I was writing an article about characters, and in it I brought up a show called “Bump in the Night” that I remembered from my childhood as being, vividly, a show I can remember nothing about. It had to do with some green guy who yelled at everybody and did everything wrong, and the only little nugget I can bring back from my child’s brain is that they had a time travel episode. It’s my earliest living memory of hating time travel.
So I thought to myself: the show that made me realize time travel could make you want to peel the skin off your own eyelids shouldn’t just be a wild mustache hair on the tip of my tongue. It needs to be a real, living memory, and I need to agonize over it in the present day.
I think the best part about getting older is that more and more, nobody has any idea what I’m talking about when I bring up weird shows I watched, or sometimes even world events. That means that when I tell people we’re going to watch Mr. Bumpy, they have no idea what they’re in for, and I have full control to guide and color the experience from start to finish. One of these days, I’m going to be an old guy who traps you in a long, winding story that explains nothing, yet absolutely everything, baby, and that day is today! Sit back and buckle in, as I walk you through the claymation sensation that was Mr. Bumpy.
I Tell You He Goes Bump in the Night
Thanks to these life choices, Mr. Bumpy’s theme song is now stuck in my goddamned brain. It’s like some kind of classic, 60’s era Rock N’ Roll, sung by Boogie Woogie Barbies, and they want to make it abundantly clear that Mr. Bumpy goes bump.
They don’t tell you what it means to “Bump”, but they assure you that he’s done it before and he’ll do it again. He’ll also do it very quickly – at about a million miles per hour, to be precise, which puts his bump rate at an incredible 1/600th the speed of light. If Bumpy were to ever bump himself straight to the moon, it’d only take him about fifteen minutes. I wish the dolls would explain how he survives the tremendous G-forces associated with bumping that fast, but we just have to wonder.
He bumps, damn you. He does it quickly, and he does it in the cover of darkness. And this is him, by the way.
You take one look at Mr. Bumpy and I think you’ll understand why I’ll probably never totally forget this show in spite of having no recollection of anything that happened in it. This guy is downright notable. He’s a green toilet with frog legs, purple warts, a pickle for a nose, and gigantic, expressive stalk eyeballs. How could you not recall?
He introduces us to his friends.
The first and most reoccurring friend is Squishington – frequently “Squish” for short – whose name escaped me to such an extent I couldn’t have told you what it was if you put a gun to my head. Naming your straight man character after an adjective must be one of the worst things you could do. It’s like if Jim Henson decided to name Kermit, “Jump” because that’s something a frog does. Even as successful as The Muppets was, people would have struggled forever to remember a character named “Jump”.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’d be another story if the only thing Kermit did was jump and that’s why he was named that. Animal was named “Animal”, and the only thing he did was animal. No problems there. But the fact is, I don’t think Squishy really does squish more than most of the other characters. If anything, Mr. Bumpy himself handles most of the slapstick and is the one getting squished because it’s one of the consequences of going bump so irresponsibly fast. Squishy’s name implies his only purpose is to squish and he gets upstaged on that to the extent he loses his identity.
Then we have Molly, which as I understand developed a small cult fandom on the internet that wants to have sex with her, because of course she did. I think it’d be more astounded to find a female character that absolutely nobody finds attractive, but after Digital Circus began to blow up and people began pointing out how Molly must have influenced the design of Ragatha, I saw a number of people admitting that she was a guilty crush of their childhood.
If I had to guess, it’s because she had sort of a deep voice for a female character and was always trying to solve things in practical ways, the combination of which made her feel like an authority figure. Watching it again as an adult, the truth is that Molly alternates weirdly between being the smartest person in the room and the dumbest person in the room depending entirely on what the plot calls for, so it’s total luck of the draw if Molly is going to be the solution or the problem for any episode. Still, I very distinctly remember as a child thinking that Molly was in charge of everyone.
I think you can bash on men for being easy to please or for being single-minded, but on the re-watch I am not at all shocked that this otherwise hideous character was the girl nobody would admit to liking. The male gender has complicated interests and stuff, I swear! It’s just the media has an easier time doing something with a bikini and doesn’t always know how to create girls that boys will fall for in spite of her left arm being clearly stolen from another doll. Considering toys in this show are alive, that means that when Molly needed a new arm, she killed some other girl with literally one hand and took that new arm. You guys don’t have to be ashamed about being into an alpha female, is what I’m saying – it’s natural.
However, an interesting thing about the character is that it feels like she occasionally gets her lines cut in an awkward way. As someone who’s spent a lot of time editing audio recorded by myself and other people, sometimes you’ll want to splice a take somehow to better fit a scene. Sometimes an actor does a really interesting take for the first half of a read, and then they re-take the line and the interesting stuff is in the second half that time, so you wind up stitching the takes together to get an overall better delivery. When you do this, you have to be careful to not create a sense that you’re sticking takes together, but with Molly, she’ll deliver a line, there will be a very hard cut that makes it obvious something was altered in post, and then she trainwrecks into her next line.
As a kid I never noticed, but as someone experienced with this process now, it smacks me like sack of frozen oranges every time, and I’d love to know what was going on there. My best guess is that the show, while not exactly good, also isn’t exactly boring. They do a really good job of making sure that the pacing is fast – almost too fast – so that even though nothing on screen makes a ton of sense, it’s at least not tedious. It’s possible that the actress for Molly delivers her lines too slowly, and it was just enough that the editors got worried it was making the scene drag, so they went in and whacked her lines like Jason killing teens at summer camp until only purity remained.
So this theme song really sets you up with the impression that this is going to be a fairly cool show with a lot going on. The animation is expressive, there’s a lot of skill in the claymation for this and the budget obviously got put into warming up the crowd. You think Mr. Bumpy is going to really drive the plot and be a firm main character who will bump too goddamned fast, but if that’s what you think, you’re about to be let down.
Let me tell you now, Mr. Bumpy is not a main character. Oh, he is a character. For sure, there’s a lot of… Mr. Bumpy on screen, doing a lot of stuff, but I wouldn’t exactly say he’s a leading role. The one most consistent thing about Mr. Bumpy is that he’s easily distracted. It’s hard to describe just how in the moment Mr. Bumpy lives, but I own a dachshund that probably has more complex foresight than he does.
Like my dog will go in the back yard and eat her own barf from yesterday because she forgets she already threw it up and thinks, “Hey, free turkey!”
She doesn’t wonder why not even the neighborhood ants have taken her puke away yet if it’s so good. That’s not how dogs are, they just live in the here and now. There’s no accounting for the past, and when she throws that turkey up again she’s not going to put these events together in her head. However, my dog does have a certain amount of object permanence. She has patterns to her behavior. She barks at children consistently because she remembers the time my son tried to run her over with a walker. She stalks the yard every day for rabbit burrows, and I’ve had to deal with likely over a hundred bunny bodies over the years. My dog has life goals and purposes that she lives out with a certain dog-like nobility.
Mr. Bumpy does not have these things. Mr. Bumpy will eat his puke, yes, but if I let him out in the yard in the afternoon, he’s not going to use that time to pee before he comes back in the house. Mr. Bumpy will climb into a tree, collect a few bird eggs, forget why he was doing that, get in a fight with a squirrel, call Molly for help, forget why he called her for help when she gets there, get in a fight with his own reflection, come back inside, and then will pee in the house. Watching Mr. Bumpy is like watching the stupidest dog anyone has ever owned in the history of humankind. Nature could not have produced an animal as stupid as he is.
Now this could be the secret to a good show. In this case, I assure you, it’s not. Occasionally, Mr. Bumpy stumbles into these strokes of comedic genius, but it almost feels as though a million monkeys slamming their knuckles into a typewriter led to those moments. Mr. Bumpy could do anything, at any time, and completely at random he occasionally chooses to be funny. You can’t know if he’s going to be funny now, or in a few minutes, or even if he’ll be funny at all this episode. Everything just happens when it happens and you’ll get what Mr. Bumpy gives you.
I think the most interesting thing about the show is what a blend of actual talent there is in spite of the parts that are threatening to come off the hinges. The voice acting is strong, the pacing generally works, the animation is good for what it is (they get lazy sometimes, but claymation is expensive), and the good bits don’t feel unintended. In fact, you get so lulled into this sense that maybe it’s not going to be good that it surprises you when it occasionally is. I was watching it with friends, and someone would be in the middle of whining about some disjointed scene, and then a joke leopard would ambush us from the grass and drag that guy off into the woods. It’s amazing how they’ll just be going nowhere, Mr. Bumpy is doing a bunch of things for no reason, it doesn’t matter, and then BOOM! One thing happens in this whole twenty minutes that makes you think you could sit through another round.
The show ran for two seasons and has a Christmas special, because cartoons in the 90’s legally had to do Christmas or the Clinton family ordered the show staff to be torn apart by wild dogs. In this case, the special threatens to go on for over an hour, and we’re both excited for it and dreading it. My goal is to watch through every episode so I can write up a summary of the plot and what I think went wrong, or what went right. I’ll post those essays here in whatever sized chunks seem fair, so if you’re down for that, and the next article is finished, you can click the link below and we’ll get started.