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Original Air Date: October 21, 1984 Review completed November 27, 2005 "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" Henry encounters a catastrophe; the Chicago Cubs are finally getting a shot at the division title, but he won't be there to see it. After trying every possible way to get tickets (including a shot at a radio giveaway), he ends up dealing with a scalper and, with Punky's help, manages two seats. When he gets there, however, he soon finds that he's been had, with tickets for 1884. Punky finds a way anyway, getting two lousy seats...right in the Cubs dugout. Let me state right out what a good portion of my problem is with this episode, and that's that Henry comes across as an absolute idiot. And a bit of a jerk, what with yelling at two little kids and his best friend over the freakin' Cubs. Okay, Henry did more than his share of mis-steps in the previous episodes, but Henry pridefully putting his foot in his mouth and getting taken for a walk is one thing. Being too stupid to double-check the tickets he bought (from a scalper!) is another. Cripeys, Punky doesn't even seem to notice, despite the fact that she has direct contact with the tickets several times, and the fact that she's portrayed in this episode as being smart and observant enough to nearly outwit a conman. In fact, it takes a pair of nuns and at least a full day for anyone to notice that they have 100-year-old tickets. Jeez, where do I start with that one? Shouldn't those be in a museum? Wouldn't they be worth a lot of money anyway? How haven't they turned to dust yet, or at least yellowed? Would 100-year-old tickets REALLY be able to pass for ones produced on a modern printing press? How does a scalper get a hold of pieces like that without stealing them from a private collector or something? If they're fakes, why put such a far-off date on them and run a huge risk of getting caught? For that matter, why don't Punky and Henry go after the guy? And for the final question; is it really worth paying the writers when they come up with a main plot point that I can raise seven good objections about within a few minutes' writing? All right, let's get off the plot points; it's just raising the blood pressure. Truth be told, if you took the first half of the episode by itself, it would be pretty good, minus the production goof of the old title sequence showing. In lieu of a Halloween episode, we get the costume fittings at the beginning of the episode, which makes for a decent filler segment. Henry gets back in afterwards, and his story-telling skills are put to use again with a tale of woe at the ticket box. (It's times like this that you can really tell that George Gaynes spent most of his time on stage.) Next up, a bedroom talk between Punky and Henry about the importance of baseball. This includes a nice gag where Henry unintentionally wishes that Punky get beaned with a baseball; Punky's silent 'ow' gesture cracks me up. A longshot call to Ernie Banks has a few good examples of comic timing ("Henry, is this what they call a longshot?") And then the radio call-in scene; "Punky Power!" is now officially a catch-phrase, and I can totally buy Punky knowing the answer over Henry, given how much school-type knowledge everyone forgets about. The scene of verbal sparring with the scalper is an interesting one. On the one hand, he has more cheaply-written bad tendencies than a pro-wrestling villain, including a part where he pushes Punky aside. (It really wasn't necessary, if you go back and watch.) Also, he has the worst-looking array of tickets since the crowd at the World Series of Table Tennis. Truth be told, though, you can't help but chuckle when Punky tries a con game on the guy, and it's a nice step in the right direction that the guy still doesn't buy it, but uses it to advance his own game. After that, though, the episode gets lazy. Incredibly lazy. "Let's look in the film vault and pull out a bunch of crud"-kind of lazy. In the last half of the episode, we have a three-minute montage of stock footage of the outside of Wrigley Field, and the episode ends with at least two more of footage from the actual 1984 Cubs/Padres playoff game. With all of that effort devoted to trying to build an authentic setting, it makes the cuts during the final two minutes uproariously funny. I realize Punky had a low budget, and no one's expecting anything specutacular from the production department, but the constant cuts to an dugout in an obviously empty park (or soundstage?) with Punky, Henry, and one other player are hysterical. Yeah, it's hard to simulate the feel of a dugout at game time, but couldn't they at least have went around the lot and got a few more big guys to put on Cubs uniforms and look busy? The in-between is a little better, but it still doesn't really stand out. The nuns don't really do much other than move the plot and have one of them provide a fan stereotype. The big dude (does he even get a name in the episode?) is only really there to threaten Henry a bit, but hey, he does it well enough. We get a little tension when Punky runs off, and the direction does a good job at making the crowd looking like a big mass that swallowed her up. Too bad the rest of the episode lets it down. I need to talk acting somewhere, so here's a good a place as any. George Gaynes uses his storytelling a fair bit, but he also looks like quite a tool for going along with his character acting like a buffoonus. Soleil Moon Frye... well, what does she have to do in this episode? She reacts, pretty much. Kind of broadly for a little while as well; it doesn't seem as natural as most of her episodes so far. Everyone else, well, they do their jobs. Nothing that bad in the acting quotient, but nothing that helps, either. What seperates this episode from the true bottom tier (see: "Just Say No", "Accidents Happen") is the ample supply of one-liners. I've already mentioned a few, but this episode has more quotables than that. You have Henry's deadpan response to Punky's questions about Babe Ruth, Henry's flailing attempt to keep his call to Ernie Banks going, and a beautiful rejoinder from Cherie. (Betty: "...I hate to see a grown man cry." Cherie: "I don't; can I stay and watch?") There's even a true 80s reference in Punky's line about getting a "push-button (phone)"; the same crowd that boggles their eyes at Cherie's "What's a VCR?" in a later episode ought to have an interesting reaction to that. Also, it's hard to really hate an episode where Eddie gets around thirty seconds' screentime. One-liners and all, though, I can't get around the fact that this is not among my favourite episodes. Why not let the characters and their locations do their jobs? Why use stock footage to get the point across? Why the freakin' Cubs? The producers learn from their mistakes, I'll give them that, but it's too late for this ship. [Insert cliché baseball closer here] - Jimmy Vibes Do the click |