If you’re watching Bump in the Night through some kind of video on demand service – and you almost definitely are now since that’s the only way to watch the show – then this first episode has established exactly one thing about Bumpy for sure: you cannot leave him unsupervised. He’s stupider and more destructive than any dog, but he also has thumbs and can climb. Being friends with Mr. Bumpy is like being friends with a tiny little monkey that isn’t exactly evil, but will take a dump in your shoes, eat your homework, and steal your fingernail clippers, and he’s liable to do this several times a day.
But look at those big eyes!
Mr. Bumpy is awful in so many ways, and yet just cute enough, just expressive enough that he seems friendly and possibly forgivable.
Gum Crazy
And then he shows you what he’ll do when left alone with gum.
In this episode we learn that Mr. Bumpy loves gum, he loves eating gum, and he loves sticking it all over your walls, your floor, your tennis rackets, everything. Not only is he passionate about it, but he’s resourceful enough to frequently get gum, enough that Squishy specifically notes how good he is at what he does with it.
I like it when a show has a sort of “hidden world” element. Like you imagine gnomes hiding in the walls, baking mincemeat pie out of very tiny cows, or maybe all your toys come to life, but they die instantly if your mom touches them. It’s all happening, but you’d have to know what to look for to prove it’s real. It’s like fairies living under the refrigerator. However, I have an incredibly hard time imagining someone wouldn’t notice signs of a Mr. Bumpy. It seems to me, mouse droppings are a lot harder to spot if you’re not looking for them, but gum spread everywhere across the bottom of your furniture is going to attract a swarm of ants that will lead you to exactly where Bumpy’s dumb ass is hiding.
Anyway, when Bumpy says he loves eating gum, Squishy tells him the myth that gum will sit in your stomach for seven years. Bumpy, being the kind of thing he is, hears this and immediately gets excited at the prospect of having possibly a seven-year stockpile of gum sitting in his stomach, and he begins wondering how he can get it out to eat it again.
And, you know, it’s concerning, because when a character this stupid becomes interested in the contents of his own stomach, you never know where the writers are going to go with it. This was the era of Ren and Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life, so they were experimenting with all kinds of horrible ideas just to see what they’d get away with. Now I know that there are people that have a fondness for those shows, but if anyone ever tells you the 90’s didn’t sometimes push the envelope of bodily humor too far, you should call the police, because that person is serial killer about to do something unspeakable to your body. You should always worry when a 90’s cartoon you’ve never heard of threatens to make bodily fluids part of the plot.
Luckily, the only thing Bumpy does here is consume his own body so he can go inside his stomach and find the gum, which creates a world-ending black hole.
The show decides to display a warning on a convenient computer screen that everyone is going to die as a result of this, and then Squishy is sucked into the hole because he was standing closest to it.
Inside the black hole is not a crushing gravitational singularity, but rather a series of… honestly kind of cool looking doorways.
For some reason, Albert Einstein is inside Bumpy’s body, so he steps out of a door to explain to audience that the world is doomed.
And, look, I thought this was already clear when the computer announced the world was ending at the moment that Bumpy turned into a black hole. It’s not an especially strong show of confidence when the writers tell you point blank what the conflict is and then still feels nervous enough to have Albert Einstein slowly and clearly spell out the conflict a second time. I get it, show! Bumpy has killed us all! It’s obvious!
What kills me worse is that we didn’t even need the computer nor Albert Einstein to express this concern. We have Squishy standing right there, who in a previous episode was scared of a robot that wasn’t doing anything. Isn’t Squishy exactly the character who should immediately think the world is ending and say so? A black hole is numerous times more concerning than a robot, unless the robot could also make black holes somehow. This should have been Squishy’s time.
Either way, Bumpy doesn’t care because he has no concept of future-tense and only came here to eat the gum that was already in his stomach, so they thank Einstein for destroying forty seconds of screen time and find the door labelled “Bumpy’s Stomach”, so they can steal gum from it.
His stomach is this diseased, spongy-looking thing, and it’s immobile so Mr. Bumpy can take the gum and just run off with it. Episode over, right? Except the stomach tells Bumpy it’s not up to it whether or not he can have the gum. The stomach tells Bumpy he has to consult with the heart first. For some reason, even though Bumpy has already stolen the gum and his mission is complete, he decides to go and talk to the heart anyways.
This is one of these story kludges that I feel like I see all the time when trying to play roleplaying games with certain kinds of people. You start off with a clear objective, but the GM hasn’t really thought a lot about how easy it would be to complete the objective if you didn’t passively stand around. The queen wears a magic necklace, and if you do a bunch of inane errands, the king will let you have it, but what if you just grab the necklace off the princess’s neck and leap out the window with it?
