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Popples (1986)

First episode title: Panic At The Library

How familiar with the show am I?: I'd never heard of it.

I have lost count of how many shows we've done that are based on toylines. Popples were multi-coloured teddies of indeterminate species with rabbity ears and lollipop tails, whose gimmick was that they had a kind of "pouch" on their back that you could fold over to put the bottom half of the Popple inside it, essentially becoming a ball that could bounce around until you decided to "pop" them back to their regular forms. So, the show characters, who are toy-sized, all share this as their ability, along with a whole bunch of other magical powers!

Popples title card

The opening sequence shows a human girl and boy playing with a whole bunch of the little creatures, but this particular episode only features the girl and four Popples, so we won't be learning anything about the others here.

So let's learn who the characters we'll actually be focusing on are:

Bonnie: the human. Several Popples seem to live in her house.
Party: she's mostly pink with white parts, and she's spontaneous and playful.
P.C. (Pretty Cool): he's blue with pink hair, and seems to be the group's ideas guy.
Potato Chip: she's yellow with pink hair, and I think she's meant to be the food-obsessed one, hence the name, but it doesn't come up in this episode. She's also by far the smallest of these four Popples.
Puzzle: he's orange with green hair, and seems to be a little confused all the time.

It's only a little bit confusing that one Popple is known as P.C. when he's not the only Popple with those initials.

In an ordinary albeit large house, Bonnie is searching desperately under her bed, throwing books out across the room. P.C., in curled-up form, slides out of a drawer elsewhere in the room and magically springs back to regular Popple form, and he asks her what she's looking for. She's looking for a maths book, which she sarcastically says doesn't matter because she only needs it for the world's biggest maths test. Party pops out of another drawer with a book she says is the right one, saying that it's time to party as confetti and streamers start raining down, apparently as part of her magic powers - but Bonnie tells her that isn't the right book.

Party says 'let's party' and streamers rain down, while Bonnie and P.C. look surprised

Puzzle and Potato Chip emerge from the bedclothes with more books, and Bonnie gasps when she notices that Potato Chip has her diary. If you know anything about cartoon girls, you will know that is her most important possession.

Then the Popples, laughing, start to present things that aren't even books, like a hairbrush and a mug. The Popples are more childish than the child. They start causing chaos all around the room, throwing things, and switching between regular and ball forms to bounce around. They spend quite a while doing this but it's adorable to watch, even though it is of course annoying to Bonnie, who finally tells them to stop.

Popples throw books around, they rain down on Bonnie and a ball hits her head

Even then, Puzzle starts suggesting books Bonnie might be looking for, which are Popple-ified versions of stories like "Popple-stiltskin", but once she points out that it's her maths book that she's trying to find, Puzzle suggests going to the library. I guess it's a generic textbook rather than an exercise book or anything, because Bonnie agrees that that plan makes sense.

The Popples are excited to be going to the library, and underneath Bonnie's bed they go through quite an elaborate sequence of magically setting up their own little vehicle made out of a rollerskate, each component being pulled out of their pouches like they were Mary Poppins' bag, with Potato Chip driving, until Bonnie tells them they can't come. Why didn't she say that immediately, then? She leaves the house on her bike, not realising that all four Popples have snuck into her backpack anyway!

P.C. turns a shoe into a rollerskate car and Potato Chip gets in the driver's seat

Bonnie enters the library, and, when she passes through a turnstile at the entrance, the Popples jump out of her bag and start riding it like it's a merry-go-round. One of them calls it a "Popple-go-round" because apparently you don't need to be making actual puns to shoehorn the word "Popple" into everything. The turnstile comes to a natural stop, so P.C. gets a small electric fan out of his pouch and puts it on top to get it going again. The force makes everyone except P.C. fly off and attempt to make jokes about the places they land - Party saying "time out" due to landing on a clock is the only one that really works in context. Throughout all this, Bonnie, who looked like she was rushing along, has somehow only progressed a few steps past the turnstile, so she looks around at the noise but doesn't spot any Popples.

