Could they be related?

Check out the new bad guy in this strip. Doesn't he look familiar? Hmmmm?
The dark eyes, the black hair, the hooked nose. Why I'd say he looks almost like this guy. Maybe it's one of his descendants. Heh!

He never met a neanderthal he didn't like...

Now Will Rogers is going to get the Bender treatment just like Richard Feynman. I just hope they don't make him come across as stupid as the rest of the Alley Oop cast these days. At least they've done their homework up to this point and have Rogers in the proper time and context. I wonder what his special ability is that Oop will need to use. Trick roping?
So is this going to be like the Star Trek Next Generation episode where Mark Twain helps the time traveling Data to stop a bunch of soul-stealing aliens?
What I don't understand is that if Doc Wonmug already traveled back in time to find Will Rogers and update him on everything, then why does he need Alley Oop? And then, of course, there is the conundrum of how Doc could have known in advance that the timeline was going to be messed up in the first place. But if we just ignore these logical inconsistencies, maybe the Benders will surprise us with a half-way decent story this time. As Monroe would say, "Let's all hope for the best!!!!"

Is it over yet?

Wow. Time for some fresh thread. Sorry about that.
What an awful story. There is not much that I can add beyond the thrashing that this story has received from the comments in the previous thread. This story, I assume, was supposed to help King Guz redeem himself with his people. They will probably return him to the throne after hearing of his heroic efforts to destroy the bizarre space plague which conveniently effected everyone in Moo except for Guz.
It will now probably be several weeks before the Benders finally drag out the next noxious storyline. In the meantime, I'm guessing we will be treated to lots of filler. Enjoy!

That’s using your head, Oscar!

I can’t tell you how creeped out this comic makes me feel. Here we had Oscar Boom practically begging not to be sucked back into that freaky tube thing only to be dismissed offhandedly by his former partner Doc Wonmug. We’ve already seen that Dave Wowee doesn’t really understand how or why it works, and now today we have him ominously warning them not to leave Oscar in there too long. Is there something else you haven’t told us about the tube, Dave? What happens if they stay in the tube too long? Do their vaporized molecules dissipate, never to be reassembled? The whole thing seems like a form of torture.
And now we have Ava saying they are going to take Oscar directly to the authorities. Ummm. What authorities might that be? The time cops? The police in Wonmug’s time aren’t going to believe their fantastic time travel story. What exactly are they going to charge Oscar with and how will they prove it? No prosecutor is going to be able to make those charges stick. At best Oscar would be out on bail in a matter of hours if the “authorities” choose to arrest him at all. Maybe they will arrest Doc and Ava instead and charge them with kidnapping.

Wasted opportunity/wasted time

Hmmmm... Oop is holding the wand backwards. Maybe he'll accidently suck himself up into it this time.
How disappointing that the authors passed on a chance to salvage Oscar Boom's character. Why they felt the need to turn him from a good guy into a crazed lunatic is beyond me. So this means the whole Oscar and Dinny mixed up in the tube at the same time meme was just one long time waster with no consequences for the storyline. Very disappointing, but very typical for these authors.

Why, I oughta.....

Come on, Oop! Bust Dave upside the head with your ax! He deserves it, the moron! That’s what he should get for entrusting a bunch of clueless people from the distant past with such a powerful, futuristic gadget. Why didn’t Dave go with them to make sure that the device was used properly? What? He didn’t have “time”? They have a TIME MACHINE for crying out loud! Arghhhhh!!!
After being so snotty to them when they first got back, now we see Dave starting to sweat it out in the face of Oop’s wrath. I think they should just take the bulb and bash it against a wall and see what comes out. Maybe we’ll get a weird Oscar Boom/Dinny mix like in that creepy 1970s remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” where a pod gets busted and ends up creating a dog with a man’s head on it. Yuck!
I have to agree with Jeff that this has proved to be an unusually entertaining storyline so far, all things considered.

