The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police (1997-8)

 

Studio: Nelvana

Director: Steve Whitehouse

Screenplay: J.D. Smith, Steve Purcell, Hugh Duffy, Marty Isenberg, Robert N. Skir, Bob Ardiel, Jamie Tatham, Tim Burns, Dale Schott and Tracy Berna

Based on the comic book series by Steve Purcell

(Voice) Cast: Harvey Atkin as Sam; Rob Tinkler as Max; Dan Hennessey as the Commisioner; Tracey Moore as Darla "The Geek" Gugenhee; Patrick McKenna as Lorn the Friend for Life

An Abstract Candidate

 

It might not look much, but in two weeks they put me on fries. Then they’ll pay!

By episode two, this show has parodied 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when tuning the monolith to stop it causing suffering leads to the simian people living around it to discover roller disco for the better. This is somewhat appropriate for this title, a one season adaptation of Sam & Max, originally a comic book by Steve Purcell, adapting the characters his brother Dave started in their youth, apatly being the result of Steve parodying his brother’s own comics just to annoy him¹. Most will know the videogame adaptation by LucasArts, the point & click game Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), as Steve Purcell became a staff member and brought the characters with him. From their golden age of these titles, Sam & Max was a strange game as much as a funny one, a touchstone to weird Americana which this series gets into, a franchise which would see a reboot in 2006, when with Sam & Max Save the World, Telltale Games would bring the characters back in a series of episodic games. In the midst of this, was this Canadian animated series that I actually saw an episode of on Fox Kids on satellite television in the UK, the episode about a “glazed McGuffin”, so I have had an emotional investment to track this series down.

Wondering why the series was cancelled, effectively thirteen episodes with twenty four segments, I would not be surprised alongside how precarious television is in general, where even a good show will not be continued with, that a work which feels more inclined for adults to appreciate it more was not going to succeed. It feels barely like a children’s show, disguised as such when it is more a dissection of one, where in episode two, going by each being ten minutes stories, the leads are looking directly to the camera and breaking the fourth wall among many times, saying that they will not have commercials only to cut to one. Even the music is eclectic as it goes – the title theme is jazz verging on avant-garde, and eventually with the Apocalypse Now parody in a later episode, when the leads are in central park in New York City, a literal jungle here searching for the commissioner’s lost keys, you get psychedelic rock in the score.

The premise is scatter shot on purpose aside from the fact that Sam in an anthropomorphic dog in a suit, Max is a bordering psychotic “rabbit-thing” and both are true best friends forever. As “freelance police”, in a world where New York City is even more rundown to the point you get a joke about a rat literally carrying a baby on its back away, they are the only sane thing to bring in for the weirder cases if they do not get into their own mischief along the way. The original videogame was already unpredictable, getting into a secret tribe of Bigfoot, as this show gets into for an episode, and an apocalypse to be averted, so this is not strange ground for the franchise. Even with prior awareness of this, however, this show is still legitimately strange, the kind of show which does not try to explain why it has shifted into a parody of the night Mary Shelley devised the story of Frankenstein, set in the period past, to allow a story of Max’s tale being resurrected and developing sentience, or how episode fourteen involving them having to deal with a giant robot which has done its job, even if that means taking it over to Japan to fight a kaiju sized baby.

Probably more striking before you get into the plots or the visual look of the series is how verbose the dialogue is. Likely to go over some adults’ head, and even referencing Aristotle at one point, it is hilarious at times and shows how the series is able to get away with pure disregard for logic, in how this show finds ways to be this gleefully witty even when it is weird. A lot of the experience is just viewing the series and not expecting what will transpire, but there are good episodes just by themselves – a Die Hard Christmas parody is funnier because you have Sam’s grandma, an awesome one-off of a woman who apparently survived the Korean War and put most of the prisoners away she now visits and gives gifts too on the series, even if being a stereotypically lovable grandma, and armed with fruit cake both likely to be bulletproof and proven to break a whole foot’s worth of bones when used as a defensive weapon. And it is amazingly twisted in a lot of its humour as well, where the sense it is merely pretending to be a children’s show is clearly obvious at times, in how the Frankenstein parody gets into the idea of desecrating graves, only to get a Victorian era drive-in fast food place to provide fake body parts, or helping sentient rats on the moon avoid being used to stir into coffee by giant cockroaches. There is one entire segment, about the practical uses of a pancreas, such as being a door stop, which is just an excuse to get body organs onscreen without being too gory.

