The Journal (Hey Arnold Season 5 Episode 19) - 'Toon Reviews 34

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The Journal

All my time of reviewing Hey Arnold has finally come to the last produced episode of the original series.  Its subject is one worthy of a near hour-long runtime with a lot of interesting background to explore on featured characters and the emotional effects their absence has on Arnold.  These characters are his long lost parents, the perfect people to give the impression that for how well he leads his life, there’s a deeper emotional layer to Arnold’s persona.  It’s certainly not common for someone to be abandoned by their own parents at a young age, so Arnold dealing with this is believably met with some resentment.  However, this story has an interesting way of showing that even with such somber circumstances, situations like this can have capacity for understanding, and if fate allows, hope.

On the anniversary of when they left, Arnold is easily at his most depressed. He has dreams of the his parents abandoning him for an adventure, wants to be alone as all his friends go out for fun, and no one except his grandparents understand how he feels.  I personally may never understand how he feels since I never faced parental abandonment, but what Arnold expresses over this matter feels believable to people who have faced that.  The emphasis on loneliness, being left out of traditional family dynamics, and fear of possible tragedies is all too real. You can’t help but share his pain in being without major parts of his family especially since what happened to them is already a huge mystery by nature. 

After all these years, Arnold is just about ready to give up hope of his parents ever coming back, let alone finding out what happened to them.  Putting away the trademark little blue hat they got him further demonstrates the magnitude of this shift in mindset.  This is when the point of low points opening up the best forms of healing possible becomes known.  Up in the attic, Arnold discovers a major key to all answers regarding all mysteries of his parents, a journal belonging to his father.  As a result, the entire showing of turmoil over Arnold’s missing parents makes for a strong prologue to a grand in-depth look at the lives of this cast’s most mysterious characters.

There’s solid thought gone into the entire story of Arnold’s parents, Miles and Stella.  Their first meeting and occupations of humanitarians to the jungle village of San Lorenzo was seen before, but it was a simplistic showing without many details.  The journal holds those very details and the resulting story delivers with exciting adventures, an exotic setting, and above all, genuine chemistry from the featured couple.  Miles and Stella’s love for each other is the heart of every story the journey holds.  Every jungle mission and dangerous pastime activity is big on intensity, but the standout element of is how much they love each other. 

In fact, these moments and more within the journal shape the progress in both their lives while still keeping things exciting.  The jungle adventures highlight their jobs and show how they grew closer as a couple with underlying action and danger suitable for the setting and the capable characters.  The feel and tone of the setting even applies to simpler moments that officially brought them together.  Their wedding came with a totally unexpected earthquake, and their honeymoon involved a cable car rescue that almost smashed them into a mountain.  No matter how crazy, or painful in Miles’ case, their lives in the jungle got, their love appears to have been very genuine, remaining strong as ever.  It’s healthy, pleasing to watch, and all around an organically formed romance put to media. 

Just as strong as Miles and Stella’s relationship, is one formed between a tribe of people who played a huge role in their adventures.  They’re simply described as the Green-Eyed People who are never fully seen nor do they reveal the city they live in.  However, they showed clear trust in Miles and Stella, working in mysterious ways to keep them alive during jungle adventures.  As a consolation, Miles and Stella also returned their favors in a multitude of ways.  Missions for them include stopping at nothing to retrieve their sacred artifacts or find a cure for a deadly sleeping sickness.  Like other moments, they’re highlighted by memorable jungle hunts for disease cures and encounters with dangerous fiends to the tribe. 

However, the biggest highlight of the journal is saved for later, bringing together everything great about Miles and Stella as a couple, and their tie to the Green-Eyed People.  It's the last phase of the couple’s life together when it was discovered that they were going to have Arnold.  This is where both groups work together just as the story doesn’t hold back with its intensity.  With Stella enduring the pains of going into labor, nature unleashed its fury with a frightening volcanic eruption bringing huge lava flows and panicking animals.  She and Miles were only able to get to safety with the Green Eyed People setting up a temple just for them at that moment.  In fact, the moment turns out to be perfect with all of the crazy natural disasters stopping just as Arnold is born.  Whether there’s something special about Arnold or this is a work of grand scale staging, there’s certainly no birth as exciting as Arnold’s, that’s for sure. 

