Eustace Bagge (1999)

Cartoon Courage the Cowardly Dog Animal Coot and/or codger

Outfit: Green overalls / Charlie Brown baseball cap / No teeth

Tagline: "Stupid dog!"

Plot summary: Courage the Cowardly Dog was a pink dog with a green tongue and a hole in one of his teeth. He lived way out in the country with an elderly couple named Eustace and Muriel Bagg, and he was easily frightened. If you have read the previous two sentences successfully, you have now seen every episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Basically the premise was that Courage was a very terrified, excitable dog who would happen to see an enormous terrifying monster on its way to devour the house/household, then run to his owners and gesticulate frantically while yammering something like "BUHBUHBUHBUHBUHBUHBUH." Muriel would try to be reassuring while Eustace would talk about how worthless Courage was and abuse the dog in some form, and then lead the Atlanta Falcons to like a 7-10 season. Courage would continue to see the monster while the elderly couple would not, and would somehow overcome his fear in order to defeat/inadvertently defeat the monster, after which Eustace would show up again to comment on how worthless the dog was. (more)

User comments: An alternate title for Courage, the Cowardly Dog could very well have been "Hey Look, Everything I Hate About Cartoons." You've got the hero who only succeeds through luck/idiocy, the authority/parental figures who are completely oblivious to everything around them, and the SAME PLOT IN LITERALLY EVERY EPISODE. If I ever met the creators of Courage or Inspector Gadget I would throw a Saturn at them. By which I mean the planet.

Eustace Bagg was a terrible human being, even for a cartoon. He loathed his loyal, caring dog, never agreed with his wife, never smiled, and probably hated all blacks and Mexicans. He felt it prudent to move his family to a meager shack in the middle of a monster-infested wasteland. Jesus Christ, even the dude in Grapes of Wrath would have kept driving if he had been offered land in a cacky-baby-poop desert. I bet the creators of the show thought they were making some political statement about 1999's America. "Get outta here, grandpa, we're the young and tolerant generation! You keep your eyes closed and refuse to admit you're out of touch! Our president is the blowjob president!" And then their show got cancelled and I laughed uproariously.

User Rating: 2.8/10 (4 votes)