"Trick-or-treat, gutbucket!": The Adventures of Pete and Pete, 2.07 - Halloweenie

First off, thanks to everyone who's actually reading this, because it's been forever and I feel terrible about that. And secondly, I'm sorry for starting up again on yet another Pete and Pete episode, but it is one of the few Halloween specials I can find. I had really wanted to recap the Marc Summers Halloween special, but I searched everywhere and couldn't find it. For a nice little summary of it though, including some screenshots and a few clips, you can look here. And now onto the first recap in months!

Memories:

I love this episode of Pete and Pete. Like Yellow Fever, it's one of my favorites of the series. I love when they take something mundane and make it seem meaningful and important. And I love Big Pete's introverted take on everyday life. This episode focuses on the internal conflict of smashing a pumpkin, and I related to that a lot because it always made me so sad to see a crushed rotting pumpkin on the ground... it was like smashed innocence on the sidewalk to me. So Big Pete's little moral dilemma resonated with me because I too was a quiet kid who tended to overthink just about everything.

Recap:

Big Pete reflects on losing his Halloween spirit, which Little Pete is pretty pissed off about. He has big dreams of breaking the Wellsville trick-or-treating record by going to the most houses in one night. Little Pete and Nona hear from the local crossing guard that a gang called the Pumpkin Eaters will be out in full force on Halloween night, ready to smash pumpkins and steal candy from kids who haven't gotten old and jaded yet. The crossing guard says that if they don't stop the Pumpkin Eaters this year, this will be Wellsville's last Halloween.

Big Pete tells Ellen that he's sick of Halloween and happy that this year might be the last one ever. They walk into an alley of smashed pumpkins, including one that somehow managed to survive. Pete used to hate the site of a smashed pumpkin, but his growing jadedness is causing him to finally understand the sentiment behind it. The background becomes all blackscreened and Ellen whispers to him to smash it because he knows he wants to and no one's looking. Pete does, and instantly feels guilty. A Pumpkin Eater, who is bully Endless Mike with a jack-o-lantern on his head as a mask, has been watching this entire scene. Endless Mike is endlessly awesome. "Pete Wrigley! You have tasted the dark side!" heehee. And then his sidekick goon adds, "And it tastes like chicken!" A second goon asks if anyone else's pumpkin smells like tangerines, and a third agrees with him and admits to licking his once. Well, then.

Pete and Nona get attacked by the Pumpkin Eaters on the night before Halloween--shaving cream, toilet paper, the whole deal. Big Pete feels like he's somehow to blame because of the bad karma over the pumpkin he smashed. Nona's "Pop" (ha! I love how that reference totally went over my head as a kid) won't allow her to go trick-or-treating anymore, so Little Pete's dreams of breaking the record seem to be shot. (Edit: Nona's dad is played by Iggy Pop.) Big Pete feels guilty and offers to go trick-or-treating with him, even though he must be, like, 16? That is crazy.

Ellen agrees with me. She reminds Pete of Ned Richmond, a kid in their class last year who got caught trick-or-treating at age 15 and wound up tied to a tree by the Pumpkin Eaters with "WEENIE" written across his costume. The fact that he went dressed as a sailor probably didn't help his cause much. Now nobody will go near him, not even in the yearbook, where he is on a page by himself, his photo hanging upside down like he was in the tree, under the caption "Weenie."

The Petes dress up as astronauts, complete with masks covering their faces and technology that allows them to pee in their spacesuits. And walkie-talkies, which I used to think was so cool. Little Pete pees in his suit and proclaims, "ahh, science." Disgusting. They trick-or-treat all over town, and Big Pete starts to feel his Halloween spirit returning.

But the Pumpkin Eaters are out in full force, trashing the neighborhood and scaring little kids. The Petes zig-zag across their neighborhood trying to avoid them. But they wind up at the house of Ned Richmond, the pathetic kid who was caught last year. He answers the door in full costume and recognizes Pete, saying "Maybe we can go together next year Wriggles." I always loved when he called him Wriggles. Big Pete is shaken and wants to give up, which pisses Little Pete off. Little Pete vows to beat the record himself as Big Pete runs home, but the Pumpkin Eaters ambush him and chase him down the street.

