Subscribe!Pippi Longstocking (1997)
First episode title: Pippi returns to Villa Villekulla
How familiar with the show am I?: I was only vaguely aware of the character.
Is this the first episode?: Like a few other shows we've covered, there was a movie first, and this show continues from it, but this is the first actual TV episode.
Pippi Longstocking was a series of Swedish children's books about the strongest girl in the world. This TV adaptation of it was a Canadian co-production, which is how it has ended up on my English-speaking-country-focused cartoon blog.
The episode starts with a large sailboat pulling into a harbour. One of the people on the boat is Pippi, a young girl whose very distinctive appearance includes red hair with pigtails, and the long mismatched socks that reflect her name. In our first look at her, she's hugging several sailors that she has lifted off their feet! Yes, another distinctive thing about Pippi is that she is supernaturally strong, for no reason that I know of. She heads off the boat carrying a chest of her belongings in one hand and holding up her horse in the other hand. Her monkey, which is fully clothed including a hat, is on top of the horse. I don't know what the limits of her strength are. Clearly it doesn't scare the sailors though, as they happily wave her off.
There's an old man with a pipe snoozing in a little boat off the shore, who got woken up by the sailboat's arrival. When he sees Pippi disembarking with her things, he looks shocked! Pippi gets "Mr Nilsson", the monkey, to wave goodbye to the sailors for her. One of the sailors responds by asking if she could get them started again, and she blows at the sails to get the boat moving, so apparently her breath is as strong as her arms, or more! At this, the old man looks even more flabbergasted. Pippi hops up onto the back of the horse, apparently just named Horse, and rides off, saying it's time to go home. The horse moves much slower than Pippi herself did when carrying it, but I suppose she still gets to rest this way!
We next see the three of them travelling through a small town, where there are audible snores coming from every house. Pippi seems amused by this, but Mr Nilsson covers his ears in annoyance. When animal characters without voices nevertheless express their feelings through human-like gestures, my go-to comparison is Gromit from Wallace & Gromit, although Nilsson is a bit more exaggerated than that.
They reach a more forest-y area and Pippi says she thinks this is the way, but she's only been there once before, a very long time ago. Throughout the episode we only get tantalising hints about what the history of Villa Villekulla is, and this is our first one. Then a middle-aged woman comes around the corner, wearing a hat with a flowery decoration, and riding a bike with a small dog in the basket. She isn't quite looking where she is going, and, despite Pippi shouting "Look out!", crashes straight into Horse, knocking off her hat. She is indignant and seems to think it was Pippi's fault, as Pippi laughs it off and asks her to imagine what if Pippi had been riding a hippo instead. Pippi just seems to be the sort to say whatever comes into her head. And do whatever comes into her head, as we'll see more of later.
Pippi asks the woman if this is the way to Villa Villekulla, and she points out there's a sign with that name on it - Pippi jokingly says she thought Villa Villekulla began with a Q, and the woman doesn't appreciate the joke. Meanwhile, Horse is eating the hat that's on the floor, and, when Pippi rides off on it, the woman discovers the damage when she tries to put on the hat and her head goes right through! This is one thing that can at least be blamed on Pippi, or at least on her animal, and the woman shouts for Horse to come back as it slowly continues on its way.
It doesn't come back, though, and Pippi soon arrives at a nice, old-fashioned red-and-yellow house labelled Villa Villekulla. "Villa" just means a house, like in English, and I asked a Swedish friend about "Villekulla" - it could mean "Wild Hill" or "Hill of the Lost". Mr Nilsson immediately scurries up the house and into the chimney, there are a lot of sounds from inside, and then he comes out through the front door to let Pippi in! So... I guess she's not going to need a key here! She says that means Nilsson must remember, so she must have already had him whenever it was she last came here.
The camera zooms in on a nearby green house, where a girl and a boy are being led outside by their mother and told to play croquet - all the stuff for it is set up outside the house and they're holding mallets. The kids simultaneously say that it's boring behind her back as she closes the door on them, leaving them outside. Then they talk to each other about how this place is boring and they should never have moved here. The girl specifically calls this place "all the way out here", and I'm highlighting that because this show generally does the thing of "Canadian show pretends to be generically North American by toning down the accents so that it can be sold in the USA", but the girl's voice actor slips up on "out" and gives us the stereotypical Canadian "oot". Which isn't an actual "oot" but if you have heard Canadian English then you know what I'm talking about. I don't think it happens again throughout the episode.
