Sylvanian Families (1987)
First episode title: Dam Busters / Outfoxing the Foxes
How familiar with the show am I?: I'm generally aware of the toyline that it's based on, but nothing more specific.
Is this the first episode?: Not only do different sources disagree on the order of the episodes, they disagree on which segments were paired up to make the episodes. Since the copies I found match up with Wikipedia on the latter point, I've gone with Wikipedia's ordering too.
Sylvanian Families is a line of toys of adorable little anthropomorphic animals in rural clothing. Like many toys for children, it has received several animated adaptations - something we should be used to by now!
The opening sequence is one that describes the concept of the show. A man with a beard tells us that if you make a wish before you go to sleep, it might take you to the Sylvanian forest. It looks like you enter through his house, which has a little mousehole-sized door at the back, and some kind of magic turns you "small... smaller... smallest!" (in his words) before you go in. Evidently, the Sylvanian families are as small as their toys, I suppose to help kids pretend their toys are the real things!
So here we go with another show that has two segments per episode, the first one here being "Dam Busters". It looks like the general pattern here is that we get introduced to a child in the "real world" at the start of each segment, with the bearded man narrating why it is that this particular child has made a wish to go to the Sylvanian forest, before they are magically transported to him.
This segment's child is seven-year-old Donny, who wishes he was strong and could win trophies like his older brother. They both sleep in the same room, and we can see as they sleep that his brother's side of the room is full of trophies and other sports paraphernalia, whereas Donny's side has toys and a poster of a cartoon animal. A shower of magical sparks lifts a version of Donny out of his sleeping body, and he is immediately transported outside a building he recognises as "the woodkeeper's cabin", the woodkeeper being that bearded narrator. The children all seem to know this rule about how you get to the Sylvanian forest and recognise the characters and such, so have they already been watching the show they're in? Or have stories about this place simply been passed from child to child? The cabin is built into a large tree which looks like it must have been hollowed out to make that possible, since some of the windows are on the tree itself.
Donny goes into the cabin - the woodkeeper already knows his name. I would guess that the magic that transports the children is controlled by him. Donny is interested to see that the woodkeeper also has many trophies, and he assumes they're for sports, but the woodkeeper tells him they're actually for all the times he's helped the Sylvanian families. But it's too early for Donny to learn the moral of the episode just yet, so the woodkeeper opens the little door and Donny shrinks down like in the opening.
Donny goes through and he's magically transported again, to the forest. He approaches a house where two grey bears are working on some kind of contraption. One of the bears, a young boy, spots Donny - he introduces himself as Preston Evergreen and the other as his grandfather Ernest. Donny introduces himself, bashfully, although that aspect is conveyed much better by the animation than it is by the voice acting. Grandpa Ernest explains that the machine is an automatic carrot-picker that Ernest made, and asks if Donny wants to help.
But then Preston starts pedalling on it, and it goes zooming around the place out of control! It almost crushes Ernest, but Donny pushes him out of the way just in time. In case there is any doubt as to how dangerous that machine was, Ernest says that Donny saved his life. Already things are looking potentially deadlier than expected from such a cutesy show! It never gets close to that again in this episode, though. And then the three of them share a hug.
Now we cut to a much gloomier, swampy looking place, where a monstrous-looking purple creature in dungarees is sleeping in a hammock. Unfortunately this is the kind of show where his natural appearance increases the likelihood that he is a villain. A shadow passes over, and we see another evil being flying overheard - bat-like in appearance but probably not an actual bat because he doesn't have actual wings, his vampire-style cape serving that purpose, he definitely looks to be something fairly rodent-ish.
This character refers to the purple creature as "Gatorpossum", which roughly tells you what Gatorpossum looks like a combination of, as the new arrival gets annoyed about how filthy Gatorpossum's living space is. As he lands, he tells him to get up and spins the hammock around, dumping Gatorpossum into the swamp. Gatorpossum initially threatens to beat up whoever woke him, until he realises who it is, indicating even this tough-looking animal is scared of our main villain.
Gatorpossum: Sorry, Mr Pickleback, uh, I...
Packbat: It's Packbat, you idiot!