The destruction of Oscar Boom

One of the most wretched things about this latest storyline is how the authors have completely destroyed the character of Oscar Boom. For as long as I have been reading the Alley Oop strip - dating back to the mid-90s - Oscar Boom had been one of the good guys, regularly going on adventures with Alley Oop and Doc Wonmug. So to see his character suddenly devolve into this crazed, arch-villian is disconcerting to say the least.
Now I see from The Holloway Pages that Oscar had been a good guy dating back to at least 1965 - the year I was born! So this sudden reintroduction of Oscar as a villian comes literally after more than a generation of readers grew up knowing him as one of the good guys.
This is really a travesty in my opinion and a sharp U-turn away from the vision that had been set in place by V.T. Hamlin and Dave Graue. It’s bad enough that the current authors have turned King Guz into a cowering wimp and Doc Wonmug into an absent-minded buffoon.
I’m so baffled by this latest plot derailment that it seems pointless to criticize the other minor flaws in the strip that crop up so consistently - like the left-hand/right-hand holding the gun switcheroo just a few frames back.
I’m assuming next we will have Queen Umpa relinquish her throne to Guz in appreciation of his bold efforts to warn the villagers about an impending crisis by sheepishly telling them they are in danger without ever once mentioning the crazed gunman hiding in the bushes.

Sniff this

What the heck!?! Futureboy doesn't need to see the computer information to track down Oscar? He just needs a personal item?
So that's what that big honker of a nose is used for. I should have known. Wowee is going to track him down like a time-traveling bloodhound. Sheesh!
I can buy that the silly printout that Ava put together is useless, but a personal item? I suppose this is along the same lines as when Wowee asked for a paperclip to fix the old time machine before giving up and bringing in a brand new one from the future.

Forgetfulness

Sometime back, I speculated that Doc Wonmug may be suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease because of his forgetfulness - like forgetting how to repair his own time machine.
Now I have to wonder if it is not the Alley Oop strip’s writers who are really suffering from the disease.
The other day we had Wizer back in our time asking Doc and Ava this question:

“I don’t get it... If his lab is more advanced, why don’t you just get him to update your time lab?”
To which Ava replies: “We can’t do that, Wizer! It violates the laws of time travel.”

Really!?! Imagine that! I think I recall saying something to that effect back when they DID GET WOWEE TO UPDATE THEIR TIME LAB!!!!

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!!!!

Did the Benders agree with that assessment and are now trying to forget that it ever happened? Or do they figure that the tiny handful of people who still read this strip will have forgotten by now?

Random placement

One of the things that drives me nuts about Alley Oop today is how the characters are just randomly placed from frame to frame. Today’s strip gives us a perfect example.
First, why are all the characters always standing around with their backs to one another when they are talking? Is it easier for the illustrator to draw full-frontal shots of the characters each time?
Now look at the first frame in today’s strip. We have Oop standing and looking at the podium he just built, while Oola is directly to his right and Umpa is further to the right. Meanwhile, Guz is in the immediate foreground with his back turned to everyone.
Now jump to frame two and it is enough to make your head spin! Notice the podiums still in the background for perspective. Now it appears that Oop and Oola have suddenly switched places with Umpa ending up in between them and Guz has been magically teleported directly behind Umpa - still with his back to everyone but now reversed. No wonder he has a question mark above his head! He’s saying “How did I end up here?”

Moo-vin' On Up

Sorry that I've been out of pocket for awhile. I promise to get new posts up quicker henceforth!
So, what happened to all the men of Moo? Are they still cowering behind rocks somewhere since leaving it up to Dinny and Queen Umpa to save the kingdom from the Conquistadors? All we've seen for the past few weeks are women (with the exception of Oop, Guz and Foozy). Is Moo going to evolve into Amazonia soon? And since when did it become a democracy?
This storyline has obviously been brewing for sometime as we've been forced to watch King Guz make one blunder after another. And I suspect that a certain Democratic presidential candidate had something to do with inspiring it as well. In fact, I could swear one of the women characters from last Sunday is supposed to look like Hillary.
But I can't imagine how they are going to resolve this storyline in any kind of decent fashion. I agree with Jeff that it is uncharacteristic for Oop to jettison his loyalty to Guz like this. And how can they allow Guz to remain king at this point without making some kind of sexist "women just aren't cut out for this" kind of statement? Watching these storylines unfold is like seeing a car wreck in slow motion.

