First up, let us clear up a little confusion. The Netflix sleeve this thing came is cites it as the last Pippi Longstocking movie in the series…I’m counting it as the second, following both the almighty Wikipedia, as well as the logic which dictates the second film released would coincide with the second “Pippi Longstocking” novel. The source of this confusion, of course, is how the Pippi pictures were produced – first as a TV series in 1969 and 1970, then released theatrically in the U.S. over some vague period of time in the following half decade. Well, curse it all, this may have been put out second or last or whenever in the U.S., but I’m pretty sure those Swedes made it second – and that’s what counts…Right?
Whatever, the movie’s copyright is 1975, so…Everyone’s right!
Actually, the opening scenes of Pippi Goes on Board feature the entire closing sequence of Pippi Longstocking, providing us the entire emotional arc of that flick, no matter how little it affects the proceedings this time around. Still, it turns a 75 minute movie into a 79 minute movie, and stretches your 13 TV episodes a bit more over four movies.
Now, Pippi Goes on Board was made concurrently with Pippi Longstocking, so there’s no change in cast, crew, or reason for its existence. Just refer to yesterday’s post. Where Pippi Goes on Board differs is in somehow being even more plotless than its predecessor, if you buy that. There is no overarching story, no conflict, and 92.35% of the time no apparent connection from one short scene to another. If you asked me to do so, I could possibly identify three separate television episodes encased here, but they’d seem unmotivated by television standards as well. And as the first sequel, there is the natural reduction of novelty value which drove the original; this is just 79 minutes of wheel-spinning.
Also, in the whole of Pippie Goes on Board, Pippi never goes on board anything.
Rather than struggle to discuss the proceedings, it shall be simplest to merely relate them as they happen. This horribly re-edited Swedish TV series turned U.S. movie deserves no less…
Pippi Longstocking (Inger Nilsson) sits alone at home, pondering what she shall do next. She never does quite figure that one out.
Those nameless crooks (Hans Clerin and Paul Esser, I think) escape from prison yet again, for as little impact as they had last time.
Pippi’s best friends, siblings Annika and Tommy (Maria Persson and Pär Sundberg), greet her. She proposes they all take “crumulous pills,” which will keep them children forever. Pippi’s a pusher, and even a closet druid, as the scene further proves. One minor film thread becomes apparent here: Pippi frequently does things which are highly inadvisable (especially for a kid’s film). Here it’s taking drugs.
Pippi’s inexplicably red footprints walk into town, causing feckless cops Kling and Klang (Ulf G. Johnsson and Göthe Grefbo) to fear a serial murderer. (Kid’s film.)
Pippi hassles a shopkeep about her anti-freckle bias.
The siblings’ father shows them how to play darts. Then Pippi comes along and plays darts.
The children fly kites at the lake. Pippi resumes her “don’t do this at home, kids” habit, and jumps off a cliff. She jumps off a cliff! To see if she can fly! Bad influence! I’d oppose such action more so, except I feel any real children dumb enough to follow Pippi’s obviously fictional example here would be doing Darwin’s good work. And stop editing the violence out of the Looney Tunes, everyone!
Pippi floats twigs in the stream when she sees the crooks. They ask for gold, but she instead floats them things like pancakes, eggs, and whatever.
Pippi plays darts again.
The three children loiter uselessly when a random little girl arrives to ask about her father’s whereabouts. No one knows, so she skips off idly. This is the first and last we’ll ever hear about this. Still, it killed like 30 seconds.
At home alone, Pippi lights candles and eats fruits.
Tommy and Annika arrive at Pippi’s to celebrate her birthday. Pippi practices a reverse gift-giving policy, giving her pals presents rather than receiving. Then she clears the dinner table in the laziest way possible – I think I could learn something from her.
The children invade Pippi’s attic, Annika the worrywart terrified of ghosts (she’ll make a terrible, psychologically-scarred adult). They find no ghosts, but instead an enormous cache of loaded pistols. Again playing the übermensch/bad influence, Pippi lets the other children fire the firearms wildly, nearly killing Pippi’s pet horse and monkey.
Apropos of nothing, Tommy announces his parents are out of town and they are being babysat by town prude, Fröken Prysselius (Margot Trooger). They may not get to play with Pippi for a while.
Well, that didn’t matter, ‘cause here they are fishing at the lake. Pippi discovers a submerged canoe underwater and salvages it, with intent to fix it up.
This next section is the most coherent thought in the film so far – Several whole minutes concerning the kids’ fixing the canoe, sailing it out to a Huck Finn island in the middle of the lake, living there for a bit, then going home. Out here, the children all skip aimlessly around the campfire in a strange parody of misremembered childhood. Then they sing campfire songs, and seeing as they’re Swedish, these songs all concern alcohol and death.
The following morning, before going home, Pippi momentarily hides the canoe from her best friends for no reason, prompting depressive Annika to lament her own imminent death. Nice girl! There’s something about this whole impromptu camping session which strikes me as another bad influence.
