Hey Arnold: A Few More Honorable Mentions...

Next week is essentially going to be “Helga G Pataki Appreciation Week”- that’s how much material I’ll have to work with so stay tuned for that.
Before I get there, though, here are a few more honorable mentions. Plus some Arnold-centric storylines that go into what makes him the unique character he is.

Mr Green Runs

Just a quick look into politics.
The butcher Mr. Green decides to run for mayor after the current mayor had failed repeatedly to fill a massive pothole in front of his shop. He has other shortcomings as most politicians do, but that was his motivation.

I mean, the audacity of that guy! When he finally does listen, he has a couple of his guys put a single wooden plank over the hole and that’s it. Grandpa’s Packard ends up in the hole all the same.
Mr. Green wins by a landslide and the former mayor, in a last ditch effort to save his political career, tries to recruit Arnold to be his campaign manager. After all he did help lead Mr. Green to victory… hey, if Arnold and Gerald could be Mr. Hyunh’s managers, anything is possible on this show.

Das Subway

Going back to season one for this…
One of those episodes where all of the kids experience an event collectively and have different reactions.
One night they’re late coming home from the movies and Arnold suggests taking the subway. Nobody is ok with this because apparently it’s bad luck to take the subway after dark. As Gerald put it: “when the sun goes down, stay above ground.”

First of all, they take the train and Gerald somehow misreads the map and they got on the wrong line. But then we see a rat chewing up the electric cables attached to the top of the train and… well, they’re stuck.
There’s a bunch of other characters on the train with them and we get to know them a bit through the course of this event. There’s a blind guy and his dog Killer. There’s a therapist and his patient. And there’s some scraggly old homeless guy who keeps saying “get outta my house!”

Well, they can’t get off the train cuz it’s surrounded by rats and Helga is afraid of rats. Panic slowly sets in for other people and they start to get on each other’s nerves.
The patient keeps reciting a mantra (“great big open spaces”) but when her therapist panics and she tries to use it to calm him, he snaps at her: “that mantra doesn’t do anything, you mental case!”
Harold does a lot of goofing off- he hangs upside down pretending to be a monkey and the blind guy tells him off. He asks how he knew he was dangling and the guy says how his other senses got stronger in his blindness. Also adds “phew, when was the last time you took a bath?”
Later on, the blind guy smells chocolate and Harold's the guilty party again. Helga starts up on him: “We’re all starving and you’re holding out on us!” And everyone is now at each other’s throats.
What makes them stop: Arnold notices something is wrong with Killer and they all put their differences aside for a few moments.It turns out he was a she and Killer had puppies and everything comes out ok.
Meanwhile, Grandma channels her inner Rambo (without the machine guns) and heads to the subway to resolve the issue with the train. She simply climbs to the roof and reconnects the wiring and that’s when they start moving again.
To cap it all off, the homeless guy has something to say…
Helga- we know, we know
Everyone else- get out of your house!
Homeless guy- no, not that. I’ve got something else to say.
And he starts a little ditty and soon everyone on the train is singing along with him.

World Records
This was such a big thing in the 90s. I think there were several shows where the characters tried to get into the record books but I can’t remember any of them right now.
Arnold and Gerald start it, but soon Arnold figures out they can’t do it alone. By the end, the whole neighborhood gets involved. Their final attempt is making the world’s biggest pizza puff. And the local shop owners donate ingredients to help make it. Unfortunately, some sort of gross miscalculation occurs and it winds up exploding before it fully cooks.
In the end, they make it into the book for “The most failed attempts at breaking a world record. They say we’re the most determined neighborhood they ever heard of.”

Grand Prix

There’s an upcoming neighborhood go-cart race and several of the kids are involved. Including the 5th grade bully Wolfgang and his gang.

Before the big race, a massive setback occurs. Arnold’s go-cart the Dark Avenger (co-owned with Sid and Stinky) is destroyed in a collision with Eugene’s cart, the Mauve Storm. So their only recourse is to join forces and their cars get combined into one.
But what makes this super funny and memorable- at least for me- their dilemma about what to name it because Sid and Eugene insist on using the names of the original racers.
Then Stinky says “I got an idea, fellers. How about we call it the Mauve Avenger?”
Arnold: Stinky, we are not calling our go cart the Mauve Avenger.

…wait for it…

Arnold- I can’t believe we called our go cart the Mauve Avenger…

Haha!! I love that gag!