A Christmas Carol told badly

Well that last storyline ended on a lame note, but don’t they all? King Guz has once again proven himself to be a cowardly, incompetent fool. And then we have Doc Wonmung callously sending the conquistadors off to certain deaths because “We can never change history! No matter what!!” What a riot!
Next we are introduced to Wonmug’s bratty grandchildren. But wait a minute!! How can he have grandchildren? Is there a Grandma Wonmug somewhere? How come we’ve never been introduced to her, not to mention their kids?
Now we are being treated to a very much abridged and scrambled version of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol. But can someone explain to me how the time machine is allowing Doc Wonmug and his grandkids to watch the story unfold without being noticed by the participants in the story? Couldn’t Doc have just read his kids a book and achieved the same results? Oh, nevermind!
Already we’ve confused the ghost of Marley, Scrooge’s former business partner (played inexplicably by Alley Oop) with the Ghost of Christmas Present (I guess we skipped the Ghost of Christmas Past), and with the hood on he looks exactly like the Ghost of Christmas Future. How much more mixed up can this story get?

Open fire?!?

Such appalling story telling here. Are we to believe that the lead conquistador is such a horrific villian that he would order his men to open fire on an unarmed couple all because the woman said “Leave my husband alone!”? I don’t think Darth Vader is even that bad. Nor is he that stupid.
Think about this. The conquistadors are stuck in a foreign country where they are heavily outnumbered and surrounded by people they know little about. While they have guns (even if they had not been rigged by Oop and Wizer), they are still just single-shot flintlock muskets that have a nasty habit of jamming and misfiring. If the conquistadors really did gun down the king and queen in cold blood, how long would it be before they would be overwhelmed by angry hordes of Moovians? Probably long before they would have time to reload their muskets for a second shot.
Remember that General Custer’s men had rifles too, and much better ones than the conquistadors have, but that made little difference at Little Big Horn.

Catching Up

It seems I’ve been away from Alley Oop Watch for much too long. My apologies. I know I am way behind, but I just want to comment on a few past strips that struck me as especially odd.
First there was the way Alley Oop was able to contact the folks in the time lab by walking up to a hidden video camera and waving. We’ve all seen how the time machine can magically send back images of the past in concurrent time to the folks in the time lab. No explanation was really needed for how this was done. If you can accept that there is a time transport in the first place (with the magical ability to allow anyone who travels in it to speak the native tongue wherever they end up) then the ability to monitor events with a video screen seems less fantastical. However, now we have this mundane explanation of a video camera that had to be set up in advance and it only serves to send a jolt of reality into the story and emphasize just how ridiculous it all is. Are we supposed to believe that they have set up video cameras all over the world and all throughout time and leave them there indefinitely - powered by Energizer batteries, I assume?
And of course, the folks in the time lab just happen to be monitoring the scene when Oop walks up. How convenient.

Next we have Oop suddenly threatening to punch out Dr. Wonmug. Not a very admirable thing for our hero to do, to say the least. And then we have this extended sequence where they fret about not knowing the exact time and place where the Conquistador invaders came from, as if this should prevent them from swooping in and saving the Moovians from this threat. Here’s an idea - why don’t you scoop up with all the invaders with the time machine and get them out of Moo. Put them somewhere else, anywhere else, until you figure out where they came from. That way the folks in Moo are safe.
But no, that would be too easy. So instead we have to go searching for the answer to their whereabouts before taking any action. But, hey, at least that is something. And now with the reintroduction of Oscar Boom, the story is starting to get interesting again. So let’s sit back and hope they will salvage a halfway decent story out of this mess before it is all over.

