The Wuzzles

I’m pretty sure my younger sister had a stuffed animal from this show. I have no memories of watching the show itself, and I can tell you that, even as a child, I would’ve hated it. But somehow, it’s in the back of my head that my sister had a Bumblelion or something, bought as her One Thing from a Disneyland trip or gifted by a relative or similar. Maybe she even watched the show. She’s four years younger than I am and has always had, charitably, less refined taste. Which if you know some of the stuff I like should tell you something.

The Wuzzles live on the Isle of Wuzz, naturally. The island is full of bizarre crosses between two different things. Our main characters are all combinations of two animals. Bumblelion (Brian Cummings), as I mentioned, is of course a bumblebee and a lion. Eleroo (Henry Gibson) is an elephant and a kangaroo. Hoppopotamus (Jo Anne Worley) is a rabbit and a hippo. Rhinokey (Alan Oppenheimer) is a rhino and a monkey. Butterbear (Kathleen Helppie-Shilpley) is a butterfly and a bear. Moosel (Bill Scott) is a moose and a seal.

There are villains, of course. Crocosaurus (Bill Oppenheimer) is obvious. Flizard (Brian Cummings) is half frog, half lizard. Brat (Bill Scott), surprisingly, is half boar, half dragon, and his name is the only one that’s a descriptor and not just a “this is what you are, so it’s your name.” The island is also full of appleberries and castlescrapers and other unnecessarily combined things to give you the idea that the whole thing is wacky. There are goings-on with a Brahman Bullfinch and Humbugs and a Mockingbirddog and so forth.

You get the idea. It’s desperately whimsical. And then you get various adventures with different levels of stakes. Hoppo wants to be a star in Hollywuz, naturally, but she’s fat and she can’t sing. Crock wants to make a lot of money without doing any work. Butterbear is too nice. The others actually realize how annoying Rhinokey is and decide to do something about it. There’s a wishing well, and Eleroo has to learn that he doesn’t really want to fly after all.

There are a lot of frustrating things about this show, but the two that get me most are the constant body-shaming of Hoppo, especially combined with the fact that she can’t sing, and the fact that they don’t want to let anyone realize their dreams. There’s the Hollywuz episode, where Hoppo is convinced she can be a star because they are trying to get her to go away and stop annoying them and tell her she should really be on a bigger stage. But she’s terrible and should just play King Kong in a full-body costume. And then there’s the one where Eleroo gets a wish on a wishing well and wishes to fly, and everyone hates it so even though it’s his long-time dream for his wings to work, he wishes it away.

Wings? Yes. They all have wings. Don’t worry about it. Is there a reason for a character who is an elephant mixed with a kangaroo to have wings? Of course not. But that’s our character design, and it doesn’t matter if it makes sense. Neither a moose nor a seal have wings, but a moose’s antlers don’t look like pink gardening forks, either, and wings help make a character look cute. I guess.

But anyway, Eleroo is a sweet, kind character who is just clumsy. He dreams of flying because he thinks he won’t be clumsy if he flies. And he still is, but for one, it’s his first day, and for another, the show seems to go out of its way to make sure he can’t actually get anything out of his wishes. He falls down the well and wishes himself out of it. So he only has two wishes left, and everyone knows the third wish is the one that undoes the other wishes.

The thing is, it’s the largest character who is clumsy. So he can hurt people. And even episodes that aren’t focused on Hoppo tend to take a minute to call attention to how big she is. Rhinokey mostly deals in mindless puns, but he also finds it a real knee-slapper to insult Hoppo for being fat. She’s a literal hippopotamus. And that’s the trait they’ve given her from it. But fat jokes are just inherently funny, somehow.

This show only lasted thirteen episodes, which is fairly short for an animated show of its era. Sure, Little Muppet Monsters only had three episodes, but even Ewoks had twice as many as The Wuzzles. Seasons were longer in those days, and The Wuzzles was a half-season series. Rewatching it, or possibly watching it for the first time—Lord, I don’t remember—shows me why. It has a needless narration by Stan Freberg, explaining plots that don’t need explaining because they just aren’t that complicated.

I could make a better show of this. This is a property that Disney has swept under the rug; it was an Eisner project, and the Eisner history at Disney is complicated. But the idea of combined creatures is a cute one, though I have a lot of basic ecosystem questions about how it works in practice. But stop body-shaming. Give Rhinokey some actually funny jokes. Show some respect for the intelligence of your audience. They’re children, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid.