Potsworth & Co. (1990)
First episode title: Night of the Bedbugs
How familiar with the show am I?: I'd never heard of it before!
I didn't mean to do two Hanna-Barbera shows in a row, honest! This one's completely different from Scooby-Doo, though, because it's about a group of kids and their talking dog. Wait, what? Um, anyway, the kids in this show look to be ordinary kids in their waking life, but in their dreams they form the "Midnight Patrol" who protect the Dream Zone from the evil Nightmare Prince. Potsworth is their dog, who is just a dog in real life but can talk in the Dream Zone.
The show was called "Potsworth & Co." in the UK and "Midnight Patrol: Adventures in the Dream Zone" in the US. Normally I'd go with the title used in the country of origin, but awkwardly this one was a UK/US co-production. So, I'm defaulting to the UK as that's where I'm from.
The intro shows each of the kids going to bed in their own houses and getting transported to the Dream Zone from there, so now is the perfect time to go through the characters and what we can learn about them just from this sequence:
- Keiko rides a skateboard and has a ramp leading up to her bed, so she's clearly the sporty type. In the Dream Zone, her skateboard can hover.
- Rosie and Nick must be siblings, as they sleep in the same room in a bunk bed. Rosie has the top bunk and Nick is definitely characterised as more of a little kid, so I think it's safe to say that Rosie is the eldest.
- Nick sleeps with a toy dinosaur in his bed, and there's a dinosaur poster on the wall. Nick wears a caped superhero outfit - in the dream world, this allows him to fly.
- Rosie has a ponytail and skirt combo that would make her look designed to be the token girl character if Keiko wasn't also there! On the title card she has a grumpy expression whereas the other kids are all smiling, so she's probably meant to be a bit of a spoilsport.
- Carter sleeps with Potsworth on top of his covers, so he or his family must own the dog. His room has a toy plane and a "Space" poster, but also an "MHS" sports pennant and a ball, so I guess he is an all-around ace!
The intro also shows us that the Dream Zone is ruled by some kind of sleepy king character in a crown and pyjamas, and terrorised by the Nightmare Prince, a figure in a dark cloak whose head is possibly meant to be a crescent moon? It's certainly pale and long and curved and doesn't have ears.
The episode itself starts with the very same Nightmare Prince, and two little green minions of his, being chased by a big hairy purple monster through a forest of what I want to call brambles? The Prince identifies the monster as a Globgobbler right before it gobbles him up. Wow, the villain was dealt with quickly! ...OK yes you know that's not it. The Prince's minions burst into tears and one of them asks why "someone so rotten" should go out this way, so immediately I could tell that these are villains that operate on that whole "bad = good" logic where every term that's negative for us is positive for them. You'd think I'd have seen that more so far in Debutniverse.
But then the monster looks disgusted and spits him back out.
Nightmare Prince: Yes, good thing I wore my "old sock and onion" cologne, eh?
See what I mean? Smelly is good to them too. Anyway, the Prince and his minions move along and reach a grand building which the Prince calls "the Temple of the Cork". Unfortunately, the Prince suffers from "British accent voiced by American actor" syndrome, and I definitely did not hear it as "Cork" the first time round. He tells us (yes, he actually turns to the screen) that this is where the "Bedbugs" have been imprisoned for a thousand years, up until now.
They enter the outer chamber of the temple, but the Prince fears a booby trap. He tells one of the two minions (named Irving - we'll learn later that the other is named Igor) to open the door to the inner chamber. Irving does so, and a massive stone block crashes down... onto the Prince instead. The Prince, as flat as a pancake, brags that he was right. Small victories, eh?
They get into the next room anyway, and, as promised by the name of the place, there's a giant cork stuck in a hole in the middle of the floor. The Prince says that this is where the "Dozer" imprisoned the Bedbugs a thousand years ago. We'll find out more about that later. For now, the Prince explains that Bedbugs eat everything and orders the minions to uncork the hole, which they do, releasing a load of child-sized green insects that start chanting about how they're going to "party". I like the look of the Bedbugs - recognisably "bugs" in having six limbs and antennae and such, but also very cartoonish at the same time.
The minions say that the Bedbugs are as "ugly, smelly, and disgusting" as the Prince, which he of course takes as a compliment. And then he says that, when the Bedbugs eat the Dream Zone, he'll be having a "party" of his own - except he seems to make fun of the American accent of the Bedbugs, as he actually says "par-dee" mockingly, which of course isn't how he would pronounce it in his accent.