P.C. magics up an electric fan and all the Popples start spinning on the turnstile

She goes up to the library's card catalogue, which she says she's doing out loud as if to inform the viewer how a library works. This was the normal way of looking up books in a library before it was more common to do it by computer - stacks of index cards would be placed in cabinets full of drawers. She's flicking through the cards when she suddenly looks behind her - I think the idea is that she's just realised she spoke too loudly in a library and is worried she's going to be shushed - and when she looks back, instead of rifling through cards, her fingers are now tickling Potato Chip's tongue! How she managed to slip in there I have no idea.

Bonnie finds herself tickling Potato Chip's tongue and steps back, shocked

Bonnie demands to know what Potato Chip is doing here but she disappears, and so Bonnie starts pulling out drawers and scattering cards randomly in her desperation to find her - attracting the attention of a librarian. For some reason, we don't see her face - perhaps that's how this show treats all adults, as a Charlie Brown tribute, although she talks normally.

So Bonnie is shocked to be caught making a mess - she's probably a good little girl most of the time - and she promises to clean it up. Once the librarian goes away, all the Popples pop back up, with what looks like popcorn. Is that because they're "Pop"ples? Do they eat it all the time?

Bonnie says she'll need to clean this mess up and P.C. says that he can do it, picking up and tossing the cards around like they were packs of playing cards in a magic trick, until eventually they're all back in drawers. The right ones, in the right order? Who knows? But they're in there. Party once again proves herself to be the only one with good jokes by telling P.C. he's "such a card".

P.C. says this is '52-card cleanup' and he flings some cards into a drawer

Bonnie tells the Popples it's ten minutes until the library closes - I'd be more concerned about the fact that we've only got four minutes left in the episode - and P.C. says the Popples will find the book Bonnie needs. Before she can even get done saying she doesn't think that would be a good idea, all four of them are already in ball form and bouncing away.

The Popples stop at a shelf where P.C. says he sees the book, so they make a tower of Popples, uncomfortably kicking each other in the face in the process, until P.C. can reach the book. He opens it to a page of complicated calculus looking stuff, and says that this isn't the one. How he expects to recognise the right one, I don't know. He puts it back on the shelf, but the tower of Popples begins to... topple. P.C. tries to steady them by grabbing hold of a shelf, but it extends outside the bookcase - far further out than the depth of the bookcase, somehow - and they all scurry out of the way just in time for when the bookcase falls over and starts a domino effect of knocking down the other cases.

The bookcases start falling, and the Popples bounce away in ball form

As the Popples bounce away, we see that the bookcases are inexplicably arranged at the ends the way an actual domino track would be, in those semicircular U-turn shapes, so that the effect continues along the whole room! There is absolutely no consistency in the way the library is laid out, I might add. By the end, no case in the room is standing. The Popples look on from the side, shocked, Potato Chip saying "oops"... and then they all laugh. It seems like they can't ever feel properly bad for their actions no matter what.

Potato Chip says 'oops' and then all the Popples laugh

An angry Bonnie tells them off - once again, how slowly does she move when she's off-camera? - and then there's a weird bit of animation where Puzzle's hood goes over his head, the camera zooms into the black inside the hood... and then back out again, and he retracts his hood and says he knows how they can clean this mess up. Was that some kind of weird representation of him getting an idea?

He magics a little handcart out of nowhere and pushes it beneath the case at the end of the chain, and then he, P.C., and Party jump on the handle. That levers the case back into position, and somehow the entire room full of cases along with it! Well, if it's a magic lever...

There's one book still left on the floor after all this, and by an amazing coincidence P.C. recognises it as the book Bonnie needs. Is this the life she leads? Popples causing chaos all over the place and then everything just magically works out alright in the end? The librarian comes over, her face still unseen, saying that she's sure she saw the bookshelves having fallen over but now they're not. Magical friends that only you know about make gaslighting fun!

The final scene is in Bonnie's room, where Party asks if they can party now, and Bonnie says she still needs to study but the Popples can party "all night". From everything we've seen, I feel like it would be pretty impossible for her to focus on studying if any Popples are partying in the same room!

This show was alright, and the characters are definitely cute, but it wasn't doing much for me in terms of story. It was at least a good decision to not try and cram every Popple into every episode, as the short runtime would have made it impossible for any individual characters' personalities to stand out that way.