A new animated series on Nickelodeon, which features a disabled teen, should have a lot to say, but its "realistic'' humor may not sit well with some viewers.
By LAURA KRANTZ
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 23, 2000
Pelswick Eggert is a 13-year-old boy at Alcatraz Junior High, just like other junior high kids, except for one thing: He is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair.
Author and cartoonist John Callahan, the creator and producer of Pelswick, an animated series debuting at 8 p.m. Tuesday on Nickelodeon, is also paralyzed. In a conversation by phone from California, Mr. Callahan talked about Pelswick and his own life.
He has been drawing since he was a kid. At his Catholic school, he once got in trouble for drawing a cartoon of one of the nuns looking like a penguin! Mr. Callahan draws a comic about Pelswick, too, with mostly the same characters in it.
He decided to create the Pelswick TV show because of all the questions kids asked him about his disability. "There's no big mystery to being in a wheelchair," he said. "All kids have challenges."
Mr. Callahan, who was injured in a car accident at the age of 21, feels strongly that all kids are the same. "I want kids to know that people using wheelchairs are just like everybody else, and they want to be treated the same as everybody else," he said in a press release.
You can't help but notice that the names of the characters in the show are unusual. They are inspired by people Mr. Callahan knew when he was growing up, he said: Ace and Goon were two of his friends, and Gram Gram was a neighbor's grandmother.
In the first episode, Pelswick is the victim of a trick played by the school bully, Boyd Scullarzo. Boyd nominates Pelswick for school body president, the job he would do anything not to have. Just as he finishes saying the job would be torture to anyone who gets it, he finds out that his crush, Julie Smockford, is running. Of course, he has to support her, but as soon as she finds out he is "running" too, she explodes!
Pelswick is not sure what to do until his Mr. Jimmy, a sort of guardian angel only he can see, appears to help him sort out his problems. Before Mr. Jimmy can finish giving his advice, though, Pelswick zooms off with an idea. He decides to campaign like everyone else but make himself look bad so no one will vote for him. Instead, the plan backfires when the students all start to like Pelswick.
Seeing that his plan is not working, Pelswick decides to listen to the rest of Mr. Jimmy's advice. After help from his sister Kate and some careful thinking, Pelswick devises a plan to help him escape the awful fate of being elected.
I did not enjoy this show. The humor, which Mr. Callahan called "realistic," did not appeal to me; I thought much of it was rude humor, a lot of crude behavior with food (including slurping spaghetti up the nose, food throwing and throwing up), which I did not find funny. I think the rude humor, like that of so many other cartoons, takes away from the important point the show is trying to make.
Many of the characters were stereotypes of how some people see teenagers: rude and brainless. The bully, Boyd, just yells a lot, Pelswick's friends Ace and Goon are insensitive and stupid, and Julie seems concerned only about her popularity and appearance. The students' constant disrespect of the vice principal was not fun to watch.
What really bothered me is that even the adults acted like idiots. The vice principal had no clue what the students were doing, the grandmother was irritating and made comments totally off the subject, and Pelswick's father is so concerned about being politically correct, it is hard for him to pay attention to his kids.
Surprisingly though, I did find that Pelswick and his sister Kate are really good-natured and intelligent people, and they get along well together. The best line is where Pelswick corrects Boyd's attempt to insult him and says that he is not a cripple; he is "permanently seated." Kate is quite the junior photographer and turns out to be a big help in solving her brother's problems.
- Laura Krantz, 12, is in the seventh grade in home school in Tampa.
Pelswick premieres at 8 p.m. Tuesday on Nickelodeon.