Bump Bump Bumpity Bump

Nostalgia for childhood TV shows is something I think we're all familiar with. Particularly in the internet age, where you can log onto any given message board and look through "DO U REMEMBER TRANSFORMERS? Y/N" There are lots of websites out there dedicated to looking back on the fads of our childhood, such as X-Entertainment and The Nostalgia Critic. These are great sites and just the tip of the iceberg if you want to waste a day remembering when you were a kid.

But I'm not interested in talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Power Rangers or any of the major fads right now. What really interest me is the stuff that gets left behind. I'm talking about the shows no one remembers. Small, humble productions airing in some obscure half-hour block of Saturday mornings past. Shows that didn't get promotional cereals and action figures, and may not even have had national advertising. The kind of show where the only commercial you'd see was some locally-produced mess of over-the-counter editing tricks, cheesy synth music and horrible word-play punctuated by the unceremonious recitation of the timeslot by an unknown second-announcer. These are elements of childhood almost entirely lost to the sands of time.

Today, however, I want to dive into this forgotten world. To this end, let's talk about Bump in the Night.
Bump in the Night was a claymation series airing on ABC's Saturday morning lineup in the mid-nineties. Let's face it, ABC was always second-banana when it came to Saturday morning cartoons. You would think that, as an offshoot of Disney, they would have had an amazing lineup. But Disney tended to save the best stuff for their new Disney channel, so ABC was left with scraps like Recess, Captain Planet and whatever the guys at DiC felt like coughing up. ABC was the channel you turned to as a fallback. Maybe Beakman's World was a rerun that week or you were finding an episode of X-Men a bit too talky. ABC was your fallback for serviceable, but unmemorable entertainment.

All that changed when ABC unleashed the awe-inspiring One Saturday Morning on audiences. (I don't care who you are, if One Saturday Morning's roller-coaster-filled CG intro didn't get you pumped as a kid, you have no soul.) But before that, we had Bump in the Night.

Why bother remembering Bump in the Night? Quite simply, it's one of the most nineties cartoon series' ever created. If my kids ever ask me what cartoons were like in the nineties, I'm going to show them this. It was weird, crass, full of pop-culture references and reveling in the fact that nothing needs to make sense.

The show starred Mr. Bumpy, a lovable monster living under the bed of a particularly messy little boy. Equal parts Bugs Bunny, Chester Cheetah and a California Raisin, each episode followed Mr. Bumpy's exploits. In most stories he never had much of a coherent motivation and there was rarely much at stake. It was more or less him just wandering around the oft-empty house and seeing what kind of trouble he could get into. Mr. Bumpy's only real driving force was his insatiable appetite, particularly when it came to eating dirty and discarded socks. Given his aversion to clean socks, I always assumed his metabolism was set to pull nutrients from human skin cells and perspiration, living in a sort of false-symbiosis with the human child, and this may have been one reason I played alone at recess.

Bumpy was voiced by Jim Cummings, whom you may remember from everything.

In any cartoon where the protagonist is adventurous and brave, it's an unspoken rule that he must have a total wuss of a best friend constantly in tow. Enter Squishington, aka Squishy, a blue wad of goo living in a toilet tank. I believe it was once explained that Squishy was actually a sentient blob of cleaning fluids, and as such he was obsessed with cleanliness. He may have lived in a toilet tank, but he shined that baby up with near obsessive-compulsive intensity. Squishy was often the voice of reason, or at least the voice of caution, acting as Piglet to Bumpy's Winnie the Pooh. He was also the subject of much slapstick thanks to his ability to splatter apart on impact T-1000-style.

The third main character, the only female protagonist, was Molly Coddle the Comfort Doll. While it seems likely she was introduced as a sort-of love interest for Bumpy, she was actually one of the more interesting characters on the show. Basically, Molly's thing was that she was never happy with herself. Every week it would be something different. She's not as pretty as the other dolls. She's not as tough as the action figures. She doesn't have any skills outside of comforting people when they're down. Nearly every episode centered around her involved her trying to improve herself somehow, only to learn that it's okay to just be a comfort doll if that's what you're good at. If you think about it, that was a rather odd message for a children's show, but it was always very sweet in a "love who you are" kind of way. This was an era when "girl power" was a major force and it was in-style to have female characters who were tough, empowered and...more or less without character flaws of any kind. Molly's a great example of how flaws make a character more interesting.

There were other characters, too, but they were only seen intermittently. Like Molly, the show had other instances of toys being alive, so Mr. Bumpy occasionally had to content with Destructo, a robot warrior action figure and The Cutes, an irritating (and oddly creepy at times) band of Barbie-like dolls. The interesting thing about these characters is that, while they were supposedly antagonists, they rarely actively got in Bumpy's way. Usually they would only notice him if he accidentally (or, at times, intentionally) messed with them, but on their own they generally left him alone. The closest the show had to an antagonist was Closet Monster, a terrifying amalgam of dirty laundry and unwound hangars who would grab anyone too close to the closet doors. That said, even he was more or less confined to his little area, so the characters had to be brought to him for various reasons.

(More than once, depressed characters would consider essentially killing themselves by giving themselves to Closet Monster. It's only in retrospect that I realize how incredibly dark that is. Somehow as a kid I must have found suicide more acceptable.)

What I find amazing about this show is that it seems as though no one watched it. There wasn't much advertising and the kids at school never mentioned it. When it went off the air, no one seemed to care, and today you never see it mentioned on any but the most elaborate of nostalgia sites (and Wikipedia of course., from which I got a lot of this info). Bump in the Night aired around the same time as ReBoot, and in my mind they're kinda intertwined, but it seems only the latter was remembered, probably just because of all the spiffy CG.

However, I think that this is part of what made the show great. It has the quirky charm that only comes when the creators know not a lot of people are watching anyway. Episodes are short and largely nonsensical, such as an entire episode of Mr. Bumpy getting into a fight with an inexplicably-animate glove. What keeps things coherent is the lovable characters, surprisingly good animation and voice acting by people all of whom would have great careers to follow.

Episodes on YouTube abound, so I encourage people to check this one out. It's a lost Saturday morning gem I'll always remember.