#wicked!

What is Wicked!?

Before you try to be all cute and make any references to the hit musical, there’s a reason I’m putting that exclamation mark there.

Wicked! started out as a series of six children’s books written by Paul Jennings and Morris Gleitzman. I actually grabbed a kindle copy of all six books (because I’m in this thing too deep and I wanted to see how the cartoon compared with the source material) and I gotta say, they’re very charming.

The best way I can describe them is that they’re in the kid horror genre, but they’re less Goosebumps and more The Weenies book series by David Lubar in terms of gore and child endangerment. Wicked! has some artful depictions of blood and gore, but in a way that can be digested by the grade school crowd.

Being a former child, I can proudly proclaim that I would’ve adored this series when I was younger. Just look at these covers!

The plot of the books is that there’s a widower with a daughter and a divorced wife with a son who get married, and the two new step-siblings Rory and Dawn absolutely hate each other. They can’t stand the fact that their parents are getting married! Gross!

But then, on the day of their wedding, creepy things begin to happen after Rory receives an appleman doll in the mail, and then, over the course of six books, a deadly single-minded virus that feeds on hate and is targeting Rory’s bloodline begins to spread across wildlife, creating crazed mutant animals that try to kill everyone in the household. It’s up to Rory, Dawn, and Dawn’s grandfather Gramps to stop this virus before it kills Rory and his mother, and to do so, they have to seek out Rory’s father, who seems to be the mysterious cause and/or the solution to the virus.

I’m not sure how well these books did, on account of the whole “not Australian” affliction I seem to suffer from, but they seemed to do well enough to get a TV show adaptation.

And surprisingly, the TV show is a very close adaptation of the books, only they changed the plot in two big ways so that it fits an animated series with a “monster of the week” setup.

The first big change was that, of course, they toned down the blood and gore and removed the deadliness of the virus, choosing to go with a more cartoony mutagenic approach. Rory gets infected by the virus several times in the show, just like how he does in the books, but unlike the books, he never thinks that he’s going to die from it and it’s definitely treated as a more temporary thing. There’s no race against time either. Everyone is trying to live their lives except every so often, the virus shows up. A wacky cartoon virus with cartoony stakes.

That brings me to the other main change that they make in the show. Unlike the books, where the main villain is a mindless virus that feeds off of hate, an invisible foe that can only be defeated at the end of the last book with the help of Rory’s father, the TV show decides that that’s no fun and instead makes a main villain out of one of the main plot points in the books. Say hello to The Appleman. (Apple-Man? Apple Man? Fuck it, I’m going with the first one from now on)

Instead of having the virus mutate mysteriously and having the main characters constantly hypothesize what’s going to happen next, the TV show made a main villain who constantly reinvents new strains of virus in a laboratory that he set up in an abandoned refinery.

What then happens is a basic plot set-up that the show follows pretty consistently in every episode. The family is trying to do something, we get the theme for the episode, and The Appleman, who is a spiteful bastard who is trying to ruin this one family in particular (and I’ll get to that), decides to make a virus that will infect the theme of that episode.

Pretty standard cartoon stuff, right? Ah, but then you don’t realize the beauty of this show. But first, I gotta introduce the main stars of this show.

The Characters

(quick note: this bus is incredibly important to the plot, but only in the books)

First we have Rory (the boy holding up the tin) and Dawn (the mad red head).

Dawn is the step-sister who lost her mom, a bus driver, in a gruesome bus accident, Rory is the step-brother whose parents got a divorce and then his dad went missing, believed to have run away from his whole family. Both of them are meant to be the dual protagonists, but I feel that there’s just a tiny bit more focus on Rory. There’s a reason for this that I will mention later.

What is interesting to note is that they make Rory the smart, non-athletic little nerd that gets picked on a lot at school for being a dork while Dawn loves sports, is failing science, gets made fun of for not being as girly as the other girls in her class, and likes violent computer games. I wouldn’t exactly call them “fleshed out” but they did enough to make these kids feel like actual kids.