Out of this moment are instances showing how important being good parents to Arnold was to Miles and Stella, selling them as loving individuals.  Even in this role, dangers still happened as what tends to happen when caring for infants.  The jungle was obviously not right for baby Arnold to grow up in, prompting a move to the city as we know it.  In the city however, Arnold would still find himself in serious harm.  One thing Miles writes in the journal is especially meaningful. Out of all the adventures he and Stella went on, none of them were more frightening than seeing their baby son on top of a slide.  For all their awesomeness and adventurous spirit, they were clearly caring people first.  You can’t get more genuine love than this, despite what happened later.

There truly is a lot to love about what unfolds in this journal.  The intense moments from the jungle adventures and really Miles and Stella’s life together in general put it over the top when it comes to the series.  However, their love for each other and their newborn son is what makes the adventures and everything that happens all the more endearing.  There’s even solid comedy from Grandpa’s occasional self-promoting narration and Grandma’s off-the-wall comments while listening, adding levity to all drama.  Nevertheless, the last part of the journal is treated with the utmost respect.  It answers the question for exactly why Miles and Stella chose to leave Arnold especially with how much they love him.  The depths of the mission they were assigned are revealed here, all relating to another nasty outbreak of the sleeping sickness on the Green Eyed People.  Knowing all the good this mysterious civilization did for Miles and Stella, it becomes perfectly acceptable that they’d decide to go and help.  Plus, they’re the reason Arnold even had a safe birth.  It’s also acceptable with the fact that Arnold now knows how important the Green Eyed People were to his parents.  It doesn’t make the scene of their departure any less emotional though.  Plus, this new sense of understanding allows this entire special to continue to build upon itself with one monumental moment after another. 

Just when you think things can't get any bigger, a monumental comes at the very end as well when Arnold finds a hidden page of a map of where his parents were going to go.  That’s the best hope for a possible happy outcome for this sad event.  After such an exciting story of the lives of an extraordinary couple, with so much heart at that, a key to finding them is a very welcome sight.  Now, for the longest time this ending seemed to go to waste with the intended continuation not getting a chance to be made.  You might say that going without closure staring the audience right in the face is much like Arnold going much of his life without his parents.  For both sakes, it’s great to know fate was on both sides, especially given the greatness of the story of this journal.

The main series goes out with a total bang with this special.  The subject is huge enough to warrant so much attention, the staging of the story is huge and memorable, and the potential for the future is very pleasing.  All the strengths of Hey Arnold have come to this, and even more impressively, something even bigger is yet to come…

A+

The Ranking

1.      The Journal

2.      Arnold Visits Arnie

3.      Chocolate Boy

4.      Married

5.      Beaned

6.      Helga’s Locket

7.      The Racing Mule

8.      Eugene, Eugene!

9.      On the Lam

10.  Ghost Bride

11.  Grandpa’s Packard

12.  Ernie in Love

13.  Rhonda Goes Broke

14.  Big Bob’s Crisis

15.  Timberly Loves Arnold

16.  Sid and Germs

17.  Family Man

18.  Phoebe Breaks a Leg

19.  Rich Guy

20.  Principal Simmons

21.  Harold vs Patty

22.  Fishing Trip

23.  Sid the Vampire Slayer

24.  Old Iron Man

25.  Gerald’s Game

26.  A Day in the Life of a Classroom

27.  Suspended

28.  Stuck in a Tree

29.  Big Sis

30.  April Fool’s Day

31.  Gerald vs Jamie O

32.  New Bully on the Block

33.  Phoebe’s Little Problem

34.  Curly’s Girl

35.  Bag of Money

Final Thoughts

So after its final season, it’s safe to say that Hey Arnold remains fairly strong as a slice-of-life show.  It has plenty of instances that show the depths of the cast, interesting story ideas, and tact and effort in showcasing life, just as many of the best works of the series have done before.  At the same time, it also shows a fair share of faltering or less than stellar efforts in storytelling to a larger degree than any other season, suggesting burnout.

