The partner episode of "Real or Robots?" is "Special Delivery", a story which somehow manages to be even edgier despite dealing with less overtly nightmarish subject matter. Stu constructs a hideous talking doll that would psychologically scar the wits out out of any child unfortunate enough to lock eyes with it, Tommy and his friends grapple with the question of where babies come from and later on Tommy sees a dead body. Ladies and gentleman, welcome to another dark and demented day in the unnerving lives of the Rugrats. "Special Delivery" follows a formula that was fairly common in the early days of Rugrats, in which Tommy (and Tommy alone) would go for a wander around a distinctly un-kid friendly environment, a scenario which in real life would result in somebody finding Tommy's crushed and mangled body and Stu and Didi being sent down for criminal neglect. Actually, if you want a dark subtext to go with Rugrats then you scarce need look further than the gruesome displays of parenting we get in just about every episode - obviously some suspension of disbelief is required in the interests of facilitating a story, but if your one-year-old son is seriously able to to stowaway in a mailbag and go on an adventure around the sorting office without you so much as noticing, then clearly there is something terribly wrong with how you prioritise the running of your household.
While Stu is down in the basement pouring blood, sweat and tears into his latest abomination, a talking doll named Patty Pants that keeps malfunctioning, Tommy is in the hallway checking out Spike's daily display of animosity toward the mailman. Included in today's delivery is a mail order catalogue from the Eggbert toy company, and Stu is distressed to learn about Tina Trousers, a talking doll that boasts similar features to Patty Pants but is superior in every way, right down to getting realistic diaper rash (Christ, who on earth wants to play with that?). Stu is miserable about being beaten to the punch, but Didi assures him that the actual Tina Trousers probably isn't anywhere near as good as her ad makes out and encourages him to order the doll and see for himself. Suddenly Stu brightens and decides to order a Tina Trousers of his own for next-day delivery. Didi tells Tommy that a new baby will be coming for them in the mail tomorrow and Tommy, still being far too young to have an inkling of how the reproductive process works, takes this to mean that he's getting a new baby sister and she'll be delivered through the hole in the door.
Tommy later tries to explain this to Phil, Lil and Chuckie while they're sharing a playpen. Phil and Lil remark that it's strange, as their mom has been talking about getting a new baby recently too. Their comments on the matter are a bit odd, as it's not altogether clear if they're also getting a doll or if we're meant to pick up the implicit suggestion that Betty thinks she might be pregnant again. The twins' heated disagreement on whether the new baby will be coming from the "stork" or the "store" doesn't exactly clarify matters. Chuckie butts in to point out that his mother (a robot or zombie, thanks to the joys of retconning) informs him that he came from the hospital, prompting to Tommy to respond with one of the all-time great Rugrats one-liners: "The hospital? Nah, that's where you go when you're sick."
The following morning, Tommy is anxious to meet his new sister and opts to wait by the door until she arrives. When the mailman finally does show (following a sequence in which he's harassed by a slew of neighbourhood mongrels), Stu takes command of the situation and demands to know where his Tina Trousers is. Turns out, Tina Trousers comes in such bulky, environmentally-unfriendly packaging that Stu will have to go down to the sorting office and collect her in person. While Stu and the mailman are arguing about this, Tommy manages to slip unnoticed into the mailbag and begins rummaging through the contents in the hopes of flushing out his new sibling. Tommy then gets carried all the way to the sorting office without Stu or Didi apparently ever realising that he's gone. Danged deadbeats. The mailman does grumble about his bag feeling so much heavier, but he also remains oblivious to the fact that there's something moving inside; perhaps he's too preoccupied with fending off another local cur looking to make mincemeat of him.
