Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

(1989)

Spoiler warning for the Beetlejuice movie (1988).

While my mom may have expressed her dislike of this show and even may have made me turn it off at times, I confess I watched Beetlejuice religiously.

I think I may have seen the movie on TV at some point but I couldn’t follow what was going on, I think primarily because I was trying to make up the Beetlejuice character in my mind as a protagonist. In the movie he really wasn’t. Why was he such a pain in everyone’s ass? Of course it makes sense to me now but as a kid who started with the show, I was confused.

The fact that BJ wanted to marry Lydia in the movie was particularly creepy to me but it was supposed to be. That was the point. In the animated show they were just buds. He was still a pain in the ass but it was all in good fun. My mom’s main problem with it was the gross out humor, I think. I’m sure I became rather uncouth in public as a result of this show and I needed to learn time, place, and manner a bit.

I’m sure the huge dead face with a beetle crawling into one nostril and out of an eye socket didn’t help my mom’s love for the show. It had a profound effect on me though. To this day I still say “What in Tar-hooties!?!” I don’t know what a Tar-hootie is but I frequently want to know “What in them” thanks to this show.

The production music lives in my head rent free too. All the little musical segues, not just the Danny Elfman theme. I’m not exactly musically inclined but I think I could play this show’s music perfectly on any item that can produce a sound just from hearing it so much. Until watching the show from season 1, I didn’t realize the allusions they were making to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” music. It was heavily used early on but still had some lasting cues clear into season 4.

I think it’s unfair to binge watch these kinds of shows and then judge them based on how sick of the show I am by the end of season four. They weren’t meant to be binged. I am impressed by how fresh the writing was throughout four seasons. Of course they do resort to parodies of classic literature and other such things but even doing that, the jokes never really got stale. Even the Munsters had a hard time with that toward the end of season two. When your show is about the macabre, there’s about six jokes you can do and then you’re spent.

After about the third time I hear “You’re being loud enough to wake the dead! And I should know!” I start to wonder how long we’re going to beat this dead horse. BJ kept the jokes pretty fresh though.

By season 4 of Beetlejuice the writing gets streamlined a bit, not that it was ever slow. They quit setting up storylines and started doing cold starts. The show would start and everyone in the Neitherworld would be playing baseball. It cut out a lot of exposition which I’m sure kids weren’t interested in anyway. They’re playing baseball today. I get it. No explanation needed.

Earlier episodes would have started with Lydia playing baseball in the land of the living and she’d be complaining about it. BJ would sell her on the excitement of baseball in the Neitherworld which is totally different for some zany reason and off they’d go. That was the formula for a long time.

Toward the end of the series there were a lot of jabs in the script which I would assume were pointed at the expectations of producers. If I were to venture a guess based on what the show presented, I’d say the creators were being pressured to have a constant villain and Beetlejuice himself was to be molded into the niche of “superhero”.

There’s no indication of that kind of pressure though and it’s likely the creators were just poking fun at the super hero shows that were growing in popularity such as Batman- The Animated Series (1992) or Fox’s X-Men (1992). It’s funny to me how many plays are about making a play, or movies are about someone trying to make a movie. It’s interesting sometimes but I doubt kids are interested in a show about making a show which was the premise for several Beetlejuice episodes. Other cartoons have done it too. Heck, Animaniacs took place in the Warner Bros. movie lot. It makes me feel like the writers need to get out more and experience life beyond writing and show-running. But it was what was on so I watched it. What else was there to do? Develop a healthy hobby that could turn into a lucrative career? Ha!

Some episodes didn’t have Lydia at all. I’m not sure why that was an occasional decision but I didn’t care for it. Lydia was a good foil for BJ with whom the audience could relate. Thankfully there weren’t a lot of these instances.

I love all the transformations BJ would go through for a gag. Sometimes he’d be portraying a certain type of character for an entire episode. That was a pretty innovative gimmick which other shows like Fairly Odd Parents would employ to great effect now and then.

It was fascinating to me how people in the Neitherworld, although grotesque, were just trying to live out normal peaceful “lives”. BJ was the only constant annoyance to everyone. Even his own mother just wanted him to be cleanly.

Despite what I assumed was pressure from producers and big wigs, ironically this show was never cancelled! The creators just decided they had a good run and parked the bus. I kind of love this. I think that decision is instrumental in this show never trailing off into obscurity or going stale. It’s a great show from start to finish. I really have to commend the creators for having this kind of wherewithal and artistic integrity to reach a point of satisfaction and just move on. Well done!

I really have zero serious complaints about this show. What a strange era when movies not really made for kids get an animated series made specifically for them. You just don’t see this kind of thing any more. It’s a gem. And it has one of the greatest title sequences known to man…