I love Packbat's sneering high-pitched villain voice. Packbat tells Gatorpossum they're going dam-busting - hence the title - to flood the "Silly-vanians" out of their homes. He says the whole place will become a swamp - "My swamp!", a phrase I can't hear without thinking of Shrek.
Back at the Evergreens' place, Preston has got his carrot-picker invention working properly, and he's riding around to show it off. Ernest suggests going to the carrot fields by the dam to test it out properly, so Preston and Donny start riding the contraption over there. Well, Preston pedals, but Donny helps by pushing it. Both of them soon need a break, and Donny finds himself wishing once again that he was as strong as his brother. The mention of strength gives Preston an idea - getting Roger Waters to help. Looking at this from the perspective of the moral this segment is trying to teach, the intention looks to be that some people are good at some things and others are good at other things and it's okay for things to be this way, like in Budgie.
We cut to a dam, and, as you might expect, the family that run it are beavers. A grown-up beaver with glasses is telling his son, who wears a cap, to keep an eye on the dam today because Packbat has been sneaking around. The father tells his son to slap his tail on the water to call him if there's danger, and the son gives his tail a couple of practice slaps on the ground in response. What a cute version of SOS they have!
Donny is still waiting by the carrot-picker, alone, while Preston is off to find his friend. Donny hears something moving in the trees and gets scared, though, so he hides away. He's right to - the noise is Gatorpossum, tearing his way through the forest. Packbat's with him, and Gatorpossum gets his name wrong in a different way every time he talks to him. Packbat doesn't understand why Gatorpossum feels the need to tear down every tree instead of just going around them, and Gatorpossum says he doesn't want the trees to ever get in his way again - but the tree he's currently pushing proves to be too much for him, and he topples over with it, producing a sigh from Packbat. This is a healthy villain/henchman dynamic.
After removing the tree, Gatorpossum notices the carrot-picker. Packbat recognises that it must be something that Preston Evergreen built - I guess he has fought the Sylvanian families enough to know some of their respective specialities - but he also reasons that, if it's sitting there abandoned in the middle of the forest, it probably wasn't successful at what it was intended to do, so they can just ignore it. This is why Packbat is the smart one and Gatorpossum isn't. Gatorpossum wants to smash it up anyway, but Packbat is so insistent that he's right that he doesn't want him to - his annoyance over the tree thing is probably clouding his judgement, stopping him realising that it's probably easiest to just let him smash it and move on.
Packbat: Don't forget who's the boss around here! His name is Packbat!
Gatorpossum: But that's you, Mr Pinkbot!
In amongst their arguing, Packbat mentioned the fact that they're on their way to bust up the dam, so Donny is trying to sneak off to warn Preston, but Packbat spots him! He tells Gatorpossum to follow him and so a short chase ensues, Donny escaping the immediate danger by making it into a crack in a rock ledge that's too small for Gatorpossum to enter. Then Donny has an absolutely genius idea. Taking advantage of Gatorpossum's stupidity and the fact that Packbat only told Gatorpossum to go after Donny, Donny claims to be working for Packbat, and says that Packbat wants Gatorpossum to do whatever Donny says. He uses the fact that he knows the plan is to destroy the dam to "prove" that they're on the same side. This kid is smarter than I am, honestly.
The orders he apparently gives are even pretty logical. We cut to Gatorpossum carrying some logs, commenting on how clever "Porkerbat" is to think of building a boat before they bust the dam!
Donny has now managed to meet up with Preston, and the young beaver in the cap, who is of course Preston's friend Roger Waters. They also have the carrot-picker now, so Packbat must have left that area too. They head to the dam, Roger pedalling the carrot-picker himself even with the other two riding on it, and Donny remarks on how strong Roger is.
So now Gatorpossum has stacked a bunch of the logs he's gathered, and Packbat shows up, confused about why Gatorpossum is doing this, of course. Gatorpossum says about how he thought Packbat gave him these orders through Donny, and Packbat realises what's happened, resulting in this brilliant line:
Packbat: You half-wit! You zero-wit! You've been tricked!
