Now we’ve primed ourselves to bump – or at least we can only hope – but it quickly becomes apparent that “bumping” just means being off your meds.

Made in Japan

The 90’s were a bit of a transition period. See, the Democrats had gone through a series of reforms back in the 70’s and had moved away from the principles of the New Deal and more towards the neoliberal ideal that corporations should do whatever they want to whoever they want, and that was only really – you know what, never mind. Basically what I’m getting to is that not everything had been transferred over to Chinese manufacturing yet, and our approach to Japan’s intellectual properties was still lackadaisical at best. Something being from Japan was so foreign and exciting that people had no idea what any of it was. “Made in Japan” is an episode that only makes sense if you have never seen a single piece of Japanese media, and if you could be convinced that a toy from there was going to kill you just because it was foreign and not because it shoots rockets that small kids choke on.

The conflict is that Japan is a scary place with cities named after foreign words like “Osaka”, and robots are popular there. The moral is if you spend the better part of five minutes screaming at a Japanese person, they can’t get a word in edgewise, and presumably the Japanese person has something important to say, such as “I am Japanese” or maybe even “Arigato”.

This first episode is kind of a fun time capsule of things that don’t really exist anymore. Mr. Bumpy is eating chocolate cereal when he and Squishy notice that if they send in one box top, they’ll be awarded with a free toy. Right off the bat, I’m stunned by how generous this box top offer was, because it basically never happened that you got anything for just one box top.

See, back in my day, companies didn’t have a massive surveillance network to know exactly what you masturbated to. Instead, they hired people who spent their entire career making educated guesses about it. Those people came up with all kinds of clever tricks to get you to reveal a little bit more information about yourself and whatever weird things you were into, and box tops was just one of the numerous, layered schemes to seize that information.

Cereal companies were in a war. The war on childhood obesity, but they obviously fought on the side of obesity. For them to clear the fog and better understand their enemy – the children – they needed to know exactly how much cereal the kids were really buying per household. Sure, the boxes left the stores, but how much of that was being concentrated to one specific child, and how could they convince that child to get fatter? Towards this end, cereals would sometimes ask you to eat six hundred boxes of cereal, and if you mailed in all those box tops, they’d send you one cheap plastic spoon in the shape of their mascot’s face or something.

Cartoons, which often pretended they were neutral in the obesity wars, would sometimes try to alert kids that box tops were a form of asymmetrical warfare. Those cartoons would invent propaganda episodes to teach the children that the Trix cereal spoon is a flimsy piece of crap, and if you ate cereal with the box top it’d probably last you longer. The box even had a picture of the mascot on it already, so you’d already won if you wanted the stupid spoon. Normally an episode with this formula would involve the hero eating cereal until they developed diabetes, only to regret they’d been afflicted with a lifelong malady for a hunk of brightly painted petroleum product.

Not Mr. Bumpy. Bump in the Night was a firm sympathizer with obesity.

Mr. Bumpy orders his toy at an unheard cheap cost. It’s frankly a deal, because he already bought (or stole) the cereal for the cereal alone and has to make close to zero effort for the prize. Yet he gets upset because it’s not a super cool robot off the bat. The interesting part is, the show openly tells you this toy got mailed all the way from Japan. That means that Bumpy sent a standard mail letter with only one box top in it to this company, and the company must have mailed him a package that cost three or four times more than a box of cereal.

You think I might be exaggerating – surely the company ordered these robots in bulk and then shipped them out from a central location in the US – but look! There’s Japanese scrawled all over the top of the package. Overseas, through customs, everything – from Japan to the US. The show wants you to know the box is straight from another country. They thought about it. They added details to make this clear.

Now, Bumpy is a stupid creature, so he doesn’t think of the effort someone went through. Though on the other hand, a small child wouldn’t appreciate the ridiculous shipping and handling costs of doing this, and in fairness, I guess even most adults wouldn’t be thankful if you spent twenty bucks to mail a used tampon from one end of the world to the other, so there’s something we can say about relative value, or network utility, and other kinds of market theories – I don’t know. Bumpy storms off mad because he feels ripped off, even though he definitely did get more than what he paid for.

Toys are alive in this cartoon. I don’t know if there are any exceptions to this rule, so Mr. Bumpy deciding to order a toy is really the same as deciding to order a living person in the mail. The characters don’t seem to acknowledge this, but as soon as Bumpy and Squishy walk off screen, the show suddenly remembers that, and the toy comes to life. It transforms to reveal it’s the “ultra cool” robot that Bumpy thought he was getting in the first place, and then it just sort of wanders around the hallways because there’s honestly nothing else for a super cool robot to do in a suburban home.

See, the episode starts off looking like the message is going to be “box tops are a scam”, but at this point the lesson is, “box tops are awesome and you’re just an idiot if you don’t think so”. However, we’re now about three minutes into an eight minute short, so where do we go from here? Well, the show decided it wants to do a Michigan J. Frog routine, where Squishy keeps seeing the robot wandering around the halls, but any time he tries to tell someone else, it transforms back into its dopey, little form and nobody believes Squishy.