Big Pete ducks into a closed haunted house, hoping to lose the Pumpkin Eaters, and scoffs at the lame-ness of all the decorations. Little Pete hears him on the walkie-talkies and calls him a traitor. Endless Mike jumps out at Big Pete and proclaims "tag--you're dead!" and the rest of his gang pops out of the shadows. Endless Mike calls Pete the "biggest Halloweenie of them all" while Little Pete reaches the last house and turns on his walkie-talkie to rub it in Pete's face. He overhears Pete pleading "What do you want from me?" and Endless Mike responding "Nothing... except your soul!" followed by maniacal laughter and knows his brother is in trouble.

The gang wants to tie Pete from the goalpost, or perhaps to the roof of their car and drive him around town all night. That is kind of awesome. But Endless Mike has something special planned for Pete. Pete asks what they're going to do to him, and I'm getting a very "Luke Skywalker vs. the Emperor" vibe from this scene (only that vibe is coming from the original version of the film, not that crappy digitally enhanced version). Endless Mike says that he saw Pete smash the pumpkin yesterday, and now he's here hating Halloween even more. "Just like you?" Pete replies. Yeah, totally a Star Wars vibe. Endless Mike tells Pete to smash the pumpkin he has in his hand and that together they can take down Halloween forever. Pete asks, "And if I don't?" and Endless Mike says, "Two words. Ned. Richmond."

Big Pete is all inner-conflict-y and feels the power he has to destroy Halloween coursing through him, but his inner child wins out and he instead smashes Endless Mike's mask open to reveal his identity. Somehow Pete is shocked to discover that it was Endless Mike, as if it wasn't obvious the entire time. Even Endless Mike thinks that is ridiculous, as he says, "What'd you expect, Mr. Tastee?" He instructs the gang to "fry the weenie," but it is Little Pete to the rescue! He gave up his visit to the last house and, with the help of the crossing guard, came to save Big Pete. Which I never understood. It would've taken two seconds to ring that last house's doorbell first. But whatever.

The next morning, the Pumpkin Eaters are charged with cleaning up the neighborhood they destroyed. Endless Mike is scrubbing Nona's father's front porch, and in quite possibly the most awesome reference ever, Nona's dad comes out, hands him a Q-tip, and says, "You missed a spot. Stooge." Again, totally went over my head as a kid, but great. The Petes didn't break the record, but they managed to save Halloween for years to come and know that they will never again lose their Halloween spirit.

Random Thoughts:

-The crossing guard refers to the night before Halloween as "devil's night." But on Are You Afraid of the Dark they called it "mischief night." I had never heard of either of these before seeing these shows. Which one is more common?

-Big Pete says that his brother is taking the news that this Halloween may be the last "like someone punched his soul." hee.

-The black-and-white "old footage" of the famous kids who broke the record years ago dressed as ghosts is sooo creepy looking. There's something unsettling about it.

-Little Pete tells one of the people at the house they're trick-or-treating at, "You know the routine. Hustle." That was awesome. I wish I'd been brave enough to say things like that as a kid.

-Another awesome Little Pete comment, from after Big Pete has ditched him: "Hey Blowhole... in 45 minutes, I'm going to famous. And you know what you're going to be? ...a blowhole!"

-Polaris' "Waiting for October" runs over the closing credits, and I love that song.

-In my search for the Marc Summers special, I managed to come across this old Nick Halloween-related bumper, which I totally remember, and this ad about a kid who won Nick-or-Treat and got, among other things, his weight in M&Ms. Such a cool prize. I wonder where that kid is today.

"You look like a bona fide Sludgesicle man": The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Special #4 - What We Did on Our Summer Vacation

Memories:
I remember that this aired as a special shortly before the show became a full-length series. It came after the shorts had been around for awhile but before season 1 was announced. I feel like Nickelodeon must have promoted the hell out of it, because certain clips, like Little Pete's friend screaming "TASTEEEEEEE!" in the middle of the street, really stick out in my mind.