Donny, Preston, and Roger arrive at the dam, ready for the villains. Preston says that Roger is strong enough to take care of them, but Roger knows his limits and calls his dad for help by slapping his tail like his dad said. Well, not exactly like his dad said - he slaps it on the ground, not the water. We see a shot of Roger's dad cutting up some wood somewhere and hearing the call, but unfortunately Gatorpossum and Packbat get to the dam first!
Packbat, who has landed on top of the dam, starts cranking the lever to open it, and Donny gets another idea. He directs Roger to use the carrot-picker to actually pick a bunch of carrots, and then fire them at Gatorpossum! I assume Preston had at one point explained enough to Donny about how the carrot-picker works for him to already know that it was possible to pick "in reverse" as it were. In a surprising display of villainous compassion, Packbat realises his helper is in trouble and swoops over to try and help him, only to get hit by a second barrage of carrots! As the kids chase the villains off, Roger's dad shows up in time to close the dam again and avoid disaster.
Afterwards, the trio are sitting on the step outside Preston's house's front door, and Roger congratulates Donny on his "Sylvanious" idea for defeating the villains. And Donny says he couldn't have done any of it without Preston's invention and Roger's strength. Yes, yes, we get the idea! Donny goes back to the real world with his new friends and their relatives waving him off. The woodkeeper narrates to tell us that Donny earned his trophy after all, although I suppose it's only a metaphorical trophy. And then he says he hopes that all our wishes come true too, which he also says at the end of the second segment so it must be a catchphrase of his.
The second and final segment of the episode is "Outfoxing the Foxes". This segment's child is six-year-old Joey, who wishes the other kids couldn't trick him so easily. He gets transported out of his body just like Donny and arrives at the cabin. This exchange is interesting:
Joey: Wow! Am I dreaming? Or is this the woodkeeper's cabin?
Woodkeeper: [opening the front door] Yes!
The woodkeeper's response could just be taken to mean that this is the cabin, but it's certainly ambiguous. Even without this conversation, the fact that kids get to the Sylvanian forest by sleeping makes it seem like some kind of dream world.
Anyway, Joey's doubt about whether he's really there soon turns out to tie into his problem, because even when he enters the cabin he's wondering if this is all a trick. The woodkeeper tells him that the way to avoid tricks is to use your brain, and then we get a "small... smaller... smallest" sequence for Joey and he enters the tiny door.
Joey arrives outside a house populated by rabbits. A girl rabbit is digging up carrots, and she is telling a boy rabbit she addresses as Rusty to help her - she mentions that the carrots need to be "hidden by nightfall", which will be relevant later. Rusty says he has a way of automatically topping the carrots, and we see he's using a carrot on a fishing rod to lure a baby rabbit across the field, who eats the greens off each carrot as they pass!
As well as already knowing about the woodkeeper like Donny did, Joey recognises the rabbits:
Joey: Hi, I'm Joey! Bet you're Rusty and Hollie!
Rusty greets Joey and asks him to help by pulling up carrots. Wow, way to greet a visitor, immediately asking them to do unpaid labour for you! And then we zoom in to some of the carrots in the field and see a few of them disappear down into the ground. Underneath, we see the culprits. A fox boy with a shovel is digging a tunnel underneath the carrots - the fox is the same type of adorable design as the other Sylvanian animals, so at least we don't have a complete dichotomy between "good and cute" and "evil and ugly" characters. And accompanying him, if you hadn't guessed, is Packbat! Packbat says that whoever controls the carrots controls "Sylvanianville". Interesting - I'd have expected it to be called Sylvania.
Packbat addresses the fox as "Buster". There's an amusing moment where Buster says that "nothing can stop us now" and then immediately gets a shovel to the face from Hollie, who's only digging up carrots and doesn't even know he's there!
Back on the surface, a rabbit in a suit and bow tie who must be the father of the family tells everyone he's off to the bank to deposit some carrots, which he has in a little wheelbarrow. He asks if Rusty wants to come, but Rusty is now playing a banjo to get baby Juniper to sleep - she's lying in a cot nearby. We can't assume she's the same baby we saw earlier, as I looked up this family in the toyline and it looks like it includes twin boy and girl babies, so it's possible the baby that was eating the carrot greens was Juniper's twin brother Barkley. Don't worry, it won't be important to the plot!
