Dumbed Down

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Originally uploaded by mwthomas87.

Whenever the Alley Oop cartoonists introduce a historical figure into the cartoon strip they usually manage to dumb them down in their effort to have them interact with the imbeciles who make up the regular cast.
In this strip we have Dan Gable, the former Olympic wrestler and coach at Iowa University, trying to give wrestling advice to Oop.
Here is his advice:

"If your friend is in top codition, he'll have the stamina to run his opponent all over the mat... until he runs him out of gas. You know.... wears him out."

"Runs him out of gas???" I certainly hope that Coach Gables didn't really talk like that. Or that he had the bad speech habit of always saying "You know..."

Oop is typically clueless, but then a light comes on in his tiny little pea-sized brain. We can only imagine what that means...

Breaking the Ice

Alley Oop has supposedly been sent back in time to ancient Athens to find the great Greek wrestler Milo so that he could learn from him in his own bid to become a wrestler in the 2004 Olympics. But Dr. Wonmug sent Oop to a time before Milo had a chance to compete in his own Olympics so I’m not sure what Oop was supposed to learn from the guy. Anyway, once there Oop challenges Milo to a match and promptly throws him 20 feet in the air so that he comes crashing down on his face. Now Milo’s spirit has been broken and he is contemplating giving up his dream of being an Olympian. So Oop promises to go find other historic figures and ask their advice for Milo.
Next Oop gets shipped to 1900 Iowa to meet Frank Gotch, another famous wrestler from history. Once there Oop inexplicably grabs the guy and throws him 20 feet in the air so that he too comes crashing down on his face. Afterwards, Oop says “Oops, Sorry. Guess it was a conditioned response.”
A conditioned response!?! To grab some guy who is walking past you and throw them violently to the ground??
When Gotch gets up his head is spinning with little stars floating around. You might think he would be a bit preturbed with Oop at this point, but you would be wrong. Instead he says “Now that you have my attention, what is it that you want?”
Wow, some icebreaker. Good think it didn’t break Gotch’s back too.
So Oop asks this guy who he has just slammed to the ground for wrestling advice, as if he needs it. Gotch has two things to contribute. First, he makes the brilliant observation that a wrestler needs to be in excellent physical condition. Great. When we first met Milo, he was walking around with a fully grown bull on his shoulders. He explained that he had been carrying the bull around since it was a calf to help condition himself for wrestling. So Oop is going to go back now and tell Milo that he needs to get in shape??
Gotch’s second bit of advice is to smile at your opponent to take them off their guard. I’m sure that will be a big help for Milo too. And that is all the advice he has. Then Dr. Wonmug zaps Oop away while he is still talking with Gotch, no doubt traumatizing him for the rest of his life.
Next Wonmug turns around and ships Oop to 1972 Iowa to meet wrestling coach Dan Gable, supposedly the greatest Olympic wrestler of all time. Once again Oop wrestles the guy but this time the match ends in a draw. So what kind of advice does Alley need anyway? If he can beat or best the greatest wrestlers in history, what could they possibly tell him that he would need to know?
Of course Gable’s first pearl of wisdom is that a wrestler needs to be in top phsical condition. Well, Duh. I think we have heard that somewhere before and once again the information will be of no use to Milo.

Honeymoon in Athens

So now we are off on an Olympic-themed adventure. Just a short time ago, Alley Oop had finally proposed marriage to his long, long, long, long-time girlfriend Oola. Suddenly Dr. Wonmug pops in uninvited and invites the pair to come back to the future for a “vacation.” Oola is immediatly shipped off on a shopping spree with Ava. Despite the fact that she comes from a prehistoric culture with no money, Oola is surprisingly well versed in our modern day consumer culture. I suppose that Ava is going to spring for all the things that Oola might want to buy.

Meanwhile, Oop’s “vacation” seems to consist of mainly sitting on a couch with a beer and watching sports on TV. One thing this comic strip does well is fortifying sexist stereotypes. But then out of the blue we have Wonmug suggesting that Alley Oop drop everything and start training for the Olympics. This should make most readers suspicious of Wonmug’s intentions in bringing Oop back to the future at this point. Maybe he is planning on making some bets on the side.
Oop, of course, has now forgotten all about asking Oola to marry him and is ready to transport back to the past to meet an ancient Athenian wrestler to help him train for the modern games. He doesn’t even bother to change back into his caveman outfit, which would probably be more appropriate for the time period than the slacks and polo shirt he is now wearing.
In a most remarkable turn of fortune, the first person Oop meets after his transport is Milo, the wrestler he is supposed to train with (Imagine that!). Milo takes no notice of Oop’s strange clothing and all his curiosity as to the identity of this strange person is completely satisfied upon learning his name.