Time Travel Rules

"Time travel rules say we can't do anything to change history, so we can't destroy these (rifles)..." says Alley Oop in today's strip.
But of course Oop is not the one time traveling this time, therefore the rules should not apply to him. He is in his own time, so anything he does now is fair game. Unfortunately, the Benders are too stupid to make this simple and logical observation and so we have this idiotic situation where Oop is going to refrain from destroying the rifles, but will instead make them inoperable. So what's the difference? Either way he has changed history, if that is what he is worried about! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
And since when does Alley Oop start spouting off about time travel rules anyway? He's never cared about them in the past (or the future, that is). Is he afraid some time traveling cops are going to pop in and give him a citation or something? Sheesh!

An alternate Alley Oop storyline

Long-time Alley Oop Watch reader and devoted Alley Oop fan Jeff has drafted the first part of an alternative Alley Oop narrative which I am printing below. Jeff, who is frequently critical of the writing talents of the strip’s current authors (just a mild understatement), should be lauded for his initiative and his courage in putting his talent where his mouth is. I think his story outline is excellent and I would invite everyone to join in through the comments section and help him to flesh it out further.
So as the current Alley Oop strip plods along at its usual snail’s pace, I hope you enjoy this taste of what could be:

(During a powerful electrical storm, Ava is transported to Nazi Germany into a lab deep in the bowels of the “Führerhauptquartier Wolfsschanze”, or Wolf's Lair, the military headquarters of Adolf Hitler during World War II. There she accidentally happens upon the experimental time machine built by the brilliant Dr. Fritz Liess in 1944.)

Location: Moo
Time: Prehistoric

Our story begins with our hero, Alley Oop, Fishing in a Moovian stream. Suddenly Oop finds himself being transported through time, and into the laboratory of Dr. Wonmug.

Location: Doc Wonmug's Laboratory
Time: Present

Oop, feeling a little angry about being pulled from his tranquil settings without warning, lets his anger slip away when he sees the panic in Wonmug's face. Across the room, frantically typing at the keyboard of the computer that controls the time machine is Wonmug's longtime assistant, Oscar Boom.

A crash of thunder roars through the sky outside, loud enough that it seems to have come from inside the laboratory itself. Oop towards the time machine transportation platform and sees smoke wafting away from its frame.

“What happened, Doc?”

“We’ve lost Ava.” Doc replies. “What with the storm outside, we thought it would be a good time to do some light maintenance and repair work on the time machine. Ava was working on the platform when a lightning strike somehow activated the machine, and transported her into another time.”

“Where?” Oop asks.

“That’s what I am trying to figure out”. Oscar replies as his fingers fly across the keyboard. “The machine miraculously wasn’t damaged too badly, but we are only able to locate and transport people to the present. When the lightning struck it burnt out all the past and future time circuits”.

“Great!” Oop yells. “So you can get Ava back, but I am stuck here!”

“Not exactly.” Wonmug says. “Without knowing Ava’s coordinates, we don’t know where she is to bring her back. We weren’t sure how long the machine would work for, and we of course will need you to help retrieve Ava if we do find her, so we transported you here right away. After all, we knew you would want to help in any way you could.”

“Yeah,” Oop said, having calmed down once understanding Wonmug’s thinking. “You did the right thing, Doc.” But how did the lightning hit the machine? What happened to the lightning rod?”

“The lightning must have hit a power line.” Wonmug said. “A fantastic amount of electricity blew right past all of our safety precautions, and lit the place up like the Forth of July. We fired up the generator to power the computer while we were working precisely to prevent it from being damaged by a lightning strike. I never imagined if lightning were to strike an outside power line that it could activate the platform. I should have been more careful. I should have powered it down, but we just needed to run a few simple diognostics…”

“Don’t beat yourself up Doc.” Oscar said, “No one could have predicted this! What is important now is that we find Ava, and fast!”

