Welcome back to my rambling overview of an obscure Cartoon Network show. In the last article I took a look into Mo Willems' history in animation before the series and now we are looking into the show pilot, among other things.
The show starts with Farmer John (this is his legal name) and his sheep name Sheep, and they are quickly informed by the narrator their lives are about to be shaken up by a secret military organization. The audience are then informed that the diabolical General Specific and his secret military organization, where everyone else's name is a pun too, has a ray gun that can only be powered by Sheep in Particular. There's no good reason for this and the show is aware but doesn't care.
Then General Specific and his right hand man Private Public attempt to capture Sheep only to be thwarted by Farmer John. In retaliation General Specific threatens the entire farm if Sheep is not surrendered. Sheep then decides to take agency in his situation and leaves the farm. After escaping another attempt at capture, Sheep finds himself in the big city.
This is a summary of the first ten minutes of the Pilot, and I won't spoil how the rest of the episode goes so you can watch it yourself if you are interested, but one thing becomes very apparent. The writers on this show love puns. It gets to Rocky and Bullwinkle levels, and it's clear in the structure and execution of the rest of the series that Rocky and Bullwinkle is a good comparison the same way you could compare Ed, Edd n Eddy to The Three Stooges.
The story in a typical episode of Sheep In The Big City is a three act structure that starts off with a cold open of a parody of a tv show or tv advertisement that's being watched by Sheep before he quickly turns it off. This is followed by the theme song, then the aforementioned three acts of sheep having various misadventures.this is all kept together by the narrator, Ben Plotz. It should be noted the show is presented as a cold read by Plotz , who does make his option on the story he's presenting well known. The Narrator has on at least one occasion changed the ending of the episode himself because he wasn't happy with it.
To transition into discussing the cast and crew of the series, I will start with The Narrator, who I initially guessed incorrectly to be voiced by Tom Kenny. Ben Plotz is in fact voiced by Ken Schatz, whose voicework is not very well documented online, with the best information I can find coming from his own website. Schatz is an acting teacher who had done voice over work for Sesame Street during Willems' time on the show, including on some of Willems' animations. This is most likely where Ken Schatz got the role, as most of the other voice actors also worked on Sesame Street. I'm not even joking, Sheep in the Big City has a page on the Muppet wiki just because of the number of people who already had pages on the wiki who worked on it.
For example every major Female Character in the series is voiced by Stephanie D'Abruzzo, a Puppeteer known for her work on Sesame Street, Oobi, The Puzzle Place, and The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss, among others. She is also the current performer for Prairie Dawn on Sesame Street.
I could break down the rest of the shows cast with their Sesame Street roles but I think I've made my point clear. And on the other side of things there are other crew members who did very impressive things after the series. In particular there's one person in the credits, in an unexpected role, that is objectively more famous than anyone else on the show.
Gerard Way is the lead singer of the pop punk band My Chemical Romance and the creator of the comic book series The Umbrella Academy. They were also an intern on Sheep In The Big City. He spoke of his experience on the show to the Orange County Register, saying: “I was working eight hours a day and I was the photocopy dude." And “It was really hard to eat,”. All in all they did end up working on a rejected pilot before leaving Cartoon Network to become a rockstar and comic writer so he eventually found something that worked for them.
Walking away from the topic of the cast now that I've addressed the underpaid retrospectively famous person, I want to stress there's two outstanding types of humor in the show: parodies, and lots of puns. This show is an absolute pun factory. Literally every segment title, and there typically three segments an episode, is a pun. Usually a sheep pun, and they never dry up. Most of the characters' names are puns. Out of the characters I've not mentioned yet, Lisa Rentel probably has the most egregious pun name, but about every member of the military in the show has a pun name.
And to finish the article, I have to mention the segment the show always ends on. It ends with the Ranting Swede. This sounds like complete hogwash, but every episode of this show ends with a Swedish Man ranting about whatever is irking him. Most of the time his rage is from him taking an idiom literally. It's something you have to see for yourself the third time before it clicks, that this was how one of Cartoon Network's "Cartoon Cartoons" ends every episode and nobody ever talks about it.
If you are interested in watching Sheep In The Big City, it is archived online in a less than HD quality, mostly tv recordings from the few reruns it had. I am not aware of any legal situation that would stop Cartoon Network from putting this show on DVD or even streaming, with only the first half of the series even being available on iTunes before removal. However there have been semi-recent reports of the show being available for streaming on the Latin American version of HBO Max, so make of that what you will. If the state of viewing the series updates, I'll probably make an addendum to all this in the comments.
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