Next position please

One of the things that drives me crazy about the Alley Oop strip today is the way the artists can't seem to keep the character's positions straight from one frame to the next. Take today's strip (July 2, 2004) as an example.
Notice in the first frame we see Dave Wowee facing forward with Ava just to his right and Oola is across the room in front of him. Alley Oop is to Dave's left across from Ava.
Then in frame 2 Oola is suddenly behind Dave and to his right. Then in the final frame, Oola is back across the room and Ava has switched sides and is on Dave's left with Alley Oop nowhere to be found.

A modest proposal

So Alley Oop finally gets around to asking Oola to marry him after 71 years (the Alley Oop strip began in 1933) and Oola says she needs time to think about it!?!?! Aaarrrrgggghhhhh!!!
But before we have to deal with that any further the incredibly annoying Dr. Wonmug suddenly pops in from the future. He has obviously been snooping on them with his time machine and decides to barge into the middle of their intimate encounter to invite them on a “vacation” to the future. Golly! It’s not as if they had ever been there before.
So what is Oop’s reaction when Wonmug suddenly barges in just moments after he has popped the big question? He asks if the time machine has broken down again. That’s like having someone drive up to your house and your first reaction is to ask if their car is broken down. No, you idiot. That’s how I got here.
Now remember that it wasn’t too long back that Oop was trapped in a Scottish dungeon when Dr. Wonmug couldn’t figure out how to fix his broken time machine and during his extended absense from Moo he nearly lost Oola to another suitor. So one might think that he wouldn’t be real hot on the idea of jumping back into the time machine for another trip so soon. But of course you would be wrong. They are ready to go without even a thought of going back to the cave to do any packing or to get a change of clothes. So, off we go again. Whoopee!

The Pit

I sometimes wonder how far in advance some cartoonists craft their stories, especially when world events begin to converge on the action taking place in the comic strip.
Surely, I wasn’t the only person who cringed when the storyline about Dolf wrapped up with King Guz sending him to “the pit” at the same time that the Abu Gharib prisoner abuse scandal was making big news around the globe.
Dolf, of course, was the mysterious interloper who started wooing Alley Oop’s girlfriend Oola while our caveman adventurer was out on one of his pointless time traveling jaunts. When Oop came back he went after Dolf like Ken Starr went after Bill Clinton - digging for dirt, spreading rumors and innuendo and generally trashing his character to everyone who would listen.
But unfortunately for Dolf, the strip’s authors had it out for him in the end. As Oop’s obsession with Dolf grows, we see the cheerful, good-natured Dolf suddenly transformed into a dastardly villian right before our eyes. Now, instead of smiling pleasantly at everyone, he has a nasty scowl on his face whenever he is not dealing directly with one of the main characters. We also find that in addition to being a vile evil-doer, Dolf is also an idiot (which explains how he was able to fit in so well with the rest of the Moovians).
It turns out that Dolf has been drugging King Guz to get him to say where his troops are stationed on the border between Moo and Lem. You see, Dolf is a Lemmian who is secretly planning to lead an invasion force into Moo to take over the country. But this begs the question, if he already has King Guz under his thumb why does he need to invade? What would that accomplish?
And if he can’t defeat the Moovian forces at the border and only plans to sneak by them, what is he going to do when they come in from the border to confront him once he is inside Moo with his invasion force?
These questions are never addressed, however, since Alley Oop has already devined what Dolf’s plan is and is there to foil him when he leads his ragtag group of invaders across the border. During the melee that ensues, Dolf has a chance to escape, but stupidly decides to stop and see if Oola is still enamored with him. She of course slugs him and he is carted back to King Guz in handcuffs. When Guz learns of Dolf’s treachery he immediately sentences him to be thrown into “the pit” which I guess is Moo’s version of Abu Gharib prison. No trial, no appeal, no legal counsel, not even a chance to contact family members.

