Subscribe!Will Quack Quack (1982)
First episode title: Mr. Puw-the-Shop
How familiar with the show am I?: I had never heard of it.
After we spent last week in Scotland, we've now moved on to Wales! In fact, this was originally a Welsh-language show called "Wil Cwac Cwac". Will is an anthropomorphic duckling in another of those cosy countryside settings we've seen a few of.
We've ended up with two really short shows in a row. Another resemblance to last week is that the show has constant narration. The opening sequence flips through the pages of a book until it reaches a page showing a country house, which transitions into the same shot in the actual animation.
Zoom in on a window and we end up in the room of the duckling, Will Quack Quack. He's asleep and dreaming about eating a bunch of living snails from a big bowl, happily. Yes, this is a world where anthropomorphic animals do eat the sorts of other animals they normally would - but their diet isn't exactly like real life, as we shall see.
Will actually starts flying around the room in his sleep. Like, I don't mean in a cartoonish way, I mean he's flying because he's a bird but he's doing it while he's sleeping. Sleepflying. His mother Martha, a bigger duck in a bonnet and apron, comes into the room and he crashes into her, so the first we actually get to hear of a character talking in this show is Will's mother berating him as "You clumsy quack!"
Will gets dressed and comes downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast - wasp porridge. The internet seems to differ in opinion over whether ducks would actually eat wasps.
The narrator says that Will ate it all before anyone could say... and then she says a phrase in Welsh. Am I supposed to learn any Welsh from this? Because if the show doesn't tell me what the phrase means, it doesn't help! From asking around, it appears the phrase is "Llanfihangel yng Nghornwy" meaning "Church of St Michael in Nghornwy" - "Llanfihangel" is a common place name but this exact combination doesn't seem to be a real place. So how did it get here?!
When he finishes eating, his mother tells him to go to Mr Puw-the-Shop's shop. That's a common way of referring to a person in Wales, by appending "the" and then something to do with their job to their name, like Evans-the-Post and such. She wants him to buy snails, and caterpillar sauce. I reckon the writers had a list of bugs around somewhere for whenever they needed to refer to a food.
Martha hands Will a bag and a purse, saying that the purse has a pound note in it, and that he can keep a penny for himself - at this news he is ecstatic. A penny was plenty to a child back then, you see. And a pound was enough for your shopping! He runs out of the house in excitement and slams the door so hard that a painting falls off the wall and the frame smashes. His mother has a point about the clumsiness.
There's an aerial view of Will running off through the village, and he encounters his friends at "Ifan's place" according to the narration. All his friends are also birds, of a variety of species, and they ask where he's off to. When he says his mum's given him a penny to do the shopping for her, the other birds initially snatch the purse from him, tossing it around between them and making them seem like bullies, but then they pass it back and reveal that they've all been given change too so they can all get something together. I'm not sure what we were meant to take from that.
They walk along together and go into the shop. Mr Puw-the-Shop is a pig who wears glasses and a suit, and his shop seems to have everything, all stacked on shelves around the place. Ifan, Will's friend who is a turkey, asks for a penny worth of the yellow sweets on the top shelf. As Puw puts up a ladder and climbs to the top shelf, a cockerel in the group called Sioni chuckles, and the narrator tells us how Puw hated climbing the ladder. So it definitely seems like the kids know this and have intentionally decided to torture Mr Puw today. I am not a fan of these children at all.
It only gets worse from there. Once Puw has gone to the trouble of getting the jar of sweets down, exchanging sweets and money with Ifan, and then climbing back up and putting the sweets back, he asks who's next, only for Huw the goose to ask for another penny worth of the same sweets, making poor Puw go through all that again. This time he's smart and asks if anyone else wants a penny worth of the sweets before putting them back up. No-one answers, so he carries the jar back up again, comes back down... and Will says that he wants a halfpenny worth of the sweets. They still had those in the early eighties, you know. Puw's face turns all sorts of colours before he drags himself back up the ladder again, more and more uncomfortable every time.
When Puw is at the top of the ladder... Will says he's changed his mind and wants snail toffee instead. This is too much for the barely-managing pig, and the ladder comes crashing down, knocking down shelves and items with it. The boys all run out of the shop, and the next thing we see is Will in bed, with the narrator telling us that Will did get told off by his mother but at least he got to have some sweets because Huw shared his.
What? That's it? No lesson learned, no proper punishment, and Martha never got her shopping in the end? Not even some proper jokes to at least make it funny? Unfortunately this is one of my least favourite shows I've taken a look at on here. For once I'm thankful for its short length. Compared to the one I most infamously hate, The Little Lulu Show, the one advantage this has is that its art style is prettier. Sorry, Wales, but this didn't do it for me this time.