Let's Watch This: An Episode (or Two) of "Little Shop"

NOTE: Please do not take any of the little nitpicks in this review (or any of my other reviews, for that matter) seriously. I write these reviews in the hopes of making people laugh. Those nitpicks are really just dumb little observations that I'm attempting to make jokes out of, not complaints that add to whether or not I like something.

NOTE #2: No disrespect is meant towards anyone who worked on the show I am reviewing today. I'm sure they are all very nice and talented people.

NOTE #3: If you like this show, that is great. Go ahead and like it. I'm not judging you.

I have never seen Little Shop of Horrors - either the original movie from 1960, the musical it was adapted from, or the movie adaptation with Rick Moranis based on the musical. But I do know that it's a pretty spooky movie about a giant Venus flytrap who eats people. And yet, for some reason, the folks at Marvel Productions and Saban Entertainment thought such a film would be PERFECT for a kids' cartoon show!

How exactly do you make a show for kids based on a horror movie (okay, technically it's a horror-comedy, but you know what I mean)? Well, the show's developers, Mark Edward Edens and Ellen Levy, found a way. First, they made the main characters from the film, Seymour and Audrey, into kids, presumably so the audience could identify with them. Next, they reinvented the giant human-eating plant, Audrey II, as a friendly plant named Junior (voiced by Roland Buddy Lewis, with Terry McGee doing his singing voice) who originated from a fossilized seed rather than from outer space. Thirteen episodes were produced and aired on FOX Kids from September to November of 1991. You can currently find episodes of the show on YouTube.

I'm not sure what the mindset here was. I doubt a lot of kids in 1991 were Little Shop of Horrors fans, and fans of the movie were probably turned off by all the changes and the fact that Seymour and Audrey looked nothing like Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene (even Junior doesn't look much like Audrey II). But since, again, I've never watched any of the actual Little Shop of Horrors adaptations, I'll simply have to judge this cartoon on its own merits... or lack thereof. This is the eleventh episode of the show, "Walk Like a Nerd".

The episode starts off with Seymour (Marlow Vella, with Lisa Michelson doing his singing voice) and Junior on the subway, which is filled with all sorts of strange people. Frankenstein's Monster, a guy eating a flower, Igor, a biker with weird flesh-colored spikes sticking out the top of his head...

Is that his hair?

As the train pulls into the station, Seymour sees Audrey (Tamar Lee) walk by and attempts to make small talk with her. She's a sportswriter now, apparently. I didn't know kids could get jobs as sportswriters.

By the way, take a look at the subway train behind them. I guess it's supposed to look like it's covered with graffiti, but it looks more like Jackson Pollock gave it a paint job.

I'm digging Seymour's elephant hat, too.

After Audrey walks off, Seymour realizes that he left Junior on the train and has to follow it all the way to the end of the line. Junior is none too pleased.

The next day, Mr. Mushnik (Harvey Atkin) walks into the shop and finds Seymour begging Junior not to be mad at him. Well, one thing HASN'T changed from the original movie - Seymour works at Mr. Mushnik's flower shop. Even though he's, what, thirteen?

"Why does a nerd like you get to walk around free as a bud when I have to drag a flower pot around everywhere I go?!" Junior complains. He's so aggravated that he launches into a rap song. Why? Because this cartoon was made during the 1990s, of course! And cartoon characters had a habit of rapping in the 1990s to prove that they were hip and cool with the kids, yo!

Is it at least a GOOD rap song? I think you know the answer.

In an attempt to cheer Junior up, Seymour invites him to sleep over at his house. But Junior doesn't do any sleeping. Instead, while Seymour snoozes he reads about altering your molecular structure. Then he grabs a bunch of household appliances - a broom, a washing machine, a toaster - and combines them into some sort of strange device that even Rube Goldberg would be confused by.

If this thing actually alters his molecular structure, I'll eat my hat with a side of hashed browns.