Now, this show is no stranger to than less than amazing cartoons, but somehow in Season 5, the weaker material seems to show up just as prominently as its highlights.  Most of them aren’t necessarily bad, but when they do get bad, it really shows.  In fact, a lot of the weak points of certain cartoons are very similar.  Some of them like “New Bully on the Block,” “Gerald vs Jamie O,” and “Big Sis” feature characters suffering unfairly and not getting any good payoff.  Others go way too overboard with gross-out gags like overly long farting over beans during a camping trip, some April Fool’s pranks, and even an entire plot built around a fart.  It feels like the series would do better than that, making it feel desperate for attention it’s typically good at getting. 

However, the biggest drawback to a lot of works in Season 5 are how a couple stories seem to deliberately forget who certain characters are.  In other words, there are times when characters are stripped of their depth formed throughout the series, making them seem like the characters they appear to be.  This is especially apparent when kids who appear tough and mean like Helga and Harold enact conflicts or are a major source of teasing a character deals with.  Moments like this feel like very basic characterization when in fact they’re more vulnerable than this, or have deep sympathetic reasons for the behavior they show.  The most pressing issue of all is in “April Fool’s Day” where Helga delights in tormenting Arnold even when she’s all by herself as if any love she has for him is nonexistent. 

It’s not even characters who forget their own depth.  Other plots involve anyone who isn’t the main character jump to conclusions on who’s right and who’s wrong in a conflict without getting all the details. Two cartoons in particular showcase this drawback.  “Curly’s Girl” has the entire student body forget how much of a dangerous creep he is on a regular basis.  They really have no right to sympathize with him when Rhonda ‘breaks up’ with him and make her look cruel, especially when he uses blackmail to initiate the whole thing.  That, however, is nothing compared to the worst work of the series found in this season, “Bag of Money.”  It frustrates to phenomenal degrees by going against the established reputations of characters.  Arnold is immediately framed for something the audience knows he didn’t do the moment something goes wrong.  For that, the whole cartoon is a sequence of one uncomfortable moment after another from his so-called friends right down to tying him to a pole which no one stops.  You can’t help but question why everyone believes Arnold is guilty and why they don’t consider that he’s typically good and trustworthy.  It’s really no wonder that I granted cartoon with a grade I rarely give, an F.  There was a plus to that F, but it’s still a failure.  Along with a few other mundane or dumb plots, it’s amazing how below standards this final season is.  Then again, I did start off by saying it’s normal for shows to suffer burnout this late in a run.

Weak material may show up a lot more in Season 5, but at the same time, when a cartoon turns out great, it utilizes the expected strengths very well.  As a result, there’s plenty of proof that the show can stand as a legitimately strong slice-of-life series.  For every mundane story, there’s also an interesting concept brought to life.  Some put certain characters at entirely new life challenges that take their usual traits to major extremes.  Ernie comes off as self-conscious about his size when finding love, but shows pride in it when his crush blows him off for it, and she later feels bad for being judgmental.  Even if she’s never seen again, it’s safe to assume they have legitimately decent chemistry.  While his paranoia is mostly as overbearing as usual, Sid is at his most understandably freaked out when made aware of the concept of germs, complete with a freaky nightmare.  Rhonda has one of the most interesting stories that shatter her world view when her wealth is stripped and she and her family have to live in Arnold’s boarding house.  Her progress from lamenting what’s happened to adjusting to poverty is so strong, you’d wish that the story didn’t go back to the status quo so easily in the end. 

