Skippy: poet, diplomat, explorer

Continuing my occasional series of posts about ordinary ancient television -- I was watching a couple of episodes of Skippy the other day.

Two things stood out for me.

(1) It was the episode where Buddy or Tommy or Sharky-boy or whatever his name is (the older one, can't remember, don't care) was irritated he had to spend several weeks shepherding around a marine biologist looking at some aspect of coastal biota. But then he discovered that the deadly dull professorial biologist was actually a fox (as they used to say on Diff'rent Strokes) -- a nubile platinum blonde cutie with conical breasts (as was the style in those days).

Anyway when sea-cutie steps off her boat and into the scene, the most amazing music plays. It's all wokka wokka bow wow wokka wokka bow wow. Nothing but wah wah guitar and sleazy sliding trombone.

For Christ's sake, she was a marine biologist, not fishing for five dollar bills in her g-string (which reminds me, where the hell did I leave my wallet...?).

(2) So like the boy Sonny or Shitty or whatever (I know its Sonny -- I'm pretending not to care to remain cool and aloof) scares Skippy by holding up a lobster. Skippy backs into the boat's ignition which sends the boat shooting off causing Sonny to fall and hit his head, knocking him out in the boat. The boat continues to careen out of control in a fairly narrow estuary without a driver (the sea-cutie and Chocky are scuba-diving below).

So like they need to stop this boat fast before it hits the rocks. They've only got an hour or so. But how to get onto the boat as it zooms at 20 000 knots over the sea? Well sea cutie flies over in the helicopter, allowing Stimpy to jump out and land just behind the boat, but dammnit, he can't quite get onto the boat! Somebody needs to let the net down. But who? There's only a kangaroo and an unconscious 12-year old!

Luckily this is no ordinary kanga. It's Skippy, who went to Geelong Grammar and then a small liberal arts college on the east coast where he studied fine arts and law.

Sea-cutie leans out of the chopper and bellows out of a megaphone: 'lower the net, Skippy, lower the net.' She says this a couple of times before the roo wises up.

Oh, lower the net. Gotcha! So a pair of dessicated roo paws enter the shot without, er, the rest of the kangaroo (that's right, they're kanga stunt paws) and they untie the piece of string holding the net up. The net is lowered, Belchie climbs aboard, and the boat and boy are saved moments before hitting the rocks.

Yay!

Can you believe they made 91 episodes of this? Every parody of Skippy you've ever seen (defuse the bomb, Skippy, defuse the bomb! Cut the red wire, the red wire!) is actually topped by the original.

Rewrite the Internet applicaton layer, Skippy!