Does the machine work? Well, not exactly. It doesn't give Junior feet. Instead, it sucks him up, puts him through the rinse cycle, sprays Seymour with water, and then... um... somehow puts him inside Seymour's legs? I have no idea how that happened. None of this makes any sense. I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure this is not how molecular structure altering works!

But whatever, Junior is now in control of Seymour's legs. He's so happy to have feet that he launches into another rap song. This time, Seymour does some rapping too. It's just as cringe-worthy as it sounds.

"Hey, you know what they say, Seymour: two heads are better than one!"

So now Seymour and Junior share a body. And that gives Junior the ability to have Junior take control of Seymour's brain and have him say things like "Where do you think books come from?! Trees! They come from poor, helpless trees! Murdered in cold sap!" While everyone else in his class thinks that Seymour has been posessed by the Lorax, Junior forces Seymour to pull books out of the bookshelf and drive the other students into a frenzy. I will say this, for a kids' show this is just as disturbing as the movie likely is. Having a giant carnivorous plant controlling somebody's body isn't exactly much better than a giant carnivorous plant eating people.

However, there are benefits to having a sassy Venus flytrap sharing your body. For example, Junior manages to save Seymour from a thrashing by school bully Paine Driller (David Huband). TWICE! He also winds up as part of the track team, and starts imagining what winning the track meet would mean. I would now like to show you the funniest thing in the entire episode:

Come on, just LOOK at it and tell me it's not hilarious. I think what really makes it is the fact that his head is way too small for his body. Alas, that hilarious image is promptly followed by another awful song.

After that, with Junior's help Seymour manages to break the school's pole-vaulting record and pulls off the shotput so well that an entire building crumbles. But when they try to throw an incredibly heavy weight, Junior is somehow pulled out of Seymour's body. This might make winning the hundred yard dash difficult. Junior tells him that he didn't need him to win the other events, he just needed confidence. Then he uses his vines to tie the other runners' shoelaces together, torpedoeing the "you just need confidence" moral that they were presumably going for.

Despite that, Seymour winds up tripping over his own feet and then getting trampled by the now-barefoot other runners. As for Junior, he doesn't care that he doesn't have feet anymore. He might not have feet, but at least he's got soul.

"You sure you don't want me to eat that Driller kid? He's pretty obnoxious."

"Nah, we'd never get away with that in a kids' show..."

Nothing about this episode made sense. How did combining a bunch of household appliances put Junior in Seymour's body? Why did it allow him to take control of his brain? Why was the "Junior wants feet" plotline pretty much forgotten about halfway through? What exactly was the moral here?

Now, this is normally the part of the review where I give my thoughts on the show as a whole. But as I was posting it, I realized, hey, this review is incredibly short. I don't like my posts on this blog to be incredibly short. And you know what THAT means, don't you? It means I'm gonna have to look at ANOTHER episode of this show. Because I'm a glutton for punishment.

So, let's watch the SIXTH episode of the show, "Pulp Fiction". A reference to ANOTHER movie that I've never seen.

Seymour and Junior are going to the Skid Row National Forest, home of the oldest living tree in the world. And here I thought the oldest tree in the world was the Methuselah, located in eastern California. Oh, wait, I didn't, because I had to look it up. Don't say I never do my research!

When they get to the forest... I know I already made a reference to The Lorax, but it looks like the Once-Ler has been here. On the bright side, the oldest living tree in the world is still standing. Junior apparently worships it and tries to strike up a conversation. Silly Junior, trees don't talk. Except the ones in Oz, of course.

"All hail the redwood! King of trees! I shall do your bidding, my liege!"

This leads to ANOTHER LOUSY RAP SONG. Y'know, Junior, just speaking fast to a hip-hop beat does not a good rap make. I obviously agree with what you're saying about how pollution is bad, but there are better ways to get people to wise up than this. You could, for example, make a cartoon or write a book about the dangers of pollution. It worked for the producers of FernGully.

