Review: Amphibia “Little Frogtown; Hopping Mall”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In “Little Frogtown”, Hop Pop leaves the kids to wait in line for an arcade while he visits Sal, an old friend from Wurtwood who went on to make it big making sandwiches. When Sal’s sandwich shop appears to ransacked, Hop Pop goes on a film noire style investigation to search for him. After an extensive search through Newtopia’s upper echelon of the social class, he eventually finds a factory that seems to be replicating Sal’s special sauce…which turns out to be run by Sal himself! Seems that selling sandwiches wasn’t as profitable as he initially thought, so he pivoted his business to just selling the sauce. With that cleared up, Hop Pop catches up with his friend before heading back to his kids. Also he might have killed a man.

Later, in “Hopping Mall”, Anne, Sprig, and Holly are given a short leash with their allowance for souvenirs but are encouraged to haggle to try and get better deals. Polly takes to this pretty easily, getting a shiny new bucket, but Anne is on the hunt for a specially picked gift for her mother, who is probably worried sick about her back home. She eventually finds the perfect potential gift, but it can only be won in a shopping cart derby contest, with her main competitor being a muscular newt mother named Pricilla the Killa and her daughter Pearl. Anne ends up being able to exploit Pricilla’s tail injury to get the win, but decides to let Pricilla have the prize when she saves Polly from getting run over and because Pricilla’s mother actually made it before she died. In exchange, Pearl gives Anne a hand-made butterfly that is just like what her mom would want. That night, Anne and Sprig bond over their moms, with Anne missing her mother greatly while Sprig barely knowing his and Polly’s before she died, wondering if he can even miss someone he never met.

OUR TAKE

So…did Hop Pop kill someone?

But seriously, while this episode may have been a 7 for most of it, that last scene was plenty to bump it up to an 8. Amphibia has definitely shown itself to be powered by some very quick tempo but incredibly sharp humor, but this makes its occasional steps into the more heartfelt moments all the more effective. Last season’s finale fight between Anne and Sasha is undoubtedly one of the entire show’s highlights, so I have little doubt this tender moment between Anne and Sprig will go overlooked. Anne’s feelings about missing her life on Earth has been pretty consistently brought up, though her missing her mother specifically hasn’t been as prevalent. Not to say that there’s been any implication that they were at odds any more than any mother and daughter, but this is probably the first time that things have gone into this much detail or shown how much not seeing her mother is weighing on Anne. It’s also the first time we’ve had ANY mention of Sprig and Holly’s mother, who we now know died early in their lives. There’s always been this sort of subtle implication about the two of them being orphans, which hasn’t totally been confirmed yet, but it’s still a well timed and heartfelt step onto the topic that is sure to be one of this season’s best moments.

As for the rest of the episode, it’s once again Amphibia living up to its usual standards of both pacing and comedy, which is to say its pretty dang good. However, I have to say, when I heard the title was going to be “Little Frogtown”, my mind didn’t immediately go towards an homage to the 1974 Roman Polanski film. Actually my first thought was that this would be further exploration into topics that Brad Neely might see as worth exploring with his own cultural experiences by seeing a Wurtwood-esque recreation within Newtopia that put Frog culture into a bit of an oversimplification. I’m not exactly disappointed we DIDN’T get that in the end, as I wasn’t exactly sure what they would do with that sort of topic anyway, and that segment turned out to be just fine as it was, but I guess it goes to show how this show is managing to get me thinking about other interesting ideas based on what we’ve seen so far. Next week looks to be the end of the first half of this season, followed by a month break, so hopefully this lives up to what I liked about this point back in the first season too.