Recap:
Major Characters:
"Big" Pete Wrigley - The older Pete; more thoughtful and introverted than his brother
"Little" Pete Wrigley - The younger Pete; the more outspoken of the Petes
Don Wrigley - The Petes' dad
Joyce Wrigley - The Petes' mom; has an oft-mentioned metal plate in her head
Ellen Hinkle - Best friend of Big Pete; "a girl and a friend, but [most of the time] not a girlfriend"
Nona F. Mecklenburg - Little Pete's best friend beginning in season 2; a young Michelle Trachtenberg
Artie, The Strongest Man in the World - Little Pete's "personal superhero"

How do you know that summer is really and truly over?

Big Pete (whose voice hasn't fully changed in this early episode, aww) asks this question to open the episode. His dad goes by the calendar date, while Ellen knows summer is over when you start thinking about school supplies. Or, if you're me, when you go to to buy books for the graduate English course you're taking and you're poor because your fiance is living off a graduate stipend so you can only afford to buy books for the first two weeks of class for now, and the bookstore is conveniently missing the book for this Wednesday's class, so you have to overnight it on Amazon, which makes the shipping costs only $2.00 less than the book itself. Yeah. That's when summer is really and truly over. But I digress.

Here's some opening credits goodness for everyone. I love this theme.

Big Pete tells us about some surefire signs of summer, like Little Pete and his friend racing downhill on big blocks of ice, the lawn border dispute between Pete's dad and their neighbor, and, of course, the arrival of Mr. Tastee, the neighborhood ice cream man with a big plastic head that looks like a vanilla soft serve swirl. No one knows his true identity behind the mask. Some kids think he's a mental hospital escapee. A really young Heather Matarazzo tells that chubby kid from The Mighty Ducks that she thinks Mr. Tastee is "that guy who used to be married to Cher." Ms. Vanderveer, this creepy blind lady on their block, calls him Leonard, and walks around saying, "You never understood me, Leonard. You never really understood me." I love her.

Ellen is working for the summer at her uncle's Qwik Pik photo-developing booth. How old is she here? Maybe 14? She's too young to work. It's kind of like how Logan in the Baby-Sitters Club was working at the Rosebud Cafe as a busboy at 13. One day, Ellen stumbles across photos marked "Tastee." She knows it's against the rules to open them up and look at the pictures, but, as Little Pete says, "rules bite," so they take a look at them. The photos show Mr. Tastee traveling the world and posing by famous landmarks, only he never takes off his ice cream head. They think he looks lonely in the pictures and wonder why he doesn't have any friends (but if he didn't have friends, then who's taking the pictures, hmmmm?).

They decide to try to make friends with the ice cream man, but he gently tries to discourage their attempts. Ellen, in an attempt to make conversation, asks Mr. Tastee if he has a girlfriend. He replies that he has 39 of them, and then proceeds to point out all his ice cream bars on the front of the truck. Maybe he has some kind of weird ice cream fetish? I wonder what he does with the Lemon Licky Nubs and Strawberry Blowtorch after dark. One day, the kids invite him to go fishing, and when he politely declines, Ellen gets right to the point and asks him straight up if he has any friends. How about some information pleeeeeeease? He tells them that he's just their ice cream man, and they're just his customers, and that's the way it has to be. He offers them popsicles and says "goodbye kiddos" all foreshadowingly-like.

Mr. Tastee doesn't return the next day, or any day after that, and the neighborhood kids start going crazy with ice cream withdrawal. They start hallucinating that the see his truck. Crazy Ms. Vanderveer wanders around saying, "I didn't mean it, Leonard. Leonard, you were good to me!" and again, awesome. Rumors abound about what may have happened to him--his truck crashed, his head melted. Baby Heather Matarazzo thinks he remarried Cher. The kids are left with nothing else to do but sit on the curb and watch a neighbor's arm flub flop back and forth as she performs her yard work. That was disgusting when I saw it as a kid, and it's even more disgusting now. It is, as Little Pete said, a flesh avalanche. gross.