Some creative story ideas offer unique memorable perspectives of life topics.  Examples include Chocolate Boy’s love for chocolate portrayed as a serious addiction (which it is) and Grandpa losing his car coming with a film noir style mystery.  The show even continues to be successful at crafting a scary atmosphere suitable for the story.  There’s a story of a ghost bride who murdered her cheating husband and sister and later herself, showcasing the depths of how far some people can go.  As a more personal fright, one cartoon has Arnold find himself in the hometown of his creepy cousin Arnie whose friends are all warped versions of the kids Arnie knows.  Unsettling vibes aside, they do say a lot about what Arnold sees in people.  Among the kids is a doppelganger of Helga who’s so pleasing to be around, he soon develops feelings for her.  This is among the most explicit showing of what it will take for these two to get together.  All Helga needs to do is be true to herself. 

In fact, aside from the nastier than average portrayal of Helga in “April Fool’s Day” all cartoons developing this relationship are legitimately well done.  Apart from another humorous stunt to keep Helga’s feelings secret in “Helga’s Locket” are more endearing ways they get closer despite their differences.  “Big Sis” and “Big Bob’s Crisis” are among the biggest examples of Arnold showing interest in Helga’s problems despite not needing to this season.  “Beaned” further showcases his desire to help her out and tend to her, even after she drops the amnesia act.  However, the biggest support to them getting together comes in “Married.”  Arnold is understandably horrified about the idea of actually marrying Helga since she hardly ever shows any good traits.  However, after a horrifying nightmare, he dreams of pushing her to admit that she’s really not as bad as she seems and she comes close to saying that she loves him.  While this is only a dream, coming from Arnold’s dream, it is very telling that he is probably aware of all of Helga’s true intentions and mindset.  Of all the things Season 5 brings, most material developing Arnold and Helga’s relationship is among the elements of it I can recommend the most.  Then again, that usually is a season highlight to begin with.

There is one other work of Season 5 that deserves a high recommendation coming at the very end.  After spending the entire series getting to know these characters and the deep emotional undertones of their lives, the finale turns out to be a culmination of sorts.  It looks into one of the biggest mysteries regarding the character to give the show its title.  You can’t help but question why Arnold’s biological parents aren’t around, and while this topic been brought up before, “The Journal” adds a lot more weight to it.  The loneliness Arnold feels without his parents and gradual hopelessness of them ever coming back has never felt more apparent. Not to mention it reveals more than what his typical nice portrayal suggests.  Finding that journal also makes for what may be the biggest story told in the series proper.  The chemistry that formed between Miles and Stella against many dangerous jungle adventures is unbelievably endearing.  How the adventurous spirit followed them through moments like their marriage, their honeymoon, and giving birth to Arnold in a volcanic eruption gives their lives a special touch.  Their generous, helpful, and heartfelt mannerisms show how they formed a special bond with a mysterious tribe of illusive Green-Eyed People.  This in turn makes their decision to leave Arnold as understandable as it needs to be.  After seeing how much the Green-Eyed People have helped Miles and Stella in their adventures, it’s only right that they go back to their civilization to help them in a time of crisis.  Even better is that after hearing all this from the journal, Arnold grows to understand their decision, and feels a lot better about the state of affairs.  Still, it’s simply rewarding that it all ends with a hopeful spot for closure to this story when Arnold finds a map, suggesting an adventure to lead to a long-awaited reunion.  You can only imagine how hard it must have been for fans, myself included, to have gone without something being done with the map for so long.  All I can say for now though is that it’s great that going without a follow-up to the finds of this journal was not forever.  As for “The Journal” as a whole, regardless of how long it took to get a follow-up, it’s easily worth putting up with all the ups and downs of Season 5 to get to it.

Even if it burns the series out a bit, the final season of Hey Arnold is solid overall.  While weaker cartoons are more prominent than they were before, there are many pleasant surprises to be found in many works that show a lot of passion.  It may not be your favorite season, but since the experience is still positive, that’s telling of how much this series practically owns the slice-of-lice genre for the most part.

Recommended

Now this would usually be the part where I thank you for reading and sign out:

But wait!

There’s more!

That’s right! Join me for the next two reviews where I look into the feature length Hey Arnold works.  Next time is the very first one known as Arnold Saves the Neighborhood later renamed Hey Arnold The Movie.

If you would like to check out other Hey Arnold reviews on this blog, click here for the guide made especially for them.