Hide and Go Freak

The moral of Hide and Go Freak is that if you torture you friends, eventually your friends will grow to learn the implements of torture you exact upon them by experience. They will then turn the torture back on you, and you will perish by it. Or that’s the general idea, anyway.

It opens up with Squishy and Bumpy playing a game called “Hide and Go Freak”, which follows a formula that I’ve seen ascribed to Dreamworks, but it obviously predates Dreamworks quite a bit. The trick works like this: you have two friends who play their own esoteric game with unique rules the audience can’t really understand. The game establishes the closeness of the characters, because you’re given to understand that they’ve built this game up over time, played it frequently, and still enjoy playing it together even though the game obviously sucks if you slow down and think about it. It gets attributed to Dreamworks, because a good several of their cartoon films use this trick to establish two kids are friends, and then the film simply wants to move on and get to something else, something like a more interesting story.

This is the whole story for this episode of Bumpy, however, so we’re going to stay on what exactly Hide and Go Freak is and how much it sucks as a game for about ten minutes. Now, the primary sin of the episode isn’t that it focuses on how Squishy and Bumpy play – that’s fine. The problem is that the game doesn’t seem fun at all, and they spend the entire time trying to force Molly to play it.

The rules are, you act like you’re going to play Hide and Go Seek, but then instead of hiding, you go your separate ways for about thirty seconds and then come back with your eyelids flipped inside out.

Except this is a cartoon, so Bumpy can flip more things inside out than his eyelids. It seems like the goal is more or less just to upset your friend with whatever grotesquerie you can conjure up in thirty seconds, but in Bumpy’s defense, I can concede, I see where this would get started! You’re playing Hide and Seek, but you’re going to lose; your friend is about to find you. Instead of accepting defeat lying down, you jump out of the closet with your face half ripped off, and now who’s the loser? The seeker just emptied his bowels from raw terror! They won the “finding” objective but lost the “have fun and not live in terror” objective! Eat it, nerd!

So Bumpy and Squishy demonstrate what this is, and then concur that, man, this whole game is actually a little one-note. It’s easier than Hide and Go Seek, because you find your opponent within thirty seconds, and neither player is really all that shocked by your horrific face because he was expecting it in the first place. The two of them conclude that they need a new player who isn’t prepared for what the game is, so they go fetch Molly.

And yes, surely our female friend will want nothing more than to look at our ugly faces for the next half hour, but without much actual social interaction outside of that. We’ll count, run away from each other, come back with our intestines hanging from our open jowls, then have a good laugh about it. What would Molly not love? And this is something important: many shows and many parts of society will tell you girls can do anything boys can do, but the main caveat that is oft too unspoken is that girls just want the option to do anything boys can do. They don’t necessarily want to have to do the things the boys are doing, especially when it’s something like Hide and Go Freak.

See, a woman only has so much time in her life, and it’s a shame to imagine she’d have to spend it sitting on the sidelines of something that might be fun to her, but if you force her to do something she objectively doesn’t have any interest in, then you are wasting those precious moments of her lifespan and it is the same crime!

She tells them she doesn’t want to play, in no uncertain terms, while trying not to be rude about it, but they insist she has to. Seeing as how she really isn’t being given a choice, Molly surrenders. They promise her it will be fun, and she’ll really enjoy it, but from the very beginning they both had terrible intentions. There isn’t a scrap of desire between them to see that Molly appreciates her time with them.

They start explaining the rules, and they suck. They finish the explanation and Molly reiterates that she does not want to play. They ignore her. They promise to help her learn, but instead it’s all a set-up to scare her. “That’s the game, Molly!” they say to a terrified comfort doll, “That’s the game! You let your guard down and then we poop blood! It’s the whole game!”

“I don’t want to play!” she says, and they tell her again that she can totally trust them, and it’ll be so fun, just wait, you’ll see.

This is one of the episodes where Molly is the smartest person it the room, however, so when Bumpy comes back a second time in the form of a blood-pooping, crater-backed, booger-beast from Hell, she only pretends to be scared.

Her grand master plan is to stand there with a dumb, horrified expression until Bumpy and Squishy believe that they gave her a stroke or something. It’s an incredibly risky plan, because when your strategy is to remain motionless, it’s more likely that the boys are going to shove your own fingers into your nose holes, and there is some distant risk they might pick you up by your underwear and hang you from a tree. Bumpy and Squishy have already been fairly malicious all day long, so the only way this wouldn’t end badly for Molly is if they both completely bought into it.

It works, because otherwise the moral of the episode would be “don’t do the statue game when your friends are in a bastard mood”

But they do use her as a hat rack for like a second, so there is a tiny amount of believability here. At last, Molly reveals that she wasn’t brain-dead after all – she was only taking an excruciatingly brain-dead gamble by betting on the good nature of her friends, which only paid off because they were too stupid to be evil at exactly that moment.

They all agree, in a completely idiot fashion, that they learned a powerful lesson, and since we established in an earlier episode that Molly and Squishy are fooling around, it’s safe to assume he didn’t get laid that night.

Better Homes and Garbage

So we just had an episode that established Squishy and Bumpy are life-long friends who have been developing weird games together for many years, which means we should definitely follow-up with an episode that establishes neither of these characters have anything in common! What could be better than two absolutely contradictory perspectives on the same characters!

