Review: Corner Gas Animated “Sunny and Share”

Summer solstice has the citizens of Dog River doing crazy things.

Overview:

With the longest day of the year happening Hank fully intends to take part in the annual Summer Solstice celebration on the Ruby’s Café patio. The only problem is, there is not much room and unfortunately for Hank he is left without a chair for yet another year. Wanda has scored herself a spot and is using her time to prepare a psychology paper on groups of people in hot enclosed spaces and how they will tend to become irritated. As she starts to stir the pot to make her paper more interesting everyone catches on and quickly banish her off of the patio. At the same time, Hank finds a loophole by saving everybody else’s chair as they need to get up scoring himself a day in the sun.

Meanwhile, Davis is feeling insecure as his gun is being repaired after he used to stir up a pitcher of juice. During a presentation at a local school, things get worse as the children lose respect for the officer without a weapon. Karen tries to help him by sharing her own gun, but eventually gets fed up and replaces Davis’s pistol with a fake. Brent gets into his own sort of trouble as he begins selling off his favourite frozen treats that his mother makes for him, “mom-sicles.”

Our Take:

I absolutely hate the hot weather. Though as a Canadian I can sympathize that the long months of winter mean that summer solstice is a thing worth celebrating. I mean, up here we only get a few months of nice weather and I can attest to the fact that the summer patios fill up fast. I may not be one of the people that would get there early and spend an entire day soaking up the sun, but it does mean a lot to many Canadians. Hank’s round-about method for securing his day spent on the patio of Ruby’s Café is actually full of genius. Like most of his hair-brained schemes, there is an element of pure logistic intelligence behind it. I could see more than a few people giving this plan a whirl to guarantee themselves a chance to sit on the patio all day.

I also fully agree with Wanda in this episode that the heat mixed with being packed in with a bunch of bodies makes people extra testy. That sounds a lot more like myself. The last thing you want when you are already extremely warm is another person bringing their sweaty warmth into your personal space. Seriously, why do people enjoy these crowded patios so much? There is a reason that humans invented air conditioning.

Besides Wanda and Hank’s completely relatable storylines, I also enjoyed Brent’s dilemma over his love for food and his love for money. His affection for his “mom-sicles” was adorable enough, we don’t get to see the mama’s boy in Brent come out very often. But, the idea that he would sacrifice his love for his mommy-treats for the chance to make some money is very much Brent. The idea that Brent would be the only one to enjoy a frozen gazpacho on a stick was also very characteristic. It was a good storyline for Brent who I feel has been in a minor role for the last couple of episodes.

I really liked that all of these storylines blended together to make one cohesive episode of the citizens of Dog River. Unfortunately, the Davis and Karen plot was completely out of left-field. It had no connection to the rest of the episode and worse yet, didn’t seem to align with the idea that it was summer solstice. Though I may complain that there are too many stories almost every review, at least they typically make an attempt to tie it all together in one way or another. And, while how Davis lost his gun in the first place was genuinely funny, the rest of the storyline felt like more of a distraction from what was happening in the show.

All in all, this was a decent episode of Corner Gas Animated, but not a great one. I was left feeling a bit confused on what the point of the story was, especially Hank’s story which seemed to have led nowhere. The humour and the jokes that we have become accustomed to were all there, but for some reason, there didn’t seem to be much depth to the episode overall. I feel mixed on this review, as I did resonate with the characters and I did think it was clever, it was the ending that left me feeling unfulfilled.