There is also stuff in here I wish, as original concepts from this TV series, returned into later videogames, such as Darla "The Geek" Gugenheek, the sole female character in the cast but a cool one as the most sober figure in the leads’ circle, as their gadget creator and friend, cool in the sense of the straight man in their comedy who still has the appropriate cynicism for the tone as a teen prodigy able to accept the lunacy that transpires in this world. Some may not be as fond, in his two episodes, for Lorne “the Friend for Life”, one of many ways these shows were perversely mocking their own obsessive fan bases, something you see even in the Comic Book guy in The Simpsons, a super fan for Sam and Max whose enthusiasm is too much even for them. That he willingly breaks the law, and eventually ends up hijacking a Swiss tourist blimp to for his heroes to save the day in, is an ultra-cynical joke contrasted by how potentially annoying or insulting the character could be, as he really cuts down into the bone with hindsight about fandom for pop culture. (The blimp episode would also not be acceptable, in its jokes, post 9/11).

A huge portion of the show, and these characters included, is a fixation on weird and “lowbrow” Americana, the world of the largest balls of string attractions, which was a prominent aspect in locations in the first game, alongside junk food and general pop culture, be it the bigfoot episode, explosive corndogs as a single episode joke, a Jerry Springer parody required to settle the marriage problems of Greek Gods Zeus and Hera, or that one of the villains’ plans, only evil because he has the brains removed from the locals to turn them into zombies for his lair, is to create sea monkeys which actually live up to the years of false advertising. Said villain, Mack Salmon, also has to be a hyper intelligent fish in a robot suit which, like Bob the Goldfish in the Earthworm Jim franchise, is general weirdness that can also be found throughout the nineties in general. Fast food employers, unwisely, are employed by a super villainess who wishes to extract all the worst traits of tourists and use it as a biological viral weapon, and like the game, Sam and Max clearly like their strange on the road attractions as they do junk food and television. The glazed McGuffin episode I remember in fact, a reference to the “McGuffin” Alfred Hitchcock used as a term, is entirely of its era of idiosyncratic (and highly unhealthy) junk food full of preservatives and the streak of political correctness campaigners from the time, as someone gets their favorite snack taken off the shelves and, in their attempts to hound him to change his mind, ends with him snapping and trying to murder them. Mocking fifties pop culture, at a time when nineties culture reflected on the past, you get an entire episode, if slighter than the premise could have become, about a figure from a children’s TV show named Dangly Deever being brought into the then-present and being forced to accept a world worse than Rudy Giuliani’s worst nightmares.

As for the leads themselves, they nonchalantly take most of this in, with the show having a streak of post-irony to it all, the pair blasé no matter how dire the situation, such aliens running a diner where they feed customers other customers, effectively riffing on Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987)  in as child friendly form as they can. They do not act like cartoon characters in fact, as in possibly one of the issues a viewer could have, they never go off-model as anyone else in this world, a concept for comedic timing in animation of distorting your characters for moments for emphasis in the moment, instead the two figures appropriate for this highly details and vivid world standing back and commenting in the absurdity until they need to get their hands dirty, even in reference to being a fictional show. They are capable of nobility, such as getting an artificial heart as quickly as they can to the President of the United States, but they also willingly mess around with time travel and change it, giving a caveman a rocket launcher, to see what happens in the future. It is not with surprise these characters, in this version, were not going to take the show over more than one season, for they seem as much reflections to their writers, gleefully stepping on clichés in the medium, rather than making something which is meant to have adventure and fill space between advertisement.

I have nothing but admiration for the show. It dangerously gets close to being too weird for the sake of it, but the level of humour is so consistent that it succeeds, with how many jokes land and even when something is so abrupt, in strangeness or just kneecapping expectations, to cause me to laugh. The show is helped simply by the fact that it is one season and cannot outstay its welcome. As much as I am fascinated by the idea of how they could have continued this, a one-one season which knew it was doomed, ending on a final episode which, in another inspired touch, is a clip show using scenes that are newly animated from stories we never saw, there was as much chance it would have been compromised if it managed to be hit. I think, truthfully, its home in videogames where the big success came from was where these characters can rightly stay, with this instead the tangent that we really just need to be more readily accessible.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric / Metatextual / Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) The History of Sam & Max: Part 1: The Early Years. From Telltale Games’ site, archived from the original on January 3^rd 2008 and preserved on the Wayback Machine.