Location: Wolf's Lair Laboratory
Time: 1944

Ava was knocked out by the force of the machine when it transported her through time. When she awoke, she found herself on a bed in what appeared to be a makeshift hospital. The room was sparse, and was only furnished with a few small beds, a handful of chairs, and one large desk over by the door. There was a cabinet with glass doors. It appeared to be a medicine cabinet. Her eyesight was fuzzy, and she had difficulty seeing clearly just a few feet away, much less across this room, but she thought there might be glass containers in the cabinet.

Two men in white lab coats were seated at the foot of her bed, and when they saw she was awake, they spoke.

“How do you feel?” the taller man said in German. Ava had taken German and French in collage, and understood what the man had said. She was still mildly confused, and wasn’t sure if she was dreaming, or if not, where she was. Even worse, she couldn’t remember what she had been doing that day, or how she got to be in this hospital.

“I feel… confused. Who are you?”

“I think it is more important we find out who you are, fräulein.” The man asked.

“My name is Ava.” She answered. “I work for Doctor Wonmug. Is he here?”

“Doctor… Want-mog?” the man asked. “I am afraid you have me at a disadvantage, fräulein. I do not know your doctor friend.”

Piece by piece her memory crept back to her conscious mind, and alarm started to replace confusion as Ava realized there must have been an accident in the lab. She remembered Wonmug had her and Oscar running some routine diagnostics when suddenly she saw a brilliant flash of light. The next thing she knew she was speaking German with a couple of strangers in a strange room. The obvious questions came to her mind.

“Where am I?” Ava asked with a little more command in her voice. “And who are you?”

“I am Doctor Fritz Liess, and this is my assistant, Olaf Fenstermacher, and you are in our infirmary. You appeared, well, out of no where! We were quite surprised.”

Ava looked at the nervously. She wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t trust the seemingly good natured doctor, and she certainly didn’t trust his assistant. Fenstermacher’s brooding face was defined by his heavy brow, sharp cheekbones, and strong chin that had a scar that ran from the right side of it back up and around to his right ear. He was a large man, and his heavy hands danced delicately across his clipboard as he wrote down every thing that was said.

“I… appeared out of nowhere?” Ava asked. She wasn’t sure what these men might know about how she was able to do such a thing, but her intuition told her they knew more than they should.

“Yes.” Dr. Liess said as he stood up and walked towards the desk. “Olaf and I were working in my laboratory. We are studying the new ideas proposed by Dr. Einstein..”

“New Ideas” he had said! Ava suddenly knew about when she was. Dr. Liess was obviously talking about Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity.

“We were conducting an experiment testing the good doctor’s hypothesis. We discovered that (I need and idea here) when all of a sudden there was a bright flash, and what sounded like thunder, and then you arrived.” The doctor said calmly. “It was very exciting.”

Ava wasn’t sure why the doctor was telling her all of this. If she was in the first half of the 20th century, any laboratory working on something as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity would presumably want to keep the work hush hush. But doctor Liess was more than willing to talk about his work. In fact, he was more like bragging about it.


Author's note: That's where it falls apart. Einstein’s “new ideas” about relativity weren't new anymore by 1944. Also, I can't rationalize why Dr. Liess would tell Ava all about his project when doing so right under Hitler's nose would be enough to get him killed. I guess I am just trying to move the story along too quickly. That is why I thought that if this were a good enough idea for a story, then perhaps I should just outline it, or just hand over the basic premise to the Bender's and let them butcher it.