The father, Herb, says that there's nowhere safer for carrots than "my root vault" - I get the impression he actually owns the bank. Hollie says that she has her own secret place to hide carrots, and Herb lets her get on with that even though he reckons it's a mistake. Rusty seems to have tired of actually playing the banjo already, as he starts using it as a bow to fire carrots around as well, until he hits his father on the back of the head with one, annoying him as he leaves.
Packbat and Buster both pop out of the ground nearby, and overhear Herb reiterating that he's off to the carrot vault, giving Packbat the idea to go there next. What reason did Herb even have to say it out of nowhere to no-one? But then Packbat goes to get out and it turns out he and Buster are actually stuck in the hole, which I did not expect.
Joey has apparently agreed to take Hollie's carrots to her secret hiding place, and she's drawing a map on the ground with a stick to explain to him where it is. Not much to say there. Back at the hole, a fox girl in a pink dress and with a bow on her tail approaches, and Buster asks her to "Give me a paw, Scarlet!" Scarlet, who is of course Buster's sister, is disgusted by how messy Buster has gotten but pulls him up anyway, leaving Packbat to fall back down into the tunnel - Buster, who doesn't seem to share the same kind of bond with Packbat that Gatorpossum has, drops a manhole-sized slab of rock down onto the hole to stop Packbat coming up behind him!
Buster and Scarlet see Joey coming and, being stereotypical sneaky foxes, they tell him they're Hollie and Rusty's best friends and offer to help with the carrots. Despite being here to learn to avoid being tricked, and despite already knowing about the Sylvanian characters which should mean he already knows the foxes are bad guys, Joey somehow falls straight into this one and hands over the carrots, letting them take his wheelbarrow while he goes back for the next load. Of course, Hollie and Rusty are surprised to see him back already, and once he says that the foxes helped, they know what has happened. Hollie tells him not to worry as there are still plenty of carrots, and she hands him a basket full of them, telling him to use his head from now on so that he doesn't get tricked again.
Joey walks along through the forest, repeating to himself "I will use my head", but then Scarlet pops up out of a tree stump. She claims to be apologising for what her brother did, as if she hadn't been part of it, but while she speaks she's surreptitiously using a pair of scissors to cut a hole in the bottom of the basket. He hurriedly says goodbye and runs off, since he knows not to trust her now, but he doesn't notice he's leaving a trail of carrots behind him! By the time he gets to the secret hiding place, which is a tree with a hollow in it full of carrots, he empties out the basket to find it only has one carrot left in it. The first time he got tricked he looked upset, but this time he's angry!
He sees a tail with a bow on it sticking out of a nearby bush, so he knows Scarlet is nearby. So he tries a trick of his own - he says out loud "Well, guess I'll get more carrots", but actually climbs up a tree and looks down to see what Scarlet does next. Of course, Scarlet goes straight for the hiding place now that Joey has given away its position. We haven't seen Scarlet interact with Packbat directly, but she must be working for him too because she says he'll be pleased with all these carrots. Consistent with her remark earlier where she was disgusted by Buster getting himself dirty, she doesn't want to touch a bunch of freshly-dug carrots herself, so she makes sure Buster will be able to find this tree later by taking the bow off her tail and tying it around a branch of the tree.
At night, Joey is having dinner at the rabbits' house - Herb is carving a huge family-sized carrot that's drizzled in gravy like it's a joint of meat! I assume that's vegetarian gravy, though. Also, I think I was right that the baby eating the carrot greens was Barkley, as he and Juniper are both visible at the dinner table and the clothes seem to match up right. (I couldn't see Juniper's clothes before because she was under the covers of the cot.)
Hollie is explaining what happened with her carrots, and Herb quite smugly tells her that he was right all along. To his own daughter! But Joey says he used his brain and has come up with a plan. It is an interesting choice to have both the kids in this episodes be ones that learn to use their intelligence to win, but of course these two shorts might not have been made to be paired up with each other based on what I said about the episode listings.