The children decide to go "on strike" by just sitting down instead of playing croquet, but they quickly decide that is also as boring as playing it. Useful tip for writers: having your characters say that the events happening on screen are boring doesn't make them any less boring for the viewer! Luckily, the boring doesn't last as it's at this moment that the two kids first spot Pippi. She's walking backwards towards Villa Villekulla with Mr Nilsson on her head, repeating "four-three-two-one" like a backwards army march. I don't know whether some more time has meant to have passed and Pippi is all done moving in now, or if she has immediately come out of the house just to do this. Pippi does seem spontaneous enough to do something like that!
The two kids go up to Pippi and ask her why she's walking backwards, and she says "it's a free country" - see what I mean about trying to make the show seem American? Then she claims that in Egypt, everyone walks backwards and they'd laugh at you for walking forwards, while the animation shows a stereotypical camel- and pyramid-filled desert with people walking with their arms up like in hieroglyphs, demonstrating the scenario Pippi describes. When the girl questions whether Pippi has been to Egypt, she claims she's been almost everywhere and that in India people walk on their hands, illustrated with another stereotype-filled animation of men in turbans doing just that. There is a bit where some Indian kids are playing hopscotch on their hands and using their feet to pick up the marker. At this, the boy tells Pippi she's lying and she immediately admits to it. Well, at least she's... almost honest?
The girl tells Pippi she shouldn't lie and she responds with her entire backstory as an excuse. Apparently she's got no mother (I would guess that means her mother died) and her father is lost at sea, but he owns Villa Villekulla and told her to wait there for him if they were ever separated. It sounds like she is being sincere for once here, but it's still absurd to bring it up as a reason for her other behaviour.
Then Pippi introduces herself with a ridiculously long name but adds that you can just call her Pippi Longstocking. Again, hard to say whether that long name is real or not. She introduces the monkey as Mr Nilsson, and the other two introduce themselves as Tommy and Annika. Then Pippi asks the pair if they want to come for a visit, and when they move to go into the house, she tells them they can't come for a visit yet because they're already here, so they have to go away first. That's a very Alice in Wonderland bit of logic, and then Pippi continues her backwards march back into the house.
An undetermined amount of time later, the siblings approach Pippi's front door again. But before they can knock, they notice Horse for the first time, startling them.
Tommy: Why does she keep a horse on the veranda?
Pippi [opening the door]: Well, he doesn't like the parlour! And he'd be in the way in the kitchen.
Pippi is covered in flour and tells them that breakfast is almost ready. It hasn't been made clear what time of day it is other than that it's light outside, but from what we've seen of Pippi it wouldn't be surprising if it's a completely inappropriate time for breakfast. She leads them into the kitchen which is just as covered in various food stains, and flips some pancakes in the air, making Tommy and Annika duck for cover, but Pippi perfectly catches three pancakes in plates, two in her hands and one on her foot!
Next, all three kids are riding on Horse, Pippi eating her pancake and commenting on how great it is to eat pancake on horseback, which the other two don't have a response for. So they change the subject, Tommy telling Pippi he hopes she doesn't regret moving here because the place is so boring. Right after both siblings have affirmed that nothing exciting ever happens here, there's a yell in the distance, and, of course, Tommy adds "until now, that is!" It does seem a little over the top to assume something exciting is happening just because of a yell, though. For all they know, some kid just tripped over and cried out or something like that!
Horse is so slow to try and get them to the source of the yelling that they decide to get off and run instead. Pippi leaves the pancake in front of Horse, and he immediately eats it. She places it deliberately enough that I assume she left it for him intentionally.
They arrive at a little park with a football pitch where three boys are bullying a smaller boy, pushing him around and taking his ball off him. One of the boys is the biggest and is obviously the leader, and Annika recognises him as Bengt, a name I of course had to look up the spelling of (it's a normal Swedish name, though). Annika and Tommy try to stop Pippi from marching up to him, since of course they don't yet know about her strength - she confronts Bengt, who mocks her clothes and hair and calls her a circus clown, and so she lifts him up with one hand and the other bullies step back in fright. Pippi tosses Bengt into a tree, and gives the smaller boy his ball back. See, she is chaotic but she stops a bully when she sees one. Horse shows up just in time for Pippi and friends to ride off on him, and Bengt falls to the ground when the tree branches break.
The next scene is in a police station. There are two moustachioed police officers behind a desk, identical except for their hair colours, and three people are ranting at them - the old man with the pipe who saw the antics with the boat, the middle-aged woman who crashed into Horse, and the bully Bengt. The police officers tell them to quieten down - these two seem to actually intentionally have Canadian accents, perhaps a bit of self-deprecation as the two seem quite pathetic.
The complainants tell them all the things they're accusing Pippi of, and for each one, the cops search through a whole bunch of papers under their desk to find the appropriate hyper-specific forms - apparently they have forms such as one for throwing someone into a tree, which is briefly confused with the form for throwing a tree. It's unclear how any of this is seen as illegal - I think the only think it's reasonable to accuse Pippi of is Horse eating the woman's hat. Everything else was either self-inflicted, justified, or, in the case of the things the old man witnessed, not even remotely a crime. Why is he so annoyed by her lifting a horse and blowing at a ship, anyway?
