Have you ever danced with the panda in the pale moonlight?
This is MJ, I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer.
You can find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
Welcome to Red Panda Report Number 16.
This time I'm going to be talking about The Sweet Tooth, which originally aired November 18, 2006.
And this is the copy for it.
Cynthia Muldoon, daughter of one of the city's finest families, has disappeared.
Has she been kidnapped, as her family fears, or run off with some young man, as the police suspect?
And what, if anything, does this have to do with a chocolate shop that Kit Baxter seems preoccupied with?
If the Red Panda is to find the answers, first they'll have to pull The Sweet Tooth.
I assume that Greg Taylor is the one writing all this copy?
He does a fabulous job.
Like, if you don't know, Greg Taylor performs the voice of the Red Panda, as well as Captain Sabian over on Blackjack Justice.
And he does a phenomenal job in both roles.
Red Panda is interesting because he has a range and a depth that, I don't know, you wouldn't necessarily expect,
especially when you hear an interview with Greg Taylor using his civilian voice.
It's not at all what you would expect.
So kudos to him for such a great performance in doing the voice of the Red Panda.
Not to say that the others who do voices on the show aren't also doing really great work,
but I particularly love his voice, which we get to hear so much.
And I'm astonished that the man can not only perform so well, but that he can also write so well,
and that he can write old-fashioned, punchy, pulpy copies so well.
I don't know, I don't think any of the Shadow episodes I listened to at all were,
none of them were able to, or none of them included in them any of this kind of copy.
They had the Blue Kohl copy, and gosh, there was one other one at least.
But yeah, most of it was Blue Kohl, call your local Blue Kohl dealer and find him in the white pages.
Yellow pages for people, white pages for businesses.
Anyway, doesn't matter. That's a tangent.
But yeah, so I'm going to go ahead and talk about this episode.
And I have to say, this is an interesting episode for me because it does not concern super heroics like one might expect.
Instead, well, I mean, it does concern super heroics because, you know, the Red Panda is a superhero.
But what I mean, what I'm really trying to say is that it isn't a wild, outlandish, colorful,
yes, colorful, even though this is all audio, colorful super villain like the Mad Monkey or Professor Zombie.
Instead, we get this more subdued, creepy villain of the week.
And I don't remember her name, but it doesn't matter.
That's not a black mark against the show at all.
It's just it doesn't really matter.
And I've been saying this recently, and I used to be much more of the opinion that everything matters to the absolute detail.
But it's what it does to you. It's what it makes you feel.
I think that matters more than anything else, especially with a show like this or with a story like this.
And I don't know if that's because this is lowbrow art and it's not as great as it could be.
You have to forgive me. I just finished Little Women, listening to the book Little Women.
And in it, there's a distinction between the sensation stories and more refined, good, wholesome fiction.
And I guess you could call red panda sensation stories, but it's not.
It's a nice subdued form of sensationalism, I think.
But anyway, and I'm not taking a firm moral stance against sensation stories other than to say that I don't anticipate me using lurid things in my books.
And I think Taylor does a really good job of keeping things fairly chased in these red panda stories.
Yes, they're on the radio. So what could you see?
Nothing, but you could hear plenty and you don't really get a chance to because he finds his perfect balance of making it edgy and dark where it needs to be.
But also pulling some punches and keeping things softer for an American like me who doesn't like certain things creeping into his fiction.
And especially fiction that can be enjoyed for children.
And I think something like the shadow should be able to be enjoyed for children.
And no, that was not a slip of the tongue. I did say the shadow when I'm talking about the red panda, because, of course, the red panda is very much inspired by the shadow.
Speaking of which, I felt like the villain this week was very.
Oh, it's like the nickels or the coins or whatever it is like nickels under the bridge or so.
Oh, yeah. So earlier on, there were a few episodes that I didn't criticize as being rip offs of shadow episodes.
But I said, this is very much inspired by the shadow.
And I can tell because I just listened to this episode not too long ago of the shadow.
And that's fine. I'm OK with that.
But and actually what I'm talking about here is something beyond that.