In the race, Arnold goes most of the driving and later Eugene insists on taking over because half of the cart is his. Despite everyone else’s objections (you know, because he’s a jinx), Eugene gets to drive and they wind up in… second place.

The winners are the team of Helga, Harold and Phoebe. And Phoebe is actually the one that leads them to victory.
At first she’s modest about Helga’s suggestion she take the wheel, but then she runs off to grab her own helmet and jumps in. At one point, she’s laughing like a mad woman and speeds past the competition.
Yeah, don’t underestimate the quiet ones.

Wolfgang’s go cart winds up getting wrecked because Eugene temporarily lost control (apparently he left the pit too quickly and parts were flying off the cart for the final part of the race) and his sidekick Edmund chastises him saying they would’ve won if he’d let him drive. “I wouldn’t have crashed…”
Sure, the guys didn’t win the race, but they did succeed in beating Wolfgang so it worked out for the best.
Except Sid and Eugene are still arguing over the name… oh well…

Runaway Float

Before the show officially premiered, it was hyped up with a few short promos. One of the promos had footage that became this particular episode.
Arnold and his classmates want to make a float to go in a parade. But they don’t have the financial backing to do it. Helga offers her dad’s company Big Bob’s Beepers to sponsor it. Her one caveat: “I get to ride on the float and I get to ride where everyone can see me at the very top.”
It was an easy deal to make.

But then Big Bob saw the float and didn’t like it because there wasn’t enough promotion for his business. The little sign hanging at the top of the float apparently wasn’t good enough.

 He and his business associate take things over, turning the whole float into a giant beeper. And the kids are all dressed up as beepers and phones and Helga is queen of the beepers.
Arnold is so discouraged by this that he wants nothing to do with it. The float was originally designed to be an ode to the city with various landmarks represented and that’s all covered up now.
He does get involved, though, because something goes horribly wrong on parade day and… well, the float runs away. But he’s able to onboard to find the emergency break. Once it stops, the cardboard all falls off and the real float becomes visible. And apparently there’s some sort of contest and it wins for best float.
***

There’s a lot about Arnold that makes him stand out among the cartoon characters I grew up watching.
First off, we can’t go further without mentioning his football shaped head. Even without Helga’s teasing, it’s kinda hard to miss. And as someone who’d been really getting into football at that time, it was kind of a memorable feature.
There was actually an episode where he inducted into a gang of teenagers and he ultimately finds out they wanted to use him for the unique shape of his head. They wanted to steal a tweeter from a Hi-Fi store and actually shoved Arnold into the oval shaped window to get him inside. What they didn’t count on was him getting stuck and he’d trip an alarm. And they ran off and left him. Luckily Gerald was tailing him at the time and arrived in time to get him out of trouble.

Yeah, that was pretty brutal. What’s sad is that the writers probably came up with the idea for this storyline not long after they decided to make his head that shape.

Arnold’s Hat

Perfectly in the middle of his head sits a little blue hat. A detail Helga notices after she completes her shrine to him. The infamous one where she recreates his likeness out of his used gum.
…either Arnold consumes a lot of gum or Helga’s doing a lot of stalking. Either way, it’s gross.

She spends half the episode actually trying to steal his hat for the statue, only to fail every time. But thanks to the luckiest gust of wind, it winds up flying off his head and into her possession.

Meanwhile Arnold is depressed because he doesn’t feel the same without it. Even people he regularly sees in the neighborhood notices something isn’t right with him.
We learn from a flashback that he got his hat from his parents… more on them later. And he’s so upset about not having it that he proclaims to the entire neighborhood he’s never leaving the house again.

Helga finds out about this and decides to give it back to him… except she goes to her shrine and finds it completely gone.
She runs to her mom and asks about "a collection of seemingly useless junk randomly arranged behind a curtain in the back of my closet for no apparent reason”

… dramatic pause…
Half distracted, she says “ uh yeah I threw it all out.”

Helga embarks on a mission to track down the garbage truck and winds up at the city dump. And just as she’s about to give up, she finds it. A random pigeon had it.
A talk with Grandpa convinces Arnold to come back out and he walks down the street. All of the adults that said negative things earlier are now complimenting and saying how handsome he is.

Then he bumps into Helga and he’s so overjoyed to find she has it, he hugs her. Yeah, completely oblivious that she’d been to the dump and is riddled with bird poop…
She allows herself to enjoy it for a few seconds before pushing him away.
“Yuck, who said you could touch me?”
He apologizes, saying something like he couldn’t help himself. She says to take the hat and go and he thanks her again and leaves.

