Some of you may have noticed that I did this once before. The website used to have articles about several episodes of Mr. Bumpy, but due to a series of tech problems, the articles were wiped out. Now, some people would interpret this as a higher power trying to let Mr. Bumpy die appropriately as he so deserves. However, I can be a combative soul, so I read this as more of a challenge from the galaxy. I didn’t finish the original run of the articles because after a few episodes, I had to take a break. I was making myself inordinately angry at a children’s show that wasn’t even on the air anymore – and the thing is, the show never even made me mad as a kid! Well, not most of the time.

Made In Japan

Cartoons are funny. I mean, sometimes they’re actually funny, like “ha ha”. You laugh at them. Other times, a company’s whole pedigree revolves around coming up with the most boring, stale, and moderate ideas in spite of animation being ludicrously expensive. It’s sometimes said that the main advantage of cartoons is that they can explore any sort of fantastical scenario you can imagine, and then it turns out some executives can imagine selling toys themed around Gleek the monkey from Super Friends.

That’s funny in an existential way. Like, oh god, I can’t believe we as humans live like this, and then we purport to be children of God made in His Almighty image. What does that say about God? Should making lazy, low quality cartoons be a sin? It doesn’t seem sinful, but I’m not a person who does religion as a profession, so who am I to ask the big questions.

Made In Japan was an episode that’s only possible because when Bump In the Night was airing, the idea of a “weaboo” hadn’t really come to fruition. Nobody knew about Japan or what Japanophiles were. I think, vaguely, we’d become aware that anime sometimes tolerated panties on screen, but at that time, we were still very much a slave to the opinions of concerned, Christian mothers who didn’t think it was a sin to have lazy cartoons, but they did think it was a sin to have panties. So the crux of this entire episode is that a foreign person is walking around just doing nothing, and that’s terrifying because the only thing that can lead to is politicians.

Mr. Bumpy brings this down on his household by eating cereal and reading an exceptionally bland ad that promises if you send in a single box top, they will ship a toy all the way from Japan to your house. Now I do want to give them a little credit, here, because it’s a little bit funny that the ad promises a complete refund on a free toy. Or, I guess, they promise to give you back your box top? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, because they also confusingly say the offer is void everywhere.

But it’s not void everywhere, because they send in the one box top and they get the toy!

It’s got the Japanese moon runes scrawled on it and everything! They make it clear it really did come from Japan. They also highlight Bumpy’s address, which is a real address that belongs to a place called “Jericho Storage” right now. I assume this used to be the studio that made the show, and there’s no telling if Bumpy still lives in the walls or something. It feels like Bumpy would be as hard to get rid of as bed bugs, if not worse.

Anyway, he opens the box and finds out it’s not as cool of a toy as he thought it was.

And he gets mad, because what else can you do sometimes, I guess.

Actually! Scratch that! If he was really mad, then he could just get a bunch of box tops and order hundreds more of these toys, because there’s no way the cereal company could possibly make a profit shipping these stupid things all the way from Japan one at a time like this. Every single toy you order costs the company five times more than what the cereal cost you, and if you were diligent, I’m sure you could get the entire promotional offer canceled through sheer grit and cantankerous hatred.

But he doesn’t do that, even though that would be a really funny twist on the old box top trope. Yeah, asking the question, “What if box tops got you something better than they were worth, but still so bad you want to hurt the company,” might make a fun episode, but that would require more creative brain cells than Bump In the Night could offer. Instead, Bumpy wanders off, and the rest of the episode is a Michigan J Frog routine where the robot transforms into a bigger robot, wanders around the house, and then transforms into a stupid little robot whenever Squishy tells someone about it.

It does nothing at all throughout the episode, so the only reason Squishy gets so frightened of it must be because he understands that if you get foreigners in your house, you’re going to attract politicians. See, it’s a natural predator and prey relationship, kind of like how if you see a lot of spiders, you generally don’t have a spider problem, you have a bug problem, and the spiders are eating the bugs. Foreigners are the natural prey of Republicans. Their preferred diet is Mexicans, which is why there’s so many Republicans in Texas, but they’ve been known to eat Japanese opportunistically. Squishy knows that if nobody does anything about a foreigner in the house, then pretty soon a geriatric inside trader will be running around, cutting taxes for the rich and who knows what else. It’s a real problem, but nobody believes him.