Prysselius sings an ear-rapingly vomitous Swedish version of “Twinkle Twinkle” on the piano.
The children wander the forest roads with no direction or focus, as though the director just wasn’t around that day. Here I realize I’ve spent the last half hour watching children play vaguely, and I shall do so for another hour still. Why am I doing this to myself?
Pippi, struggling to outdo her former atrocities, briefly considers kidnapping the mayor and holding him for ransom. Her spurious logic dictates this is allowable, since the mayor is on the floor. Finders keepers is actually cited as legal precedent. Lucky for this free-range mayor, instead Pippi merely feeds him celery. (What the?!)
Suffering from Swedish ennui, Tommy and Annika grow bored of Pippi, movie still not half over. Left to her own devices, Pippi decides her monkey and horse are a married duke and duchess, respectively, irrespective that they’re both dudes. She briefly struggles to enact interspecies romance. (Kid’s film.)
One of the crooks pretends to be an organ grinder. I usually do that at night.
Tommy and Annika, growing tired even of ennui, return to see Pippi. Pippi is now disguised as a psychotic old lady, and tells them Pippi has gone to the moon. They believe her. Then Pippi reveals herself, a truly pants-soiling image of hideous drag-queenery that – Damn it, I forgot to screen cap that! Aw well, consider yourself lucky.
Pippi skips around her house a little, singing a self-promoting song about herself. Increasingly, Pippi is taking to speaking in the third person, which isn’t cute.
The carnival is in town, meaning it’s time for another connected series of vignettes, all centered around the carnival. Here they are:
Kling and Klang sneak onto the carnival rides ahead of schedule, then get dizzy. The town’s children accuse them of midday public drunkenness.
Some weirdos perform on the trampoline.
Pippi wins at a can toss game. She also wins at the strength bell.
Pippi wrestles the traveling carnie strongman…and wins. Suddenly acting the responsible role model (possibly because it’s a different episode now), she lets the strongman have her winnings.
In a scene which has absolutely no place in a children’s film (though I’m not complaining), a hot Swedish blonde does a sexy stripper dance with a snake before an audience of pre-teens. Pippi throws one of the deadly poison snakes around the audience, going right back to “bad influence” mode.
For no reason, Kling and Klang are hit with pies.
Well, that’s it for the carnival sequence. And now on to the final episode, hastily glommed onto this ostensible theatrical film – the winter episode. At least this one has a connecting theme: Christmas.
Tommy and Annika crow to Pippi about how pleased they are about the upcoming Christmas vacation. Pippi, ever the sound logician, laments how she, as a jobless, unschooled lay-about, has no “vacation.” Thus she shall get one, by going to school.
Pippi preps for school the only way she knows how – by going home and washing the dishes…Okay.
Then I see something I never thought I would – Pippi Longstocking steps foot inside a school building. I rather expected something a bit more like Damien’s first communion from The Omen, but rather Pippi merely gets one better on that high-fallutin’ schoolmarm, what with her book learnin’ both them there maths and alphabets. Specifically, and strangely, Pippi is loudly opposed to Plato – which personally offends me.
Completely running rampage, Pippi draws her horse on the wall, then just walks out, ‘cause to hell with school. The poor, exasperated teacher has her remaining students sings a nice new German song (read: the dubbers didn’t want to translate this). Behold throngs of blonde youths singing “Lang Phasenscheiße!,” or whatever.
Pippi makes the largest snowball in the whole wide world. The crooks, in a surprise moment of competence, have managed to steal Pippi’s chest full of gold, when they make the relatively-shortsighted decision to crow to Pippi about this. Thus Pippi bowls them over with her snowball, Japanese game show style. Didn’t see that coming!
Pippi bakes cookies while singing of herself in the third person.
Pippi makes homemade ice skates out of knives. Hey kids, do that!
Surely enduring some sort of brain aneurysm, Pippi hangs Christmas gifts all over a tree.
The filmmakers suddenly grow aware that there are only 10 minutes left, and there’s been less meat in this thing than in a McDonalds sandwich. As with the first, that means we gotta suddenly force-feed some healthy dollops of Swedish sorrow onto the proceedings, with Pippi alone at home on Christmas Eve. To break that up a little, we also see Annika acting sad, but that’s just her regular mood. And sure, being alone on Christmas is sorrowful, but this movie sort of lost the benefit of the doubt with me some 48 minutes back.
But – Oh joy! – here come the town children, with an incredibly unsurprising surprise for Pippi. They’ve remembered her, and have arrived bearing fire and trumpets – yup. Pippi wisely advises these dozens of children climb in the tree at the same time to retrieve the gifts, while she toots her own horn (the trumpet she’s just been given). The movie ends with a freeze frame of this confused, directionless child – Oh, way to rip off The 400 Blows at the last minute there!
This movie was about nothing, and there’s nothing more to say about it. Besides, I gotta save something for the final two.
Related posts:
• No. 1 Pippi Longstocking (1969)
• No. 3 Pippi in the South Seas (1970)
• No. 4 Pippi on the Run (1970)
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