The spy who made me jealous

I know I haven’t posted here in a while, but the latest Alley Oop story line has just been too awful for words.
Let’s see if I can summarize the past eight months in a few paragraphs...
The idiots at the time lab have finally returned Alley Oop to Moo where he finds that during his lengthy absense a new character named Dolf has moved in on his territory by charming the citizens of Moo, befriending King Guz and, to top it off, is courting Oop’s longtime girlfriend Oola.
One might wonder at this point why the time mavens can’t return Oop to Moo closer to the time that he left so that his absense wouldn’t be noticed. I mean, it’s a time machine for crying out loud! But nevermind.
And so naturally Oop’s first reaction is one of intense jealousy and anger. He is so distraught by the notion of a competitor for Oola’s affections that he gives up on asking Oola to marry him (She has been his steady girlfriend since the strip was started in 1933 and he is just now getting around to thinking about matrimony??) and he doesn’t even bother to let her know that he is back from his recent spate of time travelling. Instead he decides to take off on a pointless trip to nowhere with his one remaining true friend - Dinny the dinosaur. But before he can take off for good he spies Dolf wandering about and decides to stalk him. Based on no evidence whatsoever, Oop is suddenly convinced that Dolf is some kind of villian who is up to something. Oop soon runs into his friend Foozy and in no time at all has convinced him - still based on no evidence - that Dolf is bad news and they start plotting ways to foil Dolf’s nefarious plans.
Things are getting a little creepy at this point with Oop conspiring against this poor guy for daring to court his girlfriend while he’s been gone when the authors decide to give the readers a broad hint that (gasp!) Dolf really is a bad guy and so all of Oop’s worst suspicions are dead on. (Note to future spies who want to help overthrow the Moovians: Don’t get Alley Oop jealous and you will never be found out.)
As it turns out, the nefarious Dolf has been drugging King Guz - using a truth serum made by the wizer - in order to learn the position of his troops guarding the border between Moo and Lem.
So now catching up to present day we find that Oop has singlehandedly ordered all the troops to be repositioned without even telling King Guz what he is doing or why and is preparing to set a trap for Dolf.

Feynman to the rescue

Now they have pulled the reknowned physicist Richard Feynman into this lame story line. Incredible! And in keeping with the standards of the strip, they have to make him appear to be just as stupid as the rest of the characters.
Here is some of the gibberish that they have Feynman saying just moments after being accidently zapped into the time lab by the new time machine:

"Perhaps if we analyze the physical dynamics of the coordinating vectors used in the space-time continuum used as your foundation, we could reconfigure the fundamental synchronicity involved!"

Not only does that make no sense whatsoever - even using Star Trekkian sci-fi logic - it is not even good grammar.

So now it has become clear that not only is Dr. Wonmug a complete idiot who has no idea how his own time machine is supposed to work (in addition he is a complete jerk as demonstrated by the scene in which Feynman is first zapped into the lab and very naturally asks "Who are you people", instead of answering him, Dr. Wonmug rushes up to him with an angry scowl and screams in his face "No, Who are you!!!" - as if it was his fault for coming to the time lab rather than Alley Oop - sheesh!!) but we now know that future-boy Dave Wowee - Dr. Wonmug's "cousin" from the future - is also a complete idiot who doesn't have the foggiest notion how his own time machine from the future operates.
So now we have to pull in a famous historical figure from the past to help our crew of dimwits fix their problem. And of course, Feynman is eager to jump into this problem just moments after being zapped into the lab in the middle of one of his bongo drumming sessions.
Maybe once Feynman fixes the time machine he will confiscate it and take it away from these dangerously stupid people who have no right to be messing around with technology that they do not understand.

The end is near

This painfully awful Alley Oop segment appears to finally be drawing to some sort of conclusion. First Dr. Wonmug has been thoroughly humiliated by his inability to repair his own time machine, then his "cousin" Dave Wowee from the distant future comes to the rescue with a time machine from the future... and now we find out that even future boy has no clue as to how the time machine works. After spending what seemed like weeks doing calculations on a yellow note pad, Wowee finally returns Oscar Boom to the present time period but is then mystified that Alley Oop didn't transport with him. So what was that he said earlier about needing to have all the precise coordinates in place, blah, blah, blah...
Maybe when they finally show that Alley Oop has mysteriously transported back to his time period in Moo the writers will anounce that they are retiring the strip and relenquising their pens. We can only hope.

The lovefest continues

This whole lovefest between Alley Oop the wimp priest and the king who is supposed to look like Sean Connery is getting way too syrupy now. And I like the way that Oscar Boom has suddenly dropped off the face of the planet. I mean, as far as the king and the priest are concerned Boom is just a criminal who should still be in the stockade. Aren't they concerned that he is standing there wielding a broken board like a club? While Oop is soaking in all this adulation and being granted his freedom will he even remember to say "Oh, and what about my friend over here?"

