DEFANGED
On a trip to my native Montreal, my 7-year-old son and I scouted out the bookshops in search of Mordecai Richler's "Jacob Two-Two" children's books. Richler, whose work for the older set depicted Montreal's insular and prickly immigrant Jewish community, ticking them off with each manuscript, wrote the Two-Two tomes for his own children, and featured his immediate clan as characters.
My son was eager to find out what the Hooded Fang of "Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang" (1975) might look like. But in the new editions put out by Tundra Books, their covers shouted out anything but the anticipated dread. Staring out at us, too cute to bear, were Jacob Two-Two (so called because, as the youngest and most diminutive of Richler's five kids, he has to say everything twice just to be heard) and wrestling nemesis Fang, and neither look anything like the gnarly characters of artist Fritz Wegner's drawings inside. The reason for the defanged versions, it turns out, is that they are a tie-in for a new animated TV series on the Cartoon Network that we had somehow missed.
The prospect of encountering my literary hero as a cartoon character proved too tantalizing to resist. So when the first nine Two-Twos made it onto DVD, we put in a rush order for the lot, and spent an afternoon hanging with Two-Two, Hooded Fang, Perfectly Loathsome Leo, Miss Sour Pickle and the despicable Principal Greedyguts. And it was not quite what I'd bargained for. For while there is no mistaking the animated Richler, with his wildly disheveled mop, smoked-meat-sated paunch and moth-eaten cardigan, he is way too benign and beneficent to jibe with his reputation as the literary bogeyman who gave his fellow Semites and dyed-in-the-wool Quebecois equal dollops of the Heeby-Jeebies.
To be sure, the show highlights Morty's penchant for late-night noshery and mid-day siestas, his love for professional wrestling and Saturday night hockey. As befitting Canada's best-known mensch of letters, literary allusions and bons mots abound amid the turmoil of the hectic family life recreated on-screen. There is even a scene that has Richler usher young Jacob, who is barely "two times two times two," to a revered dictionary housed atop a pedestal behind the curtains of something that looks very much like a Torah ark, where father and son pursue the definition of the word "diminutive." Such exaltation of the written word stood the Richler lot in good stead, as most of the kids went on to make their own marks as critics, broadcasters, actors and, in the case of Daniel and Emma, novelists.
Absent in the cartoon version are other trademarks and props associated with Richler's life and career. There is no sign of the bottle of Scotch by his electric typewriter - though in one of the books Jacob lands in hot water for telling a reporter that his father said he wrote for whisky money, with any spare change going toward the family upkeep. Gone too are the pungent Schimmelpenink cigarillos, Richler's mumbled asides, and most egregiously, his acerbic, generally spot-on observations. Instead of Richler as Barney Panofsky, the rogue iconoclast of his last novel, "Barney's Version," we get Richler as a portly and Jewish Robert Young of "Father Knows Best." Several times an episode, he comes perilously close to batting his eyelashes.
Morty is not the only one to be cleaned up for kiddy prime time. Jacob, whose British accent (courtesy of his father's 20-year sojourn in London) provides no end of mirth to his fellow classmates in the books, has been stripped of his verbal affectations, the accent transposed to one of the Richler neighbors instead. The best accents, invariably, go to the walk-ons, including an Irish cop, a pest exterminator who could be French Canadian, German or maybe Serb, and Jacob's plucky little Quebecoise pal Rene, who looks and sounds like a pint-sized Edith Piaf.
There is certainly no mistaking the family's Jewish affiliations. The show even boasts a Yiddish-accented Zeide culled, no doubt, from the same animated Central Casting as the one used by "Rugrats."
For me, however, the show's charms derive from its sense of place - the view of the Port of Montreal from Jacob's attic bedroom, the hockey games at the old Montreal Forum, the furious after-school snowball fights, and the occasional interrogative "eh?" I can't wait till they come out with the action figure.
Sheli Teitelbaum