Also, they fight. Constantly. This is the main complaint of anyone who actually looks into this show judging by my brief skimming of Internet comments because these two constantly bicker and insult each other and that makes up like 40% of the dialogue in any given episode. While this is one of the main story conflicts and they’re like this in the books too, it just feels super exhausting to see these two constantly at each other’s throats in every single episode.

They get mean too. Which, surprisingly, makes them both more realistic (I babysat multiple times and kids can be pretty verbally awful to each other) while also making them just a tiny bit unbearable at times. Here’s some actual dialogue.

"My dad sent it to me!" "Gee, he must think a lot of you to send you a doll full of worms." "Your mum thought so much of you she drove this bus over a cliff and into the river to get away from you."

GEEZ, guys...

Eileen, Rory’s mom.

It feels out of the three adults in the family, she gets the least amount of character development, but she does get a fair amount of screentime, so you can’t really say they’re intentionally ignoring her. She divorced her previous husband and works as a mail courier. Instead of owning a car, she drives a motorcycle, and, in the first episode, even drives it to her own wedding while dressed in a bridal gown. Rory’s mom rules.

She tries to bond with Dawn because she always wanted to raise a daughter, but Dawn clearly doesn’t like her new stepmom very much. Dawn is also afraid of the motorcycle and it comes up a couple times in the show.

Eileen is the adult that gets targeted the least by The Appleman’s schemes. There’s a very pointed reason for this, and I swear, I’m getting to it soon.

(quick note: yes, the show uses real photos to put in picture frames in the backgrounds and it’s real weird and never addressed)

Jack, Dawn’s dad.

Jack is a sheep shearer, just like in the books, and he’s a big easy-going dope that is hard not to love. Look at him hammer in this carpet. A true champ.

Out of the three adults in the family, he seems to be the one that nearly dies the most, with The Appleman going out of his way to specifically target Jack in some episodes. If you know Appleman’s backstory, this reads as absolutely petty spite and I love every minute of it.

Gramps, Dawn’s grandfather and Jack’s dad.

He’s an aging WWII veteran (one that has killed people in combat no less) who radiates constant Boomer vibes and, unlike Eileen and Jack, he actually sees some of the crazy shit that happens and will sometimes sense when something is infected with virus when the other two adults can’t.

In the books, he’s suffering pretty badly from dementia, but thankfully the cartoons drop that completely. I’m glad too, because I don’t have the confidence that they would’ve written it with enough sophistication to make it not seem ableist. Instead, he’s just your typical kooky cartoon grandfather.

He’s probably the adult that gets the most screentime because he will actually help Dawn and Rory out. Again, this ties into the books, where he was the main adult ally for the kids.

He says a lot of army-themed catchphrases. It’s a tad overplayed but it never really gets to a point where I would call it “annoying”. Also, instead of living in the house, he lives in a tiny granny flat on the property. Sometimes Rory spends the night there.

Last but not least, we have the star of the show, and the reason why the easiest way to find information of this show is to google “Wicked The Appleman”.

The Appleman, as explained, is the main villain of the story. Dressed in a very fancy suit complete with dress shoes and a nice blue tie, he lives in an old refinery full of rats, bats, and giant worms (called Slobberers), and he’s rocking a voice that can be best described as “Australian Mark Hamil” with an absolutely heavenly evil laugh. He has gross clawed hands, a rotten apple for a head, and likes making people miserable, because he’s basically the living puppet for a virus that feeds off of negative emotions. The main goal of each episode is to either defeat him or to stop the mess he’s made. Usually both.

Since all of his minions are non-sentient animals, a lot of his dialogue is him lurking behind something while he monologues to himself, sometimes turning it into a creepy little rhyme. He’s a pretty lonely guy, so him hanging out with this family can be seen as a very non-subtle cry for help.

The best episodes are the ones where he tries to lurk about in public with a very poor attempt at disguising his hideous features. Somehow it always works, you know, despite the fact that he has yellow eyes, the skin like a moldy apple, and no ears.

