If grotesque puppet creations are your personal nightmare propellent, then the UK television of the early 1990s might have been rough going for you. Call it the Spitting Image effect, but between The Winjin Pom, Dizzy Heights and The House of Gristle, there wasn't much escaping the horrors in latex. Ad breaks were of no refuge - for a good stretch of 1991 (and later 1993) you were likely to run into the Robinsons Gang, a bunch of creepy critters who were perpetually on the move, and always sipping from their cartons of branded fruit juice. The accompanying slogan assured us that "You Get More *slurping sound effect* With Robinsons Flavours", and I presume the intention was for this assortment of colourful puppets to act as embodiments of all the fun and variety of the Robinsons range. What it more aptly reflects is the overstimulated frenzy of a sugar high, and potentially something a lot harder. Among the campaign's numerous head-scratching details was a bus ad, in the premier installment, telling us to "EAT GRASS", and with no other leads on what that particular command had to do with anything, I'm going to go out on a limb and interpret it as a pro-drugs statement. It fits in just as neatly as anything else about the Robinsons Gang.
The set-up was simple enough - the Robinsons Gang was comprised of species with particularly lyrical and/or pun-friendly names, and a narrator would introduce us to each of them and whichever flavour had their favour by way of a wordy, fast-paced, repetitive ditty. So, we had the Boa Constrictor on The Bus, who slurped apple and blackcurrant, apple and blackcurrant, the Manic Gannet on The Bike, who wanted apple and strawberry, apple and raspberry, and so forth. Whichever mode of transport the gang was riding, the ads were able to incorporate ominous signage denoting the locations, "Somewhere, Nowhere, Anywhere, Everywhere" - implying that nobody in this universe had any idea where they were headed, and were possibly indifferent to such particulars. The trip itself was what they lived for. The lyrics were often designed to be as aggressively disorientating as the images - we hear, for example, that the Three-Toed Chameleon drinks apple and raspberry, apple and raspberry, but had actually wanted orange, pineapple and lemon, only the powers that be, according to the Chameleon herself, couldn't make it fit the song (except they just did; see how this thing is screwing with you?). These swirling affairs always climaxed with a lone dissenter, who conspicuously lacked a Robinsons of their own, saying or doing something to bring the revelries to a halt. In the first ad, we had the Hammerhead Shark, who leaned down from the top deck of the bus and threatened to eat the driver, a Pig, apropos of nothing. Neither juice nor grass would apparently satiate him; he was lusting for the driver's blood. This abrupt-as-heck murder threat confirmed what I'd intuitively always known on being plunged into the Robinsons' world - that brewing below the surface of this hyperstimulated rabble was some frightful menace and sooner or later it was all going to end in tears. The seriousness of the Shark's malicious declaration is left open to question. The Pig's initial reaction is to run squealing, yet his goofy antics thereafter would suggest he's figured that the Shark is only kidding. The violent manner in which the shark keeps pounding on that highly malleable streetlight, however, was doing little to reassure me.
Either way, the Pig evidently made it out in one piece, for he was seen again in the follow-up ad, a further surrealist nightmare in which the gang had exchanged their bus for a tandem bike that accommodated multiple riders, with the swine once again in the front seat, and left the city to discover a sprawling, equally mind-bending rural landscape. The Hammerhead Shark did not return (his pugnacious antics on the previous ride possibly got him expelled from the gang), but there were several other familiar faces, including the Boa and the Chameleon, along with some new recruits. In an especially bizarre touch, both ads featured a flesh-and-blood lady, suggesting a merging of realities in which the outright freakish is coexisting with the perfectly mundane. In the original, she was riding the top of that bus with all those monstrous puppets swarming around her comparatively delicate frame; as a kid, I'll admit I was somewhat concerned for that woman's safety, although I now think it would be cool if the intention was for us to interpret her as yet another member of the Robinsons Gang. Alas, the second ad clearly pigeonholes her as a nonplussed bystander - there, she's not taking part in the bike ride and is positioned passively in the foreground, perhaps awaiting the bus from the first installment. In place of the Shark, the gang was menaced by an Iguanodon, whose intentions were certainly more benign - he simply wanted to join in with the bike ride. Like the Shark, however, he took the chaos a step too far and pushed things fatally out of whack, leaping onto the rear of the bike and exerting enough force to send the rest of the gang flying. For myself, that Iguanodon's intrusion was no less unsettling than the Hammerhead's.
To my knowledge, those were the only two ads in the Robinsons Gang campaign. A few of the gang members never received formal identification by way of shout-outs in their respective ditties - among these unnamed recruits were a duck-billed platypus, some kind of burrowing critter in a hard hat, and I don't know what that purple thing behind them on the bike is intended to be (Portuguese man o' war?). It was not, however, the last we'd be seeing of the gang, as both ads were later recycled in 1993, with completely new audio. The frantic ditties were dropped in favour of a more conventional theme song, the lyrics of which were nowhere near as wordy, although the thing was still catchy as hell, and easier to hum along to. The final punchline of each ad was also altered, to have things circle back more explicitly to the exalted product. Now, the Shark and Iguanodon's respective actions were motivated by a craving for Robinsons, as their targets were accused of either concealing or stealing the coveted juice (the Shark asks the Pig what he's done with his Robinsons, the Iguanodon tells the others to come back with his Robinsons). I'll admit that these revised versions went down a whole lot better with my younger self, since they amounted to less of a sensory overload, although with hindsight there are certain details that I suspect might have become even more heinously baffling. If you hadn't caught the campaign during its earlier round, then without the benefit of the bison/basin wordplay, would you have understood why the gang had an anthropomorphic bathroom sink (with eyes and, potentially, guts) of all things random and unholy?
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