Review: Uncle Grandpa ‘Mystery Noise’

Spoilers Below

Uncle Grandpa and the gang are all set for their sleepover dream night. They hurry into the dream fort and say their goodnights. Just as they’re about to fall asleep, they hear a noise that sounds like Donald Duck blowing chunks. They try to disregard it, but it just keeps happening. They toss and turn until, finally, they just can’t take it anymore. Uncle Grandpa, Mr. Gus, Pizza Steve, Giant Realistic Flying Tiger, and Belly Bag all snap, and decide to try to figure out where the noise is coming from.

In their delirious desperation, they rip the RV apart. When that doesn’t stop the noise, they start to turn on each other; pointing fingers about who’s been making the noise. Pizza Steve is especially psychotic-looking, because he’s been losing out on “valuable handsome gentleman sleep.” In an epic pillow fight, chock full of slow-motion anime action shots, Uncle Grandpa is the last man standing; having made the rest of the gang vanish into thin air with each pillow strike. The RV was destroyed. His friends had been vanquished. Finally, he stopped the noise, or so he thought. The obnoxious squawk rings his bell once again. At this point, he’s so sleep-deprived that he thinks he’s been making the noise the entire time, so he knocks himself out.

When he wakes up, everything is back to normal. The RV isn’t destroyed, and everyone is laying in bed. It turns out that they were all having the same dream, and the noise they had been hearing was their breakfast bird letting them know that breakfast was ready. With one more little twist at the end, the mystery of the mystery noise is solved.

The funny thing about Uncle Grandpa is that I always expect to hate it, but wind up being proven wrong. Maybe the show’s writers are sweating bullets trying to be clever, but it definitely doesn’t seem like it. They have a good formula going, and the characters compliment each other well. I know this comparison will be lost on Uncle Grandpa’s target audience, but there was a lot of animation in tonight’s episode that was very reminiscent of Ren and Stimpy.  There was no shortage of comical nonsense and witty one-liners; like when Uncle Grandpa said something like “Wars don’t determine who’s right. They determine who’s left.” As I’ve said before, Pizza Steve is definitely my favorite character. From this point forward, I will refer to sleep as handsome gentleman sleep, which I definitely need right now. Hopefully my dreams are much less chaotic and busy. This episode doesn’t quite get the recommended eight hours of sleep, but it comes close with a score of