What Makes Wicked! Unique

(no, The Appleman doesn’t actually use that axe)

The first thing this show does that most of the formulaic shows don’t do is that it does, in fact, have a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s why this show was packaged into a full-length movie - you can glue scenes together and actually make a pretty decent narrative, even if the resulting movie definitely had a “glued together TV show episodes” feel ala some of the bad Disney sequels like Cinderella II and Atlantis II. 

This show even has some plot-heavy episodes that dive into just why this whole Appleman situation is going on and why he seems to have it out for this one family in order to flesh out the characters more.

Because that’s a thing that this show does. The Appleman is a cartoon-y villain who cackles in his lab and constantly invents new strains of viruses that can mutate things like animals and household appliances, but he doesn’t do it to take over the city or to “destroy the world”. He does it purely to inconvenience this one Australian family, who he stalks pretty regularly. This is a thing that comes from the books and honestly, it’s a thing that elevates Appleman from “ugly-looking cartoon villain” to “pretty damn creepy, if also still cartoony in execution”.

Sure, a lot of cartoon villains target the main protagonist in their evil schemes, but this one is definitely more personal.

He regularly follows Rory and Dawn to school and, when the family goes on a camping trip, he comes too. If Rory decides he’s going to hang out in the wrecker’s yard, The Appleman will be cackling and hiding behind totaled vehicles. If Gramps takes the kids out to the bay to go fishing, The Appleman will pull an ice cream truck out of his garage and follow them there. That’s how the main conflict is really set up.

I think if a scarier cartoon tried, they’d make him out to be this grotesque stalker, but instead, since this show is kinda goofy in execution, he’s like the shittiest cryptid in the world, constantly crouching behind trash cans and on top of rooftops while constantly cackling about how clever he is and how, miraculously, no one notices anything’s amiss.

This alone would make this villain interesting, but then they set up something about this show at the beginning if you watch the intro and the first episode and put two and two together.

Right from the start, the opening shows that The Appleman was once human by depicting his transformation by the virus. They don’t even try and pretend that he’s some demon or some sort of supernatural monster - he’s specifically a blue collar worker who had a nasty run-in with fate and mutated into this hideous apple-headed creature that now has to hide out in an abandoned refinery. You see why he’s dressed like that - he’s still wearing his work uniform.

Right after you watch that intro, the first episode of the show has Rory receiving a mysterious package from his father on the day of his mother’s wedding. It’s the first time that Rory and his mom Eileen have heard from their dad after he mysteriously vanished years ago. 

What’s inside? An apple-headed doll, which contains the first virus-infected monsters, The Slobberers.

When The Appleman makes his first dramatic appearance, he never says Dawn’s name, but he does know Rory’s name.

And, in case you didn’t pick up the hints from the first episode, the fourth episode really drives it home without spelling it out. Then the last episode of the series decides to say it out loud.

That’s right. Rory’s father, the man who mysteriously vanished from Eileen and Rory’s lives, is still an important part of the cartoon’s storyline, but instead of being the man who appears in the last book that knows how to cure the virus while also being the first victim of the virus, he’s the main antagonist.

The Appleman is Rory’s father.

And honestly, because of this little plot point, this show becomes a much richer experience once you look at the unhinged appleman who keeps unleashing horror on these kids and realize that he’s a divorced dad who constantly keeps tabs on his ex-wife's unstable dysfunctional family in order to make them more pissed at each other because that feeds the virus that mutated him.

This is a very cool concept. This is where Wicked! shines when, for all intents and purposes, it is otherwise a pretty average turn-of-the-century Australian cartoon that can be best described as “it’s okay, I guess” in terms of quality.

Because that’s really the rating I can give this show. It’s Okay.

It’s a very solid Okay, but I think any adjective more powerful than “Okay” is really pushing it. It’s not Great, it’s not Amazing. It’s Okay. Alright. Kinda Good.

