That Song From Toy Story

1994 was a year of notable happenings. The world celebrated the election of Nelson Mandela. Gen Xers everywhere grieved at the loss of Kurt Cobain. Americans were mesmerized by shady doings in the world of of sports when a man attacked Nancy Kerrigan and squeaky clean O.J. Simpson turned out to be neither squeaky nor clean. A strike would put a giant dent in the popularity of baseball. Final Fantasy VI, one of the greatest video games ever and origin of the handle I’m using for SoSF, would be released for the SNES.

But who cares about any of that? We’re interested in the goings on in Westview, OH and what had been going on come the start of 1994? Well, not a whole lot. Les became a teacher, Funky began his long association with Montoni’s, Lisa returned, we got some school shenanigans with the early Act II generation of high schoolers and… that’s really it. The first couple of years of Act II are honestly little different from the last few years of Act I. The gags are toned down, there’s some more storylines but there’s also a lot of carryover from Act I that, given the focus of this series, we aren’t seeing much of. For one, a lot of what became Dinkle’s stock gags like Holtron poorly investing the band funds or Skip Townes’ shady dealings, are present. So too are some things like the weeks dedicated to test answers where the student drawn in the strip is completely superfluous to the joke. But the mid-’90s will mark the definitive end of the last vestiges of Act I as those hold out gags are swept aside for good.

I’ve found it interesting the way TB likes to tell the story of the strip’s transition into more serious material; away from gags and into soap opera. If you listen to him, you’d almost think that there was Lisa and she was pregnant and in 1986 she miraculously gave birth to the more adult and serious Funky Winkerbean; the mature comic that Batty had wanted to do. You’d also think that the time jump in 1992 would act as a clear divider between Act I comedy and Act II maturity. It’s an interesting bit of retconning that has nothing to do with reality as the truth is that the transition was much longer and it was close to a decade between Les showing up at Lisa’s door and screaming “What happened!?” and the final move to the version of Funky Winkerbean that fascinated people in a way not unlike a car accident.

But will this affect Sadie, a character who somewhat epitomizes that transitionary period? Let’s take a look as we begin to move out of the very early years of Act I.

When last we saw her, Sadie was screaming in agony thanks to dear big sis Cindy spraying perfume in her eyes. In 1994, Sadie’s first appearances are in early February objecting to Mickey’s new Chuck Taylors.

And Mickey, of course, is none too happy about it.

In spite of her objections, Mickey will apparently give into the crowd and ditch the shoes since the week ends with Linda now wearing them.

Stuff like this is probably the most Cindy-like that Sadie’s been so far and while it’s not quite at the level of how Cindy had generally been portrayed, for Sadie I feel like it’s definitely more than a little out of character. And speaking of Cindy, we follow it up with what’s actually a bit of a rarity: a week dedicated to the sisters actually interacting with one another with Sadie showing her glee at having to live with her older sister once again.

Sadie, in fact, gets quite a lot of play this month by following this week up with another week where she takes Les’ writing lessons to heart.

And she even finishes it up with a Sunday where she and Susan talk about dreams and nightmares.

Now I know that Susan’s expression is meant to convey, once again, Batty’s thoughts on Sadie’s shallowness but I mean really, just look at that. She’s tryng to connect with Susan by relating a similar sort of dream she’s had. Maybe it’s not even shallow. Maybe it says something about Sadie’s own psychology, the drive to maintain her popularity and the pressure of that comes with it represented by having to make sure she’s always looking her best in any situation!

After a good solid month of attention, albeit not in stories of any real significance, it’s not until the beginning of April that Sadie again shows up as the Poetry Club decides to start a literary magazine.

Perhaps Sadie is just being lazy, or maybe she’s just tryng to give Susan a little something since she knows Susan is the one actually into this. You be the judge. The week continues as we get more ruminations on popularity vs. unpopularity.

It would be easy to say that yeah, Sadie was just pulling her leg, but I mean look at all their other interactions so far. There’s no bullying towards Susan so if it was a backhanded means of insulting her it’d be wildly out of character so I’m taking that as an attempt at trying to boost Susan’s confidence a little. That Susan didn’t take it isn’t really Sadie’s fault.

It’s not until summer when Sadie gets another bit of focus with a week dedicated to her engaging in charity work.

By this point we’ve also hit another Funky turning point as August 1994 is when Tom Batiuk stops drawing the strip and penciling duties are taken over by Chuck Ayers.

In September Sadie is feeling rebellious by spitting on The Man and his oppressive dress codes.

She continues her antagonism of everyone’s favorite unfairly maligned auteur the next month by protesting his terrible, horrifically unfair and misguided grading practices.

Les just wants to encourage a student doing good work but Sadie is having none of it.

When doing this I’ve typically attempted to stick to a strip or two I feel gets across the week or stories the best. Really I could have just used one strip from this week and moved on but I mean, come on! How can I ignore Sadie calling Les a loser to his face? This isn’t lovable underdog nerdy high schooler Les Moore, this is smug-for-no-reason adult Les Moore! This one strip alone should be enough to put her near the top of any character ranking chart.

With that CMOA out of the way, Sadie finishes out the year with her sister in a few Black Friday strips that show just how far Cindy’s fallen.

Much like 1994 Sadie gets some early appearances in 1995 too with a Sunday where she butters up her dad for some cash which is followed up later in January by another week with Cindy.

That’s right, we’re well into True Act II territory now where Tom Batiuk can tell the types of hard-hitting adult stories he couldn’t tell in Act I like… balancing a checkbook. A whole week of Cindy lecturing her sister about it.

By this point the sibling rivalry is basically long gone; we’re far removed from the days of physical violence and attempted homicide. In fact, you’d think there’d be a whole lot more done with the two sisters and the way they interact and how their relationship might change — but nope.