Artie, the Strongest Man in the World, is trying to get rid of the summer's killer bees by taking on the queen bee in a staring contest, when he notices the Tastee Mobile off on the horizon. Ellen uses some crazy mathematical formulas to pinpoint Mr. Tastee's location to northern Kentucky, and the search to bring him home has begun.

Ellen turns the Qwik Pik into a command center and opens every single photo packet that comes in to search for Mr. Tastee in the background like some sort of screwed-up Where's Waldo game. When she finds a clue, she pinpoints the location on a map and tries to predict his next move. How that will help them actually get in touch with Mr. Tastee, I have no idea. They have the police put up "missing" posters, Big Pete monitors the "official hotline" payphone, and Little Pete keeps lookout for the Tastee Mobile at the high dive of the local pool. But the lifeguard at the pool hates Little Pete, and their history goes back to last summer when he caught Little Pete eating a cheeseburger under water. He orders Pete off the high dive, so Little Pete gets even by jumping nonstop off the diving board all day, every day. This eventually gets to the lifeguard and makes him crack, so he begs Big Pete for help. Big Pete pretty awesomely "helps" by joining his brother on the diving board and jumping off. Little Pete pretty much gets free reign of the high dive after this, as Artie takes over as lifeguard after the original lifeguard's breakdown.

Big Pete decides to try to get info out of Ms. Vanderveer. She pulls up her dark sunglasses and says, "Leonard said my eyes were bluer than the bluest Blue Tornado bar. He did. He said that." She puts the glasses back on and kind of blindly reaches forward as Pete walks away. Big Pete then takes his search to Cloghaven beach. His dad likes to search for buried treasure there with his metal detector, because that is how he met the Petes' mother years ago, when his metal detector picked up the metal plate in her head. Big Pete questions Captain Scrummy, the local ice cream man at the beach. And hey kids, it's R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe! I thought that I heard you laughing. I thought that I heard you sing. Anyway... he tells Big Pete that he seems like a bona fide Sludgesicle man, but Big Pete just wants a Blue Tornado, which is unfortunately exclusive to Mr. Tastee. Captain Scrummy tells Pete that Mr. Tastee wears the big plastic head because he "knows the rules" about not making friends with the kids. He says that ice cream men are there on the first hot day of summer, and they provide the kids with lots of different flavors to choose from, so what more should they want? Pete seems to get where he's coming from and says that he doesn't know anymore.

Pete's dad's metal detector starts beeping like crazy over a patch of sand, and the entire family helps him dig. Within the hour, they dig out a 1978 Cutlass Supreme. That's right, a car. They drive home in it, while the Petes' dad sings in celebration the entire way home.

The kids slowly start to give up on their search for Mr. Tastee, resigned to the fact that he is never returning. When Ellen and the Petes are finally closing down the Qwik Pik command center, someone knocks at the window--and it's Mr. Tastee! He'd seen their "missing person" fliers, and he has returned to pick up his photos. Ellen says that they've missed him, and he tells them not to say that. He has to go away on the last day of summer every year, and it's hard enough to do that without having kids miss him. Ellen asks him to just stay a little longer, and Mr. Tastee asks if they want to help him wax the Tastee Mobile. But when the sun sets, Mr. Tastee has to say goodbye. He promises to be back on the first hot day next summer, and he asks if he can get a picture with the three kids before he leaves. They wave goodbye to Mr. Tastee as Big Pete ponders the fact that they became more than just Mr. Tastee's customers in that final day, and that when it comes to people missing you, it's actually not that bad at all.

