OH! Mikey
Encyclopedia
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
as Oh! Mikey (オー! マイキー Ō! Maikī), is a series of Japanese
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
comedy sketches
Sketch comedy
A sketch comedy consists of a series of short comedy scenes or vignettes, called "sketches," commonly between one and ten minutes long. Such sketches are performed by a group of comic actors or comedians, either on stage or through an audio and/or visual medium such as broadcasting...
created by Yoshimasa Ishibashi
Yoshimasa Ishibashi
is a video, experimental film and performance artist based in Kyoto, Japan and the leader of the Kyupi Kyupi artist collective, founded in 1996. He has directed work for both art museums, including Kyupi Kyupi performances at the Palais de Tokyo and Tate Modern in 2003, and commercial television...
featuring a family of Americans
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
("The Fuccons") living in metropolitan Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
. The series is notable in that all of the characters are played by mannequin
Mannequin
A mannequin is an often articulated doll used by artists, tailors, dressmakers, and others especially to display or fit clothing...
s with perpetually frozen facial expressions, like the mannequins in the French photographer Bernard Faucon
Bernard Faucon
Bernard Faucon is a French photographer and writer.Faucon was born in Apt, in Provence, southern France. He was taught at the lycée in Apt, then graduated in Philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1973. Until 1977 he worked as a fine art painter, and thereafter discovered photography...
's pictures.
The sketches first aired on the Japanese late night variety show
Variety show
A variety show, also known as variety arts or variety entertainment, is an entertainment made up of a variety of acts, especially musical performances and sketch comedy, and normally introduced by a compère or host. Other types of acts include magic, animal and circus acts, acrobatics, juggling...
Vermilion Pleasure Night
Vermilion Pleasure Night
, or VPN was a short-lived Japanese late-night variety and comedy skit TV show which mixed animated and live-action segments in a fashion similar to SCTV...
, later moving to their own late Saturday night time slot. The collected sketches are also available on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
, with the American ADV Films release being retitled The Fuccons and including English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
dubbed
Dubbing (filmmaking)
Dubbing is the post-production process of recording and replacing voices on a motion picture or television soundtrack subsequent to the original shooting. The term most commonly refers to the substitution of the voices of the actors shown on the screen by those of different performers, who may be...
versions of the episodes in addition to the Japanese-language originals. As of December 2008, ADV has released a complete collection of the series, called "The Fuccons: The Whole Fuccon Show", (previously available as three volumes of The Fuccons plus a "Volume 0" sampler), as well as three volumes of the original Vermillion Pleasure Night (which includes additional Oh! Mikey segments), one of which includes the feature-length "best of" film, The Color of Life in which the Fuccons appear.
The Fuccons currently airs in the US on the G4 network as part of G4's Late Night Peepshow
G4's Late Night Peepshow
G4's Late Night Peepshow is a TV show on G4 that replaced G4's Happy Tree Friends show when the G4 late night programming block, Barbed Wire Biscuit, was renamed to Midnight Spank...
which is broadcast every Monday night at 12:30am.
While the American DVD release claims that Oh! Mikey is so popular in Japan that Fuccons-themed restaurants have been opened across the country, this was later revealed to be untrue.
Overview
Oh! Mikey revolves around the titular Mikey, a young American boy who lives in Japan with his parents James and Barbara Fuccon, James having been recently transferred to Japan. He attends the American School. Episodes run the gamut from the silly to the surreal, sometimes ending with a joke and sometimes not. Episodes invariably end with the characters laughing hysterically, even if the episode ends on a serious note. Occasionally the series diverts from following the Fuccons and instead focuses on a destitute Japanese family, the Kawakitas; these episodes, unlike most of the others in the series, are generally serious in tone.Each sketch runs for around 2 and a half minutes long for a total of 78 episodes. Later installments aired on Vermillion Pleasure Night under the title New Fuccon Family.
Major characters
- Mikey Fuccon - Kind-hearted, impressionable, and somewhat dim-witted, Mikey is the focus of the series. Often put upon by others, he usually seems to address his problems with a smile.
- James and Barbara Fuccon - Mikey's parents. Both American, they met in Japan while James was working as a caretaker and Barbara had an office job -- apparently for the same company. One episode reveals they married after she became pregnant with Mikey, after which they returned to the United States, only to return later when James was transferred to an unspecified job with a Japanese firm; Barbara no longer appears to have a career but has become a stereotypical housewife. The two appear to have a strained relationship at times, and the Anniversary episode reveals that Barbara once caught James in bed with another woman. Several episodes, however, show James hurrying home (almost instantly) in order to help his wife with some dilemma. As the series progresses, James becomes more of a self-centered womanizer (with eyes for everyone from Mikey's tutor to Emily's mom) while Barbara becomes quicker to anger and more paranoid about potentially being replaced. The couple often give contradictory life lessons to their son, and in "Rags to Riches" actually kick Mikey out of the house and consider allowing the Blueberry King, a visiting dignitary, to adopt him.
- Laura - Mikey's cousin, who acts like an adult trapped in a child's body. Perpetually bored and frustrated with being a kid, she is madly in love with Mikey (despite being a close relative), but alternates between being protective of him and being manipulative, continually threatening to leave Japan and return to America. In other episodes she is seen trying to mould Emily into her own image.
- Emily - Mikey's girlfriend, who is learning the ways of manipulation from Laura. Her mother was James' first girlfriend.
- Brown - Emily's older brother, a fledgling filmmaker who has a crush on Barbara Fuccon. He is shown aiding Laura in her schemes to win Mikey's heart (or toy with him, as the case may be).
- Teacher Bob and Bob-Mama - Rarely seen away from his mother, Bob is Mikey's schoolteacher at the American school, who is so shy that he usually only communicates by whispering to his domineering mother (known as Bob-Mama) who interprets. They often get into arguments and Bob-Mama occasionally tries to play match-maker for her son.
- Tony and Charles, The Twins - a pair of BritishUnited KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
students who continually contradict each other and who often come across as rude to the point where Mikey eventually wants nothing to do with them. Their mother occasionally appears alongside her twin sister, with whom she has a similarly contradictory relationship. - Princess Isabella of the Blueberry Kingdom - a rich girl from a faraway land who is featured in a story arcStory arcA story arc is an extended or continuing storyline in episodic storytelling media such as television, comic books, comic strips, boardgames, video games, and in some cases, films. On a television program, for example, the story would unfold over many episodes. In television, the use of the story...
in which Mikey becomes engaged to marry her after the Blueberry King tries to adopt him by paying James and Barbara a large sum of money. - The Kawakitas - the antithesis of the Fuccons, the Kawakitas are a Japanese family (husband, wife, and one son) who used to be successful in the restaurant business, but now the father is unemployed and both parents are alcoholic and perpetually lazy, prone to forget things like their son's birthday. The Kawakita episodes are more serious in tone than most Oh! Mikey episodes and the regular cast of characters do not appear.
- Time Boy - a classmate of Mikey's who is obsessed with keeping to a schedule.
- Tracy - Mikey's sexy 20-something private tutor, who is more interested in teaching Mikey "the lesson of love" than his ABCs.
Partial list of Oh! Mikey sketches
- The Start of Our Life in Japan
- The Teacher's Visit
- Mikey's Cousin
- Mikey Goes Shopping
- Mikey and the Twins
- Mikey's Date
- Mikey and Milk
- Mikey Gets Dumped
- Let's Go on A Picnic
- Mikey and The Ghost
- The Twins and an Alien
- The Lady Tutor