Upsetting Day: Dr. Cooper and His Friends🌭

Remember Today’s Special, the Canadian TV series that instilled the deep desire to spend a night in a department store in an entire generation? That show featured the expressive puppets of Noreen Young, and as a result we once got to see an adorable mouse learn about the horrors of alcoholism firsthand from a ginned-up photographer.

But Today’s Special wasn’t Noreen’s first gig. And it might surprise you to learn it wasn’t even her first use of puppets as a vehicle for an anti-drug message. Slither aside, Curt Hiss, because a member of the goddamn Order of Canada is about to make you look like the fucking garbage you are.

That’s right, these are professionally made, government-awarded doobie-smoking puppets. Let’s meet Dr. Cooper and His Friends.

You aren’t going to find much about Dr. Cooper online. It seems to have been a series of videos created by Noreen Young for the Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario in the early ’80s to be shown in schools. There were six in all: “Butt it Out”, “Never Listen to A Bottle”, “Alcohol, The Inside Story”, “Pas de Pot Mon Pote”, “Keep Off The Grass”, and “Nothing To Sniff At.” Of these, only the last two are available online. Oh, and “Pas de Pot Mon Pote” is a French saying meaning “no luck, my friend,” but also might be a weed pun? Like most Canadians outside of Quebec, I speak only grade school French and the talking pineapple that taught me didn’t explain drug slang.

But that’s another story. Let’s get back to Dr. Cooper.

We open on Dr. Cooper’s lab and oh, shit, right off the bat we’ve got a song. It’s about making choices and getting the facts. Great! I’m sure these puppets will provide us with the undiluted truth on cannabis consumption.

There’s one weird line here, though, where the unseen singer says “All you know is getting high makes you feel small / ’cause the higher you go the harder you fall.” I’m not sure that’s how it works? For less experienced drug users, weed doesn’t really have a comedown in the same way that, say, MDMA or cocaine do. But this was the ’80s, so there was still a lot we didn’t know about drugs. Dr. Cooper was on the forefront of that research.

Check this out: he built a machine that just blasts cigs. That’s its whole job, to rip darts twenty-four seven. Melvin, Dr. Cooper’s dog assistant, is puzzled. “I thought we already did tobacco,” he says. “Let me stick my face directly into these chemical fumes,” Martha the mouse says.

I can’t lie, it’s surreal to see a Noreen Young mouse puppet that looks kind of like sweet, innocent Muffy from Today’s Special breathing in an entire 1985 Burger King smoking section’s worth of secondhand smoke. But hold on, that’s not tobacco!

It’s marijuana! Do not touch — in the ’80s, pot had the same contact-fatality effects on puppets that fentanyl has on police officers today. Martha has a puppet conniption, screaming deliriously about how she smoked dope before careening across the room in the full throes of reefer madness and immediately passing out.

Imagine this: you’re a researcher studying drugs. You come into your lab one day to find your assistant collapsed on a table. What’s your first thought? Do you check to see if she’s ok? Dial 911? Start a fire to cover up your crimes and move to Manitoba before the RCMP gets wise?

If you answered yes, you aren’t cut out for this line of work. Dr. Cooper’s first and only thought on spotting his unconscious lab assistant is: “Sometimes I think Martha gets a little too excited to be a scientist.” Man, she has tiny puppet mouse lungs! Proportionally speaking, she just inhaled an entire Cheech and Chong movie’s worth of the devil’s lettuce! But Dr. Cooper is remorseless and without feeling. He’s detached. Cold. The perfect scientist. Martha could learn from his example.

Today, Dr. Cooper is running a special government project on weed that I guess involves building a drug-smoking robot and hotboxing his lab. It also involves Mike.

You might think Mike seems like a nice fella. He’s a self-described “expert” on pot who’s been smoking dope for years. But Mike is a fool. He is a guinea pig. He is grist for the mill of science, no more deserving of our concern or respect than the drug-smoking machine. He asks Dr. Cooper if it’s alright if he lights up a joint. Go right ahead, Dr. Cooper says. Go right ahead. You’re part of the experiment, Mike. Smoke your accursed hemp and we shall observe its effects on the dried-up husk rattling around in your skull that was once a human brain.

Here is the experiment in its entirety: Mike is going to try and do his job while baked. In this particular instance, his job is installing a coat hook on the wall of the lab. Almost immediately, Mike starts fucking it up.

Which, fine. I get the idea: drugs impair your coordination and abilities. But Mike’s been smoking weed for years while somehow holding down a job as a handyman. So what gives? Well it is the ’80s, so maybe Mike’s used to stems and seeds and Dr. Cooper hooked him up with the high-grade medical stuff. The alternative explanation is that Mike gets like this whenever he’s high, which by his own admission is pretty frequently. This opens up a much darker possibility: that Mike is not among the titular Friends of Dr. Cooper. He is, instead, a pitiable homunculus, a subhuman figure of ridicule and derision whose claim to existence extends only so far as he is able to continue putting various psychoactive substances into his body for the Canadian government.

Hold on, though, Martha says. Isn’t smoking dope against the law?

Smash cut to three grinning, racially diverse officers of the law shouting “stop!” It’s time for the title number. Keep off the grass! Keep off the grass! Don’t play the fool! Who knows where you’ll end up when you break the rules?