In mid-March we return to the literary magazine which, after it’s introduction, had basically been sitting on the backburner for a year. But because this is the point where a lot of the plot threads that Batty had been weaving since 1993 start coming together, that means it was time to finally revist this one.

And of course, the magazine will need a name.

Not for nothing but I was definitely not into poetry. I was more the prime age for Goosebumps books (tangent within a tangent: I love going back through old Blogger Beware entries) and laughing at the off-kilter and slightly edgy humor in issues of Game Players that my 10-year-old self didn’t always completely get. A high brow kid I was not.

Anyway, Sadie’s name is the one that wins out and now that the magazine is all set up it’s time for all (both) members of the literary club to submit their first poems for the debut issue.

Yep, with this we’ve hit the point of the first truly big, truly dramatic and soap operatic story in Funky Winkerbean with Susan’s crush on Les. Her poem will of course cause a stir but what of Sadie’s poem? Likely a biting satire of consumerist culture I’d bet. She’s smart after all.

From there it’s getting the magazine actually put together.

And this just seems like more of Sadie’s flippancy but the very next strip…

Despite her declaring it only a “token offer” Sadie actually stayed and helped Susan put it together. And sure, Sadie isn’t cultured enough to know who Emily Dickenson is, big LOLs and LMAOs all around at her vapidity, but that betrays her apology to Susan. She does think that Susan had a real friend, that the friend died and her reaction is “Oh man, I screwed up…” and apologizing. And again… she didn’t blow Susan off in spite of what the previous strip said.

From here it goes into the the big story about Roberta Blackburn’s moral crusading against the magazine for it’s scandalous content and you’d think this would be a great chance to do more with Sadie, what with her being caught up in all of this. Yeah, you’d think that but Batty has different ideas because this is Les’ story so he, not Sadie and not even Susan, is the one who gets all the attention. The most Sadie can get is a couple of small appearances.

She then drops out of focus for most of the rest of the year until November. Susan had destroyed the tape of Les’ proposal to Lisa and in her guilt had attempted suicide. In November she returns to school and we get a mostly silent week of her walking through the halls, having to deal with the uncomfortable looks everyone else gives her until near the end of the week. Because one person is there for her.

Yep, Sadie’s there and what does she do? Goes over and warmly welcomes Susan back. It’s an unambiguously kind gesture and shows that Sadie is pretty definitively not the character her Act I sister was. And you know what? It’s good storytelling from Batty, not just this strip but the entire Sadie/Susan relationship. They’re friends and it’s easy to see why they are. They spend a decent amout of time together, Sadie never really disrespects or talks down to Susan, she helps Susan out when she could have easily blown her off and she’s the first person to not treat her with any awkwardness whe she returns.

The reader doesn’t need it spelled out, the contents of their strips together allows them to get the gist of it: Sadie, over time, has come to genuinely like and respect Susan and on some level does seem to see her as a friend. But it’s also a source of frustration because it’s something that could have had a lot more done with it because, SPOILER ALERT, this is Sadie’s last appearance in 1995 and from here her appearances are going to drop off dramatically. Sadie and Susan, as much as anyone in this series does, have good chemistry. The seemingly shallow popular girl and the shrinking violet geek is as much of a no brainer pairing of characters as any odd couple can be.

But we run into one of Batty’s big problems as a writer. Sadie is too different from him so the thought of him doing more with her or the pairing of her and Susan seems to be beyond him. Much like every Westview High generation has its Cindy, so too will it have its Funky and Les, the duo of lower totem pole male nerds who are also best friends and will thus receive the lion’s share of what little attention Batty gives to the high school students. For early Act II that spot is filled by Wally and Madison. But it shouldn’t have been and in fact, there was no reason for it to exist at all. Madison was a complete nothing of a character so I feel like there was much more to be mined by having Sadie and Susan as the core duo of the early Act II high schoolers with Wally around to fill the role not of loser but of the Gen X grunge slacker. You know, fitting in with what you’d expect his character to be given his design and interests, and you see how this kind of guy fits in with the friendless academic nerd and the image conscious queen bee.

So I like the relationship between Sadie and Susan as much as I like anything in Funky Winkerbean and I think that it’s one of the strongest parts of the comic. But Batty’s own indifference-turned-dislike of one of the characters means that after this moment it goes absolutely nowhere. It’s emblematic I think of one of his biggest issues when it comes to writing. There’s something easy, something interesting sitting right there and he refuses to even consider it because he’s so laser focused on his own ideas about what he wants that he’s completely blind to it. Sadie welcoming Susan back could have been the start of a long running story arc for the two that explores both characters, the ups and downs of their friendship and the way each changes the other. You know, very basic stuff; a slow pitch softball lobbed right over the plate.

TB claims that Sadie was just a clone of her sister but by this point that is clearly not true. Writers will like to claim that sometimes a character just sort of did things on their own and while that’s obviously not literal, a character can just seem to naturally move in a certain direction as you write them. With Sadie, it’s very clear what the natural direction for her character was but instead of going with it, Batty would stubbornly fight it. It comes off as if he wanted her to be nothing more than the clone, the pale imitation, of her sister that he claims she was because for him that was much easier to write. But that wasn’t what Sadie, removed from the confines of a gag-a-day comic where it’s easy to fit into a more archetypal role for joke purposes and now in a more dramatic strip that requires more nuance and depth from its characters, actually was. Any halfway decent writer would have realized this and thus gone with it.

Instead, Batty will continue trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and it’ll be well over two years before Sadie and Susan interact again. We’ll see that, the rest of Sadie’s high school time and indeed the rest of her time in the strip in general when we finish off this series.