So my game plan, not counting a post on holiday episodes, is to do 7 posts about this series.
Today will be purely dedicated to episodes where my memory isn't the sharpest, but I want to bring them up for one (or two) specific quote(s) that stayed with me for years. The previous post, I'd mentioned jokes for adults that get squeezed into kid's entertainment... some of that is here as well.
1. Family Feud
...to this day, I still haven't seen "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," but I have seen "Dances with Wolves"... it's definitely not a musical :P
This episode opens with the Pickles (Didi and Stu) and DeVilles (Betty and Howard) playing charades and the teams are split into men and women.
It becomes pretty obvious very quickly that the guys are bad at this game. Stu's trying to portray a wolf and has to resort to cheating to get him to understand that part. But Howard completely misinterprets the "dancing" part of the clue.
A petty and ridiculous argument enuses where they lose their temper at each other.
Howard: I don't really like musicals
Stu: it isn't a musical, you imbecile!
Didi: Now, Stu, it's just a game
Howard: Wait, did you just call me an imbecile?
Stu: (looks at his watch) very good, Howard, that only took you [I forget how many] seconds
After the guys storm off, the girls laugh at them just being idiots. But then Didi says Howard was being a little oversensitive and something like "it's not his fault the last musical he saw was 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.'"
Betty takes that as a huge insult to her taste in movies and leaves with the twins.
...I still don't get why she took offence to that. I don't think Didi was dissing that movie or suggesting it was such a bad musical that Howard wouldn't recognize a good one.
The rest of the episode is about Tommy and Chuckie trying to make peace between the families so they can play with Phil and Lil again. I think at one point they go missing and Chaz makes them stop fighting to realize how stupid they'd been.
Don't know why, but that opening scene always stood out to me. Maybe cuz it was the first time I'd heard of either of those movies.
***
2 and 3.
Touchdown Tommy and The Stork
Both of these involve the adults being busy with a football game and not noticing what the babies are up to.
The first one came back to mind very recently as something kinda funny. Before the adults become overly absorbed in the big game, the bottles are handed out to the babies and Tommy gets one with chocolate milk.
Anyway, Angelica is super jealous and tries to steal it from him. All of the different strategies the babies do to fight against her almost parallel the football game, to the point where the commentary matches. They're also kinda dressed up like they're ready to hit the gridiron themselves. (Apparently Didi was worried about the babies hurting themselves while the guys were watching the game so Stu invented a safety helmet for them all to wear).
At the end, Angelica wins, but so much of the milk came pouring out during the action that it's now empty.
That's when Didi and Betty come back from the grocery store... and Didi is not happy. The skuffle left stains all over the carpet and she demands of the guys "who was watching her when this happened?!"
...I could be wrong, but I don't think chocolate milk is safe for babies... but considering how much of the chocolate got all over the carpet, logic is moot by this point :P
Then with "The Stork," Angelica asks her parents where babies come from. And they wind up telling her they come from eggs delivered by the stork. She tells this to the babies and they believe an egg in a nearby nest will be Tommy's brother Milton. By the end of the show, they do find out that's not the case because the egg hatches and Didi returns it to its nest.
But this storyline stands out to me for another reason: the guys are making Greek omelets for a football game. And Stu makes a couple of big snafus.
First:
Stu: I wanted to be on the safe side so I ordred a gross
Drew: A gross? Stu, that's 144 eggs!
Stu: oops...
Then:
Drew: What are these?
Stu: Greek olives
Drew: Stu, you can't put Greek olives in an omelet... they have pits in them!
Stu: I knew that
...yeah, not only did this storyline teach about the birds and bees (although it was so subtle I didn't even catch)... but I learned at a young age that a gross is 144, and that Greek olives have pits. So yeah, this show is occasionally educational.
4. Home Movies
I remember this episode for one specific reason... a reference I didn't understand until YEARS after the fact.
Stu is showing the other adults his home movies and Grandpa Boris is desperate to get out of it because he doesn't want to waste what little time he has left with something so boring. Then before the babies and Angelica disappear upstairs, he calls Dr. Kevorkian...
I didn't find out until a few years ago that he was a real person. And he assisted people with committing suicide. So Boris was trying to reach him to be put out of his misery... yikes, kinda dark for a kid's show...
So the babies and Angelica make home movies of their own using paper and crayon. Each of them has a unique style and story they're telling.
It's interesting with Tommy because his are all scribbles, but he says "I don't have all my motor skills yet." It's crazy that he knows what that even means because I don't think a lot of us did when this show first aired.
But at the end of the show, the adults come upstairs and see all of the drawings and are easily impressed by them... but it's really cute.
I think at the end, Drew finds out Angelica scribbled all over his paperwork and he screams something about an account she ruined.
5. Angelica's Birthday
Yeah, she'll be getting her own post, but this is a quick little mention.
Supposedly she turns 4, but she's referred to as being three for the entire season...
But her dad tells her before her big party (apparently her mom, Charlotte sparred no expense... yikes... no wonder why she's spoiled rotten) that she'll have more responsibilties when she's older. This makes her miserable until the babies show up and she gets the idea that she can avoid all that bad stuff by regressing back into a baby.
She maintains this charade until the pinata comes out and she wants to have the chocolates inside.
Part of me just wanted to poke fun at the fact she doesn't want to clean up after herself or become more mature and that's why she goes through with all this.
6. Chuckie Gets Skunked
One last quick mention:
I'm not sure how true this is, but apparently Borscht is the perfect solution for curing skunk smell. The babies suggest him taking a bath in the pot on the counter. The adults then find out and freak until they find out it cured him.
Then Grandpa comes over to taste it and says "hmm... tastes even better than usual." Again, yikes...
But that was the first time I'd ever heard of Borscht. It's a traditional Russian dish that's basically cold beet soup.
I also can't help but wonder if this was Nickelodeon continuing to push the healthy benefits of beets... considering Doug was halfway dedicated to that endeavor.
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