puns in this show to you), and tells the kids to wait "next door with the Piggersons", raising some questions about why exactly certain choices were made about the babysitting arrangements here.
Pighead goes outside just as a car pulls up. The car's licence plate just displays a dollar sign, and the driver has a punk jacket with a big collar and spiky black hair which he immediately starts combing. Pighead calls him Rembrandt, which is the least expected name in this show so far, and Rembrandt finally solves our mystery of whose relatives the little kids are by asking if Lorelei is home. OK, so why isn't she babysitting? Had she already decided to spend this time buying a dress for herself and so shoved the responsibility onto Dotty, and now that Dotty's free they're going together? Maybe I am focusing too much on this tiny aspect.
Pighead asks if Rembrandt can take him, the snake, and Quackers to the Hogspital, explaining about the snake having eaten Portley, and Rembrandt makes fun of both Pighead's intelligence and Portley's appearance in the process of agreeing to do it, because he's just that sort of punk.
They get to the Hogspital, but Rembrandt is insisting that there's no way a doctor will operate on something as dangerous as a snake. Disregarding the fact that, in this scenario, it would kind of be their job, Pighead comes up with the most insane cartoon logic solution possible.
He says that the doctors would have to help a mother deliver her baby, and the next thing we see, Pighead is pushing the snake through the hospital on one of those trolley beds, the snake disguised with a wig and a pig mask! Where did he get those? And more importantly, how does he expect a doctor that's expecting to deliver a baby to successfully extract his brother from a snake, given that those are going to be very different medical procedures? Yes, I know, it's clearly supposed to be silly, but I can't not mention it. Pighead wheels the snake into a lift containing another expectant mother, who asks the snake if it's its first baby, and the snake just hisses in response. The mother does not seem to find this weird in any way.
Outside, Rembrandt is getting impatient waiting for Pighead as he also needs to get ready for the Slop Hop. But then the mummy leader sneaks up behind him! He turns around, looks shocked, and that's all we see of that for now!
Inside the hospital, Pighead and Quackers are crying outside the delivery room, hoping Portley is alright. Then Portley walks over to them! He said he followed them to the hospital! And as Pighead realises he's made a mistake, a doctor in the delivery room is holding up a watermelon and saying that this is one ugly pig. If Pighead's stupid, this doctor is even stupider. The three run outside to find Bo, Dotty, and Lorelei, all waiting with concern, saying that the kids told them a snake ate Portley. Portley brushes that off and then they see that Rembrandt's car is empty, which makes Portley wonder if the mummy got him. Of course, Bo asks what mummy he's talking about. There's a bit of a ridiculous amount going on here, isn't there? It's a good thing we've dropped the snake plot thread now.
The leader mummy is carrying Rembrandt, frozen with fear, into a dark alleyway where other mummies are waiting. The leader puts down the pig and says that he'll be the test subject, and then turns incorporeal and starts to be absorbed into Rembrandt! An ad break later and Rembrandt now has the mummy's necklace on, red and yellow eyes, and his hair has gone all crooked and dishevelled-looking, really adding to the effect of making him look possessed.
Mummy/Rembrandt: Excellent. The pig's body is a perfect host. Return to the ship while I attend the local ritual known as a dance. There I will steal the radio, so we can signal our forces to launch the invasion. Soon our people will inhabit every pig on this planet!
I should note that, when the mummies were checking the damage to the ship earlier, they did say that the communications systems weren't working, so this plot element isn't just coming out of nowhere.
Meanwhile, Bo, Pighead, Portley, Dotty, Lorelei, and Quackers (he really does go everywhere with them) arrive at the dance in Bo's car. It's happening in the gym building of the school, Pigsty High - the same gym building we saw earlier. Everyone goes in, except that Bo tells Quackers to wait for them in the car. So, there are limits!
Remember the wolves? They're still in the episode, hiding behind a bush outside the party, with a few small bandages to acknowledge their earlier injuries. The tall one is now wearing a "remote-controlled crossbow beanie". The crossbow bolt is just a plunger and there's a rope tied to it, the intent being to fire it at a pig and then reel them in, if a plunger would even hold the weight of a pig.
Now, there's an interesting detail to the entrance to the Slop Hop that adds to what I said earlier about the town's farm aesthetic. There are a pair of wooden barn doors on the exterior of the building, but they're clearly just for show - they're permanently open, and it would be impossible to close them because of the position of the stairs up to the entrance. Then behind that, there are a pair of actually functional modern doors with glass panes. Don't get me wrong, it's exactly what might be done by some humans if they wanted a building to look like a traditional barn but still be up to modern standards. It's just very interesting that this pig society make such an effort to do so, on all their buildings. I should also note that the other buildings we've seen (the hospital, the house) tended to look modern inside, anyway - but for some reason this specific clash stuck out to me.