Random Thoughts:
-I've been to that pool in the scene with the diving board! It's in New Jersey.
- I noticed that in at least one scene, the close-up shots of the "missing" fliers had the phone number blurred out. I don't remember it originally airing like this, and plus that wouldn't make any sense for the show to shoot it only to have to blur it out. And the phone number is definitely not blurred out in far-away shots. It looks like a regular 555 television number, so I don't get why Nickelodeon felt the need to blur it on the dvd. I have older recordings of the episodes on VCD that were taped from the tv, so I'll have to see if it's blurred out there too.
-Wikipedia tells me that Toby Huss (Artie) also played Mr. Tastee. I never knew that before.
-Wikipedia also tells me that when this originally aired, before it was re-edited to fit into season 1, all the music in the episode was different from the typical Polaris background music. Why isn't that original cut on the dvd? Stuff like that annoys me. My VCD has the original version of the Valentine's Day special, but I only have the re-edit of this one.

"Passengers will refrain from killing my soul!": The Adventures of Pete and Pete, 2.12 - Yellow Fever

Memories:

My memory of this episode is pretty fresh because I've watched it as an adult on dvd already. But I remember that when I was 12 and watching it for the first time, what stuck out to me was the "If You're Happy and You Know It" scene. And Ellen sitting next to someone else and getting Pete angry.

Recap:

This episode will be hard for me to snark too heavily on since I love it so much. As Big Pete narrates that the real education on a field trip occurs on the bus ride there, we see a spinning bus wheel superimposed over a roadmap, and hey! That's a map of my home state of Massachusetts! I see Fitchburg and Leominster and Worcester (where I went to college). Anyway, according to Pete, long trips cause people to change--friends to become enemies, enemies to become friends, and a field trip to become a trip into the darkest recesses of your soul. See, this is why I loved this show. I loved how it could put a bizarre twist on mundane events that every kid could identify with.

A really fake-looking CGI moth flies by the schoolbus. A teacher is giving the kids the rules before their field trip to the Glurt County Milk Museum. (This show really loved its weird-sounding made-up words.) The most important rule is that no one is to sing "If You're Happy and You Know It," as it is disturbing to busdriver Stu Benedict. Busdriver Stu is awesome. Also insane. We see a flashback to his relationship with fellow busdriver Sally Knorp (Ellen Cleghorne) and how "If You're Happy and You Know It" was their special song. One day though, this exchange occurred:

Stu: If you're happy and you know it clap your hands. [Silence.] ...Sally, you didn't clap your hands.

Sally: I'm not happy, Stu.

Soooo awesome. So, they break up, and no one knows what will happen if Stu hears that song again.

Someone has sent Ellen a love note and promised to reveal his identity by sitting next to her on the bus. This bothers Pete even though he and Ellen are just friends. Pete wonders who the secret admirer might be: one of his best friends Bill or Teddy (I saw Teddy in a bit part on an episode of Scrubs a few years ago and was like "It's Pete's friend!!!!!!"), shy-kid Wendell Hyde, arch-nemesis Endless Mike (greatest bully name ever), or even Mark Twib, a nerd with big flickable ears who has been constantly "twibbed" since second grade.

Even though he thinks he won't do anything to stand in the admirer's way, Pete sits next to Ellen anyway. Ellen is pissed off. Stu welcomes everyone aboard the Yellow Fever, which will take them away from "the twisted wreckage of his shattered life." I love Stu. With that, the field trip begins.

Pete narrates that on bus rides, kids reveal parts of their personalities that no one was meant to see. Wendell Hyde reveals his secret ambition to become a wedding/bar mitzah singer. The kid has a pretty good Richard Cheese-esque lounge-singer voice. Just being on a bus makes Della Summ constantly have to go to the bathroom. Teddy is famous for eating his entire lunch five minutes into a bus trip and has devised a plan of taking small bites at timed intervals throughout the ride so that he'll still have half left at the end for lunch. Bill turns into a prankster, making a sign that says "HELP! Being Kidnapped! Call Police!" and sticking it to the bus window. Pete says his own mutation, however, is the weirdest. He's still in the seat Ellen needed, mocking her "loverboy," and Ellen accuses him of being jealous.

