GIDGET’S
EPISODE REVIEW
Pizza Pie in the Sky
2 out of 5 Krakatoa
Specials
Summary
Rebecca goes to the Businessmen’s Boot Camp to
learn to make more money, leaving Baloo and Kit in charge of Higher for
Hire. Baloo, Louie and Kit start their
own pizza delivery service, calling it Pizza Pie in the Sky. Louie bakes the pizza, Kit takes the orders
and then helps Baloo deliver it. The
pilot ‘borrows’ a dollar from the H4H safe, saying: “Not havin’ money’s no problem --- as long as you know someone
who does.”
The trouble begins when Baloo ignores Louie when he tries to explain that he’s
severely allergic to anchovies. He and
Kit start ‘advertising’ their wares by dropping hot, messy pizza on the streets
of Cape Suzette.
Kit:
“Is this mass marketing or mess marketing?”
At first the plan works --- Louie bakes the pizzas and the boys deliver
it. Then someone orders anchovies,
which makes Louie too ill to continue, so Baloo and Kit end up cooking the
pizzas mid-air and nearly get blown up by a volcano. All this is for nothing when the Inspector finally catches up to
them.
The Inspector pops out of the safe and fines Baloo $499 for all the damage.
Baloo (kisses roll of bills): “G’bye, boys!”
Inspector lectures him on checking with the board of Health first. “Remembah!
We’re here to help ya!”
Baloo (sarcastically): “Yeah, to help yourselves to our
money!” Looks down sadly at the
one-dollar bill he started with. “Well,
at least we broke even.”
Suddenly, a voice startles him. “Get
your paws off that safe! Dipping into
petty cash, again, Baloo?”
“Uh… how was the
seminar, Rebecca?”
”Oh. It was… very interesting. I learned all about how to make a business
growl…” She corrects herself. “I mean
grow. We got pizza for lunch,
right? But it was delivered by a real
bunch of losers --- filthy, plain, disgusting delivery people! If a company like that can make money
delivering pizza, then Hire for Higher can make a fortune!”
Two clunks --- the sounds of both Baloo and Kit fainting with exhaustion.
Rebecca is
perplexed. “Baloo? Kit?”
Then she shrugs. “Some people
can’t handle success.”
Quibbles and Bits
When Nanook, the igloo-dwelling customer
throws the second pizza at Baloo, it hits the snow and forms a snowball as it
rolls down the hill. Just before it
hits the pilot, it freezes in mid-frame.
Baloo opens the barrel of anchovies, saying proudly, “Got the whole barrel for
a dollar --- can I smell a bargain or what?”; Louie passes out from the
smell. As he lies there turning green
around the gills, neither Kit nor Baloo seem concerned about his health.
Kit:
“If Louie’s sick, then who’s going to make all those pizzas?”
Baloo:
“And how am I gonna pay back Rebecca?”
Cody: *snorts*
Some friends.
When Kit yells, “You can’t put a grease fire out with water!”, both smoke and
Baloo freeze in mid-frame.
The plane should have blown up in the volcano.
No way could it have stood that kind of heat.
Gidget: Kentucky Fried Kit!
Cody: I think you
mean Kentucky Fried Bears. And how come
Baloo’s bum didn’t get fried? He didn’t
have any protection on it. That whole
scene was poorly done.
Gidget: Did Rebecca actually stay at the seminar for two days,
like she said she would? It seemed like
one day. Did Nanook’s ‘Land of Midnight
Sun’ count as night in Cape Suzette? My
head hurts…
Cody: (hands Gidget an aspirin) The
time was really, really messed up, IMO.
There’s absolutely no way that
they could have advertised in a magazine or newspaper or anything else in two
days. See, there’s this little thing
called a deadline for ads, and it’s usually three or four days (or even a month
in the magazine biz) before it goes to print.
And how did they pay for it?
Neat Little Details
The guys use unorthodox methods to bake two
hundred pizzas:
-Louie stomps on
the tomatoes like they’re grapes to make the sauce.
-a cement mixer is used to mix the dough, then a steamroller to roll it out.
-to make the circular shapes, Kit attached a garbage can lid to a pogo stick
and jumps all over the dough like a giant cookie cutter.
-shovel for the
sauce and toppings
-when Kit dumps the stove overboard, they fly over a raging volcano to cook the
dough
Gidget:
If they’re so hard up for money, how could they rent heavy equipment?
-You find out that Rebecca likes anchovies, and that Louie is allergic to them.
Cody: Well, there
goes the possibility of them as a
couple. ;)
Gidget as Louie: *sniff*
There goes the only girl I’ve ever loved this week!