In Better Homes and Garbage, Squishy, who lives in the toilet, is made homeless by an incompetent plumber who works only at night.

This means Squishy needs to room with someone else for a few nights. He brings it up with Bumpy, and Bumpy promises to let Squishy stay over without eating him, or laying eggs in him, or any of the things Bumpy would do in a normal episode. Typically this is a setup for Bumpy to be horrible to someone, but not this time – Bumpy really is taking a break from terrorizing everyone today.

It is wonder Squishy doesn’t go to Molly, since they are fooling around. I feel like, in parts, that’s how I got married. I started staying at my wife’s house longer and longer until she realized she liked having me around, and then we made it legal. Maybe Squishy has a fear of commitment? If he stays at Molly’s house, she’s going to read that as things getting more serious, and he’s not ready to have that conversation. Molly does seem like the type to want to rush into a deeper relationship before everyone is ready, so it must all be calculated.

It’s revealed that Squishy is a neat freak, and he’s appalled by the disgusting state of Bumpy’s house. Yet, his squeamishness does apply very selectively. In this episode, he can’t live with it, but in other episodes Squishy is perfectly fine to be walking around with swamp ooze in his bare hands, and even feels positive about it. It really depends on if they wanted Squishy to have conflict with Bumpy. Because he’s never straight about it and changes his mind so much, Squishy came across as a bit of a dick head to me when I was a kid.

In this episode, it’s a very large problem for Squishy, so he cleans Bumpy’s house while Bumpy is sleeping.

And I think this is normally the opposite of how all this works. Squishy can’t stand the mess, which means he’d clean, which means Bumpy would get used to the cleaning and never worry about his own messes. That should lead Squishy to get mad at Bumpy for being a slob.

Instead, Bumpy hates having a clean house so much, he rips his own arm off.

You think I’m exaggerating, but I am not. Bumpy is in such a state of horrified disbelief, he rips off his own arm right at the socket.

Then Squishy puts his arm in a filing cabinet so they can find it later, demonstrating the value of an organized, clean house. And you know, I’m pretty relentlessly dumping on the show, but I have to give it props when it does something funny, and this is one of those moments where the show deserves credit. That’s a fairly good bit. Very cartoony, very outlandish, it’s establishing a problem and then having a character double-down on the problem like it’s a good thing. It is not a good episode, but this was a good gag.

The reason it’s not a good episode is because we’re only about two minutes in now, which means we’re at an alright pace for once, and then the whole plot runs out of ideas. It goes on for eight more minutes, and it’s just a blur. I can scarcely remember anything else I watched, because it’s merely about Squishy taking good care of Bumpy’s house, and Bumpy doing his best to tolerate it.

At one point Squishy makes Bumpy a dinner, and it’s a very sad dinner, but Squishy has not taken over Bumpy’s diet or anything. He just tried to make something he thought Bumpy would like and Bumpy doesn’t like it. In fairness to Bumpy, Bumpy only eats socks. That’s his whole diet, so Squishy trying to feed him a carrot was a stupid waste of time, no matter how small it is. However that doesn’t stop Bumpy from eating any socks on his own time. I think he whines that he doesn’t know where to find the socks now that they’ve been organized instead of strewn all about the place, but the socks are still there and Bumpy could eat them once he knew where they were.

Like I get that if somebody reorganizes your room, you have to learn where things are again. I mentioned I was married, right? I have a family. I know what it’s like when somebody takes something and doesn’t put it back in its usual spot, but I’d struggle to turn that into a ten minute episode or to try to convey that as a reason I can’t live with my wife or something. Yeah, Squishy moved your stuff, but he put it in the filing cabinet, and he’s standing there to help you find it if you want it. If they wanted this to work as a conflict, Squishy should have left to go shopping and Bumpy has to turn his whole house upside down just to find his fingernail clippers or something.

And I suppose it is kind of imposing that Squishy decided to clean and reorganize during a temporary housing arrangement, but Squishy did think he was doing a good deed to repay Bumpy’s hospitality here, so again, there’s not really that much conflict except that Bumpy is not able to emotionally process it. They don’t even need to have an adult conversation, they just need to have conversations that aren’t infinitely stupid, or have a conversation just barely smart enough to establish some sort of conflict beyond, “the house is cleaner than my rotten asshole and that makes me mad.”

Just mess the stupid house up again, Bumpy! It’s easy! You live there, it’ll happen naturally with time after Squishy leaves!

By the end of the episode, I was more or less rooting for them both to simply go straight to hell and finish the episode. Nothing was happening! It turns out these two characters don’t like each other and can’t be around each other for more than twenty-four hours! This is a terrible episode to have about your characters who are supposed to be inseparable friends!

The episode concludes with the both of them realizing that they can stay friends so long as they stay away from each other, which is possible when Squishy gets his house back.

All considered, the weirdest thing about this episode is that Bumpy doesn’t do anything to bring any problems down on himself, and isn’t really the main source of the conflict. He just can’t tolerate Squishy being clean. Normally, Bumpy is the problem and deserves a whole lot worse than he gets, but here, Squishy moves out and it’s a relief for us all. Luckily, in later episodes, Squishy won’t always care about cleanliness for this to be a problem! But we’ll see as there’s more to come!

Click Here for Part 5.