Upsetting Day: A Very Special Today’s Special

In the annals of Canadian children’s television, Today’s Special is up there with Polka Dot Door and You Can’t Do That On Television. While it hasn’t yet received an analog horror take on its premise like The Elephant Show (look up the theme song), it remains a beloved touchstone amongst Canadian millennials. When star Nerene Virgin died earlier this year, thousands of Canadians in their mid-30s poured out remembrances on social media, while anyone south of the border or outside of that age group likely had no idea what they were talking about.

Well, I’ll tell you: Today’s Special was a Canadian children’s series about a mannequin who comes to life with the help of an enchanted hat. Running from 1981 to 1987 on the educational channel TVOntario, it actually predates the film Mannequin and takes place more or less entirely within a downtown Toronto department store after hours. For adults mired in a perpetual adolescence by multiple financial crashes and unprecedented global crises in their lifetimes, that adds an additional layer of fantasy to the viewing experience: on top of the magical mannequins, remember department stores? Remember how beige they all were? Remember tagging along with your mom and begging to be allowed to go to the toy department to see Sky Dancers and Snailiens? No you don’t, you fucking liar. Nobody knew Snailiens existed until they started showing up on eBay.

Where was I? Oh, right. Jeff is a mannequin brought to life by a magic hat. It’s sort of a Frosty the Snowman situation, if Frosty had the body of an adult man but the mind of a child.

This born-sexy-yesterday abomination is coached on the realities of being a self-aware, living creature by Jodie, a store display creator; Sam, an ancient security guard who is also a puppet; and Muffy, a mouse who can only speak in rhyme.

Jeff’s mannequin rules are extremely specific and restrictive. His hat must be activated with the magic words “hocus pocus alamagocus.” If his hat comes off at any point, he reverts to his inanimate form, as he does when the store opens for business. And should he ever leave the store, his life is forfeit. He is, essentially, a prisoner in the store for eternity.

What happens if the store is knocked down? Does Jeff age, perhaps at half the rate of a normal person? Does he die when he becomes a mannequin? Well, he’s not sleeping — in episode seven, we learn that he’s tired because he didn’t know he was supposed to sleep in the first place. Becoming a mannequin each morning, then, is not a restful time for him. Rather, he simply ceases to be until the following night. How do we know he’s the same Jeff when he comes back? More importantly, how does he know?

These are the sorts of questions a millennial who grew up watching Today’s Special might pose in a “7 Shows From Your Childhood That Were Secretly Dark” listicle. But we don’t need to lower ourselves to that level. Indeed, we needn’t fuss with subtext at all when the text itself is so rich.

Most of the early episodes of Today’s Special revolve around basic subjects, with Jeff being a sort of stand-in for the child viewer. In season one episodes, Jeff learns about snow, pets, noses, fruit, hands, and camping. But by the time Today’s Special hit its sixth season, they were running out of body parts and natural phenomena to explain to the world’s first and possibly only male sexy baby. What was left? Well, how about problem drinking?

Most episodes of Today’s Special jump right in after the opening sequence in which Sam closes down the store and Muffy rouses Jeff from his deathless(?) slumber. Not “Phil’s Visit.” Kids in 1987 must have known something was up as soon as the opening credits gave way to Jodie sitting alone on a stool amidst the wreckage of a medieval castle display.

She looks directly into the camera and explains the cause of the disaster: a man drank too much alcohol. Then she explains what alcohol is: a special juice adults drink when they don’t find each other attractive enough to bone sober. But who was the drunkard responsible for this? Sam the elderly puppet? Muffy the lightweight mouse? Surely not Jeff?

No, it was Phil Phenelli, a photographer sent by Storemakers Magazine to document Jodie’s incredible work at creating department store displays. I’m not sure there’s ever been a scenario that speaks more to the heady excess of the 1980s, and all that without a mountain of cocaine. Probably?

Phil, by the way, is portrayed by Gerard Parkes, who is best remembered for his roles as Doc on Fraggle Rock and the bartender in The Boondock Saints. I would say that his performance here is a mixture of the two, blended with a fifth of Canadian Mist.

Phil is an old friend of Sam, the puppet security guard. The two of them served together in the merchant marine. I guess some people are just puppets in the world of Today’s Special and it’s sort of fine? It’s kind of a Muppets situation, except with schnapps. Phil produces a silver flask he’s kept from all the way back when they were sailors and Sam tells him there’s no drinking allowed in the store on account of policy. Phil seems a little disappointed, as if getting hammered in Sears was a thing people did all the time back then and this is a draconian exception.

Sam takes Phil up to meet the gang and he doesn’t seem at all perturbed to make the acquaintance of a talking mouse or a plastic facsimile of a man brought to life by a wizard’s accidental magic discharge. Muffy the mouse wants to be a photographer, so he asks her to be his assistant for the night and they all sing a little song about how great they are and how much fun they’re going to have. Oh, the hubris of man! Oh, the heights from which a toy department can fall!

While Jeff and Jodie change into different outfits for the photoshoot of the store displays (???) Phil repeatedly sneaks off to the bathroom to rendezvous with his dark mistress, liquor.

He thinks he’s being crafty, using breath spray to cover up the cheap whiskey on his breath, but Muffy catches him taking a shot and can smell it through the Binaca haze. Despite being a child-like creature, Muffy knows what booze is and reminds Phil he isn’t allowed to drink in the store.

Now things take a turn. Twisted by the devil alcohol, Phil confronts Muffy — a tiny mouse puppet — and begins threatening her.