The tall wolf fires the crossbow at the pigs going into the party, but he's too late - the door shuts, and the plunger sticks to that instead. He pulls the rope back, and this apparently incredibly strong plunger pulls the whole door back towards the wolves, flattening the short one against the wall! Now, I'm going to be honest, I think the actual real-life reason the building needed to have see-through doors was for this gag, so that we could see the flattened wolf through the door. I don't think the writers put as much thought into the clash of aesthetics as I am putting. But if I'm right, the animators did a brilliant job of making the whole thing plausible.
There's a shot of the possessed Rembrandt approaching the party, and then we actually get to see inside it. Teenage pigs are dancing around and getting things to eat. But of course, they're pigs, so the food is all in a trough. There's a gag where Portley asks Dotty if she wants some slop, addressing her as "my dear", and Pighead responds as if he was the one being addressed.
Pighead has brought his own chilli peppers to the party, to spice up the food, and when he eats it it makes him jump around with smoke pouring out of him, flying up and out of his trousers all the way to the ceiling. When he lands, he says it could use some hot sauce. I might just be a Pighead myself... Anyway, he puts some of the enchillified slop into the container he took the chillis out of, for later.
Oh, and after all they went through to get to this point, Dotty's outfit at the party hardly looks any different to what she was wearing earlier!
Rembrandt comes in and Dotty can immediately tell he doesn't look his usual self. The mummy possessing Rembrandt doesn't seem to care for trying to stay inconspicuous, asking in a growl where the radio is. Dotty, however, obliviously points him towards the DJ. The party is being DJed by a guy called Billy Boar who's wearing shades indoors because he's so cool, and it seems he's broadcasting this whole thing on the radio, on a station called Radio Oink. There's a line that seems to be oddly cut off - he says he's "coming to you from the Pigsty High", with the "the" making me think he was supposed to say "the Pigsty High Slop Hop" or "the Pigsty High gymnasium" or something. And then he announces the latest song by "Pig-donna", which is the lowest effort pig version of a name or word so far.
Rembrandt snatches the DJ's radio, cutting off the music, and runs off with it, and Bo wonders what's going on and chases after him. Outside, Rembrandt now changes into mummy form. In other words, he's now covered in the bandages and the exposed parts look like the same kind of creature the mummies already were, but he's still the size and shape of Rembrandt - he even has Rembrandt's hairstyle in bandage form! He starts his car using the mummy magic even though Rembrandt would presumably have his keys on him, although maybe they're under too many bandages to reach. Bo is shocked to see that Rembrandt is a mummy now and tries to catch him but the car gets away, and by this point Bo's brothers and the girls have gathered outside too, Portley mocking Bo's failure.
So in the next scene they're all back in Bo's car driving along, and Bo remarks that the mummy has headed into "the Forbidden Zone". We see the forest the spaceship landed in, but now that we're seeing the entrance we can see signs like "Danger", "Go Back", and "Beware, by order, Mayor Hogtail". I wonder if that character appears in any episodes. Dotty says this place gives her goosebumps, and Pighead says they don't look as good on pigs. Compared to geese, not humans, I assume.
Bo, who was already giving off "Fred from Scooby-Doo" vibes, says that they will need to split up. He tells his brothers to go one way and takes the girls the other way. Oh, sure, his intent is to find the mummy, right. And it turns out the wolves are watching them. Through some twisted logic, the wolves decide that, since you would have to be really stupid to just walk into the Forbidden Zone, that's exactly why the pigs won't expect to encounter the wolves there, because the wolves aren't stupid...
Bo and the girls are walking along and there's a rustling in the bushes, so Bo tells the girls to wait while he checks it out. Why bring them with him, then? Except for the reasons I implied, anyway. So he goes to look, and there's more rustling elsewhere and a load of mummies jump out, surrounding the girls! See, this is why you shouldn't split up.
Next we see Portley, Pighead... and Quackers. Pighead's carrying him. I'm pretty sure we haven't seen him since he was told to wait in the car. Somehow, he's here now. Anyway, Portley complains that Pighead has pinched his tail and Pighead says he thought it was a vine. Pretty pathetic little vine if it was! And now it becomes clear why the animators realised they should have been putting Quackers in the scene, as Portley asks Pighead to hand him Quackers so that he can clear a path, using the duck like a lawnmower to remove the bushes in front of them... until he hears a "Yow!" and we see that Quackers has inadvertently bitten Bo's tail this time.
Bo mentions his concern that the girls have vanished, and then they hear the girls calling for help. Running to look, they see the mummies' spaceship! It's guarded by mummies... holding guns. That would seem redundant given the powers we've seen them use, but now I'm wondering - we've only actually seen the leader mummy use those powers. Are the powers unique to him? Perhaps even given to him by that gemstone? Leader mummy Rembrandt orders his underlings to put the girls in "prison tubes" while he uses the radio to make contact with the fleet.
