They used to write cartoons a little differently back in the day. Well, not that differently, but in the nineties they were trying to experiment with bolder, envelope-pushing directions while still staying safe and formulaic. The standards and regulations for children’s cartoons had been dramatically relaxed, so we were seeing the likes of “Ren and Stimpy” or “Rocko’s Modern Life” hitting prime time air. Bumpy wasn’t a show that was trying to be offensive, but it was trying to toe that line of being crude.

Gum Crazy

Gum Crazy is a great example of this. See, Bumpy loves gum. Only problem is, he’s an idiot and he swallows it. Informed of this, Squishy decides to tell Bumpy the myth that if you eat gum, it sits in your stomach for the rest of your life, or two weeks, or until your dad comes back with cigarettes. Whatever it is, it makes Bumpy realize he never knew his father, and also there’s a ton of gum in his stomach, so he dives into his own mouth to get it.

Swallowing himself causes Bumpy to compress into a singularity, which begins to suck everything into it. And see, so far this episode is doing great. This is the kind of wacky, cartoon horseshit that justifies the existence of cartoons in the first place. You never see this kind of thing in Grey’s Anatomy. Someone destroying the whole planet as part of a singular ambition to eat the gum in their own stomach is a doomsday I can respect.

But the writers immediately panic. They assume the kids won’t understand what’s going on here, so they cut to a computer that helpfully informs us that if Bumpy doesn’t knock this off, the world will be destroyed by the end of the episode. I think it’s not normally a good sign if you’re writing something and you say to yourself, “Oh man, is it unclear that black holes are dangerous?”

It’s generally good advice to work in the perspective that “the audience is stupid”, because it’s a bit of a warning to remind writers that writers are stupid. Writers will punch up a whole script and forget the audience isn’t in the writer’s head. You think, of course the audience will understand the motives of my character, because I, the writer, understand those motives! But you need to go back and look at your scripts with the idea that the audience can’t read your stupid, incomprehensible mind and come to all the conclusions you wanted them to have. You sometimes have to pull aside the veil of pretentious mystery and have characters do things that obviously and clearly display intent!

I think this is a case where the writers assume the audience is so stupid that it wraps around again and you start to wonder what the writers were thinking. Did you really think I wasn’t going to sense any danger from a terrible Bump-hole that sucks everything into it? Even if I didn’t know what a black hole was, as a child I could probably grasp the fear of getting sucked into a Bump-hole.

Now, you may think, oh Greg, it’s fine if they’ve done a little warning. It’s a fourth wall joke. Just roll with it.

Well we do roll, right into the next scene where it turns out the inside of Bumpy is a series of doorways. I’m not sure exactly why Bumpy’s insides is a series of doorways, but it is really convenient for the writers because they can put anything they want behind the doors, and what they put behind one is Albert Einstein.

He emerges with a second expository warning that if Bumpy takes the gum out of his stomach and then eats it again, that creates a paradox, and this paradox will destroy the world. This is how concerned the writers were that the kids would not understand what was going on. They needed the computer to express the danger first, then devoted even more run time to a lesson on the danger, delivered by Einstein, who lives in Bumpy’s stomach, which is a hallway full of doors.

Except – wait. Einstein’s makes this more confusing. Bumpy compressing himself into a singularity to enter his own body makes sense. Well – it makes a cartoon kind of sense anyway! I understood what was going on until a second ago, because now we’re being told that the real threat isn’t the vortex outside, but the actions of Bumpy inside the vortex. We’re told if he takes the gum out of his stomach, then eats it again, that’s a paradox. But that’s not a paradox!

If I move my couch from the living room to the kitche, that doesn’t destroy the universe. It just moves an oversized piece of furniture into somewhere it doesn’t belong. If Bumpy moves a wad of gum from his stomach to his mouth and then back to his stomach again, that seems like it’s creating less of a problem than having your couch in the kitchen. So it’s not great if you feel like you have to verbally explain the stakes of the episode before things begin, but if you then still feel so nervous that you’re compelled to use Albert Einstein to explain the premise again, and the second explanation makes less sense and only adds confusion, then you might be writing things stupider than your audience.

The whole paradox thing doesn’t even matter, anyway. Bumpy disregards the entire thing, breaks into the room that his stomach lives in, and then steals a wad of gum from it. His stomach is powerless to stop him, so at this point Bumpy has won, he got what he wanted, and the episode could be over if it weren’t for the fact that we still have a whole second half of the episode to burn through.

Now that he has the gum, he has to escape with it. The stomach explains that it’s really up to the heart to decide all the rules, but honestly nothing Bumpy does from this point onward matters. He could open another door and watch the memory of his dad leaving for cigarettes, and we’d kind of just be padding out time.

Bumpy goes to confront his heart, which, unlike his stomach – a horrible pox-ridden creature – is just him in a mustache and with a French accent.

The only reason they do this is so Bumpy can dress up as a girl and then seduce himself. As a kid, I think I would interpret the joke as being that Bumpy is horrible, and it’s comedic to imagine he’d be able to find himself attractive. As an adult, I’m so upset they didn’t lean more into it and really use the opportunity to make more jokes at Bumpy’s expense. “Mother was right about you!” feels like such an obvious quip to make here, and they just… they don’t do it.

