Pigs
In which George buildeth a dadgum thumb
Allie Whoops is the Scrappy-Doo of Curious George. When I am forced to watch the Curious George movies, I hope the big reveal at the end shows a furious little Allie Whoops drunk-driving a Dalek, right before somebody pinches her smarmy little head off. Honestly, I thought I hated Bill, but Bill never made me want to hammer nails into my ears. Her voice is like listening to Pinkie Pie laugh about how much fun it is to dig a hole in a chalkboard with a fork. Together, Bill and Allie rule the land of non-sequitur stupidity with such hideous aplomb that Dryden should be disinterred and forced to write a poem about them.
I seriously hate that little red-haired trick. If any of my girls turned out to be anything like that obnoxious monster I would personally apologize to the UN. Sometimes I think Curious George should do a crossover episode with Game of Thrones and tell Melisandre that Allie is the long-lost second daughter of Stannis the Mannis.
Or maybe it is her grandparents’ fault. I have never seen her parents, but Mr. and Mrs. Renkins let Allie run all over creation, completely unsupervised, in the company of a monkey. I do not believe social workers exist in the Curious George universe.
So today’s episode shows how much fun it is to be gaslighted by everyone and play in the mud. Either the writer was high or he hates me personally. Imagine, if you will, trying to explain the plot of the Terminator movies to an Andaman tribesman, because the plot of this episode made exactly the same amount of sense to me. Indeed, if you had not the power of Hulu and PBS, you might suspect that none of this really happened and I was just blabbing about a dream I think I had.
So it’s raining, and George and Allie are sitting on the front steps of a country house, bored. Bill shows up and throws a newspaper on the roof. He explains his aim is off because he strained his thumb, an injury that was caused,
sweet Jesus I wish I were lying
by a “thumb-wrestling” accident. Before I have a chance to ponder what powerful hands could sprain a thumb in such an inane way, George clambers up to get the paper and delivers another plot point--somebody several towns over built a giant sculpture of his dog. Boy that sounds fun, says the little red-headed hellion, we should build a giant sculpture, and Bill can “stupervise.”
Oh gee, y’all, she just said “stupervise” instead of “supervise!” Wow. So cute and endearing. Allie should win ten grand on America’s Funniest Home Videos and not be slapped at all.
I just want to eat her up.
But what to build? Oh, the possibilities. Could be another dog, a monkey, Allie herself, Mr. Quint’s dingaling, a sheep, several cows, a Calvin and Hobbes snowman massacre, an igloo, a dessert-dispensing vending machine, a Wall of Shame, a lifesize copy of that sculpture Tom Green made of his parents doing it, the frontline of the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers, the Burning Man, the Wicker Man, Ugly Lucille Ball Statue, Pretty Lucille Ball Statue, some owls, that weird dollar-bill floating eye thingy, Stonehenge, Charles Barkley, or the Tower of fucking Babel.
Lots of options. And what do they pick? Oh, but of course—giant sculpture of Bill’s left thumb. The uninjured one. Yay!
I now have many, many questions, all of which correlate with the great mystery of Curious George, which is “why the hippity-dippity fuck do any of these people do anything?”
And, and…and THEN, they all go to Bill’s house to look at pictures of his thumb. Bunch of vacuous shit is what it is; Bill is all “here’s my thumb telling my mom I liked her pisghetti” and “here’s my thumb while I was eating watermelon” and so George breaks out the Play-doh to build a replica thumb and Bill absolutely crushes his spirit.
“You call that a ginormous sculpture? That’s all you got?” Bill says, and I imagine burying him in the yard like that guy in The Serpent and the Rainbow. But then I make a mistake; I start to believe that building a giant thumb is stupid, and this episode cannot get any stupider.
Hope is poison. Take care not to get addicted to it.
Maybe Allie was just jealous of the fact that I had spent about ten seconds thinking about killing Bill instead of her, so she pipes up and says they should make the sculpture out of peanut butter. They have plenty of peanut butter—Allie leads them to a shed that is stacked to the ceiling with fifty-pound containers of peanut butter. She laughs and says her grandparents make their own.
Wat. Seriously…I’m watting as hard as I can. I am from an area of this country that literally supplies the entire world with peanut butter, and never in my life have I seen a personal shed filled with the stuff. TONS of peanut butter, on a farm that grows no peanuts, up in Yankeeland. Why do they need that much peanut butter? To whom would they sell it? Who buys peanut butter by the five-gallon bucketful? It is creepy.
Even creepier is when they pop open a drum and dig their grubby little hands into it. They decide--shocker of shockers--that peanut butter is too sticky, so they let the pigs lick it off their hands. Nobody loses a hand.
I know pigs too, y’all. I knew a guy when I was a kid that had a heart attack and fell into his pig-pen and they ate everything but his watch. Pigs will step on you until you die and then eat you. My neighbor kept pigs--the best advice he ever gave me as a youngster was “Git away from them gotdam pigs!” The pigs in Curious George are the size of four-wheelers. This is stupid.
They stay in the pig-pen anyway and try to make a giant thumb out of shaving cream because life is like a box of Dadaist chocolates--you never know what urinal aluminum nutsack kaboom.
It finally occurs to these Mensa candidates that mud might be the best medium for their thumb sculpture. This is discovered after Allie Whoops has an extended conversation with a giant pig about whether or not he wants her to make him a mud pie. I know it is supposed to be cute, in the same way I know Full House was supposed to be funny, but in both cases I either want to kill the writers or myself but would probably get the order wrong.
Because it’s not mud they’re playing in. They are in a pig-pen. It is pig shit. Tons of it. Did I say I know pigs? Because I do. They are indescribably filthy and they shit everywhere. Pigs make the entire state of North Carolina smell like that bathroom at the Carabelle public beach.
From this point on I can’t do anything but feel nauseous. They roll in it; they fill buckets with it. They use it to cover a tomato cage wrapped in chicken wire. Allie Whoops says “whoops” like fifty times, and Bill washes them off with a garden hose. Not only does nobody complain about the smell, but when Mr. and Mrs. Rankin discover what they have been doing with the pigshit, they are so very proud, whereas my mother would have rightfully beaten me bloody for doing such a stupid thing.
Neither pinworms nor tetanus exist in the Curious George universe. When a busload of tourists pulls up to take pictures of the thumb, they all sit in the pig-pen and eat the peanut butter sandwiches Allie Whoops prepares for them.
That’s how I know.