Well armed prisoners

Wow! Alley Oop looks absolutely sinister today as he waits to pounce on his captors with a vicious looking polearm that was conveniently left lying around in his cell. I mean, how stupid is that? That they would leave these kinds of weapons lying around in a cell where they keep their prisoners locked up?
Meanwhile, the wimp priest who was totally won over by Alley Oop during their two-second chance encounter seems to have forsaken his own faith in favor of worshiping the time-traveling caveman. It is the priest and the king, who is supposed to look like Sean Connery, who are approaching the cell in such a noisy fashion. Do you suppose Oop will lop their heads off with his polearm before they can explain that they have come to free him? We can only hope.... Meanwhile, what's up with the morons back in the time lab? Are they taking a coffee break or something? They zapped Dinny the Dinosaur away about a half hour ago and still haven't done anything to retrieve Oop and Oscar Boom. Oh well.

Thanks be to Alley Oop!

As I predicted, the priest has been declared a hero by the denizens of the Scottish castle after Dinny the dinaosaur is zapped away by the time machine. He has been carried back into the castle to be presented to the King (who bears a striking and most certainly not accidental resemblance to Sean Connery). Despite the fact that the King is the one who sent for the priest in the first place and sent him on the mission to vanquish the dinosaur, the Scotsmen still find it necessary to introduce the priest to the King (sigh). And for a good example of how poorly and illogically the Alley Oop strip is drawn these days check out the June 5 segment when the King reaches out with his left hand to shake the priest's hand and the priest in turn reaches out with his right hand. You can't shake hands that way, morons!!
Today, we have the King congratulating the priest on his accomplishment, but the priest stops him and says that he cannot take credit for what has happened. Now any good priest would be expected to say this and of course would insist that the credit for the good work be given to God. But not this priest. He is sure to give credit to Alley Oop and ask that he be released from the dungeon. The only question that remains is whether the idiots controlling the time machine will figure out how to zap Oop and Boom out of there before they go down to release them. Remember that for no logical reason we are operating in concurrent time frames here, so how long does it take them to reset the time machine now that it has been upgraded with all this fancy gadgetry from the future?

Time passages

What is with this tracking between the two time periods? We are following events in the present time and having it overlaid with events in 1308 Scotland to indicate that they are somehow happening concurrently. But we are talking about a time machine here!!! Why can't they just zap Dinny from whatever time period they choose? Go and get him sometime before he is being shot at by the invading English army. Of course, then we would lose the whole narrative of the story. Alley Oop is not a comic strip for people who like to think too much.

Everyone speaks English

Alley Oop has been preceding in slow motion this past week which is probably good since I have had little time to comment here. We are still going through the motions of having the new time machine zap Dinny the Dinosaur out of Loch Ness just as a cowardly priest has been sent out to exorcise the demon from the loch. It is certainly fortunate that Dinny the Dinosaur can understand English and its perhaps even more amazing that all these folks in Scotland in 1308 also speak such good English.
Last week when they first turned on the new time machine from the future it immediatly honed in on Dinny without anyone having to do more than scribble on a yellow notepad. Now, several strips later, we are told by Dave "future boy" Wowee that he must have the exact coordinates to move Dinny back to the past. Amazing that the only noticable advance on the new futuristic time machine is that it comes with a flat-screen monitor, but you still have to interface it with a keyboard and mouse. Oh well, such is the lack of imagination of these authors.
I see today that Wowee has entrusted his yellow notepad to the clueless Dr. Wonmug, maybe so he doesn't feel too completely useless as he stands around and watches everyone else do his work for him now. The remainer of this particular series is easy to predict -- Dinny will magically vanish at the preist's command making him a hero and he will then repay his dept to Oop by having him freed from the dungeon just before he too is zapped away by the time machine.

Back to the future

Well, we are finally off of the tedious back and forth between Alley Oop and Oscar Boom about the latter's criminal past, which ended abruptly when Oop suddenly noticed that he is (gasp) imprisoned in a torture chamber!! Yes, now we are shown that Oop and Boom are surrounded by torture devices that would make Saddam Hussein blush. But the denizens of this castle are supposed to be the good guys here aren't they? I mean, Dinny the Dinosaur did scare away the bad English Army that was about to invade. Oh, but I'm sure they only torture really bad people down in the dungeon and they wouldn't imprison anyone who wasn't guilty - except for Alley Oop of course.
So now we have flashed back to the current day time lab which has just been upgraded with equipment from the distant future!. Dr. Wonmug, who could no longer figure out how to fix his old time machine, is now standing around like an eager child waiting for Dave Wowee from the future to install everything and tell them whether or not it works. When asked to check out the new equipment, Dave Wowee stands in front of the machine scribbling something onto a yellow note pad for no clear reason when suddenly it springs to life showing a picture of Dinny on multiple TV screens. This machine is such an improvement, it does just what the folks want witihout their having to do any thinking for themselves, in other words, just what they needed.

