Western Animation / The Babaloos

When the lights go out, that’s when we’re on the loose!

We’re the Babaloos!
When the day is done
And you’re sleeping
We’ll be having fun!

— The show’s Title Theme Tune

The Babaloos (or Les Babalous, in the original French) was a 1996 Canadian-French animated TV series co-produced by CINAR and Moonscoop. The show is based on books written by Jean-Luc Morel.

Set in the house of a young boy called Kevin and his unnamed parents, the show revolves around the adventures of the titular beings- small household objects that come to life at night while Kevin and his parents sleep obliviously. The main cast of Babaloos includes the childish Baby Towel and Teaspoon (the closest the series has to specific protagonists), the warm Mother Towel, haughty Mrs. Fork, clever Little Pencil, his Love Interest Miss Toothbrush, the gossipy Slipper sisters, Mr. Bowl, and Sponge; in addition, there is a large number of minor recurring characters (such as the Tools), one-offs (such as Mr. I-Can-Do-Everything), and characters who were originally one-offs but eventually returned as recurring extras, such as Mr. Lighter. Each episode was approximately five minutes long.

In 1999 a second season, entitled The Babaloos On Vacation, began airing. In it, the Babaloos were brought to the great outdoors, as Kevin and his family went on a road trip across… whatever country the show is supposed to take place in. This was supposed to add variety to the settings explored in the show; in practice, all it did was produce a surfeit of Beach Episodes.

The Babaloos provides examples of:

