TV Appreciation: Well Played, Clerks

The Clerks animated series was short-lived, but Cody Hamman's appreciation for it will last forever.

In 1995, an attempt was made to bring the characters of Kevin Smith's $27,000 indie breakthrough Clerks to the small screen in sitcom form. It may seem like an odd idea to turn a film that had initially received an NC-17 rating just due to the vulgar dialogue into a family friendly TV show, but that's not nearly as weird as the fact that no one felt the need to consult Kevin Smith during the development or cast the actors who had played the characters in the movie. A pilot episode was shot that cast Andrew Lowery as convenience store clerk Dante Hicks and Jim Breuer as his video store clerk pal Randal Graves, with the characters of Jay and Silent Bob being replaced by a third clerk, ice cream shop employee Todd (Rick Gomez). Exterior shots establish that they work at a generic strip mall rather than the stores from the movie. Noelle Parker played Dante's girlfriend Veronica, the show gave him a disappointed father played by Larry Brandenburg, and Keri Russell shows up as a customer who spends a lot of time in tanning beds. The humor is very run-of-the-mill, and it's easy to see why it didn't become a series. Twenty years ago I won a VHS copy of the pilot for $500 in a competitive bidding situation, and when I accepted the copy I promised that I wouldn't bootleg it. I didn't, but someone else out there who got their hands on a copy did, so now the pilot is readily available to watch on the internet if you want to spend 22 minutes wondering, "What were they thinking?"

It also seemed like a crazy idea when it was announced that there was going to be a Clerks animated series on ABC, but this time Smith was actually involved and developed it with his producer Scott Mosier and Seinfeld writer David Mandel. Stephen Silver did great work designing the look of the characters, and the cast of the movie returned to provide the voices - Brian O'Halloran as Dante, Jeff Anderson as Randal, Jason Mewes as Jay, and Smith as Silent Bob (he didn't have to record many lines).

The animated series has a different sense of humor than the movie, as should be expected since it was a cartoon on ABC, but the over-the-top sense of humor it does have is hilarious in its own way. This is a show I would have been tuning in to watch religiously for years... if only it had lasted years. Only six episodes were produced, each in the 21 - 22 minute range, and just two of those actually made it to air. And they were shown out of order. The first episode to air was made to be the fourth episode, while the second episode to air was made to be the second episode, but had to follow the intended first episode to really work. The situation was sort of a disaster, but at least the unaired episodes were eventually released to home video and we got six episodes of comedic gold out of it.

 

Although things spin out into completely unrealistic cartoon territory in every episode, there is an admirable adherence to the core idea of Clerks: Dante and Randal are twenty-something slackers who are working jobs they hate at a convenience store (Quick Stop) and video store (RST) that sit side-by-side in the small town of Leonardo, New Jersey. Dante frequently gets called in on his day off, he pines for his ex-girlfriend Caitlin (Caitlin actress Lisa Spoonaeur makes a vocal cameo in one episode), and he and Randal hang out and discuss pop culture instead of focusing on their jobs. Meanwhile, Jay and Silent Bob are always standing around outside the stores, getting up to crazy antics. There's not much in the way of drug references in the cartoon, but Jay and Silent Bob do smoke cigarettes and sell firecrackers. They also get their own informative segments at the end of some episodes, giving kids tips on things like science, rainy day fun, and camping. These segments are often crashed by Charles Barkley, who is shamed and sent away.

Then there's a quirky take on the typical cartoon villain, with Alec Baldwin providing the voice of the wealthy and scheming Leonardo Leonardo, who has returned to his hometown after conquering Canada - a primitive land populated by tribes who think rain is evil spirits. The window for making calls to Canada only comes around once a week. With his robot assistant Plug (who looks like Oddjob from the James Bond movie Goldfinger) by his side, Leonardo is introduced in the first episode when he builds a hi-tech Quicker Stop right across the street from the Quick Stop. Not only will this drive the Quick Stop out of business, but Leonardo's plan ends with the Quicker Stop being launched into space while nuking the planet, so the clerks can't stand by and let that happen.

 

The second episode is a parody of the "clip show" episodes many sitcoms have, and which I can't stand. I hated clip shows back in the day, and now find them especially annoying in an age where the entire runs of shows are readily available, so there's no need for these "greatest hits" episodes where characters reminisce about things we've seen before. The joke here is that it's only the second episode, so when Dante and Randal get locked in confined spaces and begin to reminisce about their past adventures they only have one previous episode to flash back to. So eventually they have to start having flashbacks to earlier moments from the same episode they're still in. They make Star Wars references and think back to Happy Days episodes, including the one where Fonzie jumped the shark, and discuss the Schindler's List / The Flintstones mash-up film Flintstones List, which we see a scene from. When this episode was broadcast on ABC (with flashbacks to an episode the network had never aired), they removed the Flintstones List moment.

