Defective Mr. Squish products.

In which Leonard gets in trouble for selling crap.
(Mr. Squish, CSU Sacramento Hornet, March 1991.)

This is the first appearance of the glass-filled Mr. Squish plush toy. I actually wanted to manufacture them, you know: Cheap fuzzy dolls that would make a tinkling sound whenever you moved them, because they were stuffed with a combination of ceiling insulation and shards of safety glass from busted windshields. (I drew the glass a lot more jagged in panel 3.) I didn’t just want to joke about Mr. Squish merchandising being made from inferior product. I wanted to take the joke further, deliberately make inferior product, and have people buy it anyway, enjoying the irony of it all.

Understandably the CSUS Bookstore didn’t care to make any merchandise out of a second-semester comic strip in the school paper. The only thing I ever produced were some Julian the Wonder Dog t-shirts. That’s it. Oh well. So if you ever remember me talking about how the occasional revolution in Haiti was causing the factory to get way behind on Mr. Squish dolls, I was joking.

This strip naturally connects with the previous strip in which Leonard turned his kiddie show into a giant commercial for Mr. Squish knick-knacks. Well, now some outraged authority figure has shown up with complaints about how inappropriate the knick-knacks are.

I know; you’re going to suspect the idea for this strip came from Dan Aykroyd’s character on Saturday Night Live, Irving Mainway, who came up with all sorts of dangerous products for Candice Bergen to be outraged about. And yeah, he was in the back of my brain somewhere, but the real place I stole it from was Monty Python’s “Crunchy Frog” sketch, in which a cop stops buy a candy company to complain about their ingredients.

INSPECTOR PRALINE OF THE HYGIENE SQUAD. First we have the cherry fondue. This is extremely nasty. But we can’t prosecute you for that.

MR. MILTON, PROPRIETOR OF THE WHIZZO CHOCOLATE COMPANY. Agreed.

PRALINE. Next we have the number four, “Crunchy Frog.”

MILTON. Ah yes.

PRALINE. Am I right in thinking there’s a real frog in here?

MILTON. Yes; a little one.

PRALINE. What sort of frog?

MILTON. A dead frog.

PRALINE. Is it cooked?

MILTON. No.

PRALINE. What, a raw frog?

MILTON. Uh, we use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple-smooth treble-cream milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose.

PRALINE. That’s as maybe. It’s still a frog.

MILTON. Well, what else?

PRALINE. Well don’t you even take the bones out?

MILTON. If we took the bones out, it wouldn’t be crunchy, would it?

Yeah, there’s a bit of Irving Mainway in the way that Leonard attempted to justify the “educational” aspect of the crap he was selling. But of course there’s no justifying Mr. Squish Beer, and Leonard didn’t bother to try.