Subscribe!The Wind in the Willows (1984)
First episode title: The Further Adventures of Toad
How familiar with the show am I?: I was vaguely aware of it, and I know of the book but I don't think I've read it.
Is this the first episode?: The show was preceded by a movie based directly on the book, so this continues where that left off, but of course movies do not count as episodes for the purpose of Debutniverse. Although... the situation gets stranger than that, as we will see.
The original book of The Wind in the Willows is up there with Peter Rabbit as one of the canonical "clothed anthropomorphic animals in a countryside setting" children's books, so it's no surprise that both have had multiple animated adaptations. This stop-motion one, as mentioned above, is a continuation of a movie with mostly the same cast.
The opening sequence is styled as a book, something I've seen so often in these "cosy" types of cartoons that I don't think I've even bothered to mention it most of the time, but of course this show is based on quite a famous book.
When the episode actually starts, we jump straight into where the film must have left off, as the narrator quite casually begins by saying "After the weasels had been overthrown," and there's a shot of a black and white piratey weasel flag being lowered from a flagpole and replaced with one with a coat of arms on it. We get enough information to know that the battle was what had given Toad his home of Toad Hall back, and then we're told that he has now invited his friends there, as we see a wide shot of rolling hills with a big mansion in the distance. I would guess this expansive landscape was built at a smaller scale than the sets where characters actually appear.
Inside Toad Hall, we start with a close-up of Badger - yes, everyone in this is just named after their species - reading the programme for the evening, where Toad has credited himself separately for each individual event that will be happening throughout the evening. Badger already seems exasperated. He wears half moon glasses and gives the impression of being older than the other characters.
Throughout that, we could hear Toad talking quickly and excitedly in the background, in his high-pitched voice. As we see him and his friends sitting around a long table full of food - the other characters present being Moley and Ratty - the narrator explains that Toad seemed to remember their recent adventures differently from everyone else. This leads us into a flashback where we see the actual events that happened while Toad's narration makes him look better than he is. In fact, most of the episode is taken up by flashbacks like this... and it seems that all of the footage in them is taken from the movie. That's right, they've somehow managed to make a TV show where the first ever episode is almost a clip show! Perhaps the assumption was that, if these episodes went into regular rotation, they would often be seen by people who hadn't seen the film, so some representative sections from it would help to establish the setting and characters. Or alternatively, they were just lazy.
So we see the battle with the weasels, where Ratty had gone at them with a sword, Moley with a cricket bat, and Badger - being bigger than any of the other animals present on account of being a badger - just kept knocking weasels out with his bare hands. Badger and Ratty had guns too! That's not what I expected from this show! And this whole time, Toad had been trapped up on the chandelier, claiming in his narration that he was taking command of the whole battle and chose his moment to strike the head weasel, when in reality he clearly fell on him by accident.
Back in the present, Toad has made up a song about the battle. We only get to hear the end, and I'm glad of it, because his singing is terrible. And, of course, it's all about how great he is. His friends applaud but it's clearly not sincere.
Next, Toad presents a watch which he says is going to be a gift for "the jailer's daughter", because his guests already know parts of the story that those of us who didn't see the film don't know yet. Badger says he's glad to see Toad showing gratitude, and Moley mentions how Toad had avoided the wrath of an evil magistrate who we also don't yet have the context for.
Speaking of not having context, Toad starts up another anecdote from the movie that begins with him stealing a car, without explaining why. It's clear he somehow tricked the driver and passenger (humans, and not as big in comparison to Toad as you would expect) into getting out of the car under the guise of asking for a favour, then jumped in himself and drove off. Then, while the pair were telling a policeman what had happened, he drove back past again - in his narration Toad claimed he had said something very "witty" to the policeman, but in the actual flashback he just calls him "fat face"!
The flashback cuts to Toad's trial in court for these events, with the police officer and the motorists in attendance, a jury of weasels, and the magistrate (old human woman with an extremely posh voice) acting as judge. Toad's narration continues to make him look good, claiming he stood proudly in the dock, while we in fact see him staring down at his feet and only occasionally looking up sullenly. The magistrate asks her assistant what the steepest penalty possible is for each of the offences, and sentences Toad to twenty years! Well, we at least can see why Moley calls her terrible. One of those years is just for being green! Is that racism, or...?
In the next flashback, Toad is in prison, crying for his friends, while his present self claims to those same friends that he never lost his composure. He also claims he refused to eat anything they gave him on principle, while his past self gratefully takes the bubble and squeak offered by the jailer's daughter, a redhead with a rural accent. Yes, quite a lot of the episode is going to turn out to be that the joke is he's saying something different from what actually happens.
Similarly, in the narration, Toad says he offered to let the jailer's daughter help with his plan of escaping by disguising himself as the jail's washerwoman, when actually, not only does the daughter suggest it, but Toad doesn't even understand what she's getting at at first - when she says she has an Aunt Maude who's a washerwoman, he tells her not to be ashamed!
