Problem Child (1993)

First episode title: Toys Will Be Toys

How familiar with the show am I?: I hadn't heard of it before.

Based on a 1990 film that I also hadn't heard of, Problem Child looks to be about a Dennis the Menace-like pointy-haired kid called Junior, but without the beloved childhood memories I have attached to Dennis. So let's see how well that works out for it.

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After an opening sequence showing Junior causing chaos for everyone around him, the actual episode unexpectedly starts out in a tropical jungle setting, where two young boys in army outfits are fleeing from two figures in black outfits with hooded faces, carrying guns. My immediate thought was that this was some sort of fantasy that the title character must be dreaming up, except that neither of the boys look like him.

The obvious villains shoot lasers at the boys who duck for cover amongst some plants, and then spot two big green bazooka-type weapons left nearby. They start firing at the hooded figures, who flee in terror as the resulting explosions leave pits in the ground. Then the boys, who had looked like the good guys up until now, approach a town that definitely hadn't been there in the wide shot of the jungle and start blowing up cars and stuff.

Now it finally becomes clear what it is we've been watching, as the picture fades to an image of a suit-wearing moustached man in an office and the outline of a TV screen appears around the frame. The man introduces himself as "Larry Q. von Zell" (no guarantee I'm spelling that right), president of "Plastique Toys". Apparently this whole thing was an ad for a "Li'l Trooper" missile launcher toy, which costs $9.95 that will be fully refunded if you call von Zell personally to tell him you're not satisfied. And then there's a whole bunch of quickly-spoken disclaimers about how the product may vary and such, as Junior, in his living room, looks at the TV in excitement.

TV: Contains lead-based paint, asbestos, and traces of radon. May meet federal or state safety standards, but then again may not.

Junior's father, whose outfit makes it clear he is a police officer, turns off the TV, telling Junior that's enough for one Saturday morning. A children's cartoon telling you to be sensible about the amount of TV you watch! How quaint. There's no mother in Junior's life, by the way - external sources tell me that Junior is adopted, which makes it an interesting choice to give both Junior and his father the same red hair. Then Junior asks if he can have the toy from the ad, but his dad refuses, saying he doesn't like war toys, and that Junior should focus on things that are more creative.

Junior points out the "mural" he painted as evidence that he's creative - we see that one whole wall of the kitchen is covered in drawings of devils and flames. I know we're meant to think he's bad for doing that but it's some nice art. There is some banter about whether it's meant to be a picture of Junior's grandfather, who Junior mocks throughout the conversation, implying he's as bad as the devil. If you're picturing some innocent old man who doesn't deserve such comments, don't worry - we're going to meet him later, and he does. We also briefly see the neighbour's now-multicoloured cat that Junior apparently used as a paintbrush.

Junior points out his dad's hypocrisy in not liking toy weapons when he carries a real gun for his job. His dad tries to defend himself by saying that he's properly trained in it, but it cuts to a flashback showing him on a firing range completely missing the target, the bullet ricocheting around until it causes a boulder to fall and coincidentally hit the target. I guess Junior could somehow see this, because back in the real world he calls it a great shot.

Anyway, his dad goes off to work still insisting that he won't buy Junior the toy, so Junior decides he'll need to buy it himself. In his room, he smashes open a clown-shaped piggy bank with a hammer - how much money do cartoon characters spend on piggy banks alone? - and when he tosses the hammer over his shoulder, it disintegrates on contact with the electrically-charged cage in the corner of his room, containing his pet Yoji. Yoji is some kind of bizarre monster, covered in hair with claws and a bald warty tail, which doesn't look related to any kind of real creature. Oh, and it apparently wasn't in the film. The show just decided to give him this weird pet for who knows what reason. We won't be seeing it again after this scene.

So there's a gag where Yoji presses a food button in its cage - a tube dispenses some slop, and Yoji eats the food and the tray it came in - while Junior counts up his money. Remember, the ad said $9.95.

Junior: [sighs] Forty-seven cents, three buttons, and one unexploded cherry bomb. Insufficient funds.

Junior says to Yoji that he needs to find a way to get some money. Yoji burps in his face and it gives Junior the idea to go and see his grandfather. I swear, he deserves these insults.

So next we see Junior standing outside the front gates of a mansion. He presses an intercom and says that it's him, and a bunch of big dangerous-looking gun things come out of the walls and start firing lasers at him, while his grandfather's voice laughs over the intercom. Believe me yet?

Junior is able to dodge the lasers and climb over the wall, and gets inside the house. The inside looks how you'd expect for a huge mansion, full of chandeliers and expensive-looking works of art. Junior runs straight to a kind of spa room where his grandfather, grey-haired and moustached, is getting a massage from a burly man with an anchor tattoo. Gramps' eyes are closed, so Junior sneaks right up to him and says "hola" in his face, scaring him so that he jumps into the arms of the masseur.

