It’s All in Knowing How

Today’s Saturday Short is “It’s All in Knowing How,” presented by the dairy council. Remember that, there’ll be a quiz on it later.

But first, are you ready for some football? This short is! Bob isn’t, though. He’s not playing as well as he used to be. He’s falling all over himself, missing his kicks, and he’s lost his pep. Even his friends and girlfriend have noticed. Especially his girlfriend Alice–she immediately ditches him for a peppier guy. Even the paperboy is more energetic and cheerful than Our Bob. His sadness is so great it causes the soundtrack to skip.

At dinner, Bob is mopey and depressed. He doesn’t know why he’s so grouchy, he just is. Later his parents and the coach get together at the bowling alley to discuss Bob’s mood. The coach (who’s also the biology teacher) tells them that Bob had passed his last physical and the doctor is totally unconcerned that a teenage boy has no appetite or energy. Totally normal! Nothing to see here! Rather than encouraging Bob’s folks to get him to a pediatrician who didn’t get his degree out of a box of Crackerjack, Coach Biology suggests another method to fixing their son.

He begins to work on Bob the next afternoon. After a tortured metaphor comparing the human body to an airplane, he sends Bob over to Alice’s house to help her with her nutrition project. Class projects: they cure what ails ya.

Bob and Alice spend a “fun” evening in the living room with construction paper and glue, making a chart to show how much of each kind of food they each need every day for their nutritional needs. The narrator goes over this chart in excruciating detail, building up to the coup de grace of nutrition: dairy. Dairy, the narrator tells us, is the perfect food and must be included with every meal. Milk is wonderful and everyone should drink a quart of it every day. I would like to invite the narrator to hang out in my bathroom after I drink a quart of milk and see how much he loves that food group afterwards. Because, trust me, my digestive system is not the narrator.

Some undetermined amount of time later, Bob’s dad tells Bob that he had faced the same problems of no pep and poor appetite himself. Once he started taking care of himself, though, everything was hunky dory all the time! Bob agrees. Since he made the chart with Alice, he’s turned his life around. After eating right and getting enough sleep, he’s Mr. Pep! It helps that he dropped football and joined the basketball team instead. Why, he even has enough energy to go on a double date with his parents and Coach Biology at the bowling alley!

And that’s why charts are lame.