Molly comes out here and her panties are just on full display in spite of what any concerned mother might think, and you’d figure that this would be a great opportunity to make some upskirt joke, or something. I mean we’re talking about an episode where the whole conflict is irrationally fearing the Japanese, and it would be hilarious if Molly complained that she didn’t like their cartoons because you can always see the girls’ underwear, but no. Instead it’s only Squishy showing people the robot, the robot does nothing, and then Squishy goes back to the toilet to sulk.

Finally, it gets revealed that the robot just wanted to talk to someone to ask if it could be deported back to Japan, because that’s the natural environment of the Japanese. This means that there was no reason at all for the robot to hide like it was doing, because its goal was to have a plain conversation about what it wanted, but if it had done that then the episode would have only lasted about a minute and that’s not what the network paid for. At any rate, Squishy is relieved that everything can be resolved without involving a senator, so he packs the robot up and sends him away.

Dr. Coddle MD

You know how I said that Mr. Bumpy didn’t normally make me angry as a kid? Well sometimes he did, and this is one of the episodes where I really felt that Mr. Bumpy should have been twisted inside out and had his skeleton removed, but for some reason the writers believed he would come across as incorrigible and charming. The episode starts off with him dicking around, wasting an excessive amount of screen time until he hurts himself, at which point Molly rushes in to help.

After making him all better, Bumpy suggests that she expand her horizons and become an actual doctor, and Molly realizes that’s a life ambition she didn’t know she needed. Excitement in her heart, she immediately orders away for medical textbooks.

She’s cheerful as a lark. Pleased as punch. Chipper as a… wood chipper. I don’t know, she’s like lots of things that are happy, and you get the sense that Molly is finding her calling. She explains all this to Mr. Bumpy, and then leaves him alone with the books for about a minute.

And he eats every page of every textbook. There’s no good explanation given for this. He simply chooses to do the worst thing he could do, not even out of spite, but just because nobody was there to stop it.

Then his evil ass runs to a book shelf full of books that he could have eaten without specifically hurting his friend, and he pulls out their pages to put in the binders that Molly ordered. When she returns, he tries to pretend he didn’t do anything, while she attempts to do a basic medical checkup on Squishy by following the instructions of a cookbook and an engine repair manual. This nearly kills Squishy, leading Molly to blame herself in what must be a horrific spate of watching all your dreams die at once along with one of your closest friends.

Even as Squishy expires before their very eyes, Bumpy tries to hide this act of evil he’s committed today, but just so happens to burp up a page of medical texts while Molly is panicking. This thankfully leads her to realize her textbooks are going to be useless, so she resorts to giving Squishy mouth-to-mouth until he recovers. See, this was back in a time when the internet wasn’t really there for us, so the writers would have no way of knowing what a doctor would do in this situation, so they just made it up with a thing you’d know about off-hand. It’s how you got stuff like curing amnesia by hitting someone in the head, because no cartoon writer knew what you did with it and would just make up a stupid answer.

After all that, Squishy wakes up and reveals that he and Molly have been having sex. It was one of those jokes “for the parents”. Which if anything makes it more traumatic because Molly nearly killed a guy she’s been fooling around with. I mean, I’m sure she could do better than Squishy, but obviously she liked him on a whole different level, so she was probably pretty invested in him not being dead, all around.

Finally, they punish Bumpy a little by getting a pair of pliers and saying they’re going to get the rest of the medical textbooks out of his stomach, so the show irises out with him screaming.

And for a cartoon, maybe that’s enough of a comeuppance? But as a kid I remember still feeling frustrated. Like, Molly was on to a good thing and Mr. Bumpy ruined it, almost by killing someone in the process. Shouldn’t there be something you can do to fix it? Like order more textbooks, or something? Or I guess he’d just eat those too. One of the reasons we outlaw cruel and unusual punishments is because they don’t actually remedy or remediate anything.

But whatever! Mr Bumpy, everybody!

Click Here for Part 3.