There's some back-and-forth between Gramps and Junior about whether Junior is in Gramps' will (he isn't), and I feel like I have to mention at this point that almost every conversation involving Junior re-uses the same close-up shot of his face, just with the mouth movements changed each time. It makes a show feel really low-budget if it has to resort to animation recycling for such a simple action.

Junior mentions that Gramps has been saying on Junior's birthday for years that he's been putting some money away in a bank account for him and he hasn't seen any of that money yet, and Gramps carries Junior out of the house by the scruff of his neck while claiming that the bank went broke and lost all that money. Then he proceeds to mock Junior for wanting money for a toy, tell Junior he'll have to work for some money himself, and light a cigar by burning some cash.

There's a really weird ad break cut here. Before the break, Junior tries to catch the burning cash as it falls only for it to turn into ashes. After the break, he's standing next to Gramps again and responds to the last line Gramps said as if nothing had happened in between.

A man pulls up in a car, and, addressing Gramps as "Mayor Healy" - the fact that he's the mayor is otherwise irrelevant - tells him his "Swiss army vehicle" is here, pressing buttons to make all kinds of things like a jacuzzi and a stereo system pop out of it. The animation is pretty lazy here though, so the transformation happens off-screen, as you'll see in the gif below. Hopping into the jacuzzi, Gramps tells Junior to go off and mow lawns or something for the money, but not Gramps's lawn because it's "genuine Kentucky bluegrass", which I just thought was a music genre till now. Gramps tells Junior he can at least show him his toy once he has it, and Junior imagines himself blowing up Gramps' mansion with it.

Then there is a scene where Junior is in his room opening a package containing the toy gun, only for it to turn out to be a fantasy and he's actually holding a chainsaw in someone's lawn - due to his distraction, he has cut up some hedges and the mailbox. It's not obvious to me what exactly he was supposed to be doing with the chainsaw. He's with a girl called Cyndi who he refers to as the smartest kid he knows, and this is her father's lawn. Junior is wondering if he's still going to get paid until he hears her father yell from off-screen, and she mocks him for his mistake.

There's a montage of him mowing lawns and doing other chores for various people, the funniest being the part where he is building a huge pyramid brick by brick. Look, I'm taking the laughs where I can get them, OK? And then he's walking down the street checking what he's earned so far - he has $5.64 and there's only one house left. On this street? In the whole town? Who knows. I think he deserved more money than that for the pyramid, though.

He approaches the dilapidated-looking house of "old man Sefton" (again, spelling unknown), who is apparently rumoured to be an "escaped lunatic", and knocks on the door - an old man with wild grey hair steps out, asking him what he wants. Everything about the way he looks and talks is obviously meant to be creepy even though we don't really know anything bad about him. Sweat drips down Junior's face as Sefton asks him if he could clear out his basement. Junior is hesitant until Sefton offers him $5, which of course would take Junior's total up by enough to get the toy.

Junior descends with a broom into a cobweb-covered basement, and this supposedly tough kid gets startled by everything he encounters. At one point he's scared by a clock noise and it turns out it was made by a clock with a lampshade on top and a rug draped around it, all on a chair that's balanced on a pile of junk, making the whole assemblage look vaguely person-shaped. It does not look like a natural accumulation of objects. He also gets frightened by his own reflection in a broken mirror, and has to reassure himself:

Junior: OK, calm down. Remember, grown-ups are afraid of me - not the other way around!

Then the old man approaches out of nowhere and startles Junior into running right at a sarcophagus, which opens to reveal a "mummy" that quickly unravels into just bandages. Sefton starts screaming "Mummy!" as Junior staggers into a guillotine(!) which he narrowly escapes, getting the head of his broom chopped off. The old man cackles as he asks whether Junior likes his "little toys".

Junior knocks over the old man as he races out of the basement and out of the house, and gets all the way to his house and nails boards to the front door before he realises he never got his $5. He actually tears his own front door off its hinges in order to race back to Sefton's and demand his money from the old man, who is still on the floor of the basement where Junior left him, and now it's his turn to be scared as Junior threatens him into giving him the money. I am finding Junior's interactions with this particular old man a lot less sympathetic than with Gramps.

We next see Junior and Cyndi in Cyndi's front garden with the box for the toy, ready to open it. I don't know how much of a friend Cyndi is meant to be to Junior, because in her first scene she mocked him for messing up, but here she's encouraging and telling him he earned this.

Junior opens the box, gets annoyed at how much packaging he has to dig through, only to find a small pink pistol that looks nothing like the rocket launchers from the ad, that squeaks when he grasps it, and when he tries firing the provided ammo it just falls straight down. Junior is annoyed, but then Cyndi points out there's that full refund guarantee. This scene starts a trend that lasts most of the rest of the episode, where almost every scene ends with a similar guitar sting that would work better if the scene had had an actual punchline to accentuate - they used it sparingly earlier on, but here it's like they started to realise the episode was going to need some padding out.