I'm sorry, but you can not in any way make rapping squirrels cool.

A few seconds after Junior's totally hip and fly rap song, yo, the tree is cut down. This makes Junior MAD! As it's being driven off to a sawmill, Junior grabs ahold of the tree with one of his vines, dragging Seymour along as well. When they get to the sawmill, Junior is very nearly burned alive. Fortunately, since the sawmill is entirely automated, there aren't any workers around to crap their pants at the sight of a talking venus flytrap.

All sawmills have a portal to Hades in them. Did you know that?

Whatever Junior's plan to save the tree was, it's a failure. Seymour tries to cheer him up by saying maybe the tree was recycled into a great book. Maybe, but there's also a fifty-percent chance it was used to make another one of those crappy Twilight novels.

Seymour then sings another song that sounds like it's trying to be Schoolhouse Rock but doesn't understand why the songs in Schoolhouse Rock work (for one thing, those songs are well-sung). Then he runs afoul of Pained and his dog, who are delivering newspapers. Upon reading the paper, Junior is enraged by the crap featured in it: a guy faces off against a hundred-pound grasshopper? A prehistoric dishwasher found in Egypt? Heck, the front page story is "SUN RISES". Yeah, and here's something else you might not have known: the grass is green!

"And the guys they've got reviewing movies in here don't know what they're talking about!
No way they actually made a film starring Vanilla Ice! That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!"

"What kind of twisted mind would cut down thousand-year-old trees to print root rot like this?!" Junior demands. "I just made a tree-mendous decision! We're gonna find all the newspapers and take them back to the forest where they belong!" I guess his mindset is that if they plant the newspapers, they'll grow new trees or something? At this point, I'd say ANYTHING is possible in the bizarre world that Seymour and Junior live in.

When people are done with newspapers, they usually throw them out. So it's off to the landfill for Seymour and his amazing talking plant, where Junior... I'll give you three guesses what he does.

Yep! It's another rap song!

Even the dog from that animated Titanic movie is a better rapper than this plant.

Junior's awful rap apparently has the power to control paper, because the newspapers rise into the air and rain down on him and Seymour. Then they actually leave the dump, folding themselves into paper airplanes and inching along like a caterpillar. Instead of going back to the forest, however, the papers all go back to Skid Row. You see, Junior just told them to "go home" - in their minds, "home" is where they were delivered.

Now Skid Row is full of paper - enough paper, as Mr. Mushnik puts it, to "house-train an elephant". Seymour suggests that they all recycle the paper, but apparently everyone in this town is an idiot because they don't know what recycling paper actually is. They use the newspaper as toothpicks, they eat it, they use it as ankle weights, Orson Welles even appears to suggest using it as a napkin.

"No frozen peas jokes, please."

Then the people of Skid Row decide to plant new trees in the national forest. "It's amazing what people can do when they work together," Seymour tells us. Well, I will say this: "Pulp Fiction" was at least better than "Walk Like a Nerd", if for no other reason than because it was less boring and made slightly more sense.

What's the Verdict?

Again, why did anyone think doing a kids' cartoon based on Little Shop of Horrors was a good idea? Even if you try to separate the cartoon from the movie, you're left with very little of substance. The characters are flat, the animation isn't anything to write home about, the jokes aren't funny, and the songs are mostly incredibly lame raps that were probably just as embarassing back in 1991 as they are now. Little Shop has nothing going for it.

TV Tropes compares the show to the 1989 Beetlejuice cartoon, which also aired on FOX Kids and was based off a horror-comedy probably not safe for kids to watch but had the main antagonist from the film as a good guy. I've never seen a single episode of that cartoon, nor have I seen the Beetlejuice movie, so if you're wondering why that show succeeded where Little Shop failed (it had four seasons, was released on DVD, and seems to be looked at more fondly than THIS show was), I couldn't tell you.

Rating: One and a half flowers out of five. Leave the door to this Little Shop closed.