Fish don’t realize they’re in water until they’re plucked out of it. Canadians don’t realize how specific their culture is until they move to another country. It took dedicated effort to purge “toque” and “pop” from my vocabulary when I first arrived in the US. Trickier was not making reference to children’s entertainment whose cultural recognition stopped dead at the 49th parallel.
Canadian content, for whatever reason, often sounds made-up to Americans. We had a show about a rural woodsman type who fixed everything with duct tape and it was one of the most popular comedies in the country for many years. Train 48 was a terrible, ad-libbed dramedy taking place entirely on the southern Ontario commuter transit system. And of course, there was a kids’ series where an alcoholic photographer tyrannized a living mannequin man and his puppet friends in a famous Toronto department store.
But sometimes, as I look back at the cultural artifacts spawned by government investment in the arts and entertainment, even I’m surprised by how intensely, pointedly Canadian some of them are. To wit: Alligator Pie.
A frequent library borrow for child Merritt, Alligator Pie is a 45-minute VHS tape about a boy named Nicholas Knock going to the park. It’s based on the work of Dennis Lee, an author who wrote a lot of poetry for kids. You can think of him as sort of a Canadian Shel Silverstein, only without all the gonzo journalism for Playboy.
You can also think of him as the guy who wrote the lyrics to the Fraggle Rock theme song, because he did! He also wrote a bunch of other songs for the show, and one of the albums of music from that Henson production jointly won a Grammy Award in 1985. The other winner? Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends!
Of course, I didn’t know any of this as a kid. All I knew was that Alligator Pie was packed full of two things, besides Canadian-themed rhymes and songs: puppet violence and claymation horrors. When I say “puppet violence,” I don’t mean like, felt stabbings or anything. But, as we’ll see, someone in this production either hated puppets or just got a kick out of launching them into trash cans, swimming pools, and puddles of mud. And when I say “claymation horrors,” well, I don’t think I need to explain that. Aardman gentrified the genre when they made plasticine obey the laws of physics. They wouldn’t have the guts to do whatever the hell this is.
So: Nicholas is going to the park. He’s relating this story to his classroom during show and tell, to which he’s brought his best friend, who is an egg. The egg’s name is Egg and he perpetually wears a frozen mask of dawning horror on his little egg face.
Egg isn’t Nick’s only pal, though. The day of his trip to the park, he’s woken up by three other puppets: Bigfoot, McGonigle, and Hannah V. Varoom.
How does Nicholas respond? Does he:
A. Marvel at the size of his enormous bedroom in his early ’90s middle class Toronto home which would easily cost millions of dollars today
B. Run screaming from the epicenter of the puppet uprising
C. Hurl his best friend at them like a living missile
It’s C, of course! Egg is curiously quiet during these scenes. It’s unclear if Nicholas’s imagination can’t support the animation of the animal trio as well as Egg simultaneously, or if Egg has simply accepted his position and knows that nothing he might say could change it. The animals do a little song, during which Nicholas describes them as “marching like the mounties,” but it’s interrupted by an ominous glow and menacing voice emanating from the vent.
That’s Mr. Hoobody, a kind of trickster spirit who lives in Nicholas’s furnace. He is a fairy in the manner of the old tales — less Tinkerbell and more menacing presence. Also, he’s played by a guy who looks like a Canadian Randy Quaid.
Mr. Hoobody terrified me as a child. Now, I find him to possess an intriguing sexual charisma. Not going to interrogate that.
Stop motion break! First, a poem about something called “Psychapoo,” which emerges from Nick’s toothpaste tube and starts doing antics all over his medicine cabinet while shouting out Newfoundland. It’s only mildly upsetting, so I’m going to give it 2 out of 5 on the Adventures of Mark Twain Claymation Nightmare Scale.
But what comes next is much, much worse. Nicholas and his friend Monica sit down for a pancake breakfast, and gloved arms emerge from the table to perform a song called “Periwinkle Pizza,” which name drops a number of Canadian cities. It’s not stop motion, but it’s not exactly puppets, either. It looks like this.
I feel how Egg looks.
The song ends with a plate devouring the last pancake. For some reason this really creeps me out. And it’s far from the last food bit we’re going to see today.
At this point in the frame story, the teacher is starting to get frustrated with Nicholas’s constant diversions. Get to the goddamn park, kid! There are upwards of six other students waiting for their turn in our enormous and implausibly well-staffed school.
So Nicholas, his grandfather, Monica, and Egg all head to the park. But something is amiss. Mr. Hoobody lurks in the shadows, watching them. It’s a good thing he’s a supernatural creature/figment of Nicholas’s imagination, otherwise this might be almost unwholesome.
The animals, in turn, see Mr. Hoobody stalking Nicholas. They grab his tricycle and set out after him.
But they’ve forgotten that Mr. Hoobody is a creature of chaos. Uttering a rhyming incantation, he opens up a fire hydrant which blasts the animals into a pool and a trash can.