Meet the bad guy

Now we have a group of Spanish sailors, who apparently dropped through a wormhole brought on by some kind of weather anamoly, about to descend on the happy residents of Moo, most of whom haven’t even wiped the barbecue sauce from their mouths.
Just in case it wasn’t obvious that the Spanish leader is the bad guy in this story, today we get the obligatory evil grin followed by the evil bad guy laugh (Bwahahahahaha). The last time we saw that cliched evil grin on a character (eyebrows turned down, mouth turned up) King Tunk was preparing to launch an unprovoked attack on Moo. And why is it that only the captain is allowed to wear a shirt, while all the rest of the sailors run around with less clothing than Alley Oop?
How will our Moovian protagonists respond to this new invasion of their land? Will they offer the sailors some of Phil’s zombie juice dino ribs - thus turning them on to the carefree ways of Moofest? Or perhaps they will challenge them to a dancing contest.
We all await the next (yawn) panel with rapt enthusiasm!

Unconscionable

This is just awful. I can’t believe the Benders came up with a story line like this in light of what has been happening around the globe with terrorist bombs going off all around the world. What was their particular motivation for today’s strip? The Atlanta Olympic bombing of 1996? The Madrid train bombing of 2004? The London subway bombing of 2005? I suppose the India train bombing that happend just last week was too recent, but when that is what you read in the national news everyday and then you turn to the funny pages and you see terrified people fleeing a cauldron with what appears to be a mini-nuclear explosion underway, what else is it supposed to make you think of? And then to have a once beloved character like the Wizer standing there with this devilish grin on his face amongst all the carnage - as if he had been transformed into some type of Osama bin Wizer abomination. It is just unforgivably bad and inappropriate.
Then the next day we have Alley Oop, who was too stooopid and weak and pathetic to do anything to stop the Wizer’s terrorist plot beforehand, slowing getting up and surprised to still be alive giving a sheepish grin to the Wizer as he smugly says Did you think I was going to kill people?
Well, yes, that is clearly what had been implied all along.
Then we have the great irony of having Wizer scold Fill for “overreacting” after the explosion. Wizer is the one who decided to go nuclear with this terrorist scheme because he felt disrespected when King Guz picked someone else to be the official propagandist (historian). And he’s telling Fill to stop overreacting?? That’s rich.
Now we finally have things winding down (one can hope) and, as commenter Jim was the first to guess, it all ends with a lame joke about the invention of barbecue sauce (and yet one more plug for how wonderful Fill’s barbecue ribs are - Zombie juice, remember).

Zombie juice

Fill’s ribs must be some kind of narcotic. That would explain this weird cult-like facination everyone seems to have with them. Everytime one of the characters eats one of the ribs they suddenly get this glazed look in their eyes and then become totally compliant with whatever Fill wants to do. It reminds me of that zombie juice that the bad guys forced Indiana Jones to drink in The Temple of Doom movie. Somebody needs to jab a hot poker into Oop’s ribs and see if that will wake him up.

Have we ever seen Fill eat one of his own ribs? I don’t think so. I’m beginning to think that Fill is actually in league with King Tunk and is just prepping everyone in Moo before he launches his next invasion. Once he has turned everyone into a rib zombie, Tunk will be able to waltz right in and take over the country. Fortunately we still have one slim hope. Maybe Queen Umpa will resist the zombies and fight them off with a burning log as they try to force her to eat one of the narco-ribs. As she burns each one in turn they will suddenly snap out of their stupor and Fill’s nefarious plot will be foiled.

Well, at least that would be more interesting that the lame story line we are currently being forced to follow....

Terror plot revealed

So this is what we have sunk to. Turning major characters from the Alley Oop strip into terrorists. Isn't that just a tad bit in bad taste these days?
I'm predicting explosions and fireworks that will scare people at first and then turn out to be harmless fun. Moofest will then evolve into an annual Fourth of July-type celebration.
But in the meantime we are seeing some of the worst characteristics come out in the some of the long-established characters from Moo.
Umpa's jealousy is leading her to conspire against her own kingdom. Wizer's pride is turning him into a prehistoric Osama bin Laden.
"It won't kill anyone, will it?" Umpa asks hesitantly.
"Let's just say it will make it so no one will ever forget Moofest! Bwahahahahahahahaha!"
Is that answer supposed to reassure Umpa? Or us? Sheesh!