Once Tommy arrives at the sorting office, he escapes the mailbag and tries to locate his new sibling, and the rest of the episode revolves around the naive baby winding up in gut-wrenchingly perilous predicaments with the office employers remaining none the wiser - in one man's case because he's distracted by the centrefold in a sleazy magazine aimed at male postal workers (under the title "True Mail Man"). Among other things, Tommy nearly suffocates from having a postage label slapped across his mouth, is dragged through an x-ray machine and exposed to god-knows what levels of radiation, and then finally gets packed off to a dead letter office, past The Point of No Return Address, where he very nearly gets to spend eternity alongside the rotting remains of a dead postal worker who evidently got lost in the system several years ago. Yep, that's right - we get a good, clear glimpse of his disintegrating skeleton and all. Nowadays, I have to appreciate just how wickedly, hilariously demented this entire sequence is, and how masterfully it transforms this ostensibly mundane working environment into a nightmarish labyrinth of endless twists and turns, topped off with a macabre sight gag hinting that something seriously horrifying went down in this post office once upon a time (did he slip and fall while trying to retrieve a lost package? Was his body disposed there by an unseen assailant?). As a kid, though, I distinctively recall staring into that dead postal worker's empty eye sockets and being knocked for six with sheer terror. It's an incredibly dark and unsettling gag to insert into a cartoon aimed at a young audience, although it does succeed in hammering home the message that sorting offices don't make the safest of playgrounds, and that not everyone is going to have the same insane amount of hide-saving luck as Tommy.
Tommy manages to escape by pulling on a lever and opening up a chute which allows him to slide to the safety of a mail trolley, where he lands conveniently close to Stu's Tina Trousers doll. Tommy realises that this must be the baby and attempts to strike up a conversation with Tina, apparently not twigging that she's a fake and only capable of saying "Mamma!" ad nauseam. Either Tina Trousers is a shocking realistic doll (in which case Stu plainly does have something to fear) or Tommy's very easily duped, even by one-year-old standards.
Meanwhile, Stu has arrived at the sorting office and gets into a confrontation with a blase postal clerk over the whereabouts of his package - during this scene, I find my eyes wandering to the anti-nuke poster in the backdrop reading DON'T HUG YOUR KIDS WITH NUCLEAR ARMS (that's all we needed to make this episode just that little bit more nightmarish - a reference to impending nuclear destruction). Stu notices that the Tina Trousers box has been torn open and grumbles about the declining standards in the postal service. He caries the box away, unaware that it contains the doll he ordered AND his runaway infant son, and we get another sight gag suggesting that the clerk is still clinging to glory days from a time when he had vibrantly-coloured hair and was made employee of the month.
Very little else of note happens for the remainder of the episode. Stu gets the doll home and never has any inkling of how his irresponsible parenting nearly resulted in his child becoming body no. 2 in a dead letter office vault, Tommy continues to converse with the doll as if it were real, then finally Grandpa Lou walks in and, mistaking Tommy for the doll, picks him up and dangles him by the leg, which Tommy finds inexplicably amusing. All in all, the story just kind of fizzles. We never do learn if Tina Trousers confirmed Stu's worst nightmares (although I note that he ultimately unboxes the toy with all the enthusiasm of a child who's genuinely excited at the prospect of having something new to play with), Patty Pants is never seen again (happily) nor do we get to bear witness to Tommy's crushing disappointment upon discovering that his new baby sister is a plastic imposter, even if she does get realistic diaper rash. Essentially, this belongs to that highly glib model of endings where nothing especially goes anywhere or gets resolved, but we're given the illusion of closure because multiple characters are laughing in unison right before we fade out. In narrative terms, "Special Delivery" is frankly a mess, but I'll be damned if it doesn't contain one of the most gloriously demented sight gags you're ever going to find in a cartoon about articulate infants, and that's more than enough to grant it classic status. I maintain that the sinister shock ending to "What The Big People Do" still has it beat in the blood-curdling stakes, but the sight of that dead, decaying postal worker is grisly, grisly stuff, and understandably going to warp a few impressionable young souls.
No comments:
Post a Comment