15. aug, 2015

The Madness Of The Fuccon Family

The Fuccons (Oh! Mikey) began as a series of comic sketches on the Japanese TV program Vermillion Pleasure Night. An American family, James and Barbara and their son Mikey, move to Japan ''to live as Japanese'' The creators decided to fill the entire cast list with immobile mannequins. The show features no animation whatsoever and the lifeless 'actors' exist in the real world, with trees blowing and water spraying from garden hoses. Each half hour long episode is divided into a number of very short vignettes featuring the grinning 50s era mannequins of the Fuccon Family engaged into a variety of antics. It also features an odd assortment of characters like Mikey's teacher Bob, who only speaks through his mother Bob-Mama, Mikey's manipulative cousin Laura, the identical twins Tony & Charles, Emily, the girl Mikey's got a crush on, Time-Boy, who does everything on a tight schedule and Spinner, who you might have guessed it...spins the whole time. Episodes ran the gamut from the silly to the surreal, sometimes ending with a joke and sometimes not. At the end the 'characters' are always laughing hysterically, even if the episode ends on a serious note. Utterly bizarre, unsettling and funny, this is a gem that should be seen (don't watch the dubbed version, it's funnier in Japanese). Conoisseurs of outré cultural phenomena will revel in this and graduate students in sociology may someday write theses about what The Fuccons reveal about Japanese attitudes towards Americans..