This fades into our one scene in the real world, where the kids are having an outdoor sleepover under a big full moon. They're excited to get to sleep because the Dream Zone is having a "Midnight Patrol Day". That is, a celebration of the team formed by the kids, not simply a day where they go on patrol, which is how I initially misinterpreted it. Not much else happens in the real world after this foreshadowing, except for Rosie getting annoyed to find Nick's toy dinosaur in her sleeping bag, and him being relieved to have it back. They don't seem to get on well as siblings.
The full moon cleverly fades into the round form of the sleeping king, who is lying on a tall pile of mattresses. The room he's sleeping in has been decorated for Midnight Patrol Day, with balloons, cake, and a big banner with the faces of all the kids on it. The king's servant, a tiny balding man with glasses, is anxious about getting the palace ready for Midnight Patrol Day, but inteprets the king's snores as approval of the decorations. Nothing in the episode contradicts the idea that he can correctly interpret a non-response from the king, so I think we're meant to take it as true!
The kids magically appear in the palace. As mentioned before, in this world, Nick can fly and Keiko's skateboard can hover, so both of them appear floating beside the others. I didn't know going into this show that Potsworth can talk in the dream world, so his impressed reaction to the decorations came out of nowhere for me! Just like the Prince, he has a "British" accent.
The servant welcomes the Midnight Patrol to their "first annual" celebration, and has two of the many identical-looking guards of the place roll out the red carpet - two more guards were inside the rolled-up carpet, and jump up out of it to play a fanfare! That's a funny little moment. The king regains consciousness just enough to congratulate them all, but he doesn't even finish his sentence before going back to sleep again, and his servant has to complete it for him. It's a cute dynamic that the two of them have, actually. Nick says that it's an honour, and his plush dinosaur makes some noises of agreement. So, the living dog can speak in the dream world, whereas the toy comes to life in the dream world but doesn't gain full speech capabilities. Does everything move up some kind of hierarchy when it enters the dream?
Rosie calls this day "my own day" even though it's celebrating the whole of the Midnight Patrol. I'm starting to like her less and less. Just as she says that nothing can ruin this day, the big banner collapses onto her and Keiko, as one of the supports has been eaten by a Bedbug! He proceeds to eat the entire banner, as the king's servant is horrified to learn that the Bedbugs are back, which is the ad break cliffhanger.
Carter tells everyone not to worry because there's only one Bedbug, and then a bunch more march in, from the direction he was looking in. Do you need glasses, Carter? Or is your field of vision dependent on where the camera is pointing? The Bedbugs gobble up the cake, and when Nick says he's surprised they didn't eat a big trophy that's on display, one of them takes notice of it and eats it too.
Potsworth suggests waking the Dozer - i.e., the king. So yes, the person that the Prince mentioned as having imprisoned the Bedbugs a thousand years ago is still the person in charge of the Dream Zone today - how old is he? Here we also first learn the name of that servant of his - it's Sebastian. He says that the Dozer will soon be awake anyway, and we see that the Bedbugs are eating through the pile of mattresses he's sleeping on! He stays in the air for a moment before falling - because it's a cartoon, or because it's a dream? - and even after falling he only has time to exclaim that the Bedbugs must have escaped before he's back to sleep again! What does it even mean to sleep in a dream world? Does he dream? Is there any kind of recursion here?
Sebastian tells the kids that the Bedbugs were being kept in the Temple of the Cork, which is a lot more understandable in his voice. Keiko encourages everyone to deal with the Bedbugs with her and they all head off.
Keiko: Hey, we can handle those pesky Bedbugs! And then we'll have a party! Let's roll, Midnight Patrol!
Potsworth: [sarcastically] She makes everything sound so easy...
In a forest somewhere in the Dream Zone, where many of the trees have clearly been devastated by the Bedbugs, a very female-coded Bedbug with red lips and a beehive hairdo is trying to decide what to eat next. Two rocks with faces decide they don't want to be her next victims, so they grow little stick legs and run away. Even though this whole thing is set in a dream world, this is by far the most surreal moment of the episode.
Nick and Keiko look at the bug from a distance, and Nick tells Keiko "Murphy and I can handle this" as he pulls out a big baseball bat from his suit. A first-time viewer could easily be confused into thinking that the baseball bat is named Murphy (that's actually the toy dinosaur). I thought it was enough of a coincidence that we had two shows in a row with talking dogs, but this one's even better - as Nick goes flying into battle, he does a little "hm-hm-hm-hm hm-hm!" fanfare that's the same melody Scrappy-Doo does before he says "puppy power"! We don't see what happens between Nick and the Bedbug, but he flies back on-screen with his bat reduced to the smoking end of a handle...
