Proving that I never had much connection with the sort of people who waited impatiently for a new Harry Potter book and rampaged through it in a single night, having tracked down a reasonably-priced copy of Rhino’s out-of-print Bugaloos set, my son and I are watching the episodes at the rate of about one a month. And proving that my head might not be screwed on straight, here we go watching the episode where Caroline Ellis dresses up in a maid costume, a sight which has probably been making lustful teenagers spontaneously combust since 1970, and I give you a picture of John Philpott with some silly glasses on instead. Well, it is his episode.
Our son honestly runs a little hot and cold with this show. He enjoyed the absolute daylights out of “Our Home is Our Hassle,” which we rewatched last month, and guffawed all the way through it. “Courage, Come Home,” written by John Fenton Murray, is an amnesia story, and I guess my boy has reached the age where he’s seen one amnesia story and has realized that he’s consequently seen all amnesia stories. Another factor might be that instead of starting with some gags and silliness and taking a break for a musical interlude, this episode begins with our heroes singing their lovely bubblegum song “Come Away With Us.” I think it’s a pleasantly sunny piece of period pop that easily stands up alongside hits of the day by the Archies or the Cowsills, but he was ready for the show to get moving already.
So eventually Courage loses his memory thanks to a whack on the head in a storm, and Benita convinces him that he’s her nephew Melvin and can do all the cooking and cleaning now that she’s fired her incompetent henchmen. It’s really amnesia-by-numbers, although it has a few fun gags like the henchmen forming a picket line and the Bugaloos dressing up like her new staff – a maid, a cook, and a “gentleman’s gentleman,” though what Benita would need with a “gentleman’s gentleman,” we probably don’t want to guess – and it raised a smile or two, but overall this was nowhere close to being as funny as the previous episode.
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 