It turns out this is completely detrimental to the robot because the only thing the robot wants to do is talk to someone, so everything he does is counter to his motive. Meanwhile, the house has other action figures, so there’s not even a really good reason for Squishy to be afraid of yet another toy wandering around the house doing nothing. At best, he rambles to Mr. Bumpy about how the robot is from Japan, which I guess is fuel enough to assume it has evil intent, but we’re not quite at the level of cultural familiarity that we can use that for upskirt jokes with Molly.

The whole rest of the episode is this, and pretty much nothing else, and there’s nothing notable or interesting about the conflict. It did, however, drive me completely up the wall that Squishy would start a scene in the bathroom and would approach scene right. The bathroom would be established to be at scene left.

But then he would escape by running towards screen left.

Then he enters Bumpy’s room from screen right.

It’s not really wrong, except he kept doing it. I kept having the impression he was running back into the bathroom, but then he turned up in the child’s bedroom that Bumpy lives in, which I think is down the hall. Squishy sort of serpentines, so I think it could be inferred that he course-corrects before he gets to the bedroom, and I am being extremely pedantic here, but there’s so little going on in the story right now that I wasn’t captivated by anything else. The methods by which Squishy navigates the house becomes the larger mystery.

As another example, here he is leaping out of the toilet, which is in the bathroom.

He exits screen right, then enters screen left IN THE CHILD’S BEDROOM.

HOW DID YOU GET THERE, SQUISHY? There’s no toilet in the kid’s bedroom. It might pass you by because he’s leaving and entering from the correct sides of the screen, but if we assume the bathroom is at the north side of the house, the bedroom is to the south. The camera has flipped around a hundred eighty degrees without most of the audience realizing. So Squishy spends this whole episode teleporting all over the goddamn place and screaming about a robot he has no reason to be afraid of, because Squishy has super powers, the robot doesn’t chase him anyway, and the robot keeps hiding from everyone for NOTHING!

Finally, Squishy stops screaming and simply talks to the robot. In a nutshell, it cries and explains, “Arigato, I’m from Japan.”

And Squishy, seeing the error and the cause of all the problems, mails him back to Japan, almost certainly to a company that will be bankrupt next month.

That’s it. That’s the resolution and the happy ending to the story of “Squishy is afraid of the Japanese and will not collect his own ass.”

Dr. Coddle, M.D.

In Mr. Bumpy’s time, you really didn’t know if or when a kid was going to be able to watch an episode of a show. In this modern era of streaming, the first episode really doesn’t do anything at all with Mr. Bumpy, so you don’t get to know him that well. If I’m being honest, we barely learn anything about Squishy either, in spite of the first episode being about him – all we know now is that Squishy is afraid of the Japanese but doesn’t feel animosity towards them as long as they want to go back to Japan eventually. However, when it aired, you would have seen this stuff whenever you got to see it, so it’s probably not fair to get too prickly about “first impressions” or whatever. Still, though, it’s interesting that the first two shorts don’t focus much on the titular character.

“Dr. Coddle” is about Molly, but it opens up with a major staple of how this show is written: Mr. Bumpy is just screwing around, eating up run time.

He spends a while talking about being a super hero and explaining all the super powers that he has, but don’t worry, you can just tune all of this out because it’s not really part of the plot. Instead of doing something with this, he falls off the bed and gets a splinter, at which point Molly rushes over to help him out.

We actually could have saved an eighth of the episode by starting at this moment, because Bumpy thanks her and suggests she should be a licensed physician, and that’s when the story actually begins. Molly immediately runs off to order a bunch of medical books and gleefully embraces the idea of being the household’s primary care doctor. The first thing to arrive in the mail is the costume.

And this is roughly where the show has one of its funny moments that lets you know it’s occasionally going to be a little clever. Before the supplies come in, Molly is telling Bumpy that he gave her a great idea, and Bumpy replies, “That’s amazing! Can I have it back?”

And it didn’t get us rolling on the floor laughing – it probably wasn’t even an original joke or anything – but it’s delivered well and the timing works, so it got a few chuckles out of our group. As much as I’m making fun, the show may be quite forgettable, but I have to repeat that it’s by no stretch unwatchable.

Anyway, all the books come in next – there’s dozens of them – and they squash Bumpy flat. Molly, now viewing herself as the local doctor, runs off to get supplies and assistance to help Bumpy, and this is where we get our first taste of the kind of character Bumpy is. As soon as Molly leaves, he gets up and eats all her medical books.

And WHY? The show establishes exactly how excited Molly is for all of this. She’s telling Mr. Bumpy all about it, but because nobody is watching him since she left to help him, he decides now is a good time to utterly destroy everything she was happy about. And this is why I compared him to my dog, because my dog once tore up like a hundred bucks in paper bills, but my dog did this because she was mad at me. Most of the time, a dog chews and destroys stuff because of anxiety, or in the case of puppies, from a mix of boredom and teething. But Mr. Bumpy is so much worse than a dog. While a dog would destroy your medical texts for a reason, Bumpy does something awful like this simply because he can.

