Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #255 Selected Episodes of Bruno the Kid
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I just finished a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well.
When kindly benefactors request something for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, I’m usually able to accommodate them but sometimes patrons will request a movie that I have written about for the column fairly recently or something that’s fundamentally unavailable, even through quasi-legal means.
Alternately, sometimes readers will request something that would take too much time or be damn near impossible to access. That was the case with a Joy of Trash Kickstarter Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 choice for the famously ill-fated Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark or the 1990s animated Bruce Willis vehicle Bruno the Kid.
I would love to write up Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 and My World of Flops. It’s a legendary disaster I am utterly fascinated by, but I don’t think I could do it justice from watching something shot on a cell phone during a performance and it’s not as if there’s a big budget film adaptation I can write about either.
As someone with the sensibility and tastes of an emotionally stunted child, I was intrigued by Bruno the Kid. But my time is unusually valuable now because I need to fulfill the crowd-funding campaigns for The Joy of Trash and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition, in addition to all of the responsibilities endemic in running this website and co-hosting the Travolta/Cage podcast and Bruno the Kid lasted thirty-six episodes.
That means it would take me something in the area of thirteen hours to watch every episode of Bruno the Kid for a single article. That seems insane and masochistic even by my standards so I offered a counter-proposal.
I volunteered to watch six to eight episodes of Bruno the Kid, something that takes up roughly as much time as a movie, so that I could get get a good sense of the grand gestalt of the short-lived 90s cartoon from a handful of representative episodes.
The patron accepted on the basis that they be able to choose the episodes I watched and wrote about. They said they enjoyed the show as a child, but that was a very long time ago.
My benefactor expressing at least vague fondness for the Clinton-era Bruce Willis vanity project raised my expectations from “non-existent” to “exceedingly low.”
Vanity cartoons for celebrities do not have very good reputations. For starters, it’s shockingly rare for celebrities to even voice their cartoon doppelgängers. You think Michael Jordan voiced the Michael Jordan character on ProStars? Of course he didn’t! He’s Michael Jordan! He wasn’t going to waste his time with that shit. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was at best only vaguely aware that ProStars even existed.
The Beatles didn’t even voice themselves in Yellow Submarine and that shit was dope as hell. In the 1980s Hulk Hogan’s Rock and Wrestling the Hulkster was voiced by Brad Garrett. To cite a more recent example, my pals over at We Hate Movies recently covered Little Ellen, a cartoon vehicle for Ellen Degeneres where the title character is played by, you guessed it, someone other than Ellen Degeneres.
I was consequently more impressed than I probably should have been that Bruce Willis actually went through the trouble of voicing pint-sized secret agent Bruno the Kid in addition to Executive Producing and singing the theme song.
Late-period Willis has set the bar so impossibly low that it is borderline jarring to see the Moonlighting star exert even the tiniest bit of effort. So if I might lavish Willis with faint praise, he is not lazily going through the motions for a paycheck here. He doesn’t seem completely checked out. He’s not sleepwalking or on autopilot. In fact he actually seems to be enjoying himself, which is more than can be said of pretty much everything he’s done subsequently.
My admittedly very low expectations skyrocketed when I saw that Phil Roman Executive Produced along with Willis and Willis’ brother David. Roman is an animation legend and six time Emmy winner whose animation powerhouse Film Roman has produced some shows you may be familiar with like Garfield and Friends, The Simpsons, Family Guy and King of the Hill.
More germane to this article, Film Roman also worked on one of my all-time favorite television shows, The Critic. Before being resurrected as a deeply embarrassing webtoon, The Critic ran from 1994 to 1995.
Bruno the Kid ran from 1996 to 1997 so perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the show looks and feels a lot like The Critic.
Needless to say, that is a very good thing and one of the primary reasons I was pleasantly surprised by a goofy bit of pop detritus that’s way better than it has any right to be.
Willis lends his voice and his persona to the lead role of Bruno the Kid, an eleven year old savant with the unerring instincts and reflexes of a James Bond/Jason Bourne-style super-spy and the intellect of a computer genius.
