Let's Fish | May 14, 2007 - 12:30AM | Special
The fifth and final-ish pilot for Adult Swim’s “Night of 1000 Pilots” stunt was Let’s Fish, a live-action/animated hybrid starring Brendon Small and Scott Adsit as two hapless fishermen lost out to sea. Brendon is Scott’s cameraman as per the opening sequence, though It’s not terribly clear if they are producing a professional fishing video or if they are just pals filming their fun fishing trip for posterity. It doesn’t really matter. The idea is that these two guys are stranded out to sea and they encounter various wacky animated characters. Some of them are teased in said opening sequence with scenes we do NOT see in the pilot.
So the idea is these two live-action guys in a live-action boat are set adrift in a cartoon ocean with cartoon seagulls, sharks, and various other denizens. Brendon is the more laid-back of the two and fortune smiles upon him regularly. In the beginning of the show, Scott is waxing poetic about his impending doom while stranded in the middle of the ocean with nothing more than his emergency cracker. He looks up to find Brendon licking an ice cream cone that he somehow forgot he had, somehow not completely melted (the show implies that they’ve been stranded for a very long time). When he offers Scott a lick, he pompously turns his nose up at it, presumably disgusted by Brendon’s germs.
This spins into an argument about him being weird about food, which segues into the first of one of our main comedy set-pieces: Scott shares his fantasy about being in a fancy restaurant. This fantasy is depicted as though the two are actually sitting in the (animated) restaurant together. When Brendon points out that Scott is racist because his servant is the only black man in the restaurant, Scott gets very defensive and sweaty. This makes things worse, as his psyche spirals out of control, imagining all kinds of terrible transgressive caricatures just from Brendon’s suggestion. For my money, a fairly strong start to the show, though “fat retarded Hitler” might make some uneasy.
There’s two more sorta main scenes in this program: the first is a Cuban family floating around on a ship made out of junk, seemingly of their own design. It seems as though their paths cross often, as they don’t consider themselves “rescued” when they show up. They have plenty of food, and scold our two main characters for asking for even a little bite, as they are Americans and have so much more wealth than the Cuban people (even though they literally have nothing, other than that cracker).
The Cubans are animated characters as well, further establishing the idea that Scott and Brendon are the only two live-action characters on the show. The Cuban patriarch sings a cheery song about what he plans to do when he gets to America, which devolves into him taking over the country as a dictator and starting World War 3. This sequence features a shot of Brendon and Scott in a convertible filled with caviar, and they react mildly to it by putting their hands up as though the sensation of the slimy stuff covering their appendages is unbearable. For some reason, I don’t know why, THIS is the single shot that is absolutely burned into my brain from this show. It lasts literally two seconds, but whenever Let’s Fish crosses my mind it is entirely summed up with this shot. Again, I don’t know why. I guess it’s meant to represent the mild, inescapable clunkiness of live-action portrayed against an animated backdrop (Overall I think it works; I’m just sayin’).
I should say, this song is pretty good as far as these things go, and there’s a reason for that: Mark Rivers created this show. He’s the guy behind the music for Moral Orel, and Mr. Show, and others. He also wrote this. He’s actually quite accomplished as a writer; if you look at his IMDB page it’s just a litany of good shows and shows you’ve heard are good but never watched. This is the only thing I can think of where he’s the only credited writer. He’s got the goods.
The last bit is maybe the weakest of the three “sketches’. I’m calling them sketches, everyone. Are we okay with that? They are captured by natives who are all non-racistly white Boston sports-fan types. They seemingly don’t speak English, except they do occasionally exclaim rude epithets. Scott and Brendon are about to be dunked into a big boiling pot, like Bugs Bunny before them. When the boys desperately try to consume their emergency cracker as one act of pleasure before meeting their demise they wind up fighting over it, causing it to get crushed and land in the soup (actually clam chowder). The crumbled cracker pleases our natives, and our heroes are saved and allowed to make their escape from the island.
Why did this one fail to be picked up as a series? Well, it was voted fifth place, so that probably had something to do with it. I’ve done some light googling on the matter, and the fact was that Brendon and Scott were both rather busy with other shows, and I keep finding uncited claims that that was the real reason.
I quite liked Let’s Fish, but I don’t feel like I absolutely needed more of it. It could have been fun if they simply recast the show from episode-to-episode, just plugging in whoever happened to be available as our boatniks. Good idea? Fuck you. It’s a GREAT idea.