Bo really seems to be the leader of the gang by sheer decisiveness. I wonder if he is the oldest of the three brothers. He says they'll need to become mummies to sneak in, and tries to think what they can use as bandages. Portley responds by somehow taking off his underwear without removing any more of his clothes - his underwear is a giant pair of white boxers. He's a big guy but they have of course exaggerated how big his underwear would be. Meanwhile, the wolves sneak past the mummies and hang on to some handholds on the side of the ship, holding a net, ready to jump out and grab any pigs they see coming out of the ship.
The brothers' fake mummy ends up being Pighead on top of Portley, all wrapped in bandages, holding Quackers like a gun! Bo tells them to pretend they've captured him. Portley reminds Pighead to just growl if any of the mummies talk to him, and he says he's good at that. So they approach the guards, a mummy growls at them... and Pighead gives the most pathetic growl in history back at him. He sounds... ill. The mummy gets angry and starts growling more, so Pighead just hits him over the head with Quackers instead! It doesn't have much effect and the boys start running towards the ship as the mummy opens fire on them with laser blasts from the gun. Their mummy disguise comes off but they're otherwise unharmed.
They make it into the ship and Bo tells his brothers to "cross your tails" before pressing a random button on a nearby console, luckily picking the right one that shuts the hatch behind him, blocking the mummy's way. Then they see leader-mummy-Rembrandt.
Portley: Rembrandt, buddy! It's us, your pals! We've come to take you back to the dance!
Mummy/Rembrandt: [shoots energy beams at them]
Pighead: Uhh, maybe he doesn't wanna dance?
Bo spots the girls frozen still inside two of the tubes that the mummies had been stored in. Yeah, it's pretty stereotypical that the boys have to save the girls in this thing. Don't they know that it's the nineties? Pighead says he needs to have some of his chilli slop to make him feel better, getting that container from earlier out, and that gives Portley an idea, based on the fact that no-one other than Pighead can bear those chillis.
Portley puts a couple of straws in the slop, attaches Quackers' beak to one straw, and then uses the whole assembly as a spray with Quackers as the pump! That is one versatile duck they have there. He sprays the chilli slop at Rembrandt, who turns bright red through the bandages and smoke comes out of him, he spins around, and eventually the incorporeal mummy comes back out and we're left with Rembrandt back to his original self. Both he and the mummy (solid again) collapse on the floor, the mummy still breathing smoke. Portley remarks on the "hangover" that the mummy is going to have - I'm kind of surprised they would dare to put an alcohol reference in such a plainly kid-oriented show!
Rembrandt wakes up with no idea of where he is, so I guess he won't remember his time under possession. Then a bunch of the mummies burst into the room, so Portley tears a strip of bandage off the unconscious leader mummy, ties it around his forehead as a sweatband, and declares himself "Teenage Mutant Ninja Porker"! That would've been a very up to date reference. Then the mummies start shooting and he gives up on that plan, ducking down behind a control panel. Shuffling around under cover, wearing the sweatband, and once again holding Quackers like a gun, he now ends up looking more like Rambo!
The mummies keep firing as he sneaks around, so I guess we're meant to assume that the other pigs are just successfully dodging every shot. He manages to get another one of the mummies with a chilli blast, and as that mummy goes spinning off, it hits each of the other mummies in turn, knocking each of them coincidentally into the glass tubes! What a trick shot! And Pighead opens a door to let the spinning mummy go flying out of the room.
There's still one mummy left in the room, about to attack Bo, and Portley doesn't have any slop left, so Pighead breathes his chilli breath on the mummy and it's defeated! The boys rescue the girls and everyone runs out of the ship, and the ship then takes off - presumably the mummy that ended up in the other room has decided to make an escape after seeing what happened to the other mummies. But guess what? Yes, the wolves are still hanging onto the side of the ship! The tall one says they can use their net as a parachute, and it's only after they jump down that they realise the problem with a parachute full of holes...
For the final scene, we're back at the dance. Remember that the problem that started this whole thing was the question of whether Dotty would be dancing with Pighead or Portley? Well, right now, Pighead and Portley are dancing with each other while they wait to hear who Dotty has picked. But then Bo (dancing with Lorelei of course) lets them know that Dotty has picked someone else over either of them. Given the limited number of characters available, I felt sure it would have to be Rembrandt, so I laughed pretty hard at the punchline that she is actually dancing with Quackers!
Not a bad show overall. It has some weirdness to it, I have questions about the wolves' place in society, and there was perhaps a bit much going on for one episode, but there were plenty of parts that made me laugh!