Schroeder (as Baloo): "Awww, Louie, there's plenty of anchovies in the
s--oh, never mind..." ;)
-Louie sleeps in a frilly canopy bed.
-Rebecca’s seminar takes place in The Takeover Hostel.
Funny Stuff
Baloo keeps his donuts in Rebecca’s safe.
Rebecca: Oooh!!
Louie serves pizza with his hands --- no plate, no tray. Ick.
When Baloo starts eating the pizza, Louie smacks his hand with a spatula.
Rebecca: “Hey, I need that! What
if the squid comes back?”
Pizza Pie in the Sky advertising --- Baloo flies Seaduck over town,
dropping pizzas everywhere (similar to the way Kit threw muffins into the
office windows at surprised secretaries).
Pizzas land in the strangest places…
-on top of a live
telephone line
-the streets
-a car
(windshield wipers scraped off the mess)
-a stop sign
-the Health
Inspector’s head
When the Seaduck flips upside-down the volcano steam hits, Kit shouts at the
pilot, “Nose up, Baloo! Nose up!”
Baloo is disoriented. ”Which way is
up?”
But he does find yet another lost sandwich in the cockpit. “I’ve been lookin’ for this since last
month!” Takes a bite and spits it out.
Gidget: He probably thinks salmonella is a small fish covered in cheese.
Cody (as Baloo): But that’s what Becky said it was. And she also said that E. coli was a fancy
kind of cough drop.
Quotes
Rebecca, doing checklist before she leaves for
seminar:
”…books balanced…accounts accounted for…petty cash…*sigh*…petty.”
Baloo pooh-poohs the idea of her going to a seminar, telling her that he could
tell her a thing or two:
”You need common sense… and I’ve got the most uncommonly common sense.”
Rebecca: “Well, I use more dollars and less cents.” (Gidget: stepping into it there…)
Cody: (snorts) Like she had any sense to begin with. ;))
Baloo:
“Don’t worry… we’ll take good care of everything while you’re gone.”
Rebecca: “Maybe I should just take a correspondence course.”
Baloo:
“Naw, go! Don’t ya even trust me
ta run things for two days?”
Rebecca: “Yes… if you just follow one simple instruction.”
Baloo:
“What’s that?”
Rebecca: “Don’t do anything!”
Baloo (to himself): “That’s what I do when she’s here!”
Baloo tries to come up with ideas for starting a business:
”I know… a watch-chicken! It’ll guard
your house and give you breakfast, too!” (laughs uproariously at his own joke)
Gidget: Okaaaaayyyy…
Cody:
But you notice how Kit came up with the overnight mail idea? I’d definitely say he’s the brains of the
bunch. J
Gidget: That’s like
being the smartest one of the Three Stooges.
Baloo helps himself to the safe at H4H:
Kit:
“Isn’t this a little like stealing?”
Gidget: You should know, you little ex-pirate, you!
Baloo:
“Bite your tongue, kiddo! I’m
not gonna take any money --- I’m just gonna borrow it, uh, without tellin’
Rebecca. Great gal, Becky --- but no
business sense.”
Baloo proposes a partnership with club owner Louie:
”With my know-how and your… whatever, we’d make a fortune!”
Baloo delivers a pizza to their first customer:
Baloo:
“Hey, did somebody named Nanook order a pizza?”
(A huge polar bear, much taller that Baloo, crawls out of the igloo and
stares down at him intimidatingly)
Baloo:
“Whoa! How’s the weather up
there?”
Nanook: “Cold!”
Baloo takes a lot of punishment here. Each
time he tries to deliver a pizza, something goes wrong.
First, it’s the wrong size (Nanook brings
the whole box down, so Baloo’s head pops through the whole mess.
Second, it’s delivered too late and gets
frozen solid:
Baloo (they’re in the Frozen North,
after all) *pointing at icicles forming on crust: ”It’s not cold --- it’s just
room temperature.”
Third, the anchovies were missing, but
Baloo catches a fish and tosses it on the pizza: “There! Nothin’ fresher
than that! I always thought Rebecca was
the only one who liked anchovies. Guess
that makes two of ya.” Then a whale leaps out of the water and gulps down the
whole thing! “Maybe three?” Nanook
hurls him into the freezing water.
Baloo explains what anchovies are:
“Anchovies --- little guys with salad oil all over their bodies?”
Rebecca (seductively, holding a bottle
of Newman’s Own): Come here…
Bob the Fish Seller (trying to dissuade
Baloo from buying bad anchovies): “Perhaps I could interest you in a tasty
octopus --- mmm-mmm! Yum-yum!” and when
Baloo practically threatens his life unless he gets his anchovies: “Right.
