"The List"
The alternate title for this episode should be "Murphy's Law."
The clock is ticking by in class, and once the final bell rings, Arnold's class flies out of the school like someone just unleashed the loudest, most vile-smelling fart in the classroom.
Apparently, these kids have never had the weekend off from school because they announce their mundane plans as if it's the first time they've ever experienced them. Jeez, elementary school can't be that damn boring. Just wait until these kids get to high school--then they'll see what true boredom feels like.
So, Arnold is asked how he's going to spend his Saturday, so he pulls out an expertly folded piece of paper out of his shirt. The List. He's going to "do it all."
Sid takes The List and shows it off to the rest of the school like it's some holy grail of utmost significance. It's a freaking piece of paper detailing a bunch of fun things for a kid to do on a Saturday. Apparently, no one has ever completed The List before, but Arnold sets out to be the very first one.
 |
| It's been passed down from kid generation to kid generation. |
The List for a Kid's Perfect Saturday
- Watch every cartoon from 6 AM 'till Dance Craze...
...while eating 3 bowls of Sugar Chunk cereal
- Ride your bike down the steepest hill in the neighborhood.
- Play catch with every kid in the park (At first, I thought Gerald said "Make out with every kid in the park." Boy, where is my mind this morning?!)
- And finally, go to the movies and sit through it three times.
That's it? This doesn't seem like a very realistic list. I mean, what kid actually wants to leave their room, let alone their house, on a Saturday? It was a different time. Not that I believe all kids were always playing outside in the 90s, but I'm pretty sure they were more often then than now. Now, if this episode took place in 2015, that "perfect Saturday" would look quite different:
The List for a 2015 Kid's Perfect Saturday
- Wake up no earlier than 12 PM
- Binge-watch your favorite 90s cartoon on Netflix in the time it takes for you to eat an entire bag of potato chips.
- Surf YouTube and subscribe to at least 6 new channels--and no cheating--these must be channels you would actually watch daily.
- Play Call of Duty until your parents call you downstairs for dinner--which at this point shouldn't be very far away.
- Eat dinner, then go back upstairs to play Call of Duty.
- Watch 25 Buzzfeed videos while complaining how you think Buzzfeed is for stupid hipsters, yet you can't stop watching anyway.
- Do a bunch of "Try to Watch these Videos Without Smiling or Laughing" challenges until you succeed.
- Finally, surf Facebook, Tumblr, and Reddit on your phone until you fall asleep.
Our generation is very sad.
So, after Arnold sets his alarm clock to 5:59 AM, a paranormal presence arrives in the night and pushes Arnold's bedroom window open, sending a gust of wind to knock over and completely destroy Arnold's potato clock. Holy hamburgers, what's that thing made of that it's so fragile?
 |
| I'm pretty sure not even a ceramic bowl could shatter that much. |
He rushes downstairs and heads for the kitchen to grab his cereal. Grandpa had eaten what was left of it, and tells Arnold there's a whole 'nother box in the pantry. Yeah, there's another box of cereal--not Sugar Chunks, but Prune Bran.
 |
| By Kellogg's. |
Well, at least it's cereal, so Arnold decides to up his fiber intake just to appeal to the list. Too bad the milk's gone bad. Though by this point, he's already lost, so I don't know why he's even trying anymore.
 |
| "Either that milk's gone bad or they got a whole new way to sell cottage cheese." - Grandpa |
So then Arnold decides to move on to the next thing on the list: cartoons! But thanks to Grandpa's excellent skills in handywork, the TV explodes. No, it literally explodes.
I love how Grandpa just walks in with a screwdriver and is all like, "lol whoops." And thanks to him, power is out in the entire house. So, no cartoons for Arnold.
Next on the list is to play catch with every kid in the park. The only kid there is some loner weirdo, and he ends up running away with Arnold's ball... and his patience.
There's a running gag in this episode where Grandma and some burly, quadruplet movers are trying to figure out how to get a baby grand piano into the house. Grandma isn't helping by sitting on top of the piano, but it's Grandma, so you shouldn't be surprised. Luckily, Arnold catches a break today when the movers go on break so Arnold is able to retrieve his bike from the garage. He climbs up the steepest hill and walks it up to the top of the hill.
Alas, Arnold is finally able to complete something on The List. Or is he?
 |
| It appears some other kids have attempted The List as well. |
Arnold abandons his bike in the wet concrete to attempt to complete the last thing on his list--sit through a movie three times. He counts out his money before hand to make sure he has enough for a ticket, but when he gets to the theatre, all the money he had disappears out of a mysterious hole in his pocket. My goodness, the gods of Nickelodeon must be having a drunken field day right now. Poor Arnold--all he wanted to do was have the perfect Saturday. Just look at that slump of failure. So sad.
As Arnold walks home with his tail between his legs, he spots a window of opportunity. Or rather, a door of opportunity.
 |
| Welp, someone's getting fired today. |
Logic: Arnold enters the screening area from the right, but walks across from the left.
It's kind of funny how the movie seems to be inadvertently narrating Arnold's day. The man in the movie tells the woman how he's had the "worst day of [his] life," just like Arnold had said to the teenager at the ticket booth. He climbs up and around the walls of the entire room trying to find a good spot to sit and watch the movie. He makes his way into the air vents (a kid show classic), just in time for the woman in the movie to yell to the man (seemingly to Arnold) "Where are you going?" as Arnold is climbing up into the vents.