Toad: I have a very elegant figure, for what I am!
Jailer's daughter: So has my aunt for what she is.
Eventually, after Toad taking some offence at the idea of dressing up as a washerwoman, he puts on the aunt's bonnet and dress and walks out of the jail, the guard greeting him as Maude as if nothing was wrong and Toad calling the guard "old chap", and it's only once Toad has gone away that the guard seems to find "old chap" in particular odd, like Maude usually greets him some other way, and starts chasing him.
At this point even the characters seem to be getting annoyed at being trapped in a clip show. When Toad describes slipping onto a passing train to get away from the jail, Ratty and Badger complain that they already know all this. But Moley, who is more timid and seems to be more earnestly enjoying the story, wants to hear the rest, so the other two agree to stay and listen for his sake.
In the next part of Toad's story, Toad comes across a barge parked on the side of a river, and, still pretending to be a washerwoman, strikes up a conversation with the woman on the barge, claiming that his daughter who lives near Toad Hall had sent for him to come as soon as possible, obviously in the hopes of getting a ride home. Unfortunately he's a bit too enthusiastic in proclaiming his love for washing clothes, presumably because he's never had a conversation with an actual washerwoman in his life, and so the barge woman says that's great because her husband was meant to be washing the clothes and had gone off somewhere, and she starts piling clothes up for Toad to wash! Toad looks especially embarrassed at being handed a little frilly corset, as if it was obscene. The barge woman leaves Toad with the wash basin and goes into the barge to have a nap!
After a timeskip where Toad has clearly been struggling with the washing, the barge woman comes back out of the barge, laughing her head off at him - she had obviously already guessed he wasn't a washerwoman and called his bluff. Toad stops pretending and goes back to his usual personality, calling the barge woman fat to show us his prejudices have not changed, and he takes off the bonnet to reveal that he is a toad, as if that wasn't already extremely obvious. He never specifies that he's not actually a woman either, but it seems to be taken as read. Funnily enough, even though the barge woman could tell he wasn't who he claimed to be, it seems she actually didn't know he was a toad, and she's outraged to have such a filthy animal on her barge! She pushes him off onto the ground by the river, as Toad's narration claims that he "decided to leave".
The barge woman's horse had been standing by the barge this whole time, so, while the barge woman laughs at Toad, he jumps on her horse and rides off on it, the woman shouting at him and trying to chase after it. At this, Toad's friends back in the present are shocked that he stole a horse. For one thing, they already know he stole a car, so why they would be surprised by this part I do not know. For another, they showed before that they were familiar enough with the story to know about the episode with the train, so why is this horse part a surprise? Has he only told them random parts of the story before, or did they themselves end up encountering something to do with the train in the movie?
Toad claims he only borrowed it, so they ask whether he gave it back, and he continues telling the story. He encounters a man, who he unfortunately refers to as a "gypsy", cooking food by the side of the road, who asks if he can buy Toad's horse. Toad has put his bonnet back up and is putting on the washerwoman act again at this point, not that he changes his voice much to do so. The man offers "a shilling a leg" and Toad has to quickly take a look underneath the horse to confirm that that would only be four shillings, as if he was expecting to suddenly learn he'd been riding a three-legged horse!
Then Toad spots the man's stew and, without us hearing any of the ensuing conversation, apparently gets a plate of stew and the four shillings in exchange for the horse. Back in the present he expects his friends to praise his cleverness in making that deal, but they're all appalled that he sold a horse that wasn't his own, and insist that he needs to pay the barge woman back. Toad is especially outraged when Badger says that Toad owes the woman an apology too! In the process of complaining about how the woman had treated him, Toad inadvertently gives away that she had actually thrown him off the barge, which Ratty points out.
While Badger is listing out everything Toad now needs to do to make things up to everyone, he says at one point that the only respectable behaviour on Toad's part was promising to send a gold watch to the jailer's daughter. With everything else, I'd forgotten that was how this anecdote started. But the list starts to annoy Toad so much that he says he's not going to do any of it, not even the watch.
Toad tells them all he doesn't need any of them, so they all begin to leave, Moley looking especially sad to have to go. But Toad also looks very upset, and as soon as Badger puts his paw on the doorknob to open it, Toad admits he was wrong and that he wouldn't have been able to take his home back from the weasels without them. At this point it's really hard to properly believe anything that comes out of his mouth but it's played very genuinely. He agrees to do everything on the list, then pops open some champagne and proceeds to the next item on his programme, a speech of thanks. Badger is once again bored by the prospect, and that's where we leave them!
It's hard to get a feel for the show as a whole with an opening episode like this, with that lingering feeling that I'm missing parts of the plot of the flashbacks. Still, the style of the stop-motion animation is lovely and the voices are good too. Toad was played by David Jason, most famously of Only Fools and Horses and who we've already heard as Danger Mouse, and he didn't disappoint.