But you won’t like them.”
Bob, the pelican owner of Bob's Discount House of Fish, reluctantly sells Baloo
a barrel of anchovies for a dollar. Baloo proudly presents it to Louie,
who falls over in a dead faint. "Can I smell a bargain or
what?"
When it’s obvious that they can’t cook the pizzas and deliver them without
Louie, Kit muses that it’s too bad they can’t do both at the same time, Baloo
exclaims, “You’re a genius! Surprised I
didn’t think of it.” They then take
Louie’s stove and cook the pizzas mid-air.
Gidget: Um, with an oven preheated to 450 degrees or so and smoking,
why didn’t the plane explode?
Cody:
‘Cause the heat hadn’t reached the gas tank—the whole plane
wasn’t 450 degrees, remember. As for
the smoke, it was an inconvenience, but not hot, so…At least one thing in this
episode made sense.
Gidget: Okee-dokey.
They dump the flaming stove into the ocean.
Baloo: “Heh-heh! When I put a fire out, I put it out!”
Flying over a live volcano to cook the pizzas (after dumping the flaming
stove):
Kit:
“Uh-oh! Baloo, I think we gave
the volcano indigestion.”
Baloo:
“Glad we didn’t toss in the pepperonis --- it might have got an ulcer.”
Tiger Instructor: ”I’m going to turn
you into lean, mean, business machines!”
At the Takeover Hostel, the Instructor, a tiger, takes the two hundred pizzas
from Baloo, saying, “I always like to end a seminar with a free lunch. It challenges their preconceived notions.”
Gidget: I finally got that one.
It’s actually quite clever. And
did anyone else notice that it was the leaning tower of pizza?
Cody:
LOL! Two of ‘em!
When Kit jettisons the extra heavy items from the plane,
Kit:
“We aren’t gonna make it! The pizzas
are too heavy!”
Baloo:
“It must be the extra cheese!”
Kit dumps yet another array of Baloo’s weird ‘treasures’:
-a mattress, utensils, a record player, a moose head (!) and of course…
the kitchen sink. Someday I should make
a list of all the crap Baloo keeps stashed away.
Cody:
Pogo sticks and lingerie… offhand, I’d say our Baloo has some serious
issues. ;)
Baloo:
“Hey! Not my bottle cap
collection!”
Cody: I found that ironic—in Plunder and Lightning, Baloo acts kind of
condescending when he thinks Kit’s treasure is a bottle cap collection.
Gidget: He was condescending.
And I noticed that bottle cap thing too.
Louie (mistaking the Inspector for his
arch-enemy): “Holy pepperoni! It’s the king of the anchovies!”
Cody: Did you
notice how Disney edited that scene? In
the original before it was aired on Disney Channel and Toon Disney, they
actually showed the Inspector’s head
turning into an anchovy just before Louie said, “Why, it’s the king of the
anchovies! You’ll never take me alive!”
The Inspector, fed up with wrestling with Louie, leaves in a huff. “I’m switching to an easy job --- with the
bomb squad!”
Commentary
Gidget: It
wasn’t as bad as say, Flying Dupes, but it commits the sin of
mediocrity. For me, the one-shot characters
kept things lively. Bob the pelican
fishmonger is fun to watch as he tries to placate Baloo with everything but
anchovies. He’s a meek character and
an honest businessman to a fault in that he doesn’t try to trick the boys into
buying spoiled fish --- it’s Baloo’s own fault that he gets stuck with it. Serves him right, too… Baloo was kind of a
bully in the fish store.
Cody: Kind of? He reached across the counter and nearly throttled poor Bob!
Gidget: I hate it when he uses his size to intimidate innocent people. Kit, as usual, is caught in the middle of
the Big Guy’s schemes, much in the way he was in Double or Nothing.
A word from Schroeder: The
"Bob's Discount Store Of Fish" scene appears to be a tribute to a
Monty Python's Flying Circus routine called the "Cheese Shop sketch"
(I *think* that's the one, anyway...).
Well, if not so, I still believe it to be very Pythonesque, at least
sort of in the way Bob lists all the seafood in the world he *will* sell rather
than give Baloo and Kit the anchovies, That and the way the dialogue goes back
and forth too. :-)
Gidget: This was a ho-hum episode, IMO.
The boys go to ridiculous lengths, risking their lives to bake a
pizza. Sorry, but that’s just
dumb.
Cody: I agree
completely with your rating. The timing
was badly skewed, the animation was pathetic, and the plot was too farfetched.
Kit was the only one with any sense, but even he wasn’t enough to save Baloo
and Louie from themselves. :P