Arnold falls right into an open seat, because coincidences, that's why. And not five seconds later, the film strip starts to rip and completely breaks down to the point where everyone is asked to leave the theatre.
Okay, now that just wouldn't happen. I don't mean the film ripping all of a sudden. Nobody would just shrug and walk out of the theatre like they accidentally walked in on the wrong movie. There would be riots, cursing, and people demanding their money back. This is the kind of thing where people would get nasty. The look on their faces would be more intense than the constipated man on the box of Prune Bran.
Arnold goes home to sulk in his failure. That is, until Grandma is lifted onto the roof with her piano and starts playing an uplifting song to cheer him up. And you know what? It works.
Eventually.
"Haunted Train"
The alternate title for this episode should be "Arnold Goes to Hell."
So there's this train, see. And it's haunted.
But before we rush into this intriguing story, let's focus right now on Arnold and Gerald's boredom:
So, Grandpa decides to entertain the kids by fabricating the time he was a train conductor back when he had hair and didn't have his bones cracking every morning from osteoporosis.
Grandpa tells the tale of a train conductor who went off his meds and drove train engine #25 off the tracks.
The train was apparently never seen again after that. At this point in the story, more of Arnold's classmates have gathered around to listen. Grandpa straight up says the conductor drove the train all the way downtown, which is one of Nickelodeon's various ways to get the word Hell past the censors. And every year, on the anniversary of the day this mad conductor drove the train to the "fiery underworld" (another euphemism for Hell), engine #25 comes back, along with the ghost of the conductor.
 |
| He looks like he could be Victor Frankenstein's rejected creation. |
The doors open, only for the passengers to come face-to-face with Satan himself. God damn, this episode took a dark turn.
 |
| "Welcome to Hell, bitches." |
We learn that Helga is an atheist because when she rhetorically demands physical evidence of this haunted train being a legitimate thing, Arnold says some things can't be scientifically proven, and that some are all a matter of faith, to which Helga goes, "Phooey!" So then Arnold speculates that Helga is scared.
Helga's like "Boy, I ain't scared." So then Arnold dares her to meet him and Gerald after dark at the old train station to go check out the haunted train. Helga agrees. Oh, this should be interesting.
That night, they arrive at the abandoned station:
It's all dirty and boarded up, not to mention full of cobwebs, one of which Helga steps right into. Yuck. Gerald throws a small rock into the train tunnel for some reason, and a cloud of bats flies right at them.
 |
| Gerald is so going to die first. |
So, the kids wait a long while for the train to come, and at midnight, they get bored so Arnold and Gerald start a harmonica duet jam, singing about the psychotic train conductor. And boy do they have soul.
How are Gerald's parents and Helga's parents not calling their beepers right now wondering where they are? (Remember, this episode was from 1996.)
As soon as Helga gets fed up and is like, "Fuck this, I'm outta here," the kids hear a rumbling coming from down the tunnel and HOLY STRUMBOLI IT'S TRAIN #25:
That is some supernatural shit, right there. I mean, how could Grandpa have known a train would come down this abandoned station, let alone it being train #25?! I honestly can't tell if this is a forced coincidence or a deus ex machina. Either way, the plot of the episode needs to move on.
And so what do our fourth grade friends do? They get on the train. I guess they really want to know what Hell looks like. Haven't they been taught not to board haunted transportation?
Naturally, the kids try to get off, but the train doors close before they're able to. Well, tell Satan I said hi, kids.
So, everything Grandpa was describing in the story--the blinding white light, the rotten smell, the cacophonous music--it all very coincidentally starts to happen one by one. And then the lights blink out. You know, because they have entered "the zone of darkness."
A dark shadow starts to creep up behind Helga. It gets closer and closer, breathing its hot breath against the back of her neck. And finally, we see the outlined face of Satan:
Oh, no wait, it's just Brainy. Wait, how the hell did Brainy get on the train?!
The kids ask him what he's doing there, and Brainy responds "I don't know." I don't know why I find this funnier than it's supposed to be. Brainy is such an underrated character, and I really don't know why he's part of the show, but I just feel like he belongs here, you know?
So, the boys open the door to let Helga heave-ho Brainy off the train and into the ploppy lake. Well now, that's just mean. Why ploppy, though? Because Brainy makes a ploppy sound when he hits the lake.
The kids finally make it to Hell, fire and all, and Arnold decides it would be a good idea to put out the flames. That's right--Arnold actually tries to put out Hell's fire with a hose. This show... this is why I love this show.
The kids quickly find out that they're not hosing down Satan, or Hell, but a steel mill worker. He explains that the train isn't haunted, that it's for the steel mill workers only, and explains away all the smells, sounds, and everything else. Aww, I actually kind of wish Arnold and his friends were on a train to Hell. That would have been so much more fun.
So, Grandpa picks the kids up at the steel mill to drive everyone home and admits that he was just trying to emotionally scar them for life.
So, there's no haunted train after all. Or is there?
Lessons Learned From These Episodes: when life gets you down, look up; don't believe Grandpa's stories
The List would never work in my life, it requires permissive parents.
ReplyDeleteI bet the man would tell us about that week he spent with Rita Hayworth!
Same here. Though I think most parents would question that list as well. I'm sure they'd raise their eyebrows over the fact that their kid would essentially want to eat three bowls of sugar (cereal).
DeleteHeck yeah.
Delete