Are you going to do a Too Many Cooks Explained?
Nope. Too Many Cooks is actually simple enough that pretty much anyone should be able to get it, as long as they understand the concepts of metafiction and parody. Here, let me knock this one out:
Too Many Cooks is a surrealist parody of television during the 80′s and 90′s (that still rings true today) that tries to convey the nature of the tv and entertainment industry through actions that ‘show’ you what they’re trying to say rather than ‘telling’ you.
You have your Full House kind of intro that’s full of corn and saturated sweetness presenting a gross idealization fantasy of American life. The intro goes on and on as more and more characters with gimmicks get introduced into the show. You get a Science Kid, a Tough Kid, and the Cool Neighbor Kid, followed by The Adorable Twins, and eventually get to a puppet cat, Smarf.
It just gets more ridiculous from here as we leave the house and explore an office setting; the producers are trying to make a switch and shake things up a little, introducing more set pieces to try and catch all audiences. And then, out of nowhere, our white family turns into a black family–same show, different color, because if you have the same successful product in a different flavor, you capture both the white audience who love the show, and the black audience, and often, tv producers didn’t care about ripping someone off or making a clone if it means they increase their audience.
But then family sitcoms get boring to people, and the black family is joined by a firefighter and a police officer, bringing us into a cop drama program, of which there have been too goddamn many throughout time and we see that trend continuing today.
Television is running the gamut of what can appeal to audiences, even through the point of turning to animation with the G.I. Joe parody. And all along, through all of the changes in all of the programs, you’re hearing, “Too Many Cooks.”
That saying applies to a few things about the short. First, there are too many cooks in the sense that there’s too much of the same thing on tv, and too much on tv in general. The amount of competition between original shows and their clone rivals produces a need for radical changes in producers, and they’ll try pretty much anything to mix it up and gain a wider audience share–we see this happen in the short because it’s happened so much throughout television history.
“Add a dog! Add… add a new neighbor! Give him a new job, give him a superpower! I don’t care what you do, just GET OUR RATINGS BACK!”
Too many cooks as a phrase also applies to the kind of people who would say the quote I just made above; often, when it comes to a creative property in the field of video entertainment, there are too many cooks in the kitchen messing with what used to be a simple dish, adding things they think will make it more appealing when they don’t even know how to cook in the first place. It’s apparently a giant problem for creators working today, especially in the animation industry–the suits want to mess with the idea based on their ‘market research.’
And finally,’ too many cooks’ works in describing how a tv show can lose its way, a lot like Twin Peaks did in its second season when Mark Frost and David Lynch were off set doing other things. All of the new characters, guest stars, and stupid gimmicks thrown in can be dismissed as ‘too many cooks.’ The additions are too much, and they have to go.
So, what’s the deal with our serial killer? Does he represent anything?
He might be a symbol for two things I can think of. I see the killer as the audience, growing sick of all the same garbage, heartless twists, and rehashes. He’s a cynical, dispirited person, and is giving all of these bad programs the axe (or machete, in this case.)
He might also represent the way that some of these shows go absolutely insane and cannibalize themselves, destroying their own product for the sake of ratings while being fully aware they’re burning the whole house down. If it makes enough heat and light, they’re good with it.
And of course, when the killer gets blown up by Smarf, that character reveals himself to be a robot of some kind, because Big Twists always get audiences interested and result in mainstream news coverage.
The Too Many Cooks disease continues on, becoming an actual disease treated in another type of show we’ve had too goddamn much of–a medical drama.
And finally, it all becomes too heavy and convoluted, and there have been so many cooks in the kitchen messing with things that it’s time to just throw out the whole dish and start again. This task is up to Smarf, who goes and hits the reset button, because when you’ve destroyed something beyond repair or have run out of ideas, what do you try as a hack producer?
A reboot!
And once that intro ends and we get into the show, we have just a few seconds of actual “show” before the end credits hit, because that intro took up so much time–a comment on how television is often style over substance now.
The abstract and horror elements serve mainly as devices for serving the message, but also give us a second gift of a seriously unique horror and psychological thriller kind of situation. Too Many Cooks is 100% good all the way through and I consider it an extremely valuable short film.