In the worst kind of roleplaying group, you’ll have the necklace and now there’s no need to do all those stupid errands, but all the other players will agree to do the errands so that they can “earn” the necklace, and now you have to go and kill a manitcore in the ass-end of nowhere that wasn’t bothering anybody because that’s the script the GM prepared.
The writers clearly had a similar grocery list of things Bumpy needed to do, but somehow during the process, someone realized that Bumpy was the kind of character to just steal what he wants and leap out the window before anyone can stop him. The whole advantage of being stupid is that you never slow down to think, and you do things that people call “unthinkable”. Jokes on you, dumbass, it wasn’t thought about! By anyone!
So yeah, Bumpy has already won, but the episode is supposed to last roughly eight minutes and there’s still time to do stuff, so he decides to visit his heart to ask if it’s okay to have succeeded at his task this early. It turns out Bumpy’s heart is just himself, with a mustache, and he speaks a little bit of French. Bumpy instructs Squishy to stand back, because he knows what hearts want.
And this is the moment the show asks the bold and enduring philosophical question, “If you had sex with a clone of yourself, is it gay incest, or is it just gay, or is it just incest?”
I would say there’s no way to win a game of gay chicken against yourself, but if the end result you both want is to go through with it, then I suppose really there’s no way to lose. The problem is, I’m not sure if the audience is achieving a victory here by using the remaining run time to watch Bumpy go bump faster than was strictly necessary, so as this was unfolding, I had to wonder what the writers were going to do to save us.
Turns out, it’s not that Bumpy wasn’t absolutely down to go all the way with himself. He would have, but both Bumpies are beyond stupid and are too easily distracted to really get anywhere. They both start talking about how much they love gum. This eventually devolves into a fight, but not stemming from any established things that are already going on. Bumpy starts trying to count the gum in an imaginary ring he’s conjured in front of himself, but he interrupts himself and then gets mad about it. This becomes a fistfight, until eventually the heart declares the real problem is with the brain.
Now if it were me writing this scene, and I’d somehow already gotten this far in spite of it all, I think I would have taken this opportunity to make Bumpy jealous of his own love for gum and then devolve into a ridiculous lover’s quarrel about how Bumpy loves gum more than himself. I’d have even thrown in a “I should have listened to mother” joke, because this scene would be perfect for so many awkward accusations with double meanings. But nobody asked me, so a tangential fistfight over counting numbers is fine, who cares about all the wasted comedy potential, I don’t. It’s not something I’m going to be thinking about for a while.
Regardless, it’s time to move on to the brain chamber, and I’ll be honest, it ironically feels like they didn’t have many ideas for this segment. Bumpy and his brain fight over a jar until Squishy reminds him that he already has the gum, and he’s just trying to take it from himself anyway.
Bumpy announces that Squishy is right, and that upon this revelation, he now knows he’s already won and no longer wants to fight. The brain accuses him of being a liar, and the delivery of the joke kind of lands so it’s just funny enough to earn a few more moments of tolerance. Then an alarm goes off informing Bumpy that the episode is almost over and the world will end if he doesn’t wrap things up soon.
So Bumpy gives up and they return home. Once they get back, Bumpy pulls the gum he stole out from behind his back, and an alarm signals to indicate the world is going to end now. I need to admit, I somewhat glossed over the whole Einstein exposition that makes this work: during his speech, Einstein explains that Bumpy getting gum out of his own stomach violates the space time continuum. I didn’t bring that up that before because it makes no goddamn sense and didn’t add anything to any of the story. The gum is in Bumpy’s stomach, and he wants to move it outside his stomach – that doesn’t violate space time, that’s just moving gum from inside himself to outside himself.
It doesn’t matter, though. The show tells you that Bumpy having the gum violates causality somehow, so Squishy looks directly into the camera.
And the episode ends. It’s fascinating, because the whole Einstein scene exists only to justify this ending, and if they hadn’t done that, they’d have another half a minute or so to do a much better ending.
Baby Snail
Gum Crazy feels like an episode pitch I could get behind if better writers were the ones doing it. A character consumes himself, creating a black hole that will destroy the world, but he refuses to leave his own internals until he’s eaten gum that he already ate. It’s insane, and it sounds like there must be something to that. Baby Snail is the B-show. This is the episode they drew out of a hat – it was a Post-It that said, simply, “Bumpy babysits”.
