Main cast: Roger Dunn (Felix Purdy), Tara Strong (Jenny Lawson), Marlowe Vella (Darryll Kragman), and John Kassir (The Crypt Keeper)
Director: Laura Shepherd
One of the problems that can arise when a grown-up watch a cartoon aimed at kids is that they can end up being annoyed by things that can fly over a kid’s head. In my case, Pleasant Screams annoys me to an excruciating degree because…
Well, let’s get the story out of the way first. Basically, Felix Purdy shows up in a dream, or what seems like a dream, only to have it quickly turn into a nightmare as all kinds of monsters start throwing themselves at him and this young lady Jenny.
So yes, this is the obligatory episode that has the characters zigzagging from one scenario to another, using the excuse of it being a dream to ignore all pretense of continuity or plot. It’s an easy kind of filler episode for any genre anthology series, and there’s at least one in practically every anthology series ever made.
So, back to my issues with this episode.
For one, it’s very repetitive. Every scenario has Mr Purdy saying the same things over and over, like he can’t believe this or that.
The biggest problem, however, is Jenny. Tara Strong’s voice is best taken in moderate doses, but here, she keeps calling “Mr Purdy” non-stop with that voice that I soon feel like a blackboard being clawed by nails over and over. That character is supremely hateful, too, as she will insist that Mr Purdy do or think of everything to get them out of trouble, and then berate that man when things go wrong.
Because these characters say and do things in the same pattern over and over, everything wrong about this episode—Jenny’s behavior, her constantly screeching Mr Purdy’s name, his constant utterances of the same phrases over and over—keeps snowballing until I feel also like screaming, only I want to do this out of frustration and agony.
Things could have been salvaged if Jenny would be revealed as the true big bad of the show, or these two are revealed to be automatons or protagonists in some awful video game, but alas, the people behind this episode aren’t that imaginative. As a result, Pleasant Screams is more of a torture for folks that are old enough to realize how so much of this episode is a turd pile of titanic dimension.