I despise these cop puppets. Puppetry by its nature is a whimsical art which can bring a frog or sexually voracious pig to life and touch even the most jaded adult with a sense of childlike wonder. To construct a cop puppet, then, seems like it should run contra to the puppeteer’s code. Especially a cop puppet who sings “Can’t smoke it, grow it, give it away / Buy it, sell it or send it in the mail.” That’s the kind of bastard slant rhyme you can only get away with if you’ve got a tiny puppet badge and gun.

The police officers sing “These are the rules we must obey / so let’s have fun the legal way.” What, like beating up racial minorities and shutting down gay bars? Is the law to be the measure of morality? I pay your salary, you jovial fucks. Don’t make me call the puppet ombudsman.

Get me out of here. I want to see Mike again.

Uh oh! Mike died from weed inhalation.

Just kidding. He took a little nap and now he’s back grappling with the Dark Souls boss that is an incredibly straightforward home improvement project. Witnessing this, Dr. Cooper’s assistants have questions. What happens if you smoke dope over a long time, like Mike?

Well, Dr. Cooper explains, most people who smoke heavily also take a lot of drugs, which complicates things. So maybe Mike’s on PCP and meth too? But there’s more, Dr. Cooper says: dope changes you. “You don’t get along with your friends anymore, your grades fall, you can’t play sports as well, and you forget things.” I’ll be generous and give him three out of four. But not getting along with your friends? The famously ill-mannered and difficult to get along with stoner?

Mike protests: he smokes dope all the time, and look at him! Dr. Cooper smiles smugly, saying that he couldn’t have put it better himself.

Again: if Dr. Cooper believes that smoking pot is turning Mike’s brain into slurry, why not try to get him help? Because, of course, Mike is no friend of Dr. Cooper. But Mike isn’t the only puppet who’s getting zonked out of his gourd in this series. Let’s move on to “Nothing to Sniff At.”

There’s only a short segment of this one available, courtesy of our pals at Retrontario. I don’t know if it would make more sense in context, but the tone here is decidedly more gothic and surreal.

Melvin wakes up in a darkened lab, screaming about how “it isn’t fun” and how “he’s got to stop them.” He tries to run out of the room, straight past versions of Martha and Dr. Cooper that I can only describe as afro clown draculas, while menacing organ music plays.

But woe, hallucinating puppet dog — there is no escape from the fortress of the afro clown draculas.

Melvin then simply pops out of existence, and we see that evil Martha and Dr. Cooper are watching some children huff glue over a CCTV setup. “That’s it! Go on… inhale deeply!” Evil Martha insists, statistically giving at least one Canadian child an extremely specific fetish which they now pay artists thousands of dollars a month to bring to life again and again.

Evil Dr. Cooper excitedly tells Martha that glue can ruin the inside of your nose and cause brain damage. Now a pair of children appear on the screen and he exclaims draculously, “Alright! Glue… for two!”

He’s genuinely psyched that these kids might die from concentrating and inhaling glue fumes. Martha is less sanguine. Even as an evil hallucination, she doesn’t have the bold determination to transgress normal human ethics required of a true scientist.

Melvin reappears, hollering “don’t listen to them!” Then he wakes screaming up amidst a veritable smorgasbord of inhalable adhesives. Dr. Cooper (real, non-clown dracula version) is untroubled by this, simply saying that Melvin performed the day’s experiments without waiting for him.

But what exactly was the experiment? Gather up a bunch of volatile chemicals and make a dog honk on them to see what kinds of brain damage he gets? Dr. Cooper runs down all of the things that chemical fumes can do to you, up to and including fucking killing you to death, and we’re out.

The strangest thing about “Nothing to Sniff At” is that there are two versions of it. There’s the English one we’ve been discussing so far, and a separate French version. I don’t mean that there are two dubs — I mean they seem to have shot two separate videos using different versions of the same puppets.

Compare and contrast. Here’s Melvin in the English version again:

And here he is in the French one:

What the fuck happened to him? That French-Canadian glue must hit a lot harder. As they say in Quebec, “attache ton chapeau quand tu renifler de la colle, c’est le sperme du diable!” But it’s not just Melvin. The draculas look different, too. Or maybe they just cranked the lights up because they weren’t afraid to show those glue-sniffing Francophone kids the true face of evil.

Melvin even has different hallucinations in the French version. The bricked up door is gone. In its place are a series of nightmarish faces which rush towards the camera.

How can we explain this? Maybe French-Canadian kids in the ’90s were just more hardcore and needed to be really terrified to stay off the glue. I don’t know. I do know that nearly all knowledge of Dr. Cooper and His Friends has been wiped from the internet.

For decades, the Canadian government has tried to hide its felt-covered shame. No more. Those responsible have now been brought to justice.

Dr. Cooper died under house arrest after being convicted of using government funding for unsanctioned human and animal drug trials.

Melvin the dog was reunited with his twin. Together, they ran an unsuccessful ballot campaign to ban glue from Canadian households.

Martha smoked weed again and died.

Mike started a podcast with two of his friends who thought they should record their conversations because they were so funny but also, like, really smart? He currently makes several million dollars annually through direct sales of his personal nootropics track.

Drug-smoking machine was rescued and placed with a loving family on a farm in Saskatchewan, where it still resides today.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Yvonne Clapham, who was inspired to build their own drug-smoking robot but forgot what they were doing halfway through.