After convincing a waif of a mademoiselle at the local inflatable bounce house establishment – Ramparts! Rocket ships! Low-rent light industrial location! – to part with her young Huckleberry Finn-type for the duration of one crisp October Saturday afternoon, we repaired to a nearby watering hole and petitioned the barkeep to desist with his usual collegiate pigskinnery and to kineticize the dial toward that purveyor of so much television cotton candy: Nickelodeon Junior.
The resulting cry of anguish from the piliers de bar was quickly replaced by the bottomless trance of men enraptured by the soft glow of Philo T. Farnsworth’s brainchild. Suddenly, a sugar rush potent enough to inspire even the most somnambulant boozehound: Paw Patrol, Paw Patrol / Whenever you’re in trouble / Paw Patrol, Paw Patrol / We’ll be there on the double! Ensuring us that there is no job too big and nary a pup too petit, our heroes took the small screen in leaps, bounds, slides from a ludicrous lookout tower, and impracticably transforming multipurpose vehicles. Paw Patrol was indeed on a roll.
Enter Ryder, the (abandoned? unaccompanied?) spiky-haired, tech-imbued boy leader of the pack. Bruce Wayne, meet Bruce Tween. Who wouldn’t hand over Adventure Bay’s entire color-coded scale of Homeland Sécurité to this kid? Then, in a Whitman-esque blinding nuclear flash, the team: Marshall! / Rubble! / Chase! / Rocky! / Zuma! / Skye! / Yeah! / They’re on the way! Thank Christ.
The place is spellbound by a mid-first season classic: “Pups in a Fog.” The light on the Seal Island lighthouse has been extinguished and Captain Turbot, a man who would be right at home piloting the Exxon Valdez circa 1989, can’t get back to fix it.
“That’s not good,” he observes, somewhat astutely for an adult in Adventure Bay. The implausible premise that the ship cannot stop while the lighthouse is attended to was lost on my young friend, his vacuous stare a metaphor for a generation. Ten minutes later, the solution presents itself: replace the comically (ha, ha!) oversized incandescent bulb. Problem solved, age-old lightbulb question answered: a team of hack writers.
Utilizing my markedly superior mental prowess to teleport back to my beanstalk-entangled igloo in Ibiza, where I once accepted a red pill from a fellow traveler who insisted I call him “Morpheus” despite smelling faintly of sunflowers and merde, we continued our trek to a place where only the Power Rangers, Captain Planet, Voltron, Transformers, Rescue Bots, Ninja Turtles, PJ Masks, Blaze and the Monster Machines, and Lego brand motorcycle riders have gone before: straight to the hearts of children with a standard palette of colors and boilerplate character abilities.
Here we see Mayor Humdinger, chief executive of rival whistlestop Foggy Bottom, unleashing the Kitten Catastrophe Crew – his clowder of nefarious cats, not a postmodern Russian alt-rock groupe de musique – on the unsuspecting populace of Adventure Bay. High drama for the preschooler in us all; Foggy Bottom is Adventure Bay’s rival, its synergistic nemesis, the metaphysical Shelbyville to a metaphorical Springfield. Their mission: mess up Adventure Bay and stop them from winning the Tidiest Town contest. The Paw Patrol intervenes. Humdinger nearly plummets from a water tower, apologizes, helps clean up. Adventure Bay is victorious. Give a hoot, don’t pollute.
The adults are universally clueless, the principal omnipotent. Plots are redolent with solutions that make MacGyver appear to be an actual scientist and require more willing suspension of disbelief than a Sarah Huckabee Sanders full court presser. As I soporifically clutch my last glass of marked-up $6.99 Yellowtail Shiraz and weep for days of rain, nights of love, and remembrances of the Arch Deluxe, we become transfixed by two additional episodes of the maritime variety: “Pups Save a Floundering Francois” and “Pups Save the Bay.”
Of course Captain Turbot’s cousin Francois is a vapid and verbose Marcel Marceau. Of course a water rescue mission doesn’t involve Zuma’s water rescue craft or Skye’s air support (she wears pink and almost never gets to help – the last gasping vestige of the patriarchy is computer-generated). Of course a gaping hole in an oil tanker is fixed instantly with a boat bumper. Of course the massive oil spill is cleaned up with a colossal net of sewn-together towels assembled in approximately fifteen seconds.
“Green means go!” ejaculates Rocky. Where was this gem when the Deepwater Horizon went kablooie?
It all makes perfect sense for Orwellian times, where up is right, left is wrong, and a steady diet of burgers and diet soda can be explained away by good presidential genes. The best ones. Tremendously big and wet genes. Sighing and savoring the vin, I tell myself that the apocalypse will likely not be presaged by colorful, fuzzy puppies and their ten-year-old miniature defense department of a master. This is something of a comfort to my soul.
“They’re funny,” says the kid.
Oh, preliterate threenager. Oh, malleable consumer of the Nick, Jr. cavalcade of cromulence. Oh, America.
