The Comic Strip, Part 7 - Fish Confetti

"Five Go Mad on Mescalin" - November 2, 1983

How do you start the second season of a show that has a format that is so wide-reaching and flexible that an episode can be literally about anything? You go back and re-make the first episode of the first season, that's how. And so here, again, we see the Famous Five spun as a pack of proto-children, stomping through the countryside, making life safer for what Orwell referred to as the lower-upper-middle class.


So as this is a sequel episode, I'll give a sequel review.

In the prior review, I mentioned that after years of attempting to find the actual books, I married someone who actually had a stack of them, waiting for me. (There are many other ways that I have completely lucked out due to this relationship... but, I digress.)

So taking advantage of this long-awaited opportunity, I sat down with "Five go to Mystery Moor." The plot involves Gypsies, and all the queer things they get up to, some of which might be illegal, or at least, very queer indeed. If I tell you any more about the plot, I run the risk of giving away the ending. It was, all told, almost exactly as had been advertised, although I was slightly disappointed that it wasn't a touch more Sydney Horler.

The one thing that I wasn't prepared for was a little subplot going on in the background. As you may recall, one of the five is a young girl whose tomboyish attitudes manifest themselves in amongst other things, her manner of dress and her decision to change her name from Georgina to George. As the book begins, the five are encamped at a riding school along with another young girl who is equally as tomboyish as George, down to her decision to use the name Henry instead of Henrietta. Three of the other four find it very strange that the two tomboys seem to dislike each other (we gain no insight into what opinion Timmy the dog might have). My read on their behavior is slightly different.

To my eye, Henry and George gave off the strongest sense of inevitable bonking I've seen in children's literature since Harry Potter hauled Ginney Weasley out of the septic system. Sure enough, by the end of the book, the two are discovered to have become firm friends.

Good for them.

In some of the reading I've seen about these books, I've learned that Enid Blyton based the character of George on herself.

Good for her as well.

The reason for bringing this up is so I can have a quick dance around the subtexts that this episode sees fit to pound us over the head with. The difference between this episode and the previous one seems to lie in the amount of reality creeping into the surroundings. The first one exists in a hermetically sealed 1952ish world where the Five are in their element. Here, the supporting characters are a mix of past and modern (the large, bearded thug was in a zoot suit in the first one, but here he's in one of those mesh nylon muscle suit that they were nattering about on a recent "I Love The Eighties") knowing and unknowing (the innkeeper can say a line like "Please don't wave that tempting wad [of money] in my face, Mr. Budweiser" without betraying any knowledge of innuendo, but is also capable of propositioning the two boys). The humor is more blatant, as the envelope gets pushed a little further - they even play their hand when Julian makes a comment about how the Nazis weren't that bad ("at least they didn't leave gum wrappers all over the place").

The one thing that doesn't come up is George and her tendencies. Why not? After everything else, is this somehow sacrosanct? Or did it just somehow never occur to them?