A strange vision from my child-era that returns too often, in the Police Academy cartoon series, which existed, at one point the weapon-enthusiast Tackle Berry participates in a typical mishap and gets a toilet plunger stuck over his mouth, preventing him from explaining the incident

n the next scene he was alone in a dungeon, just wearing underwear, possibly the only time he ever appears sunglassless, with a dorky smile, talking to a rat, and there the vision ends. I had NO CLUE then why imprisonment and your clothing confiscated was appropriate punishment for getting a plunger stuck on your mouth, and I still don’t, but it left in me a lingering fear of irrationally humiliating punitive measures

And I FOUND the episode, and the moment I remembered, but only dubbed into Ukrainian! So I can SEE what happens but not grasp the context, though I may possibly prefer this to the original audio otherwise.

It seems as if the evil special guest police-academite’s master plan is to shoot Tackle-BARRRY, as he pronounces it, with a plunger-launcher, and the good terrible cops arrive to try to prevent it from happening, and once it does happen they give up attempting to help, as if not having a plunger on his face was Barry’s only claim to freedom.

It does reveal that Tackleberry is offscreen placed into a cage on a pickup truck, after being plungered, but still has the plunger while in the cage, plus handcuffs, outside the bars, which meant he was in the cage and no longer a threat before he was cuffed, and therefore probably wasn’t a threat to begin with, and isn’t wearing a police uniform, so there isn’t official regalia to strip him of before sending him to prison

possibly to hell, if this frightful pointy-edged dog-nosed micro demonspawn is any indication, and therefore there is NO reason for his clothes to be off. It makes even LESS sense than my memory! As this video was uploaded in January 2020, I am surprised Vladimir Putin didn’t cite Ukrainian possession of bio-suction based armaments that incapacitate peace-keeping forces, remove their clothes and eventually cast them into the realm of eternal torment when justifying the Russian invasion this year.

The more I review and think about the footage the more it looks like Tackleberry is imprisoned, potentially damned, exclusively because of the plunger. Or worse, because his comrades couldn’t pull the plunger off his mouth. I don’t know why that’s a crime but it isn’t even his fault! Meepwhile nobody is shown escorting him off the roof or putting him in the cage, and the ones who failed to remove the plunger just watch him get driven away in the truck cage. I am left to think they caged Berry themselves after realizing they couldn’t remove the plunger and risked similar measures for continued defiance. But once Berry is in the dungeon with his unholy familiar the plunger is gone and he seems much more content. Maybe it is an enchanted plunger that cannot be removed unless your clothes come off with it. I am really not getting the closure I wanted on this.

Additionally, mostly unrelated, I can see in the little preview, and am un-inclined to view full size, BIG dollar-sign-symbol cash sacks but in at least one shot the animators casually mirrored one. It isn’t a photography error, like the cels were wrong-side-up, or a region-specific matter, like DiC inverting shots of school bus doors in Sailor Moon, since the other $ is normal. It just means the key animators at the east Asian animation studio that would have done most of the work on a show like this weren’t familiar enough with dollar signs to see when one was flagrantly incorrect, and the grunt animators who had to draw all the individual frames and color them in weren’t paid enough to point out a problem like that in the event any of them noticed. In fact the employees who change the signs at the New Haven Connecticut Popeyes and Walgreens can’t even be trusted to put the dollar sign up forwards 100% of the time. It just is not a priority for a lot of people.

I can’t find/am afraid to find photographic evidence, but here is a 2013 dairy queen sign with a backwards N. Not only that, the Ks are upside-down. I can’t believe I don’t have friends with my superhuman powers of fault-finding.

according to my file names , this is the other side of the sign, with the same backwards N! And YOU might say this is more than likely the same side of the sign, so I shall point out that the B is ALSO upside down, but only on ONE side!

ha ha HA! Ha, ha ha HA, ha HA ha, hee ho heh.

Getting back to the main digression, I do not believe the surprise backwards S front and center on a television screen is what traumatized me into fearing the shape and being wary of non-backwards S-es with certain types of curvature and thickness, else that would be what I remember.

It was often hard to track specifics of thin moving shapes like that on blurry cathode ray screens, at least for me, which is why I never noticed the one Whirlwind carries around when running to the right and THROWS at the heroes as a weapon in Captain America and the Avengers even though I played that game every time I saw it, and that was released three years after the Police Academy cartoon supposedly started airing, and hopefully also after it had stopped airing. In fact I never noticed until today that Whirwind isn’t even really carrying the bag so much as having it glued to one of his fists. The backwards bags in the cartoon were bigger but I probably didn’t have cable at the time and potentially saw it with staticy signal distortion over it. This is important.

some things are more important, though.