The time travel conundrum

Today's strip is one of those jaw-droppers where you are left scratching your head and wondering where they come up with this stuff. Oscar Boom is trying to reconcile himself with Alley Oop while both are locked in the dungeon of a Scottish castle sometime back in the 1500s. He admits to having a "criminal past" which is news to anybody who has only been reading the strip for - oh, say the past 8 years! And then Alley Oop starts to have more flashbacks to strips dating back to WWII! Oop admits that Boom might have redeemed himself when he invented a rocket back during WWII! First off, how old is Oscar Boom supposed to be anyway! 100!?! And secondly, if he redeemed himself so long ago, why is Oop hung up on stuff that happened prior to WWII? Why aren't they making plans to escape from the dungeon? What will they do if the y do escape but clueless Dr. Wonmug can't ever fix his time machine?

Ah yes, the broken time machine problem. This was the beginning of the latest series that started several months ago when the time machine went haywire in the first place. At that time, Dr. Wonmug admitted to his assistant Ava, that he no longer knows how to fix his own invention! What's up with that!! Does he have Alzheimers or something?? But rather than addressing this issue, they set about placing want ads in the newspaper to look for someone who can fix the machine!! But the person who eventually answers the ad turns out to be a distant cousin of Dr. Wonmug from the future who has traveled back in his own time machine to give them a hand. But now the conundrum. If the current day time machine is broken and Wonmug can't fix it, how does he ever pass on this knowledge to future generations of his clan to build other time machines? It is not logical!!!! But that isn't stopping them at this point, so even when future boy fails to fix the old machine his answer is to go back to the future and fetch parts to build a futuristic machine that they can use from that point on in the past - or the present- whatever. Just pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, Dorothy.

A long history

The Alley Oop comic strip was created in 1933 by V.T. Hamlin. I did not start reading the strip until 1995, so there is a long history behind the strip of which I am clearly ignorant. That is especially apparent today as Oop and Oscar Boom continue their pointless, meandering discussion about Boom's illicit background. I never knew that Boom was anything other than Dr. Wonmug's assistant, but apparently from today's flashback where he is shown punching Alley Oop in the jaw, he must have at one time been an arch villian who later converted to the good side. Why this is suddenly necessary to bring out now while they are both trapped in the dungeon of a Scottish castle is beyond me. Maybe the writers are just filling space because they don't know where to go with the story next, not that that has ever stopped them before.

A Scottish dungeon

Today we find Alley Oop, our time-traveling caveman, trapped in a dungeon in a Scottish castle with one Oscar Boom, a member of the current day crew who use the time machine to serve business clients and to make a profit. Oop and Boom are stuck in this time because the time machine malfunctioned and Dr. Wonmug and his assistant Ava haven't a clue as to how to fix it. More on that later.
Oop's trusty sidekick dinosaur was also transported to this time period and landed in the moat around the castle where he has been mistaken for the Loch Ness Monster. He effectively scared away an invading British army and is now the subject of much consternation among the occupants of the Scottish castle. Oop snuck into the castle earlier and was immediatly captured and accused of spying and sent to the dungeon, but not before he was conveniently left alone with the resident cleric who has been summoned by the king to make the evil spirit in the moat go away.
When Oop was tossed into the dungeon cell they were nice enough to leave him with just a simple rope tying his hands behind his back. Boom, however, was placed in the stocks. Oop broke free of his rope with ease and then set about freeing his buddy by loudly breaking apart the wooden stocks. Once he was freed, Boom celebrated by yelling very loudly "Yes!! I'm Free!!!!" Amazingly enough, the guards did not come in to see what all the noise was about. How fortunate.
For the past several days Oop and Boom have been having an awkward discussion about the latter's unfortunate habit of trying to steal gold and artifacts on his time travel jaunts. Boom has apparently had enough of this discussion today and tells Oop very loudly to knock it off!!! Fortunately, the guards still do not come and investigate.

Welcome

Welcome to Alley Oop watch, a blog that analyzes the daily doings of the nation's dumbest comic strip. Alley Oop is a long-running strip about a group of current day time travelers and a pre-historic caveman that does much of their work for them. The strip was good at one time, but the original creators and their successors have all passed on and the folks left directing the strip are clearly inept and clueless.