Who’d thought Bobby’s World would give us one of the best Friday the 13th parodies ever?
I can’t say I ever thought I’d be writing about Bobby’s World on a website called Wicked Horror, but here we are.
If you’re between the ages of 35 and 45 right now, you really don’t need a formal introduction to the show. You probably watched a million episodes of the cartoon when you were a kid, even though it’s a show with virtually zero long-lasting cultural significance. Heck, this is probably the first time you’ve even thought about the show in about 20 years. And you’re welcome for that.
For all you zoomers and boomers, though, I guess the best way to describe Bobby’s World is sort of a fictionalized, semi-autobiographical series about the childhood of comedian Howie Mandel. You know, the guy from Deal or No Deal and the dude who voiced Gizmo in Gremlins. I mean, there’s a lot of liberties taken and it’s set in the (then) modern day, so I guess it’s not really meant to reflect his own upbringing. But you get the idea.
Comparatively, Bobby’s World was a fairly realistic cartoon, especially when you compared it to something like Eek the Cat or Taz-Mania. It was kinda-sorta like a sitcom for first graders, with most episodes meant to teach children some sort of sage life advice.
Which brings us to one specific episode of the program.
I was absolutely amazed to learn that the show ran for SEVEN seasons and spanned close to 100 episodes. Which kind of speaks volumes about just how memorable this episode was — it’s pretty much the ONLY thing about the cartoon I have any vivid recollections of watching.
We’re going ALL the way back to the very first season of Bobby’s World. It’s the third episode of the first-year run and it initially aired on September 22, 1990. It’s title is “Adventures in Bobby Sitting” and you don’t have to wait more than five minutes into it before you realize why this website is writing about it some 36 years later.
OK, so Bobby is obviously the main character. He’s like, I don’t know, four or five or something and he takes everything hyper literally. Which is kind of the gimmick of the entire show. He’s got a mom and dad and two older siblings and you can figure out all of the family dynamics in like, a minute of watching the show. So that’s all of the upfront exposition you really need to understand what’s going on here.
Even before we get into the explicit horror related stuff, you can kind of see why this show was so unusual for its time. The episode is basically about Bobby having a new babysitter and being a little afraid of who they might be, but for whatever reason the writers of the show thought they best way to communicate that to an elementary school audience was by throwing in some references to Cool Hand Luke and an entire fantasy sequence where Bobby imagines said babysitter being a 999-pound pro wrestler. There’s a lot of unexpected psychosocial depth going on here. I figure the kids who really liked this show were super happy to go to group therapy a couple of years later.
So we kind of go through all of the usual sitcom motions, including this bizarre sequence where Bobby gets naked for a bath and they actually SHOW his bare booty in front of god and everybody. About 12 minutes into the 22 minute episode, though, is when we get to the A-material, though.
So Bobby and his older brother are watching a pastiche of the Friday the 13th movies on TV. For the record, the character’s name is “Scary Mason,” but let’s be real, it’s Jason, right down to the goalie mask. Naturally, Bobby gets freaked out watching the movie-within-a-TV-show, then he gets even more freaked out when he gets a call from a heavy breather who sounds a lot like the murderer from Black Christmas. Knowing Howie Mandel had at least some creative input for the show, I’m guessing that’s probably not coincidental.
As it turns out, Bobby’s babysitter’s boyfriend is also named Mason and since Bobby is an unlearned tyke he doesn’t deduce that it’s a different kind of Mason than the psycho killer in the movie he was watching earlier. This is actually a pretty funny scene, since the babysitter keeps trying to tell her boyfriend Mason to not come over so she won’t get in trouble, but Bobby interprets it as her responding to not-so-veiled threats from the movie sociopath. And yes, I admit that a joke on Bobby’s World made my 40-year-old ass legit LOL.
The pièce de résistance of the episode (and frankly, the reason I’m even telling you about it) is an absolutely amazing parody of the tried and true final girl chase sequence that’s been in every slasher movie ever. It’s a pretty long sequence — and yes, five minutes IS a long time for a cartoon like this — and its pacing and structure would make John Carpenter proud.
It’s a largely dialogue-less back and forth Naked Gun meets Halloween spoof with some downright brilliant moments that suggest the writers of the episode have seen a LOT of mediocre ‘80s slasher movies and knew exactly how to distill everything to its purest essence. Like, there’s one part where a staircase turns into a spiraling M.C. Escher homage and it’s more phantasmagoric than just about anything we got out of the proper Elm Street movies. It’s low-key fantastic stuff and it probably scared the living crap out of most of the kids who watched it back in the day. And you’ve got to admire that kind of pluck.
Finding this episode out in the YouTube cosmos isn’t too difficult and if you’ve got half an hour to spare it’s not a bad (although a totally unorthodox) way to slowly work yourself into the Halloween-time groove. Although all these years later, I STILL have no idea why they thought Jason not only needed to talk, but sound *just like* Clint Eastwood.
