“Mammy Dearest”/”Cats in the Cradle”

My adapter’s broken. Again. So for the time being, these reviews will be pretty ugly (visually) and pretty damn brief until I get my adapter.

“Mammy Dearest”
After watching this travesty of an episode again, I realize that the (other) weakness in this episode is the bombardment of ideas and the lack of connection between them. Whitley decides to dictate to the others how to perform her ceremony. Whitley decides to (illogically) include mammy in her show and chastize Lena for not reading slave journals she should have been reading herself. Kim gets upset because despite a well-publicized article in Ebony magazine about Charnele Brown’s weight loss, she thinks she is a mammy. Mr. Gaines then supports an illogical basis on why mammy is important before standing up to Kim after Dwayne and Ron do some snaps. Cut to Lena somehow finding out about the dozens in one of the archivial books. Then (the best part of the episode) Kim quits Whitley’s monstrosity. Whitley meets up with Dwayne (this was mandatory) before discovering her family owned slaves. Then Whitley goes on a guilt trip for the sins of her “great-great-great granddaddy Jeremiah.” Gaines goes back to his first theories of mammy to make Kim, a victim of ignorant school officials calling her African princess outfit an aunt Jemima outfit, feel better (suggesting that Kim has always been overweight, but even this is a bit contrived). Finally Gaines helps Whitley get over her guilt trip and we have to endure a very factually inaccurate mock minstrel show/African dance segement (courtesy of Debbie Allen. If you ever wonder how her Oscar show dances must’ve felt like back in the day, look at this episode–you’ll know the reason why) where everything is magically healed except for Dwayne and Whitley’s relationship, which thankfully did heal (in a horrendous manner, but it did heal).
When I was watching this, none of these story elements did not seem to make sense to me–probably because the theme of race was too broad and was easily too solved by Berenbeim.

“Cats in the Cradle”
And the silver spoon, something something something and the man on the moon…
Okay, this is the episode where Ron, insta-bookie galore, bets money on a Hillman/Virginia A&M game (BTW, there is no A&M school in Virginia, just a buncha Yahoos, Turkeys, Pirates and two possibly corrupt religious right schools…and Sweet Briar University [for women!]) and then swindles three white dudes out of their money when he hears Hillman would win the football game because the A&M quarterback is sick. Okay, I take “three” back automatically–we all know Dean Cain is 1/4 Japanese (his last name before his mother remarried was Tanaka), so it’s two white dudes and a quarter-Japanese guy. Cain’s character, Eddie, and his equally racist buddy J.C. (the initials of…Jake Carpenter!), decide to put the word NIGGER in black spray paint on Ron’s already ugly Geo, the one that he supposedly lost because he refused to follow his father’s footsteps and become a car dealer. (Jake, played by Richard Murphy, is probably the most racially tolerant of the three, he’s just scared.) Unfortunately, they only get NI on the car. (Later somebody, possibly a stagehand, puts gger on the car.) A fight ensues between Dwayne, Ron and the two white dudes and a quarter-Japanese guy. They all end up in the stadium jail where the sitcom device of retelling a story in a character’s point of view is used…again. (One example of this is the Good Times episode where the Evans’ ugly couch is burned and we have to see the same story four different times in four different viewpoints until we find out that Penny burned the couch and subsequently put out the fire. In this ADW episode, you see the story once and two retellings, thank God. This is the only truly weak part of the script.) Of course, Ron, Dwayne, the two white dudes and a quarter-Japanese guy endure punishment from Ernie Sabella’s stadium-cop dude until the truth is revealed and J.C. the Stoned (hold on) and the quarter-Japanese dude have to paint buildings at Hillman…like Dwayne and Ron did in the first season.
The racial stereotypes are much more defined here than they were in that mess that should NOT had gotten Berenbeim a promotion “Mammy Dearest,” and the humor is much more memorable too: Whitley’s “Go Hillman, go Hillman” comment, the scalping joke (The role of the Native American scalper was played by G. Adam Gifford), the klepto A&M wolf mascot (Wayne Federman). Dawnn Lewis’ Star Spangled Banner is okay as well, but it’s a bit oversung (leading to J.C. the Stoned’s comment “I hate it when they (African-Americans) butcher the National Anthem”).
Overall the script is well written and the direction is wonderful–kudos to Gary H. Miller for writing this script and Peter Werner for directing. The one performance I didn’t like, however, was Carpenter’s–he sounds like he’s stoned, not intimidating, and I bet that if you had a five-year-old in the script of the show, the five-year-old could have beat J.C.’s ass. I also thought Ernie Sabella’s accent was a bit stong, but keep in mind his character did march with King in one of his Southern marches, so the accent could work in Virginia. And Jasmine Guy could have taken some pointers from Murphy–his Southern accent sounds so much more genuine for someone in Virginia than that destruction of a Georgian Southern accent she used for Whitley.

Next up: Prisoner of Love
Sadly, I cannot review “Bedroom at the Top” due to the lack of videotape I might have…I mean, I get paid tomorrow, I can buy a new one…