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popculturebuffet · 10 months ago

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Pirate Month III: We Lost Our Gold (Comission by WeirdKev27)

Arrgh all you happy swabs and welcome back to PIrate MOnth, our cleebration of everything piraty. eeyyyarrgh.

We're almost at the end and it's time for the return of an institution. Muppet Madness is back... and we've dropped the monthly as sometimes there's simply something else I want to do and trying to force it wasn't working. Thankfully we've come back with a whopper We Lost Our Gold

We Lost Our Gold is a 2010 puppet series by creators Vincent Bova and Damien Eckhardt-Jacobi, two pupeeteers with more than a little muppet energy to them. The two had previously made, and were still making at the time of this series Glove and Boots, another youtube show about a red muppet and his beaver pal covering various topics. I'd heard of Glove and Boots going into this but wasn't told it was by the same guys

Glove and Boots is one I'd actually considered covering on here and plan to now in 2025 in some form, and you can smell their hallmarks: the human puppets are the same they used, Mulligan of WLOG uses the same voice as Mario and has about the same personality, and Mario and Fava even guest star in episode 2.

The series was brought out of a need for promotoin: The two pupetteers wanted to draw more eyes to their work so they came up with a zany scheme I love: they took out ten thousand dollars in us coins, buired that heavy amount of money in a treasure chest, put a skull and crowbones on it and left clues. Then they shot 8 shorts starring a group of hapless pirates who lost the chest, seeding in clues to the chest. It's one of the most audacious stunts i've seen and deserves praise. They buired in in New York, made that clear and then... no one found it.

Yeah while many came close no one quite put the clues together, some deriding it as fake.. which it very much wasn't but is understandable given how hoax filled the internet is.. though given they SHOWED the chest at a few points and how hard it'd be to photoshop 10,000 us coins, I think it was safe to assume they were on the level and they were.

They eventually had to give up on it three years later for very understandable real life reasons: Hurrican Sandy ripped thorugh new york, tearing up the landscape and thus not only destroying their clues but leaving new york in a very bad state. So in a truly selfless and kind act they dug up the heavy treasure chest (A NY TIMes article covering it had them remakr on being remidned how heavy that much coin is) , and donating it all to disaster relief. It's a truly wild and heartfelt story and I love it.

So the question is how are the shorts themselves, more than a decade later and with the big reason for their existing, the treasure hunt long over? Jump down under the cut with me to find out

The Crew: WLOG follows four pirates and a parrot whose just kinda there to piss off the captain who , as the title suggests lost their gold and are trying to find it they are

The Captain: No name given ala Pirates!. A salty old cus with a giant mangy beard that covers his body half the time, and is liable to snap at the bulk of his crew, even if he cares for 2/3 of them. He's determined to keep the knowledge secret keep it safe and frustrated by his crew's deep well of incompetence minus one member.

Mulligan: A blonde pirate, a goof off whose deal is annoying the piss out of the captain and wanting to go up in the crows nest. Why isn't he allowed up there? Simple the captain dosen't want him to be happy and neither do I so I can undrestand.

Crothers: An injury prone dum dum. Not a bad guy but very clumsy and loud.

Black Tom: A ninja. None of the other pirates realize this

Yeah as you can kinda guess the crew's a bit one note: the captain's the constantly pissed off straight man, Muligan the annoying dumbass, Crothers the big ole dumbass, and Black Tom is a ninja who speaks in subtitles but dosen't really speak japanese far as I can tell , which was accpetable at the time for reasons i'm not aware of.

It's the series main weakness: the cast is fairly thin and with 7 decently sized shorts and one 30 second one, the gimmicks wear on you quick. There's just not enough comedic depth in any of these guys to justify an 8 episode series. Thankfully the series compensates in other ways as it goes on as we sift through this pile of episodes

So speaking of the pile

Ye Episodes

The Beggining: This is the weakest episode. It has a good gag or two: Black tom being the reason cruthers is missing an eye in flashback and the pirate captain getting SO tired of mullins interrupting his flashbacks "I'm not even going to wast a flashback on ye" but it's just... broing. It's not helped Mullins is at his most annoying here, working better as a foil to the captain in other episodes but here just popping in with a pretty lame joke about swapping letters around.

The Chase: This one's okay as the stuff on deck is kinda entertaining. it has a very dated bit spoofing anime animation that feels out of date even for when this came out. The ships under attack and naturally sinks

The Larry King: The best episode of the 8, and a fun one. It also has Mario and Fava in it claming the gold is actually theres, which in a joke I didn't see coming and love, it absolutely was. It's helped by the format: Larry king is interviewing the pirates and glove and boots , leading to some fun chaos as the captain tries to keep them from dropping clues, Mario bullshits, Fava interrupts then goes along with it, and Black Tom sits down with his good friend larry king. This was more lik eit

The Black Tom: A one minute short soley for the clues.

THE WPPPT: This one suffers from the same issu eof the first, dragging in places but unlike it has some great gags to it as the pirates play poker. The parody of the poker obession at the time has aged like fine milk on a sidewalk and it highlights an issue of the show at tims: some bits... just feel very dated in comparison to glove and boots. GAB had pop culture refrences, but the refrences here very late to early 2000's: celebrity poker, larry king still being around, the pirate craze at the time, pirates vs ninjas, all things long left buried by the zeigeist.

The Monkey Buisness: A really fun one as a monkey on an island reads a comic about our heroes exploits: i'ts really fun to see these goofy pirates drawn all muscular and realistic in a seroius story.. then see the style used for their usual nonsense. Really great. It's not a totally new concept but it's unexpected and fun.

The Ghost STory: This one is fine Not really much to say an da fun concept of telling ghost stories

The Final Episode: My second faviorite: the pirate captain recons with this quest, Crothers gets turned into a parrot and Mulligan finally gets to go up in the crows nest. It's an oddly moving finale too as Crothers dies in the previous episode, and posses the parrot and after freeing him from a demon they accidnetly summon is stuck there. But the Pirate Captain accepts it because he's his friend and lets go of the treasure, a suprisingly touching ending to a throughly silly series.

So overally.. I found the series.. okay. It has some good jokes, some great concepts but the core cast is fairly weak, making the ballance of the show wonky and th efirst half is bogged down by some topical refrences. The final three epiosdes are really good, as is the larry king.

The shorts main problem is pacing: the having to sneak in clues combined with the format mean it's not quite as snappy as glove and boots. And I hate to keep comparing them but by this point glove and boots existed. THey knew how to do this and I belivie could've done better. I don't feel they half assed it: the puppets themselves look great, really nice felt and the performances are great.. but the core of the series is a bunch of characters I just don't care about or find all that funny and it tempers the experince for me. It really dosen't help coming off reading the second pirates book, as that book knew how to have fairly thin characters but manage them well with wacky shenanigans. Here their trying to do a character based comedy at atimes with characters who don't fit it. It works best with stuff like the larry king or the monkey buisness where the weird scenario allows them to do fun stuff with the characters and format.

I will be positive here: while these shorts didn't grab me, the early glove and boots stuff around the same time was better, they'd learn from it and as glove and boots went it'd be awesome. These are two talented men who created a silly pirate contest then used the money for said contest to help people. I wish them luck in whatever their doing now after youtube left them off and thank them for this fun day. WELOSTOURGOLD isn't the best.. but it wasn't a bad way to spend an hour. Thanks for reading

#we lost our gold #glove and boots #muppets #puppetry #pirates #pirate month

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