Junior calls the customer complaint line, only to find out from a pre-recorded message by von Zell that the guarantee has a bunch of conditions that mean he isn't going to be getting his money back. In particular, the guarantee sounds like it excludes every single state in the USA (there's a list but we don't hear all of it clearly enough to confirm that all fifty are on it). While Junior's hearing this, we get to see von Zell participating in that classic stereotypical CEO pastime of playing golf in his office, although his office is large enough that he actually needs a golf cart to cross it. That's one gag here that I appreciate.

Junior decides to get his revenge, and we next see him standing on the window ledge of von Zell's office, looking in. As von Zell now plays archery in his office, an assistant of some kind is telling von Zell that they've had over five thousand complaints about the gun toy, and von Zell is delighted because that means they've sold over five thousand of them. That seems kind of low sales for an implicitly big company like this, though. Then another employee rushes in to tell von Zell there's been an issue with a batch of teddy bears - their heads come off very easily and there's a big metal spike coming out of the neck stump - and von Zell immediately spins it as a positive, calling it a "cuddly war toy" and demonstrating by firing it with his bow at the target.

von Zell: Ship those right out, Lester. And mark the boxes not suitable for children under three... uh, make that two months.

And then von Zell has to leave to get an award from a children's hospital. He makes the joke himself that he deserves it for the amount of business they've got thanks to his toys. This guy has no shame.

Outside the building, Cyndi is already hiding in a bush by von Zell's car, and Junior rushes over and joins her - Cyndi expresses doubts about what they are about to do. I guess she is less of a Problem Child than he is.

When von Zell approaches, the two kids jump out holding up aerosol cans, and Junior tells von Zell this is his last chance to give him a refund on his Li'l Trooper toy. When he refuses, Junior and Cyndi start spraying him with something like Silly String to tie him up, and Junior takes von Zell's car keys from his pocket. They dump von Zell in the back seats of his car and the kids get in the front, Junior claiming he's an experienced driver because his cousin has a go-kart!

Junior tells Cyndi he's going to take von Zell to meet someone who "really likes toys". Guess who. Junior decides that the "R" on the gear stick is "Roll forward" so he proceeds to go speeding away in reverse, although it doesn't faze him - he seems to be enjoying the chaos he's causing as von Zell tries to scream in the back seat, muffled because of the string covering his mouth. Junior puts a tape from the glovebox into the car's radio, and it plays... some kind of generic instrumental music that could well have been the background music for the show anyway?

Junior's father, the police officer if you've forgotten after all this, steps out of the station towards his car and almost gets hit by the backwards-speeding vehicle. He doesn't notice that it's his own son driving, though, and just yells about the crazy driver. He might not even have noticed the car was backwards.

Junior stops the tape, but you would think he had switched it to some rock music if you didn't realise the audio had just switched back to the same non-diegetic music that was playing before he first put the tape in. He ends up using the ramp of a car carrier truck to propel the car straight over some buildings and lands right outside old man Sefton's house.

The kids put the tied-up von Zell in the middle of the basement and hide as Sefton finds him and starts excitedly shouting about a mummy again. He puts von Zell in the sarcophagus and says that he'll be right back, so while he's away Junior goes up to von Zell and demands he give back his $9.95, and the same for everyone else who has called and complained. That last touch is more than I might have expected from a character like him.

When von Zell indicates his muffled agreement, Junior unties him and von Zell hands him a $10 note, then runs off yelling to keep the change, knocking over Sefton who was coming back with a teaset on a tray and who ends up on the floor by the basement stairs again now. He whimpers that he wanted to have a tea party... Even Junior seems to feel sorry for him now, so he gives him the squeaky pink gun and luckily he loves it (he's even excited by the squeaking).

Then von Zell gets outside to find that Junior's dad is giving his car a ticket for reckless driving. The fine is $2,000 because "it's the 29th of the month and you're my first ticket". Wait, do American police have some kind of total amount they have to collect per month? Ew. At least it annoys von Zell even more, and he drives away angrily.

The kids and the old man leave the house:

Junior: You know Mr Sefton, for a deranged lunatic, you're not so bad!

Sefton: Oh, same to you, Junior.

Ah, imagine if Junior grows up to be just like Sefton. Junior's dad spots Junior and says that he felt bad about dashing his hopes for the toy gun, so he bought him one, but he couldn't find a Li'l Trooper - which is lucky for Junior, because the toy gun his dad has bought looks much more like what he wanted! He promises his dad he won't shoot it at anything, and Cyndi is excited to see that the ammunition is rotten egg bombs. I still haven't gotten a hold on her personality. I think she just has the same interests as Junior but is more apprehensive about actually causing any trouble.

Junior fires a rocket. Cut to Gramps's house, where he's showing off that new car from earlier to an attractive young woman. He's being as sleazy as before and claiming that his grandson bought this car for him with his birthday money - she's impressed, right up until the bomb comes down and covers both of them and the car in slime with visible stink marks. To finish us off with a pun, the woman says that the car "stinks".

I don't know if it obviously came off from how much I was struggling to find things to be entertained by here, but I was majorly underwhelmed with this cartoon. I'm ready to forget it and move on.