The problem with baby episodes is there aren’t a lot of things you can do with them. Babies are a huge investment, and they take tons of time, but most of what they need is repetitive. You feed them every few hours, you rock them to sleep, you try to sleep yourself, and by the time you finally pass out, the baby is crying again. It’s exhausting and it compels you as a parent to do the work, because you have to, the baby depends on you, but for the outside observer it’s not very fun or interesting.
A baby in a cartoon will always be one of two stories: either the baby will wander away and get lost at a construction site, ala Baby’s Day Out, or the baby will be a pastiche of Donald Trump as played by Alec Baldwin. There are no other baby stories. Er… well, except the ones where they just take care of the baby normally and it’s as boring and repetitive as you think it’ll be, but that’s not really a story.
This episode opens with Bumpy pretending to be a pirate, and it’s just wasting air time. Normally, I’d complain about this, but with a baby episode I can’t really blame them. There’s no way to make this exciting when you’re planning to be as straight-forward as this episode is. There is a baby, it needs care, and you care for it. It’s an ancient biological function. It’s like if you did a whole episode about making a sandwich, but there was nothing preventing the hero from doing it.
They wander off in search of treasure, and they stumble into a baby snail, which is just out here for no reason.
They argue for a little bit about whether or not they should look after it, for its safety, with Bumpy coming down firmly in the “no” camp, but eventually agree it’s the right thing to do. Then Squishy does perhaps the most irresponsible thing he will do in any episode of this show: he leaves Mr. Bumpy alone, unsupervised, with a baby.
Now, I want to remind you, Bumpy isn’t evil. He’s not willfully malicious, but he did destroy the universe in the previous episode so that he could eat gum that he’d already eaten. I’m not saying he would purposefully kill the child, but there is about a 5% chance this ends with the child being eaten by him. It honestly would have been a little less negligent to just leave the child abandoned where it was. I don’t even think snails normally look after their children, so if it weren’t the central conflict of the episode, they might get eaten by predators normally and it wouldn’t be that weird for Bumpy to swallow it.
Bumpy is still on the fence about whether he even is going to look after the baby at all when the Boogie Woogie Barbies from the theme song appear out of nowhere and start swooning over it. Now, at this point, there’s a few ways the show could go. We all assumed that Bumpy would realize that girls like babies, and he’d step in to own the baby as his responsibility so the girls would hang out with him. I don’t know why this happens on TV, because I personally never got much attention from any woman besides my wife from looking after my own kid, but maybe it’s a lie parents tell their teen boys to trick them into looking after their little brothers.
Either way, we were all shocked when Bumpy’s reaction to all this was to declare the girls have cooties and are doing it wrong by showing the baby all this affection and attention. He snatches the baby back and declares he’ll never let it suffer through this sub-par upbringing ever again.
It’s such a bizarre look into the character that he does this very selfishly, but then quickly gets wrapped around the idea that he’s going to be a superior parent and commits to that. They say at times there can be no better motivator than spite, and apparently putting the Barbies in their place is a pretty good motivator for Bumpy, because after this, he just goes through standard child care. He puts it to bed, he plays with it, he gets Molly to help him out, he tries to feed it a sock, and so on.
They get into a slightly extended question concerning what snails actually eat. They didn’t have widespread access to the internet back then, so if anyone wanted to know they’d have to go to the library or ask somebody who did know.
It got me curious. So I went to look it up: it turns out that snails have really complex and varied diets, and the type of things they eat will depend on the snail. I don’t think any type of snail would eat a sock, but if we take snails as a whole, there are plenty that would eat decaying organic matter, so a woolen sock with a bit of culture growing on it might not be too crazy. They could have shared something with the sock since Bumpy eats them too, is what I’m saying. That would have been a good bonding moment, but then of course it would leave the question of what to do with all the run time they didn’t use on a cooking sketch.
Eventually they find the snail’s mother, and Bumpy reacts to this the same way he reacted to the Barbies. He declares himself to be the superior caregiver and announces he’s going to kidnap the child now.
This lasts roughly six seconds, during which the inevitable happens and Bumpy nearly kills the baby through sheer negligence. Realizing he is going to murder the child at some point if he keeps it, Bumpy gives the baby up, everyone is relieved the police didn’t have to get involved, and the episode ends.
So he’s not… he’s not a perpetual menace. It turns out you can occasionally trust Mr. Bumpy. It’s just a huge roll of the dice to do it. But maybe we’ll see if he really lives up to being the hero in future episodes! If the next article is ready, click the link below to read on!