I love Bessie Higgenbottom, Nickelodeon’s newest super hero – well, aspiring super hero, at any rate.
But, in the interest of full disclosure, I have a personal stake in seeing Bessie succeed.
No, I don’t own a piece of the show, but I do own a piece of Bessie herself. Huh?
“Huh” is what I said too first time I got a look at Bessie, the animated character from the brilliant minds of “Saturday Night Live’s” Amy Poehler, “The Fairly Odd Parents” writer Cynthia True and “SpongeBob SquarePants’” artist Erik Wiese.
I am/was Bessie Higgenbottom – the competitive kid who had the misbehaving dog, was never in the pretty girls’ group, who bossed everybody around and had dreams to be as strong as Superman – but was always too short.
And I still have to ride the Cyclone 56 times every summer and still worry every time I go that I won’t make the height requirement.
Bessie is a 9-year-old hilariously annoying “sweet girl-tornado” who every little (and big) girl will be able to relate to. She’s every girl who ever wanted to knock the world on its ear before she was four feet tall.
In the premiere, we meet Bessie (voiced by Poehler), the insanely ambitious Honeybee (sort of the Girl Scouts), who thinks that if she wins something like 250,000 badges she will turn into The Mighty B – an alter ego/super hero.
Bessie lives in San Francisco with her mother and younger brother, who looks up to Bessie as his own super hero.
In the first segment – called “So Happy Together” – Portia (Grey DeLisle), the pretty girl’s mother, is putting on a dog show which everyone knows will be won by Portia’s dog. The winner gets another Honeybee badge!
Hmmm. Problem is Bessie doesn’t have a dog, so she becomes a human battering ram to badger her mother to let her get a rescue dog.
Bessie finds a dog with a chewed up ear on the street who loves being free and stealing and being mayor of the block. Undaunted, she drags him home against his will, names the mean old dog Happy, and sets about turning him into a show dog.
Happy remains bad and mad, fighting with all the dogs in the show and nearly tearing them to pieces, but of course, he ends up winning.
Second half of the premiere is called “Sweet Sixteenth,” and it’s all about being too short to ride the world’s biggest roller coaster.
Bessie does everything up to and including putting herself on the rack at the local museum where torture implements are on display.
Huge fun and hugely funny. You don’t have to be nine and a half to love Bessie and “The Mighty B.”