Cut to Joey, Hollie, and Rusty sitting in a tree together, out of sight, as Scarlet and Buster return to the hiding spot, Buster pushing Scarlet along in the wheelbarrow because I guess she's lazy as well as finicky. Scarlet tells Buster to look for the tree with the pink ribbon on it, and he quickly realises that every tree in the area has a pink ribbon on it! Joey's plan is slightly unnecessary if you think about it - taking the existing pink ribbon off the tree would have been much simpler than adding a bunch of extra ribbons. But anyway, Buster gets annoyed at Scarlet for getting tricked. Scarlet responds by asking Buster how his tunnel to the carrot vault is going, somehow not guessing that the rabbits might be hiding nearby to overhear.
In the next scene, it's morning, and we see the carrot bank. Like the woodkeeper's house, it's built into a tree, although it's just a big stump in this case. Rabbits of all colours and sizes are queueing outside with their carrots, and the three kids rush past them all to get in. Inside, Herb is the one sitting behind the desk, so he does seem to be the owner. The kids let him know that the villains are going to try and break into the vault, and Joey once again announces that he has a plan.
Back to the rabbits' house, which the establishing shot makes clear is actually right next to the bank. Inside, Hollie and a grandfather bunny with a grey moustache are making... a Gatorpossum costume! It's interesting that this segment relies on you having already watched one that has Gatorpossum as a character - he never shows up in person in this one. That at least guarantees the segment was designed to be the second segment of an episode. Hollie jokes that the costume looks like Gatorpossum but smarter. Meanwhile, Rusty is turning himself into a one-man band, with his banjo from earlier and a bunch of other instruments strapped to him. He gives a demonstration, and...
Rusty: Sweet Sylvanius! It works great!
Well, this raises some questions about where Sylvanianville gets its name from. Is it named after a founder? A god? And as if to confound me further, the next shot is of Herb taking a box of fireworks down from a shelf, saying that they're left over from "Sylvanian days". Are those holidays, or an era of history?
A rabbit that must be the mother of the family is hollowing out some carrots, and Joey hands her the box of fireworks, for her to slot one into each carrot. All part of the plan! Herb declares his family's work to be "super-Sylvanious", as if this segment's writer suddenly had an obsession with variations on "Sylvanian" for this one scene. We had a single "Sylvanious" in the first segment but never as much as this!
Under the ground, Buster is digging a tunnel again, naturally accompanied by Packbat. He hasn't appeared since Buster sealed him in the other tunnel, but presumably nothing bad came of that. Packbat says they're getting close to the vault, but he's annoyed that Scarlet isn't helping Buster dig - she's in the tunnel, but she's sitting in the wheelbarrow again, and obviously considers herself above all this.
Packbat: It's times like this that I miss Gatorpossum. ...What am I saying?!
Buster gets past dirt and reaches wood, and Packbat pushes past him to start attacking it with a shovel, unable to control himself now that he's so close. We get to see inside the vault before he does - there are boxes of carrots out in the open, but also rabbits in hidden places, and "Gatorpossum" too. Packbat and the foxes burst in, Packbat grabs a box of carrots and... all hell breaks loose. A bright light comes on, music (from Rusty's instruments) starts playing, Packbat drops the carrots which makes the fireworks inside them go off, and "Gatorpossum" comes out from the shadows. He picks up Scarlet and she looks pretty horrified by this monster grabbing her:
Scarlet: My nails! My hair! My life!
The fake Gatorpossum drops Scarlet, and she and Buster run off in fear. Packbat also mistakes the fake for the real Gatorpossum, making me wonder where he actually expects Gatorpossum to be right now if he "misses" him but isn't suspicious that he's shown up here. Even when the fake kicks him over, he says he's firing him! Then Packbat picks up another box of booby-trapped carrots, and this time the fireworks fire him straight up through the ceiling and into the air, still thinking he was betrayed.
Back in the vault, the costume is partially taken off - it was Hollie standing on Joey's head all along, although it's hard to tell how they could have operated it, especially the arms. And Herb declares his intention to build a new "fox-proof" vault - I'd like to see that!
Outside the rabbits' house, Hollie hands Joey a basket of carrots to remember them by. It's unclear whether he'd actually be able to take those back to the real world! He gets transported straight back and there's no sign of any carrots in his room.
I may just be in a good mood but this was a really lovely show. It's sweet, the animals are adorable, and it has some good messages. Except for judging by appearances, which it's pretty bad on. But other than that, loved it!