It’s hard to get across in screenshots of a low-resolution VHS upload, but there’s something very funny to me about the camera lingering on a monkey puppet floating limply in a kiddie pool, and I’m pretty sure whoever’s job it was to shoot this scene thought so too.
The kids stop at a bakery so Nick’s grandpa can get some cookies. He tells them to wait outside, because it’s the ’90s and internet panics haven’t yet convinced the public that letting two kids stand outside a store for five minutes will result in their immediate kidnapping and dismemberment. Or maybe grandpa just doesn’t really like them that much. Either way, the kids are entertained by a little show introduced by a cookie conductor and her cast of singers.
I’m counting this introduction as a separate entity from the main event, because it features a completely different cast and animation style. I give it a 3 out of 5 on the Adventures of Mark Twain Claymation Nightmare Scale, mainly because an alligator eats one of the living, singing cookies at one point.
The overture complete, the curtains part on “The Sitter and the Butter and the Better Batter Fritter.” It’s a tongue twister about the narrator’s little sister’s sitter who buys a pat of bitter butter from a baker to bake a fritter. Each character and object morphs from one scene to the next, an ever-changing tide of flesh that’s practically Cronenbergian.
“You’re being overdramatic,” you’re thinking. Am I? Here’s how things progress. The sitter creates a malicious, living entity out of butter. She abandons her creation when it proves too bitter to consume.
The sitter then returns to the baker for a sweeter batter. She eats the resulting fritter, but then her neglected creation eats her in turn.
Finally, the sitter’s charge arrives. Finding no sign of her sitter, she instead notices the bitter butter fritter and decides to consume it, sweetened with a spoonful of jam.
The piece ends with a recitation of who devoured who: the sweet fritter inside the sitter, who is inside the bitter butter fritter, who is in turn inside the little sister. I give this sequence a full 5 out of 5 on the Adventures of Mark Twain Claymation Nightmare Scale for its disturbingly exuberant depiction of nesting doll vore.
I’m going to skip past the “mass paralysis cured by food fight” scene in an iconic Toronto diner because there are no puppets in it. But shortly after, the movie remembers its frame story and cuts to a shot of the most exasperated kindergarten teacher you’ve ever seen.
Just wait, lady. It’s 1991, and the Reaganite “Common Sense Revolution” of slashing all social services hasn’t hit Ontario yet. In a few years, you’ll yearn for the days when your biggest problem was meandering kids’ stories about boiler demons and sad eggs.
Speaking of: Mr. Hoobody casts a spell invoking “Mississauga rattlesnakes” to animate a garden hose and abduct Egg.
What does he do with him afterwards? Does he:
A. Destroy him with a dark magick which calls upon the ancient powers of Bobcaygeon
B. Break him down psychologically to convince him that Nicholas never really loved him
C. Launch him into the air for unclear reasons
It’s C. If Alligator Pie is given an opportunity to fire a puppet into the sky out of a t-shirt cannon, it’ll take it.
Nicholas is distraught at Egg’s fate of being carelessly hucked into a disgusting puddle. So, we interrupt the flashback to flash back to an even earlier scene when Nicholas relates a fond memory… of the time he carelessly tossed Egg into a disgusting puddle.
Nicholas and Monica finally make it to the park, deal with some rhyming mushrooms who sing a song about downtown Toronto streets and the department store featured in Today’s Special, then catch up with Mr. Hoobody, who’s had another costume change. He dispenses with the goofy rhyming tricks and just fucking casts Force Lightning at them.
Things look bad, until the animal puppets — who have since rescued Egg and are flying high above the park with a bundle of balloons — come to their rescue. I’m going to drop the quiz gimmick because at this point, it should be obvious how they do that.
Mr. Hoobody is defeated… or is he? No. He’s not. He uses his lightning powers to bring down the animal puppets. Bigfoot lands first, on one end of a see-saw.
Then, Hannah and McGonigle hit the other end, causing a Puppet Launch Combo!
Bigfoot is catapulted into the air, landing directly in front of Nicholas.
Finally, Nicholas confronts Mr. Hoobody in a one-on-one curse battle for the fate of Egg.
Nicholas prevails, and the children all gang up on the middle-aged man and boo him until he evaporates.
The end. Or… is it?
Yes. Yes it is. I did the math, and Alligator Pie pitches puppets at a rate of roughly one every four minutes. That’s got to be some kind of record. In conclusion, I recommend Alligator Pie to anyone who hates puppets and wants to seek vicarious revenge on them. I do not recommend you show it to your children unless you want to teach them to fear the stop-motion arts or if you want them to grow up into weeaboos but for Canada. Loonie-aboos, if you will. Will you? Too late, FINAL SECRET PUPPET LAUNCH!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Neil Bailey, Mr. Hoobody’s long lost evil twin. Basically the same but not from Canada. Spoooky!