• 65-Episode Cartoon: The show’s two seasons have 65 episodes each.
• A Dog Named "Cat": Due to some “jelly donut”-style Cultural Translation, the teakettle Babaloo is consistently referred to as “Mrs. Coffeepot”.
• A Dog Named "Dog": Most of the Babaloos are just named after what they are- Baby Towel, Teaspoon, Mr. Bowl, Mrs. Coffeepot, Mr. Vac- although there are exceptions (such as Victor the trophy).
• All Cloth Unravels: In “Wrong Stitch”, Baby Towel and Teaspoon’s fooling around manages to not only unravel one of Kevin’s wool socks, but also wrap the resulting string around most of the living room.
• Amateur Film-Making Plot: “The Babaloos Make Movies”
• Animated Adaptation: Of the book series of the same name by Jean-Luc Morel.
• Animate Inanimate Object: The titular characters are small household items that come to life at night.
• Beach Episode: A beach was one of the stock outdoor settings visited in quite a few episodes of The Babaloos On Vacation; plots in that season involved fighting crabs (twice!), finding an abandoned ship, driving Kevin’s remote-control car straight into the water, cleaning up garbage that had been dumped on one, searching for a wedding ring lost in the sand, and finding a Message in a Bottle, along with a few episodes that happen to take place on a beach but don’t have beach-related plots.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: In “The Abominable Yeti”, Teddy poses as one in an attempt to scare the other Babaloos.
• Birthday Episode: “Kevin’s Surprise” revolves around the Babaloos having to deal with Kevin’s poorly-thought-out plan to give his mother a birthday surprise; unusually, it doesn’t actually take place on her birthday, but rather the night before.
• Christmas Episode: “Is That Santa?”
• Cock-a-Doodle Dawn: One Season 2 episode involves a(n apparently wild) rooster whose cries constantly wake up Kevin and his parents (who would rather sleep in past dawn). Alarm Clock is also annoyed because waking them up when they’d rather be asleep is his job.
• Cold Snap: A few episodes involve sudden cold weather, both in the first season and in On Vacation.
• Deus ex 'Scuse Me: An early episode involves Baby Towel having to do the dishes by himself because Mother Towel is unavailable. Why was she unavailable? Because Kevin thought a random dishcloth from the kitchen would be a fine Security Blanket to sleep with.
• Dripping Disturbance: One episode involves the kitchen faucet (suddenly a Babaloo despite having been an inanimate background prop in previous episodes) developing a drip that the Tools from the garage have to fix.
• Easter Episode: “Easter Egg”
• Easy Amnesia: In “Unidentified Flying Object”, a mysterious flying disc-shaped Babaloo is unable to remember who or what he is after bumping his “head” in a crash landing. Another blow (courtesy of Hammer) allows him to remember his name: “Frisbee”.
• Everything Talks: Just about any object can be a Babaloo, so long as it’s man-made and reasonably small.
• Expy: Baby Towel is awfully similar to Blanky, being a cloth-based Animate Inanimate Object with the personality of a child and a light yellow color scheme.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Each episode takes place over the course of a single night.
• Failures on Ice: In “Slippery Stars”, the Babaloos attempt to go ice-skating on a frozen-over pool in the garden. Key word being “attempt”- Mrs. Fork slides wildly out of control, Hammer keeps falling and cracking the ice, and after seeing their performance no one else wants to give it a try. Except the Slippers, who reveal themselves to be actually good at skating, hence the episode’s title.
• Fear of Thunder: Baby Towel is revealed to have this phobia in “Baby Towel’s First Storm”, but gets over it by the end of the episode. Then in “A Stormy Night” in Season 2 he’s back to being afraid again.
• Floating in a Bubble: In “A High-Flying Rescue”, Cork somehow becomes trapped inside a stray soap bubble and is carried around the house until the bubble pops, depositing him on top of Kevin’s bookshelf.
• Flying Saucer: One episode involves a mysterious disc-shaped object who crash-lands into Kevin’s house through an open window. The Babaloos are convinced that he’s from outer space, and he is unable to refute that due to having gotten amnesia from the crash. Once he gets his memory back, he turns out to be a Frisbee.
• Food Coma: In “Enjoy Your Meal, Mr. Vac”, Mr. Vac curls up to sleep after having sucked up enough to sate his appetite.
• Forced Bath: The Slippers are subjected to one in “S.O.S. Slippers”, as part of a ploy by the other Babaloos to prevent them from being replaced by Kevin’s mom. (Why they couldn’t just tell the slippers that Kevin’s mom was planning to throw them out for being too old and dirty is unknown).
• Four-Leaf Clover: In one episode, a lucky clover Kevin picked sometime during the day is thrown out by Broom and Dustpan (who mistook it for stray plant matter that had somehow gotten indoors), necessitating the location of a replacement.
• Furry Confusion: It’s fairly common for there to be both Babaloo and normal versions of objects (for instance, one episode involves living keys causing chaos while another involves the main cast searching in the sandbox for inanimate keys), or even specific objects that are alive in some episodes but inanimate set dressing in others (Faucet is perhaps the biggest offender here).
• Gossipy Hens: The Slippers act like this in certain dubs of the show.
• Ghost Ship: The Babaloos encounter an abandoned, apparently haunted ship in one episode of Season 2. The “ghost” haunting it is actually another Animate Inanimate Object like them (a boot, to be specific).
