Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids: the Chipper Chums Go Scrumping

This review was fast lane commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire


Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids is a turn-of-the-millennium animated series, based on a series of children's horror-comedy books. I couldn't tell you what the books are like, but the animated series is a kind of deliberate so-bad-it's-good that feels slightly ahead of its time.

You know that kind of intentionally crappy-looking and amateurish animation that was everywhere in the aughts? Usually (though not always) leaning on either "lolrandom" or "loledgy" to make their humor land? Either stop-motion or claymation type stuff on TV, or Flash animations online (remember the golden age of Flash? that sure was a time alright). Robot Chicken. Homestar Runner. Half of the stuff on Newgrounds. Two thirds of the stuff on Adult Swim. Well, Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids was right at the leading edge of that trend, first airing in 2000.

That style of content is looked down on nowadays, but I think that's less because it's aged poorly and more because there just came to be too much of it, and too much of the stuff that existed was extremely bad. A lot of creators seemed to get the impression that "bad on purpose" means "you can be lazy and derivative and get away with it." Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids isn't high art by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also much better than the forgettable Adult Swim slop that would flood the market a few years later.

Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids has a framing narrative with this Crypt Keeper wannabe (pictured above) running a shitty horror show that literally only one kid can be seen sitting in the audience of. When I say he's a Crypt Keeper wannabe, I mean that entirely diegetically; the character, rather than his real life creators, is trying and failing to do something like Tales from the Crypt. Think of a cross between a one-off Wallace and Grommit antagonist and Harry S Plinkett trying to run a house of horrors, and you've pretty much got it.

He's...erm...assisted? Sort of?...by this weird uglycute critter named Spindleshanks that I thought was some kind of vampire dog at first, but apparently is supposed to be a spider.

Anyway, the framing narrative is this very distinctly British claymation style, but the stories themselves are 2D animation. Think Flash Animation aesthetics, but the minimal movements and uncanny dubbing are more like an especially terrible 1960's Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

The stories have wannabe-spooky theater guy both narrating, and doing voices for most (if not all) of the characters. The way he does the girls' voices is especially bad, in a way that takes a certain degree of skill for the real life VA to have pulled off. Voicing a character who is voicing another character is always a challenge, and he succeeds at it to solid comedic effect.

This particular episode is called "The Chipper Chums Go Scrumping," which is the most British title that any story will ever have. "Scrumping" is apparently slang for scavenging or petty theft, derived from "scrummaging." I didn't know that until today. Anyway, I don't know if this is typical of the series or just a gag for this one episode, but "Chipper Chums" is really about the narrator struggling to fill ten minutes of screentime when he only has (at best) two minutes' worth of story. Introducing the "chipper chums," a bunch of old school British children's adventure protagonist parodies, who are spending their summer break in the countryside with one of their extended families in far too much detail, complete with tangents about character traits of theirs that end up playing absolutely no role in the story.

The story finally actually happens when the five of them (six, including their dog Stinker) get hungry and decide to steal some apples from a nearby orchard. It's only after they're done eating and enjoying the bounty of their "scrumping" that the shotgun-wielding farmer finds them and starts demanding that they throw up the apples again.

When they insist that that's impossible, he says that he can't tolerate an apple deficiency in his cider production, so he'll just have to turn them into apple cider instead. It seems less than certain that he'll be able to win this fight against the whole group of them, but just then the unusually strong pesticides that he sprays his apples with spontaneously kick in and cause all the children to immediately drop dead.

Crushing their bodies in the press apparently produces an slightly off-tasting apple cider, rather than the unmistakable bloody mess that one would have expected. Crazy world, huh?

There are plenty of similarly edgy gags leading up to this climax. For instance, one of the older children starting to pull off his little sister's teddy bear's eye to use as a fishing lure, only to remember at the last second "oh wait, I forgot, you love your teddy bear. I'm sorry, what a right cad I've been." Or, when the farmer shoots their dog when it tries to menace him, that same boy momentarily breaking character to complement him on his aim before going back to being scared and horrified. Etc.

Nothing in the episode was all that funny, in the moment. At most, I just smiled here and there, no actual chuckles. But then, at the end, the theater guy comes back and grins fiendishly while warning us not to drink any apple cider produced in that year, and then he looks and sounds so incredibly proud of himself as he does a scary cackle and points a flashlight up at his face, and I just lost it. I cackled as hard as claymation shitty theater man did, only for me it was far less forced.

Really, none of the preceding gags were meant to stand on their own. They were all just buildup to the punchline of this guy thinking he's scared you. At the end, you laugh at every single joke that wasn't funny up until then.

Also, his head turns into a rotten apple for a second.

Because why not, I guess.


I feel like this show would get old really fast if you watched more than one or two episodes at a time, assuming that they're all like this. As a standalone though, I'd say it gives you your fair ten minutes worth of comedy for your time investment, even if it's all sort of concentrated at the end.

That said...I'm not sure I would say that it's better at what it does than some of the more memorable Robot Chicken sketches. It's a good example of its kind, and it's interesting for being one of the earlier ones as well, but if you didn't like this type of humor to begin with then it's not going to win you over.