The Bedbug finishes eating another tree, and when Keiko confronts her she just eats Keiko's skateboard too before fleeing. Keiko does something very interesting here - she wishes up a new skateboard just from the power of her mind, and says that it's easy to do in the Dream Zone. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this moment, but if you can magically make anything appear in the Dream Zone then it would seem to save a lot of the bother they go through in the rest of the episode. Of course, some of the other episodes might define clear rules around wishing that aren't obvious here.
The Prince watches some of the chaos from monitors in his castle and chuckles about it. He's specifically watching a pair of Bedbugs eating a big pile of corn cobs. Compared to everything else, what's so evil about eating corn? Does it just grow in the Dream Zone, or are they ruining someone's crops? If so, do Dream Zone entities need to eat to live? Do they have livelihoods? So many questions raised. (I myself once tried to write a story set in a dream world, and I found I was running into these sorts of issues constantly.) Carter, Potsworth, and Rosie are hiding in a tree above, and they drop a metal cage onto the two Bedbugs, but the Bedbugs simply eat their way out of the cage.
Potsworth: Ridding the Dream Zone of these Bedbugs is almost as difficult as training a human.
The Prince is still watching all this, but he's interrupted by a giant Bedbug eating a bunch of his monitors and asking him what's for dessert. The Prince seems absolutely devastated by his monitors being eaten, and complains that the Bedbugs weren't supposed to eat his things! Leopards Eating People's Faces, am I right?
He goes into another room and finds that they're also eating his "garbage collection". Geddit? Then he gets a phone call, on a landline receiver that comes out of his sleeve - where it connects to, I certainly don't know. It's his mother - again the English accent fails as he distinctly says "mom" - and all we hear of her voice is indistinct and high-pitched. He obviously doesn't want to hear from her, and he's spared any further conversation by the large Bedbug eating the phone.
Once the Prince sees some of the Bedbugs carrying off his throne, it's the final straw. He calls for Igor and Irving and tells them to go after the bugs.
Meanwhile, the Midnight Patrol are chasing a pair of Bedbugs who are carrying off a bath and eating some soap. The Patrol collide with the Prince and his minions coming the other way. It's over halfway through the episode and this is the first time we've seen them encounter each other! Rosie accuses the Prince of unleashing the Bedbugs, and he denies it, right before one of the Bedbugs thanks him for doing so. But they also realise that the Prince is being bothered by the Bedbugs too, and so Potsworth suggests getting the Prince to help them (which Keiko is very enthusiastic about). I'm not sure what they've seen that suggests he'd be able to help them! He initially refuses to help, until a Bedbug-ravaged tree falls on him, and he agrees. They don't even seem to be in a forest at this point - there was just apparently a lone tree there so that it could fall over onto the Prince!
Then Sebastian and the Dozer show up - by which I mean, Sebastian is exhausted from pulling a wheeled bed on which the Dozer is lying, with another pile of mattresses. What's hilarious is that he's here for the Dozer to tell them something, but Sebastian just ends up interpreting the Dozer's snores as usual anyway, so Sebastian could have saved himself a lot of effort and just delivered the message himself! Sebastian says he needs to tell the Midnight Patrol how "we" defeated the Bedbugs the first time, so Sebastian was apparently there a thousand years ago too. He gets out a book from under the mattresses and says they lured the Bedbugs back to the temple with the music of the "fabled violumpet", as he shows a page of the book with a picture of a musical instrument that looks like a cross between a violin and a trumpet, naturally.
Sebastian says the violumpet was lost long ago, but Nick says they should just find another, which Potsworth is sceptical about. See, this is where the whole skateboard-summoning thing comes back in my mind. Is it not possible to just wish for a new violumpet? Or can you only wish back something that was broken? So many questions.
Irving mentions that the Prince has a violumpet, but he hurriedly says his instrument is actually a trombonolin. But then he rants at Irving about how he only plays the violumpet because his mother makes him do it, which is delivered at full volume but I guess the Midnight Patrol aren't meant to be hearing it. Then the Prince sees a Bedbug walking off with his violumpet, so he distracts everyone by telling them a Bedbug is making off with the Dozer and grabs his instrument back. There's another moment of people's eyesight being apparently limited by the camera, because the Prince hides the violumpet behind his back, where it's invisible to the audience but should be clearly visible to the kids from their point of view!