There’s so many opportunities to go a hilarious direction with a lover’s quarrel. It could almost be perfect. And yet, instead, they both start talking about how they love gum, until Bumpy interrupts himself, and Bumpy’s “heart” decides to kick Bumpy out for being rude. All potential dashed upon the rocks, as forever wasted as their love.

The heart then accuses the brain of being behind everything, so Bumpy goes to have an argument with his own brain. They do alright with this premise: at one point Bumpy lies to his brain to try to trick it, and it explains that it knows what Bumpy is thinking so the ruse doesn’t work. Then an announcement comes in out of nowhere declaring the world will end if Bumpy doesn’t give up on the gum. He says he will, he’s ejected from the black hole that is his body, and then he reveals he still has all the gum he stole from his stomach.

Squishy looks directly at the camera and smugly announces “here we go again” as alarms blare. But why Squishy? Why is the world even ending? He got the gum out of his stomach, and then ate it again. If eating things that have already been in your stomach destroyed the world, humanity never would have advanced past chimps, because I’ve watched them do exactly that at the zoo! It doesn’t blow up the world! We checked thoroughly when we still had tails!

Baby Snail

Something I noticed quickly about Bumpy is that it often feels like every episode doesn’t have quite a full episode worth of ideas behind it. Take Baby Snail for instance. It’s about a Baby Snail, but instead of using its opening minutes to establish the snail, they have Squishy and Bumpy playing a pirate game, and it goes on for a full minute before they actually find the snail.

The episode only runs for ten minutes, so that means they dedicate an entire tenth of their episode to a pirate skit that doesn’t tie into anything. It makes me wonder about the script-writing process. Did the episode start off as being about pirates, but it was worse than Baby Snail so they scrapped it for the Baby Snail plot? What could have been worse than the Baby Snail Plot? Hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself.

They find this baby snail, and then the conflict of the episode is that their dumb asses conclude the most equipped and reasonable person to look after it is Mister Bumpy himself. Bumpy doesn’t know what snails eat, what they do, or that they’re normally pretty independent, so the best thing he can do is remove it from where it is and then kill it in his own home. It’s kind of a similar premise to “saving a baby bird” or “saving a baby bunny” when you find a little animal in your back yard and your first instinct is to bring it inside where its parents will never find it again.

This is exactly what Bumpy does. They remove the snail to a second location, and then don’t know how to take care of it. In fact, Bumpy is half considering eating the baby himself while nobody is watching when a bunch of Barbie dolls drive up and change his mind.

To the show’s credit, they went in a completely different direction here than I expected. Normally, a show is trying to convince boys that if they babysit their younger siblings, girls will like them because it demonstrates they have some sort of paternal instinct. It’s a lie, but if you’re honest about how watching your baby brother means there’s no way you’re getting laid tonight, and mom and dad are going on a date alone because they can’t lay each other while they have to deal with baby, there’s no way they’re going to get their teenage son to babysit.

Instead, the Barbies ride up, get excited about the idea of caretaking for a baby, and then Bumpy tells them all to shove it up their asses. He announces he can care for a baby better than any smelly, plastic-ass bitch, and he’s about to put all these women to shame with his incredible parenting. Women think they can do anything better than a man? Get out of the kitchen! A man is about to make his own sandwich! And he’s going to make it how he likes it! With bacon! And Nutella!

It’s such a dumb twist on the idea that it took me by surprise and I actually had to laugh at it. Old cartoons did use to do this thing where they’d have a man and woman switch traditional gender roles and come to appreciate the work the other spouse did in their daily lives, but I don’t know if I ever saw another cartoon decide to have a male protagonist take on feminine roles out of spite for women. I’ll wash the dishes, do the laundry, and feed the baby! Bumpy do it for himself! He don’t need no woman!

The rest of the episode is about a strong, independent Bumpy not having half an ass’s idea what to do with the baby.

By the end of the episode, of course, he realizes that he loves the baby and wants to keep it indefinitely, no matter the consequences. This sets up the finale conflict.

Squishy finds something that might be construed as the snail’s mother and presents it to Bumpy. However, he wasn’t there when Bumpy entered his caustic misogyny phase, so doesn’t know Bumpy is rejecting all things female where it concerns rearing children. Also nobody seems to be aware that snails are hermaphrodites, and that this is likely the first snail Squishy was able to find that presented itself as female. This would say a lot about the snail, because snails must certainly have different beauty standards than other animals, but we don’t get into it. We’re at the end of the episode, there’s no more time.

Bumpy climbs to a high place, refusing to relinquish custody of the child, until he drops something that he believes was the baby. He mourns the death he thinks he caused until it’s revealed that the whole thing was just a wacky misunderstanding, at which point, he hands the baby over to a snail in lipstick and false eyelashes. For all I know about snails, the big ones eat the little ones. I don’t know what happens to the baby afterward because I don’t believe it’s a recurring character.

However, I do know there’s more episodes! If the next article is finished, you can click the link below.

Click Here for Part 4.