But man, is it a wild ride.

Next time, I’m going to start discussing the actual episodes as well as this show’s pros and cons. Dividing this up into multiple parts partly because I feel like these things are more easily digested in smaller chunks and partly because I’m pretty sure tumblr now has a size limit on posts soooo...yeah.

Virgil's older brother and his newly wedded husband had opened up their own bookstore and needed at least one other employee to help run the place before opening. Virgil had agreed to take the position and had moved cross country to New York City to help them open. The place had become a booming success (Virgil swore it was because his brother-in-law sold his baked goods at the store along with the books), and that led Virgil to be able to replace some of his older supplies and buy some new ones as well.

The dark-haired boy slipped off his work-shirt and settled into an old sweatshirt that was already decorated with paint stains. Brushing off old papers and a bottle of black nail polish (which reminded him that he needed to repaint his chipping nails) from his desk, Virgil grabbed a fresh piece of paper and started sketching his latest commission.

Then he heard the singing.

Even though Virgil had lived in the apartment for a few weeks now, he still hadn’t met any other his neighbors. However, the owner of the apartment on his left had made his presence known. Virgil hadn’t met him face-to-face, but he’d heard the man sing. At least once a day, Virgil’s neighbor burst into song, singing Broadway show tunes as he did whatever he was doing, and the apartment walls didn’t do much to mute the sound. Virgil would have complained, but his neighbor was a crazy talented singer. Who was Virgil to deny himself a free concert?

Today, the man was singing a song Virgil knew well. His senior year in high school, the school performed the show Wicked, and the president of the drama club had practically begged Virgil to paint the sets. Virgil had agreed and often painted while the cast was practicing. The songs had ingrained themselves into Virgil's head, and he could remember them word for word to this day.

Including "What is this Feeling?" which was what his neighbor was belting out.

The man was currently singing, "Unusually and exceedingly peculiar

And altogether quite impossible to describe..."

As the other man held out Galinda's line, Virgil couldn't help himself. He sang Elphaba's response, "Blonde."

Virgil heard a sharp intake of breath on the other side of the wall. Oh shit, had Virgil ruined the other man's song? Then, he heard the man continue, "What is this Feeling, So sudden and new?"

Well, Virgil was obligated now. He dropped his pencil and looked at the wall between him and his surprise new duet partner. "I felt the moment, I laid eyes on you."

"My pulse is rushing!"

"My head is reeling!"

"My face is flushing!"

"What is this feeling?" Virgil's voice mixed with his neighbor's, and to Virgil's surprise, they actually sounded good together.

"Fervid as a Flame, Does it have a name?

Yes! Loathing! Unadulterated Loathing!"

"For your face!" Virgil could practically hear the smile in the other's voice.

"Your voice." Virgil couldn't help but let a grin of his own form on his face as he responses

"Your clothing!" Virgil joined back in, singing along to his partner's "Let's just say, I loathe it all!"

The two continued the song, Virgil singing Elphaba's part and his neighbor singing Galinda's. During the part that required it, they sang in unison on the student's part. There was something magical about the moment, randomly bursting into song like they were actually in a Broadway show themselves.

Then the magic was shattered.

It was right before the climax of the song, and Virgil and his duet partner both went for the higher harmony, Virgil surprising himself by his ability to hit the note. Abruptly, his neighbor stopped singing, and yelled, "Galinda absolutely sings the top harmony on that you bastard!"

Honestly, Virgil was so startled by the sudden change of noise, he didn't even register himself screaming back, "In your dreams asshat!"

Virgil heard loud footsteps echoing from his neighbor's apartment. He sighed, leaning back in his chair. That had been surprisingly fun, but it was over now. Virgil was about to go back to the commission when he heard knocking booming from his door.

Virgil sighed, pushing himself out of his chair. He opened his door, surprised to see a guy bout his age standing there. Just as Virgil was going to ask who the hell the guy was, the stranger waved his phone around, saying, “I have the lyric video pulled up right here, let me in so I can prove you wrong!”

Oh. So he was Virgil neighbor/mystery duet partner.

Virgil, feeling a weird mix of annoyance, self-righteousness, and amusement, shot back, “Come in then, and prepare to eat your words.”

The two of them sat down at Virgil's tiny kitchen table. Virgil's neighbor set his phone between them. As he started the video, both he and Virgil stared at the phone like it was the only thing that mattered. Virgil's apartment was filled with "What is this feeling" for the second time that day.

Both boys kept their attention on the sound, waiting for the exact line in the song. When it came, Virgil triumphantly shouted, "Ha! It's not Galinda, suck it!"

His neighbor crossed his arms. "Well, Elphaba doesn't sing it either so you can eat my ass."

Virgil snorted. "It was the fucking ensemble. We're both dumbasses."

For some reason, that sent the boy across from him to giggles, and soon enough, Virgil was laughing alongside him.

When he finally stopped, Virgil took a moment to study his neighbor. The first thing he noticed was that the guy was freaking blond; the irony was making Virgil want to start laughing again. His neighbor had soft green eyes, and he was definitely wearing eyeliner. And possibly lipgloss, but Virgil was going to resist temptation and avoid staring at the other's lips. The boy's honey skin was dotted with freckles, and he had a pencil thrown half-hazardly behind his ear. A loose red sweatshirt hung off his right shoulder, revealing what Virgil assumed was a tattoo peeking out from under the fabric.

In short, the guy was really fucking hot.

While Virgil was looking over the guy, it seemed the other was doing the same, a faint red brushing against his cheeks. "You know, I never got your name."

"I'm Virgil, you are?"

"The name's Roman." The boy drummed his fingers on the table, displaying his red painted nails. "Now, Virgil... I think there's a three o'clock showing of Wicked this Friday."

Virgil arched an eyebrow and prayed his cheeks didn't heat up, "Are you asking me on a date?"

"I mean, yeah, you're pretty cute and you gotta be an interesting person if you randomly join into a duet, and I'm probably overstepping because I have no idea if you're single or gay, but hey, gotta risk it for the biscuit, right?"

Virgil stared at him and then burst into laughter. The other boy crossed his arms, looking mildly embarrassed. Virgil took a shaky breath, attempting to stop laughing long enough to respond. “How is it humanly possible to talk that fast?"

Roman huffed, "I talk as fast as I think."

"Clearly. But lucky for you, I'm both free on Friday and extremely gay."

Roman visibly brightened; he gave Virgil a smile that could have powered the entirety of New York. "Is that your way of saying yes?"

Virgil shrugged, “My brother says I need to get out more, and luckily for me, a really hot boy just rolled in and asked me out, so yeah, why not?"

The blond continued to beam, leaning over the table and grabbing Virgil's hand. He flinched at the sudden contact, but the other had warm hands, much warmer than Virgil’s own, so Virgil didn't pull away. He was simply stealing Romans heat, that was all.

Then, Virgil almost choked because Roman pulled his hand up to his lips and kissed it like he was a prince out of a fairytale. Virgil's ears flamed as the other boy dropped his hand. "It's settled then. I'll come around at two on Friday?"

By some miracle, Virgil was able to keep himself put together. "Sounds good, Prince Charming."

Wait a hot second, what did he just say?

Roman laughed, but Virgil caught the red on his cheeks becoming more vibrant. He stood, stretching, and grinned at Virgil. "Alright then, see you in two days, My Dark-Eyed Beauty."

And with that, Virgil was alone in his apartment, the door slowly swinging shut. He honestly couldn't move; he just stared down at his hand, at the faint kiss printed there. (It seemed Roman was indeed wearing lip gloss).

"Dark-Eyed Beauty? Nice reference." Virgil muttered, before reaching for his phone. His fingers flew, typing a familiar number. It took two rings for the line to connect. "Lo, holy shit, you aren't going to fucking believe this."