• Giant Enemy Crab: In “Castle Under Siege”, the Babaloos have to defend a sand castle from a crab intent on destroying it. This trope is subverted a bit in the sense that the crab isn’t actually larger than normal; the Babaloos are just tiny.
• Green Aesop: The On Vacation episode “Save The Beach” has one about littering, with the Babaloos finding the beach covered in trash and having to clean it up.
• Haplessly Hiding: In one episode, Baby Towel is playing hide-and-seek and decides to hide in the washing machine. Then someone, unaware that he’s hiding there, turned the machine on. Eh, he was getting kinda dirty anyway.
• Harmless Freezing: In “Big Chill For Baby Towel”, the titular character is frozen after he climbs into the freezer, but is perfectly fine once thawed out.
• Kidnapping Bird of Prey: A Thieving Magpie serves this role in “The Adventurers” by carrying Mrs. Fork off to add to its collection of shiny things.
• Laughing Mad: Mrs. Coffeepot acts like this after losing her lid in “Mrs. Coffeepot Blows Her Top”.
• Literal Metaphor: The episode titled “Needle In A Haystack” literally involves searching in a haystack for the Compass’s lost needle.
• Living Toys: A few Babaloos are toys of some sort, including Teddy (a teddy bear) and Frisbee (guess).
• Lost Wedding Ring: In “Moon Gems”, the Babaloos have to comb the beach to find Kevin’s mother’s wedding ring.
• Love Triangle: One of these forms in “Moonlight Romance”- Party Hat developed a crush on Mrs. Fork and sang a serenade for her with the aid of Harmonica, but due to some poorly-phrased lyrics Mrs. Fork believed that Harmonica was the one who was in love with her, and fell for him in turn.
• Masquerade: For unspecified reasons, the Babaloos have to hide the fact that they’re alive from humans, only coming to life at night when Kevin and his parents are asleep.
• Message in a Bottle: One episode in Season 2 involves the Babaloos spotting one of these floating in the sea- given the show, the bottle is sentient.
• Miniscule Rocking: The show’s Title Theme Tune is only 20 seconds long, but those 20 seconds are pure, concentrated awesome.
• Motor Mouth: One-Shot Character Cell Phone (seen in “We’ll Call Each Other”) talks like this. And he never stops talking.
• New Season, New Name: The series’ second season saw its name changed to “The Babaloos On Vacation”, to go with its focus on bringing the characters into new environments beyond Kevin’s house.
• The Nose Knows: In “The Departure”, Perfume Bottle manages to track down Baby Towel (and Mr. Lighter) by the scent of the perfume he sprayed on them earlier.
• No Sense of Direction: The Compass acts like this after losing her needle in “Needle In A Haystack”.
• Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: The original French title of “The Adventurers” translates to “Raiders Of The Lost Star”.
• Punny Name: One guest-star Babaloo is a trophy named Victor.
• The Runaway: Baby Towel and Teaspoon attempt to run away in “Freedom At Last”. This… does not last very long.
• Rust-Removing Oil: In “Slip-Sliding Away”, the Babaloos attempt to use some oil to de-rustify the Tools, who rusted up after falling in water. For extra nonsense points, the oil they try to use is suntan oil.
• Scaling the Summit: This happens in “An Infernal Climb”. Technically, it’s not even a very tall hill, but given the Babaloos’ size it might as well be Mount Everest.
• Scary Scarecrow: In one episode in On Vacation, the Babaloos come across a sentient scarecrow who’s in danger of being replaced because he’s not scary enough. They can help with that… sorta.
• Scary Stinging Swarm: In “The Bees’ Wrath”, Baby Towel and Teaspoon provoke one of these by attempting to snack on honey from a beehive.
• Screwball Squirrel: One of these kidnaps Mrs. Fork in “The Artist”
• Security Blanket: In “Baby Towel Does The Dishes” Kevin, for some inexplicable reason, decides to use Mother Towel as one.
• Sock Slide Rink: In one episode, the Babaloos find that the kitchen floor has been freshly polished and is thus very slippery; they decide to use the lack of friction to put on a game of hockey.
• Strike Episode: Two of them.
  • In “Sponge’s Clean Break”, Sponge refuses to wash dishes because Mrs. Fork refused to acknowledge how hard she works.
  • In the On Vacation episode “Trouble’s A-Brewing At The Babaloos”, the camper van’s window is stuck open during a pouring rainstorm. The Tools are the only ones who can fix it, but they’re on strike because they’ve been insulted… by none other than Mrs. Fork.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Every single female character in the show has very visible eyelashes, and most of them also either have permanent blush spots or inexplicably look like they’re wearing lipstick. This makes it very obvious when a character’s gender has been changed in a dub.
• Thieving Magpie: In “The Adventurers”, one of these snatches first Kevin’s toy sheriff badge and then Mrs. Fork.
• Title Theme Tune: It’s short (only a little over 20 seconds), but catchy.
  ♪ We’re the Babaloos! ♪
  ♪ We’re the Babaloos! ♪
  ♪ When the lights go out, that’s when we’re on the loose! ♪
• Treasure Hunt Episode: “The Treasure Hunt”, as you may be able to tell by the title.
• Unnamed Parent: Kevin's mother and father. Even the show's credits just list them as "Mom" and "Dad".
• Vicious Vac: Mr. Vac spends the first half of “Enjoy Your Meal, Mr. Vac” roaming around the house indiscriminately sucking up anything in sight, even swallowing Baby Towel and Teaspoon. Then in the second half it turns out he’s actually a nice guy who just can’t control himself when he’s hungry, and he’s even willing to allow Screwdriver to open up his case to free the trapped Babaloos.
• The Voice: Kevin’s parents are never seen, and only occasionally heard. Kevin would qualify himself as well if not for a few episodes where we see him asleep in bed.

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