Cow and chicken antics
May 22, 2005 Edition 1
Dave Basckin
So it usually goes like this: the cat, a blue-grey chappie with a white front, chases the mouse. The mouse, despite being very small, has a bigger brain than the cat.
This means that the mouse always escapes while the cat either holds a ticking bomb until it explodes, or is temporarily flattened by a falling Steinway or runs off the edge of a cliff.
Quite a lot of human-type stuff going on here, what with the mouse’s clever little face and the cat’s boorish single-minded pursuit of the uneatable. But for all that, cartoon Tom is still a cat and cartoon Jerry remains, forever, a mouse.
Cow and Chicken on the other hand, are something else. You will find these two characters on Cartoon Network, which is more than enough reason to subscribe to the service. The other reason is I am Weasel, but more about that some other time, children. Uncle David is busy.
Cow is a cartoon cow (wouldja belieeeve it?) who stands bipedally, has prominent udders and, brace yourselves Mums and Dads, a human bum. Chicken is a chicken, who at bathtime removes his chicken uniform to reveal a scraggy, humanoid understructure.
Despite their curious disparity as species, Cow and Chicken are brother and sister, the scrappy and contentious American offspring of two humans, of whom we only ever see their legs up to their knees. The vast and trunkless thighs are elsewhere, probably on the Discovery Channel.
In a recent episode, Cow makes a cow pie. Farmers amongst my readers will know intuitively what this means, while the rest of you will just have to puzzle it out. She does this, like all bakers, with real, home-brewed love.
First she empties out the vacuum cleaner, then she collects some other stuff too loathsome to mention in a family newspaper and compounds this into a standard pastry covered domestic edible-type confection. Except of course, we the viewers know better.
The comic business that follows consists entirely of Cow convincing Chicken to eat it. This involves chasing the grumpy little fowl to school, causing a riot, and then taking advantage of Chicken’s post-school ravenous hunger.
Like all pre-pubescent boys, Chicken’s real, off-screen identity, he eats it, loves it and demands some more. Sadly, the entire corpus of Cow and Chicken stands at only 51 episodes.
Stay tuned and watch them all.