I don’t really have a lot of memories of this show, but I can recall a few shreds of emotion I felt towards a couple of select scenes. This is one of them. I remember as a child thinking that Mr. Bumpy sucked. After he does it, he knows it was wrong and immediately decides to hide it by stuffing Molly’s ruined binders with pages from other books on the family bookshelf. Now, this sets up a “hilarious misunderstanding” where Molly thinks basting a turkey is a good way to cure cancer, but it also establishes there’s dozens of other books that likely nobody cared about, and Bumpy could have just as easily eaten those instead if he had to.

Instead, he does this awful thing, and when Molly comes back he lies to her about it. Now, most shows understand that if you have a character do something awful that would make the audience hate him, then the character has to be punished, they should come clean eventually, and they should do something to redeem themselves. Otherwise, it only establishes your show’s “hero” could help everyone more if they got hit by a truck.

Bump in the Night, however, takes the bold stance that sometimes an asshole just gets away with it. Instead of torturing Bumpy with bad medical knowledge, Molly declares she’s going to do a general checkup on Bumpy and Squishy, but she wants to start with Squishy. Squishy protests, so Bumpy gets a nice hospital bed, and Squishy is strapped down against his will.

See, Squishy figured out right away what Bumpy had done, so Bumpy repeatedly stops him from talking until it looks like Squishy is afraid of getting care from Molly rather than being afraid of having a meat thermometer shoved in his butthole. The punishment for Bumpy’s crimes swiftly transitions over to torturing Squishy, with Molly following her books to the letter even though they’re about things like cooking and radio repair.

The results are, uh… not good. Squishy enters a coma, and Molly begins to panic because she followed her “medical books” to the letter and blames herself for this turn of events. Her big desire was to be a caregiver, and this is traumatizingly the opposite of everything she wanted to do. You think Bumpy would reveal the truth at this point? No, absolutely not. Not intentionally. Instead, by pure chance, he accidentally belches up one of the pages of the original medical textbooks, and when Molly asks him what it is, he goes on lying about it.

At this point you’d think Molly would be angry with him, but Squishy being in the throes of death is a more pressing issue, so she focuses all of her attention on that. The show determines that mouth-to-mouth is a valid lifesaving medical activity, because back in the 90’s it was kind of hard to do research on the fly and the writers would have had to call a real doctor to ask for ideas.

It winds up working, and when Squishy wakes up he tells her they can’t be doing this while people are watching. Now, this is a bit of a joke for the parents to establish that Squishy and Molly have been going bump in the night together behind the scenes. And look, I am all for that – I love it when a kid’s cartoon cares that the parents are watching. I didn’t get any fun winks in my direction when my son was watching Paw Patrol, let me tell you, and I never felt like my interest mattered to that show.

But now what we’ve established is that Molly probably decided to do her first official checkup on Squishy because she loves him, they trust each other, and if she’d made a few mistakes he’d be understanding about it. Bumpy’s actions led to nearly the worst possible outcome, which meant Molly nearly killed the person she felt most comfortable with in the world. It’s almost all the more tragic that Mr. Bumpy was second in line, here.

Heck, this moment even gives a little context to explain the robot episode. In that episode, the robot speaks to Squishy in Japanese and Squishy understands it just fine. Maybe it’s not that Squishy is racist, maybe the issue is that Squishy is one of the early weebs, and he’d been watching ecchi long before anyone in America even knew what that word meant. Then he lucks in to hooking up with a girl who’s totally confident walking around with her bloomers out like it’s nothing, and everyone in their community respects her anyway.

Then a Japanese robot shows up, and all Squishy knows about Japan are from his perverted underwear cartoons. Of course he’s going to assume the robot would be into Molly, Molly is a high value individual to him – he thinks everybody is going to see in her what he does. But Squishy doesn’t have that same high opinion of himself, so in no time at all, he thinks Molly is going to fall for the charms of robot boy, and that’s existentially terrifying. Robot boy has got to go.

And look, I know I’m reading too far into this, but I don’t care. From now on, every interaction between Molly and Squishy are going to be colored by my belief that these two are banging on the regular and that they have a good relationship behind the scenes. It’s just obvious that Squishy is insecure about himself and is the one stopping them from being open about it – that much is clearly built into the character.

Anyway, as a child, this episode made me sort of angry at Mr. Bumpy, but as an adult with more ability to tie together all the connections and realize the severity of the moment, I resent Bumpy a lot more. It’s weird that they never have Bumpy express much guilt about this, but on the bright side, somebody did realize there needed to be some kind of punishment, so the episode ends with them sticking a pair of plyers down Bumpy’s throat.

And I guess they don’t get too angry at him for the reason I couldn’t be too mad at my dog for eating a hundred dollars. If we all assume that Bumpy is stupider than a dog, I guess we can’t hold him too accountable for his actions? Or rather, they can, but they’d have needed to yell at him while he was eating the books or else he wouldn’t have understood what you were upset about.

But there it is! Your introduction to Mr. Bumpy! Are you ready for more? If the next article is done, you can click the link below to jump to it.

Click here for Part 3.