Then the Prince gets another phone call - there's a phone in his other sleeve! - and in answering it (and explaining that he won't be able to come to his violumpet lesson) he drops the violumpet and everyone sees it. The violumpet is such an enigma - it's rare and mysterious enough that the Prince's one is the only one anyone knows of, but common enough for people to run lessons on playing it... Then the Prince says he wishes he had a different job. What, the Nightmare Prince isn't a position you can abdicate from?
Cut to the kids having dragged the Prince somewhere in a city to begin their plan.
Nightmare Prince: It won't work, I tell you! It won't work!
Carter: Give it a rest, Prince. You must have told us that about a thousand times!
Potsworth: One thousand and forty-five irritating times to be exact.
Rosie, Keiko, and Nick rush along holding a giant sandwich, pursued by two Bedbugs, and they tell the Prince to hurry it up. So he starts playing. The instrument looks like a violin with its handle bit replaced with the honky end of a trumpet. Yes those things have real names but they mean nothing to me. Anyway, somehow that setup results in it sounding like a violin and a trumpet playing the same notes at the same time, and the melody is just the same six notes on a loop. It immediately results in the two nearby Bedbugs falling to sleep. That's the effect it will continue to have on Bedbugs throughout the episode, making it weird that Sebastian said they "lured" the Bedbugs to the temple with it back in the day.
Rosie asks how a terrible noise like that can make anyone go to sleep, and Potsworth puts on earmuffs and says "Don't ask me", which wouldn't necessarily be worth mentioning here but makes a great reaction gif:
Keiko tells the Prince his act is going on the road, and this takes us into the episode's other ad break. When we come back, some Bedbugs are tearing up what looks like a public park area in front of a grand building - Carter and Nick come out and tell the bugs they're missing the party in the auditorium. The bugs take notice of the word "party" and start chanting it again as they flood in, only for the Prince's music to knock them out. A couple of the guards show up to take some of the Bedbugs away in a wheelbarrow - one of them has the standard guard design, and the other is the same except that instead of the helmet he has hair in a ponytail. This same design shows up once in the opening sequence, so maybe he's a recurring character? None of the guards speak in this episode, at least.
Keiko: You're doing a great job, Princey! Isn't teamwork fun?
Nightmare Prince: Is she always like this?
Rosie: Yeah, but you get used to it after a while.
What's your problem, Rosie? I still don't like her. Then Keiko and the Prince go around on flying skateboards - so I guess you can summon a second one - to put a bunch of the Bedbugs outside to sleep too.
Next, Carter has his own radio station. Whether this is something he's just dreamed up or a studio already present in the Dream Zone is unclear, but he announces the station as "KBUG" and introduces the Nightmare Prince to all the Bedbugs listening out there, as the Prince plays in the studio. There are speakers on top of the studio building and the broadcast is knocking out all the rest of the bugs.
Then Rosie, also in the studio, complains that the Prince stinks and sprays him with perfume. What, did he only just start stinking now? Maybe all his work playing that music is making it worse. They grumble at each other, but all it takes is for Keiko to poke her head around the door and congratulate them for them to take the same side as each other in hating her again. Why is Rosie on the good guy side again?
The kids dump all the Bedbugs down the hole in the temple and re-cork it, and then the Prince can finally stop playing - his arms actually lengthen and his elbows hit the ground to show how tired he has gotten from playing, which is a nice silly little touch. He complains about everything that's happened to him today and Keiko tries to tell him what a good job he did, so he and Rosie complain about her again. Come on, guys.
As they all start to exit the temple, the Prince remembers about the booby-trap, and insists on closing the door (pretending he's doing it out of wanting to be helpful) while they all stand back, in the position where he got hit by the stone block last time. He shuts it, yells "so long, suckers!"... and a big stone slab drops on him instead. I love it. Instant karma. He scuttles off, still flat and still with the rock on top of him.
Back at the Dozer's palace, Sebastian congratulates the Midnight Patrol, and Keiko tries to suggest that the Nightmare Prince also deserves some credit, but Carter, Potsworth, and Rosie all yell "No!" in response. Fair point. Carter is disappointed that they didn't get to have Midnight Patrol Day the way they expected, so the Dozer briefly wakes up to declare this to be "Midnight Patrol Week"! Potsworth's reaction is to quote the Bedbugs' "Party" chant, and just like the Prince he mocks their American accent in doing so.
So, that's Potsworth & Co.! It's definitely a fun show. I just wish Potsworth himself had done a bit more, given that he's the title character - here he seems to just be a sidekick to the human children. But maybe that's the whole idea?