When a pet store called Gerbils Gerbils Gerbils opens in their block of stores, Randal becomes intensely afraid that a monkey in the store is going to cause an outbreak of the deadly Motaba virus. He takes it as proof that the outbreak is happening when Leonardo Leonardo falls ill, not realizing the illness was caused by the bad burrito the man bought from the convenience store. James Woods shows up in this episode as a government man trying to keep this imagined outbreak under control, and an employee at Gerbils Gerbils Gerbils seems to be Patrick Swayze but is voiced by Gilbert Gottfried.

Episode 4 is my favorite of the bunch; it's easy to see why ABC chose to show this one first, even though they should have just waited four weeks and let the episodes play out in the proper order. In this one, Jay slips on liquid that Randal spilled on the Quick Stop floor, and Randal encourages him to sue Dante and the store for his injuries - with Randal acting as Jay's lawyer in court. With the honorable Judge Reinhold (voiced by Judge Reinhold) presiding, the court case plays out with a dozen NBA players sequestered on the jury. Will the NBA players reward Jay $10 million for his pain and suffering? That doesn't matter, because the ending of this episode is the greatest thing to come out of the existence of the Clerks cartoon. We're notified that the end of the script was lost in transport on the way to the show's animators in Korea, so the Korean animators came up with their own ending. The jury finds in favor of a "big American party", the style of animation completely changes, there's Transformers, an animated Tom Cruise shows up, the Korean animators use the episode as a way to reveal their terrible working conditions, Judge Reinhold is reunited with Axel Foley, and a bear drives a car, giving us the most famous line from this show: "Who's driving? Oh my God, bear is driving, how can that be?"

 

While the movie Outbreak fueled Randal's fears in episode 3, the fifth episode has the most extensive movie parodies, blending together elements of The Last Starfighter, The Bad News Bears, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for a story about Randal being abducted by Temple of Doom villain Mola Ram and the Thuggee cult to be forced into slavery building pyramids because he got the highest score on the arcade game Pharaoh, in which the player builds pyramids. Only Dante and the Little League team he's coaching, which includes Jay as a player because he's still in 4th grade at age 26, can save Randal from this terrible fate.

The titles of the episodes don't appear on the screen, but they are really funny when you look them up, as they got longer each episode. It starts with "Leonardo Leonardo Returns and Dante Has an Important Decision to Make", then continues with, "The Clipshow Wherein Dante and Randal are Locked in the Freezer and Remember Some of the Great Moments in Their Lives", "Leonardo Is Caught in the Grip of an Outbreak of Randal's Imagination and Patrick Swayze Either Does or Doesn't Work in the New Pet Store", "A Dissertation on the American Justice System by People Who Have Never Been Inside a Courtroom, Let Alone Know Anything About the Law, but Have Seen Way Too Many Legal Thrillers", and "Dante and Randal and Jay and Silent Bob and a Bunch of New Characters and Lando, Take Part in a Whole Bunch of Movie Parodies Including But Not Exclusive To, The Bad News Bears, The Last Starfighter, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Plus a High School Reunion".

If you're wondering who Lando is, he's an African American character voiced by Mario Joyner who is introduced in episode 3 after Dante and Randal read a letter from a viewer who's unhappy with the show's lack of diversity. The joke is that the show now has this "token black character" who is present but is given nothing important to do, and has very little lines.

The joke of the expanding episode titles ends with episode 6, which is titled "The Last Episode Ever". It wasn't really intended to be the last episode ever, everyone involved with this show would have gladly kept it going, but it did end up being the last episode ever made.

The Last Episode Ever finds Dante and Randal attending a comic convention expecting to meet fans of the Clerks cartoon, but instead finding that the few people who attend their panel are upset that the cartoon isn't enough like the Clerks movie. So they shut themselves in the Quick Stop and spend the rest of the episode trying to make sure the cartoon will be more like the movie. This endeavor is complicated by the fair that opens across the street from the Quick Stop, where tragic events involving rampaging gorillas and cannibalistic soccer players soon take place. We don't see any of this happen, though. Randal is keeping the store's steel shutters closed for safety, and they're only told what's happening across the street by characters who drop by the store, like Jay and Silent Bob and Mallrats/Chasing Amy deleted scene/Dogma characters Steve-Dave and Walt the Fanboy (voiced by Bryan Johnson and Walt Flanagan, who played the characters in their live action appearances). Most of this episode takes place within the store, just like the movie, while the insanity of the cartoon tries to push in on Dante and Randal.

I was one of the apparently few people who tuned in for both weeks the Clerks cartoon aired. It had its premiere on ABC the night of May 31st, 2000, which was also the same night that Survivor premiered on CBS. They weren't up against each other, Survivor began at 8 and Clerks at 9:30, but things turned out very differently for those two shows. Tuning in for that first episode of Clerks was such an event for me that I still have some memories from that night.

I wish there had been multiple seasons of this show, but I'm grateful for what we did get of it, and I'm very glad that the actors from the movie got the chance to reprise their roles for this project. The cancellation of Clerks was a great disappointment, but that's because the show was a great achievement.