In "The Adventure Begins”, the precocious tyke with the never-ending one-liners schemes his way into becoming a top agent with an international aggregation of do-gooders known as GLOBE by pretending to be an adult who looks EXACTLY like Bruce Willis if Bruce Willis were a dead-eyed CGI robot monster from the scariest depths of the Uncanny Valley and the bowels of cyber-hell.
When Bruno’s adult avatar is talking to his superiors at GLOBE the primitive early computer animation is so bad and so unconvincing that it becomes perversely hypnotic.
The conventional animation and character design in Bruno the Kid is shockingly good/The Critic-lite while its foray into the then-futuristic world of computer animation is morbidly compelling in a Lawnmower Man/The Net kind of way.
Physically Bruno the Kid looks disconcertingly little like the actor voicing him. He’s a Poindexter-looking egghead with glasses and no hair on the top of his head with the exception of a rooster’s comb-like blob of blonde hair.
Bruno’s musician father inexplicably has the same hairstyle/unique strain of Male Pattern Baldness. Bruno the Kid similarly has a more cerebral vibe than the onetime Seagram’s Wine Cooler pitchman voicing him but when it comes to attitude, Bruno the Kid has everything in common with the laziest man in action movies this side of Steven Seagal.
Even when he’s not literally delivering wisecracks and one-liners directly to the camera the way Bruno does here, there is inevitably a winking, conspiratorial quality to Willis’ performance, a sense that he understands and appreciates the absurdity of what he’s doing as much as anyone else.
This may not seem like praise, but at its best Bruno the Kid suggests the gloriously ridiculous prospect of Hudson Hawk Jr. Like Willis’ infamous flop and Austin Powers, for that matter, this suggests the gleeful camp of James Coburn’s In Like Flint movies as much as Ian Fleming’s legendary super-spy.
The template for Bruno the Kid was sturdy and simple. GLOBE dispatches Jarlsburg, Bruno’s black, aristocratic handler/comic foil, (elegantly voiced by Tony Jay, a voiceover artist best known for playing the villain in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame) to recruit the pint-sized secret agent to assist in a matter of international importance.
Along the way Bruno receives crucial assistance from Harris, the show’s take on James Bond’s gadget-master Q. Mark Hamill gives the disguise-happy tech guru the nasal, excitable whine of Jerry Lewis, which is a very inspired and funny conceit with the iven and the flaven and the nice lady!
Hamill isn’t the only ringer in a preposterously over-qualified voice cast that includes bad guys voiced by the heavyweight likes of Tim Curry, Kenneth Mars, Bronson Pinchot, Ed Asner, Frank Welker and Matt Frewer, who voices a psychotic parody of Bobby Fischer named Booby Vicious.
That a Bruce Willis vanity cartoon even has a parody of Bobby Fischer speaks to how unexpectedly adult and inspired Bruno the Kid can be, as does its willingness to continually put its 11 year old hero in mortal danger.
Die Hard exists in Bruno the Kid’s world as both a hit film and a film series, one that ostensibly stars a guy who looks an awful lot like the guy Bruno is pretending to be. But the show’s inside jokes aren’t as amusing as its general wackiness.
Like The Critic, Bruno the Kid leans heavily on Al Hirschfeld-style broad caricature in terms of both character design and characterization. Bruno is generally the least funny, least inspired element of any episode because the most inspired bits tend to happen in the margins.
I had very modest expectations for Bruno the Kid but was pleasantly surprised, to the point where I even watched an episode or two that was not on my list.
Watching a cartoon from Willis’ heyday made me even more fascinated by his current professional travails. It gave me an idea to spend a month watching every direct-to-streaming movie he put out in 2021 for a feature called A Year in the Life of Bruce Willis.
That would entail watching and writing about Cosmic Sin, Out of Death, Midnight in the Switchgrass, Survive the Game, Apex, Deadlock and, of course, Fortress. Who can possibly forget Fortress?
Will I go through with it? Possibly. I have a daunting amount on my plate already but I am perversely fascinated by Willis’ sad decline so if A Year in The Life of Bruce Willis ends up happening you can thank, or blame, my surprisingly positive experience covering Bruno the Kid.
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