Several months ago, we discovered Peppa Pig, and she and her world have been a presence in our lives ever since. There are an apparently endless collection of G-rated 5-minute episodes of her show available online (on youtube and Nick Jr. and I'm sure other media sites as well). I would have expected to have seen them all by now based on how much time logged watching them, but every now and again, we stumble across one that none of us recognizes.
Here's a primer for the uninitiated: Peppa is an anthropomorphic pig/little girl who lives with her mother (Mummy Pig) and father (Daddy Pig) and little brother (George Pig) in a mostly anthropomorphic universe of talking dogs and elephants and sheep and cows and rabbits and so on. The parallel universe all these creatures inhabit appears to be somewhere in or around England since the full gamut of accents found in the British Isles is represented. This latter fact has had some curious impact on my household. My son has adopted a few British terms for items and events that were not yet familiar to him in American vernacular. For example, he uses swimming costume, power cut, and climbing frame in place of bathing suit, black out, and monkey bars, respectively.
The videos generally quite cute and toddler appropriate, and they span from the benign to the modestly educational to the genuinely clever. My wife, son, and I all seem to enjoy them on some level.
The purpose of this blog post is to discuss one episode in particular: Snowy Mountain. It's a personal favorite of mine because, frankly, it's ridiculous. I'll spare you the narrative description since the full video is a mere five minutes long and it's linked below.
Peppa Pig: Snowy Mountain
There's some full-bore nearly Monty-Python-esque silliness to be found in this video, and I'm not sure if it's all intentional. I love the fact that Madame Gazelle carries around her trophy for being
the World Champion in Skiing in a magical, object-volume concealing packet in her ski jacket. That strikes me as a deliberate and
successful attempt at goofy humor. But some other funny gags appear to be the product of lazy screen-writing.
I find it hilarious that Pig family tries to drive up the mountain in their car, but based on later in the dialog, we are led to believe that Mummy and Daddy Pig have been skiing before. Seems like they should have known better. I'm willing to roll with the notion that Mummy Pig is able stay vertical on her skis while chaotically zipping down the Snowy Mountain even after what we can only assume to be years away from the slopes, but how the hell did all the rest of the skiers, including a full class of young beginners, manage to remove their equipment, descend the mountain, and climb into a bus in time to watch her ski down the street and crash into what I believe is meant to be her own home? Is that all just part of the madcap wackiness of the show, or did Editorial take a nap and pass the script on to animation without even reading it?
In any case, I still think it's great. It just goes to show that you should never let plausibility get in the way of a good gag.