Hilariously, she says, “I’ll never wash these clothes again” just as she gets nailed by another pigeon.

Deconstructing Arnold

One of those episodes of inevitability. 
It was only a matter of time before someone told him to stop giving other people advice.
There are three storylines going on simultaneously.  Sid "borrowed" Lorenzo's phone. Rhonda decides to write a "secret admirer" letter to Curly to get him to leave her alone. And Stinky and Harold were messing around with Eugene's bike.

Helga repeatedly calls him a busybody and says he can't go a whole day without giving advice. So he agrees to butt out. Then things go so horribly wrong people are begging him to help fix things and he refuses. Helga offers solutions for them, but they just make things worse. So it’s up to her to talk him back into doing his thing.

And he does agree to resume his duty of giving advice...

It's crazy how things go so out of control and you realize just how much Arnold keeps everyone else around him in check. 

Parents Day

In a two part episode, this mystery is finally resolved… who were Arnold’s parents and what happened to them?
It all starts on the weekend of parents day where Arnold, his classmates and their families compete against each other. Arnold was insecure about coming with his grandparents and hoped they'd have forgotten about it... no such luck.

Helga’s dad gets especially competitive and spends a lot of the day heckling Arnold’s grandparents. Then at one point after a major mishap, he uses the phrase "orphan boy." Arnold suddenly gets so depressed that he just wants to go home.
Helga tries to apologize and says her dad went too far. But the way she goes about it, it comes out all wrong to him, but she's guilt-free going into tomorrow.

Grandpa is known for making up a lot of his stories. And this includes stories about Arnold’s parents. Arnold insists that night he tells him the real story. So he does.

Both are archaeologists and they met on an expedition, falling in love immediately. Once or twice he tries to take poetic license and Arnold has to steer him back on course. But there was a lot of truth in the stories.
Now, whether a massive volcanic eruption came to a halt the moment Arnold was born in the middle of the jungle… that’s gotta be a fabrication.
The three of them finally settled down in the city and were living a normal life. Then their friend Eduardo visits them and says the native people they’d helped on their last expedition are in trouble and need their help. They leave Arnold at the boarding house with his grandparents, which are his dad’s parents.
And supposedly their plane vanished and they were never heard from again…

In the Jungle Movie, which came out a few years ago and I missed a lot of it (still regret that…), this loose end is finally resolved.
Arnold has that long awaited reunion with his parents but a lot needs to be overcome to order for that to happen.
Someday I hope I can track it down to see all of what happens. I only caught the first 15 minutes and the last half hour.

Back to parents day, Arnold’s team bounces back. But I think they still finish in second behind another team. Not Helga’s family. That’s all I remember. (Phoebe's family won the whole thing)
***
I’ll end the post with a little preview for next week.

Helga’s Show

There's a new student lounge called the Cocoa Hut. And on the list of entertainers is Helga. She does a routine of impressions of the other kids and they're not fans. 

She mimics Stinky's Southern accent and his love for lemon puddin'. How Harold yells for his Mommy. How Rhonda is obsessed with what other people are wearing. She also does Mr. Simmons and uses quotation fingers whenever he says the word "special." Even more hilarious is when he asks her about it later and he has no clue that the impression is meant to be him. 

Afterwards, her fellow classmates are all annoyed with her because how she was making fun of them. Interestingly, Rhonda points out to Arnold that she didn't say anything mean about him. (That's gotta be a first...) 

And Helga doesn't know what to do. Phoebe suggests a public apology in the form of a long poem. Not having any other ideas, she goes for it.

Then of course she does it and nobody likes it. Arnold goes up to her and tells her to do the old stuff. Somehow she gets it right this time around.

She gets around to Arnold this time. Asking how he gets through doors. His hat. ("Hey Arnold, this just in! It's about a million sizes too small.") His shirt. ("What's going on with that kilt? I wasn't aware we were in Scotland. Better write a fashion ticket for him, Rhonda.")

That was another question a lot of people had about the show. They thought Arnold was wearing a skirt this whole time. But there's actually an episode where he takes his outer sweater off and we see that he just wears a really long shirt underneath. 

So yeah...

Next week- there's gonna be a lot of talk about Helga and it's gonna be awesome. 

At least I hope my enthusiasm over that aspect of the series comes through.