“Now just a minute, Muffy,” he whispers, “You’re not going to tell on me, are you? You’re not going to be a snitch and tattle tale about your old friend Phil? Because I think that would be a big mistake, Muffy Mouse!”

When he realizes he’s menacing a helpless rodent, Phil backs off and takes a different tack. He explains how if Muffy tells Sam he’s been drinking, he’ll be thrown out of the store and then he won’t be able to take photos of Jodie and her display, ruining her big night. And that would all be Muffy’s fault, wouldn’t it? Phil, if you haven’t guessed by now, is kind of an asshole.

Muffy debates telling Sam about Phil’s drinking and lands on keeping it a secret for the time being, seduced by the possibility of being an assistant to a professional photographer and maybe getting her big break in the biz. But her troubles are not over. Returning to the children’s department, now ruled over by a muddled ogre, she helps Phil open a camera bag he was unable to in his crapulent fury.

Her reward? A cussing out for making him look foolish in front of Jeff and Jodie, who are surely beginning to notice something is wrong. Nevertheless, they leave their tiny friend alone again with this raging, decrepit hulk while they change into another set of outfits. The overt message here is about the dangers of alcoholism, but the secret message is that people will turn a blind eye to terrible, terrible things in the pursuit of their own selfish desires, such as being photographed for a magazine about department store displays.

Phil slurs his way through “Muffy and Phinelli (Drunken Reprise)” then tries to take a picture of Jodie’s castle display while Muffy moves a toy dragon back and forth in the shot. He screams and curses at her while she whimpers that she’s only trying to help. “If I were you, Muffy, I’d mind my own bizzis and just do like I’ve asked you!” Phil howls, his gin-fuelled frenzy rendering him more beast than man. Finally, he can take the incompetence of his assistant no longer and resolves to put the dragon in the right place himself.

What happens next is both unexpected and obvious, the fulfillment of the promise of the show’s opening. As a child, it probably would have devastated me. As a jaded adult who has seen entirely too much, it cracked me up.

Phil stumbles out from behind the camera, lurching towards Muffy in a threatening posture, then trips over his own feet and crashes like a Brobdingnagian lush into the castle, his wrinkly, alcohol-soaked bulk completely obliterating the carefully-constructed display in an instant. And what is Phil’s reaction to this devastation?

The fucker says…

He tells Muffy to get away from him and he sits alone amidst the rubble, turning once again to his secret lover alcohol for comfort. It’s a truly wretched sight, this senior citizen guzzling Old Crow out of a steel flask on the floor of the children’s section of a department store.

When Jeff and Jodie arrive in their new outfits, Phil blames the destruction on Muffy. Here his anti-mouse bias comes out, when he tries to claim that he couldn’t work with her because of her species — it was just too much of a problem, he says. No, Sam tells him, Muffy isn’t your problem. Alcohol is your problem.

Now the entire Today’s Special crew bands together for an impromptu intervention. Being told you’ve got a drinking problem by a puppet you served with in the merchant marine has got to hurt. And getting this look from a naïve living mannequin man?

Phil has brought ruination and sin into the Garden of Eden that is the children’s department of this magical Toronto department store. He must be wondering how his life brought him to this moment.

Alcoholism was recognized as a disease in the mid-1950s. But if you thought there was going to be any discussion of Phil getting help or suffering from addiction, you’d be wrong. No, the blame is laid squarely on this old man’s shoulders. None of these people know what he saw on the sea, and they dare to judge him.

Muffy desperately wishes she could make him stop drinking, but Jodie tells her she is powerless in this respect. Only Phil can choose to stop drinking, making alcoholism seem like something people just decide to get into one day, like SCUBA diving or Jeffmancy.

Still, Muffy’s hopes are briefly raised when Phil tells everyone that he’s going to try and stop, believing that this means he’s going to get better soon. But Jodie once again brings them crashing back down to earth. It won’t be soon, she tells the mouse, and it may be never. Some people can get better from a drinking problem and some people can’t. It’s all up to Phil.

Hurray for personal responsibility! In the words of Ivan Drago, if he dies, he dies.

Phil hobbles to the exit and takes one last look back at his erstwhile friends and the remnants of what could have been, all washed away in a flood of bottom-shelf bourbon.

He leaves in disgrace and we dissolve back to the opening scene of the episode, where Jodie sits on her stool reflecting on the evening’s events and how important it is to speak up when something is wrong. Her dreams of appearing in a magazine have been crushed by a doddering old souse, which perhaps explains why she seemed to care so little whether he got help or not.

The writer of “Phil’s Visit” was Jed McKay. He wrote on a number of episodes of Today’s Special throughout its six seasons, including “Butterflies,” in which the cast learns about the concept of mortality. To paraphrase Principal Skinner, the kids have to learn about death and drinking sooner or later.

In retrospect, one of the weird things about this episode is that nobody ever really explains to Jeff what alcohol is. Sam, Jodie, and somehow even Muffy already know. Did someone explain it to Jeff offscreen at some point in the past? Has Jeff ever illicitly gotten drunk within the confines of the store? Does he go on from this episode still not really understanding what was the matter with Phil? It’s impossible to say.

Roll credits over wreckage. Cue slow, sad version of Today’s Special theme. What have we learned? The lighting director was Alf Hunter, or possibly the show’s assigned Alf Hunter was named Lighting Director.

Phil never got clean. House mice only live for about five years. Dreams crumble to dust.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Eric Rion, who is not an Alf. Who only loves cats to pet. Who has all the proper paperwork to prove Negative Alf status.