Review: Bigfoot “Catfoot”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
A dark day comes to the town of Swell just as it has every seven years (although the plot synopsis on VRV says “one day a year”): Bigfoot Day. At this time, the Great Pifflejin Tree at the edge of town emits a unique pollen that causes Bigfoot to act in a unique way. Each time he takes on a new persona and each time the town is terrorized by his insanity. Also the times listed are 1975, 1989, and 2003, which means that this series takes place in 2017, apparently? Anyway, the town prepares for the worst destruction imaginable.

And imaginable it is, as this cycle has Bigfoot becoming…a cat. They’ve no idea what hell has been unleashed.

Terry’s son Jimmy attempts to give Catfoot some milk while Mrs. Howzenduffer brings in the giant yarn. Things seem to go well at first UNTIL A ROGUE BALLOON APPROACHES, which sets Catfoot off into town, forcing Terry to risk his life to save his son. Eventually this leads to a King Kong style chase and Catfoot is brought down from a high ledge with tranquilizer darts. The Pifflejin tree seals up again for another seven years, meaning that no one has learned anything, aside from Bigfoot, whose ass is clean but his breath is bad.

OUR TAKE
Bigfoot continues its acceptable run of episodes with another just okay entry in its first season. Having binged the first three episodes prior to this, I have to say that I’m definitely enjoying the woodsy small town aesthetic the show displays, which reminds me of Gravity Falls and how it handled that. The choppy animation is so far pretty charming, keeping in mind Mondo’s tight budget, and the humor is at workable levels of surreal along with the grounded to balance the talking animals with the regular people stuff.

As for this episode, it’s a fun premise on its own, as well as pretty well timed. We’ve gotten to know how Bigfoot interacts with Swell as himself for a handful of episodes now, so this is an alright time to shake that up, as well as look into the different impressions he makes on people like Terry and Jimmy. My problem here is that this situation as it’s described seems completely avoidable. If this all starts with a specific plant’s pollen (that the average citizen knows about) getting into Bigfoot’s system and making him act so randomly, there seem to be a lot of options for making this no longer an issue, especially if they have seven full years in between. They could try moving Bigfoot away from the tree, tearing the tree down, barricading his trailer enough to block out the smell, or even warning him ahead of time so he could do all of that himself, but there’s no mention of anyone trying. And it’s not like you couldn’t just make it a mystery to people why Bigfoot acts this way by simply cutting the exposition a bit, but they didn’t.

To be clear, I’m enjoying this series for the most part, but I have trouble in accepting situations like these more than I have accepting a walking sentient Bigfoot who takes on the mind of a cat living in a forest of talking animals. I hate to keep harping on that point, but it seems so easily fixable in so many ways that I’m really more baffled by it than anything else. I’m more than sure that this isn’t going to be an issue in future episodes and other than this major hole, the episode is perfectly fine like the rest of them. But it’s the most prominent thing in my mind coming out of it, which is a problem.