Episode 2x06 "Who's Afraid of Cory Wolf?"

*Edit* Because I'm an idiot, the blog was set to restrict comments to people with accounts. That has now been changed. Anyone can comment now :)

Is the big bad wolf from Little Red Riding Hood or The Three Little Pigs? Or is that the same wolf? How has that never occurred to me before... Why's it always gotta be a wolf?

This is a Halloween episode. It's storming and Cory's writing in some sort of journal. He's using a large feather quill to write, which I guess is supposed to be funny otherwise they wouldn't have done it.

"Hey ConfidenceKBM, what's Cory writing about?"

Nah, don't worry about it.





I said don't worry about it. It's not a big deal, just skip this one. You should move on w-

YOU SHOULD MOVE ON WITH YOUR LIFE.

He's writing about how he's going to turn into a werewolf. A show lauded for its realism is doing a werewolf episode. Happy? Whenever this episode worms its way out of my repressed memories, I remember this one snippet in particular and try to convince myself that I'm remembering wrong.

Nope, it really is that bad. Ugh.... I don't wanna do this...

Shawn shows up to ride with Cory to some Halloween Party. He's wearing a Cory costume, which is funny enough to resuscitate my interest.

The second cool thing about this picture is that it shows us who is responsible for writing this monstrosity. ...Because Cory's turning into a monster... Please laugh ;__;

Not only is this plot ruining my day, it's ruining Cory's as well, since as we all know you shouldn't go to a party if you're turning into a feral predator of man. There's always that one guy at a party tryin to savagely maul the other guests, and it's just, it's, nobody has a good time.

Cory explains his situation to Shawn and the audience via flashback: Feeny informs Cory that a wolf has escaped from the zoo. Cory hears some rustling in a potted plant or a bush or some shit and we see this while some eerie music plays.

"Relax, ConfidenceKBM, it's camp, it's parody, it's deliberately terrible." 

When in doubt, follow the audience. This is a rare instance when the audience/laugh track is actually useful. There is no laughter at that part. Therefore, it is not intended to be funny. 

Don't you have to be bitten by a werewolf to become one, and not just a regular zoo wolf? Either way, Cory's sold on the idea but Shawn's not buying it. Maybe another flashback will convince him. This flashback is some point after Cory gets attacked or whatever: An alarmed Cory shows his newly discovered chest and facial hair to his older brother. Eric is like "grats on puberty bro" and I'm like "what is this the werewolf version of Spiderman?" After giving it some more thought, Eric feeds the werewolf story to Cory. It's honestly not clear whether Eric believes it or not, but I'm going to say he doesn't because I can't keep going otherwise.

Cory tries to further convince Shawn with another flashback story, this time at a Frozen Yogurt place for whatever the hell reason. It's the same set as the car towing place from last season, just at a different angle. It's mocked up pretty well though. Try doing an intentionally bad Dracula impression. That's how the store owner talks. 

Look at those prices though. I want cheesecake for a buck forty, shit.

A convenient announcement on the radio about the escaped wolf gets Cory talking about his lycanthropy, and the store owner decides to take him to the back of the store and scam him out of his money. I don't know why. Cory was about to use the money to pay for his ice cream. The store is not making a profit here. Anyway the back room looks like this:

WooOOOOooOOoooo spoookyyyyyyy. Have any of you ever been to a psychic? Do they all use the same red and brown color scheme? Remember this one from Fresh Prince? 

What am I saying, of course you remember, because that's completely normal. Honestly, I lived on Nick at Night for all of middle school. An hour of Full House and an hour of Fresh Prince every weeknight while I did my math homework or whatever. And look, here I am, using that knowledge for good.

(R.I.P James Avery)

The completely legitimate psychic is played by Phyllis Diller, who's done a whoooooole lot of stuff over the years. Check out her IMDB, you'll almost certainly recognize a few things. This completely legitimate psychic tells Cory what to expect during his transformation.

                                      

Are we still doing the puberty metaphor? Cuz that.... that'd be a little pg-13, know what I'm sayin... She also tells him that he'll have a pentagram on his palm and that he'll kill a girl who cares about him.

 The completely legitimate psychic reminds Cory that he's late for English class, so apparently he went for frozen yogurt during school somehow. Were they even trying with this? So now Cory's in class, but so is Shawn... even though this flashback is Cory explaining the story to Shawn, so... it's weird. Nothing interesting happens in class, they try to make some jokes, but they miss. Look at Shawn though! That hair! Ahhhhhhh it's glorious. Ahhhhhhh you just wanna feel it.

The star in that picture is white because White Dwarf stars are really hot. That joke may be slightly too complicated. Cory is eating a piece of paper here to hide its werewolf-related contents from Mr. Turner, like when Mac ate those contracts on It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. That was hilarious. Eating this paper serves to fulfill the "acquire a taste for new things" part of the completely legitimate psychic's prophecy. After class, Cory incidentally holds Mr. Turner's set of keys, which has a Pentagon keychain from when Turner allegedly visited the Pentagon. This fulfills the pentagram-in-the-palm part of the prophecy, even though pentagrams and pentagons are fundamentally different. Pentagrams are concave, while pentagons are convex. Where are the other math majors? Hi-five?

                                     

Startin to sound like Spiderman again. Topanga's pants are so high. Did the pants-making-people make the length from the top to the crotch longer in the 90s to accommodate pulling them up that high? There's no way you could do that with the pants girls wear today. Those don't even have functioning pockets.

Cory goes back to the completely legitimate psychic to find a way to not kill Topanga. She tells him he won't kill Topanga until the next full moon, which, WUH OH, is tonight. 

NOW LET'S JUST, LET'S, FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT HERE, LET'S THINK ABOUT THIS FOR A SEC. It's the day of a Halloween party, so it must be within a week of Halloween, which is the 31st of October, which was a Monday in 1994. 

http://www.dayoftheweek.org/?m=October&d=31&y=1994&go=Go 

It's also a school day, so this party must be happening on the 24th-29th or the 31st.  Probably the 29th, but either way the only full moon in October of 1994 was on the 19th. 

http://wise-obs.tau.ac.il/~eran/Sky/MoonPhase.html

I am doing so much more work than anyone who made this episode. At home, Alan tries to convince his son that it's just puberty and not magic, but Cory's too far gone. Topanga shows up to go to the party with the two boys and blah blah blah.

                                     

You can feel however you want about that, but I'm too cynical right now to enjoy it. During the credits, Cory is out on his porch and he learns from Mr. Feeny that the wolf turned out to be in the zoo after all. The bush near Cory rustles again, but it's just a bunny. That's right guys, I don't know if you can handle this fuckin 180 degree plot turn here, but Cory wasn't actually bitten by a wolf. 

Congratulations to David Tennant on his second appearance in my blog.

Plot: 0 - Zero like a Cheerio, all da bitches know, on da mic I got flowwwww, yo.

Character Development: 0.5 - Puberty is a big deal, but it seems a little out of place. Cory definitely already likes girls, and we had that story about hormones back in episode 1x20, and that was fantastic, one of the best of the season. I don't know why they felt they had to do it again, especially with this terrible delivery. 

Humor: 0.5 - Meh.

Life Lesson: 0 - Nonexistant.

1 out of 4. It was the good kind of bad though, the kind that I can enjoy making fun of. This review actually turned out really well. Thanks for reading!

See you Wednesday.

Clips and images used under Fair Use.