Bill's kidnapping prank works, as a cop notices the sign and pulls the bus over. Pete gives Bill a high-five, but Ellen isn't amused because she has no sense of fun. She's disgusted by Pete's immaturity and tells him he might as well go flick Mark Twib. Meanwhile, the cops put Stu through a series of coordination tests, including hitting a tennis ball into a stack of donuts. He is also made to be the bottom half of a wheelbarrow-race pair with one of the cops.

Stu hears Pete arguing with Ellen and orders him to the back of the bus, leaving Ellen the seat she wanted and Pete next to Endless Mike. Bill moves up to sit next to Ellen. Pete can't believe that Bill was the secret admirer, and Endless Mike delightedly rubs this in his face.

Stu realizes he's lost and panics. He stops by a field with a scarecrow and asks through the loudspeaker if the scarecrow knows how to get to I-87. When he gets no answer, he stumbles out of the bus saying, "Excuse me, Farmer Extremely Unhelpful... oh. You're straw." Ellen is growing sick of Bill's immaturity (really, Ellen, they're 15-year-old boys. What do you expect?) and says she doesn't think this is going to work. Bill has no clue what she's talking about, and Ellen realizes he didn't write the note after all. However, she decides to make Pete jealous and puts her arm around Bill. How non-immature of you, Ellen. During all this, we see Stu through the bus window beating and stabbing the scarecrow with a pitchfork. Endless Mike convinces Pete to get revenge on Bill. He gives Pete warmed, mentholated shaving cream (that he just happens to have with him on a field trip?) to squeeze into Bill's hand when he's not looking, which when applied to a popped zit will sting like crazy.

Pete's shaving cream prank is successful. High-and-mighty Ellen is of course disgusted, and Endless Mike welcomes Pete into his club. They celebrate by pouring bottles of Krebben Up down the bus aisle (ahh, yes, this show's love of the term "Kreb"). The rushing liquid makes Della have to go again, and the bus pulls over as all the kids empty out. Della can't go with anyone thinking about her, and Stu sees a poor random kid and says, "You! You're thinking about her! You disgust me." This is why Stu is so awesome.

Ha! I'd forgotten about this moment: just before they get back on the bus, Teddy is burying his empty lunchbag and failed lunch-eating flowchart saying "I hate myself!" This episode has way too many unbelievably great moments in it.

Endless Mike deviously tells Pete that he must also get revenge on Ellen, by flicking Mark Twib to piss her off. Pete does so, and Ellen is not happy. Pete's twib has set Mark over the edge. Back on the bus, he launches into "If You're Happy and You Know It." Stu gets this creepy smile across his face and begins to sing along. The whole bus joins in as Stu gets up and dances in the aisle. The kids start to notice that no one is driving the bus and that they're about to crash, but Stu is completely possessed and keeps singing. The cheap CGI moth flies by the bus. Wendell snaps Stu out of it with some wedding/bar mitzvah standards, and Stu hits the break just in time to stop the bus from going over a cliff.

When they finally reach the Milk Museum, the teacher says that whoever sang the forbidden song will receive an F for the project and four weeks detention. Pete feels bad for driving Mark to do it and takes the blame. Endless Mike kicks him out of his gang, but Mark is grateful. Pete apologizes for flicking his ear, and Mark confesses to writing the note to Ellen. He decides to let Pete and Ellen figure out their relationship on their own. Ellen, meanwhile, is impressed that Pete took the blame for Mark. They apologize and make up. As the crappy CGI moth flies by once more, they agree to sit next to each other on the way home.

Random Thoughts:

-Best. Themesong. Ever.

-My college roommate grew up in the same neighborhood as the house in the opening theme. She was almost an extra in one episode. My freshman-year roommate went to high school with Ellen, who was three years older than us.

-yay mid-90s fashions! I am especially fond of Pete's blue plaid flannel shirt and Ellen's floppy hat.

-Little Pete is not in this episode.

-Obviously, the blog title refers to the Snick trademark big orange couch. But now whenever I go to my blog and see "Big Orange Couch" my mind automatically thinks "Big Yellow Joint."