The police officers check their understanding of the situation by describing Pippi based on everything they've heard, and we see a visualisation of their ridiculous conclusion, a version of Pippi who is as tall as a tree with huge muscles and pigtails down to her feet, wearing a caveman outfit for some reason. The three civilians tell them they're wrong and she's just a little girl, and the two police officers are confident this will be an easy one then, finally mentioning each other's names (Kling and Klang, not to be confused with the Pokémon Klink, Klang, and Klinklang).
Back at Villa Villekulla, where Pippi and Annika and Tommy have arrived, the siblings' mother calls them home from off-screen, so they say they'll be back after lunch. I guess that at least confirms that it really was around breakfast time before. Pippi says she'll see them then if she doesn't take a six month trip to Afghanistan instead - pretty terrible idea in 1997... - but then she says she'd better get unpacked instead. So I guess the kids did first meet her right after she arrived, then!
A police car speeds through the town, and my first thought was that the siren sound effect sounded as if someone was just doing it with their voice. Then there's a closer shot and we see that one of the policemen is in fact doing that! At least it was a good enough impression that I didn't immediately think that was the intent.
The two leave the car and get to the door of Villa Villekulla, and one of them drops his notebook - when he bends down to pick it up, through his open legs he sees Horse's face in close-up! You might think Horse is going to charge into him or something, but he just leaves the police alone yet perturbed.
Inside the house, Pippi (reunited with Mr Nilsson) is deciding where to put all her dad's gold - apparently that's what the treasure chest is full of. Wait, so where was she keeping essentials like clothes? That chest was her only luggage! She puts the chest in a room that seems to be full of other travel mementos, presumably from her father.
There's a knock at the door, and she's excited to see who the visitor might be - of course, it's the police. They say they want to speak to her parents, and she says she doesn't have any, which one of the police says is also illegal - children with no parents have to stay at the children's home. Pippi argues that, since she owns this house, that makes it a "children's home", but the officers don't agree and try to grab her - she dodges and they end up sprawled on the hallway floor, grabbing each other. Pippi climbs up the side of the house to one of its rooftops - it's a bit of an eccentric shape, appropriate for someone like Pippi - and shouts down to the police to try and catch her again, just sounding like she's having fun with all this!
Side note - I don't think the police even know Pippi's name, do they? They would only know she lives at Villa Villekulla because she told the middle-aged woman she was going there, so she could have passed that on.
One cop (I'm not bothering to learn which is which) whispers to the other that they should trick Pippi into thinking they're coming up the outside of the house and then sneak up through the house itself. Then he more loudly, for Pippi to hear, says that they will need to find a ladder - and the other cop obliviously points one out to him. When the first cop re-iterates that it's meant to be a trick, the second cop somehow thinks he means that it's a trick ladder. I don't think one cop is meant to be particularly smarter than the other - this was just the way around the exchange happened to go this time.
They creep up through the house, at one point falling foul of a bucket which trips them up and sends them back down the stairs again, and then they sneak around on the rooftop where they'd last seen Pippi only to end up grabbing each other - she has, of course, moved to a higher chimney.
So the police decide to trap her by climbing up to her again from ground level. They're each using a ladder - where did the second one come from? As they climb up, Annika and Tommy arrive back, calling up to ask what's going on and recognising Kling and Klang - Pippi tells them they're just playing a game. Maybe Pippi does actually see it that way! Both cops reach up to grab Pippi, and she slides back down the house and then steals both their ladders, leaving them stranded! Unless they try to be as acrobatic as her, that is.
They call down to tell her to put the ladders back. She continues talking about this as a game, so they tell her this game has to be over now, as they have other things they need to do - Pippi relents and lets them down. Once on the ground, Kling and Klang come close to witty banter by saying that it's time for a game called "take the little girl to the children's home", grabbing Pippi, who, of course, simply lifts both of them up by the arms they're grabbing her with. She throws them back into their car and tells them they can't just play games whenever they want. Very cheeky. Sounding dazed, both cops agree that Pippi can stay where she is.
Back at the police station, the cops break the news to the three complainants, who had apparently just been waiting there the whole time. They are outraged that nothing will be done, with focus especially on the middle-aged woman, who I have since learned is a major recurring villain in the franchise, even though she isn't even named here! At the Villa, Pippi's new friends say goodbye to her, and she looks delighted when they leave the grounds of her house by marching backwards! Clearly their lives will be better for having Pippi in them.
So that's the show! It was pretty enjoyable and I love Pippi's personality and values. She is the sort of character I want to be more like.