It's something better than that. It's the fact that Taylor was so.
Craftful, craftful, artful, artful in his holding the spirit of the shadow, the way the shadows heroes were written out of them that he in fact, it's almost like he trans.
How do you say that? Trans. I trans migrated the spirit of a particular creepy episode of the shadow that had to do with people in a bad area and holes in the wall where people were held victims.
I need to know what they were victims for. Were they searching for it?
Doesn't matter. But what I'm saying is it basically Taylor ripped the soul out of that thing and he shoved it into the soul of this episode.
And I think that's pretty cool. And of course, that's like a very sensational way to say that.
But I just mean that he very well captured the essence of the shadow.
And it felt like a quiet subdued shadow episode where you have a villain monologuing about their mad plan that they have.
And the hero is calling them out on that plan and basically defeats them.
I mean, of course, with his powers, but mostly it's talking.
It's the power of him staying calm and observing things and making statements about the foe, the villain, the evil doer, the ne'er do well.
And that's enough to like lull them into a place where then they either their madness folds in on themselves and they destroy themselves or they're distracted just long enough for something to happen and for there to be a reversal of fortune.
So that was really cool. So I really like how the spirit was captured there.
And the. I definitely want to stop talking about that because I think it's that enough. But what I do want to talk about more is the mysteries of this world of the red panda.
So the whole red panda universe or world has interesting. Powers and secrets that it hides.
We have Professor Zombie who somehow is able to make zombies through the use of chemical means. But I think she also says she can combine it with voodoo as well, which is super interesting.
And then we have this lady who makes a reference to alchemy and she has a machine that these young women are hooked up to, which, by the way, spoilers for the episode.
And I know that's not very shame on you. You should have. But what happens is this Chuck Chuckletier, this woman masquerading as a chocolatier ends up setting up a chocolate shop in different places.
And she stores women into the chocolate shop. And then she sits them or arranges them so that they can have their life or siphoned off by a machine, which has been able to extend her life indefinitely.
And she has for at least 100 years, if not 200 years. And Kit kind of falls into this trap and Red Panda rescues her from it, as well as saving this old dude girl who was talked about in the copy.
So that's pretty interesting. And yeah, it was just it was like a again, it was like a weird kind of more subdued episode, but it was really entertaining.
And there was some interesting you could call it fluff, but I would call it texturing characters. There was talk about like social dynamics.
There was talk about like socioeconomic disparity and like class warfare and the war of the sexes and like Red Panda not knowing anything about women, which is referred to, you know, that's what that's about.
The kind of war of the sexes type thing going on. And like even Kit talking about the fact that she, you know, knows diaries and knows, you know, souped up engines on cars because she's just that kind of girl.
And it's really interesting because like it gets to be very playful. Nothing feels romantic between them as of yet.
But there's like that nice banter and flirtation between them. And it's more like this, I don't know, Senpai, won't you notice me? No, it's gotten past that stage.
I think that's not what's presenting at the moment. It's more like Kit doesn't want to be like taken for granted or like pitied or looked down upon.
She's a tough kid, I would venture to say. You know, she's grown up on the streets in the poorer areas of Toronto.
And, you know, that shows for sure. And she's kind of got a chip on her shoulder about it.
And she doesn't want to be like looked down upon or condescended to. And she feels like that might be what Red Panda is going to do.
And she feels like the police only care about this Muldoon girl because she's from one of the city's wealthiest families as opposed to the other girls who've been taken captive.
And there's nothing really to counter that except for what happens in the end, which is that a fund gets set up by Mr. Muldoon to help disadvantaged girls, basically, which is very cool and very sweet.
And like, I don't know, there's something like I don't know how Taylor did this. Again, I said his vocal performance is great, but also like the way he crafts the writing, like the first very first episode of Red Panda Report or where I talked about Red Panda Adventures,
I complained about kind of the hokeyness of ending on a joke. And I think the Carrot Cake one was like two or three episodes later or like one or two episodes later, I think.
And like that was kind of hokey, but it felt a little more fun. And I don't know if it just like kind of took him time to find his feet like in the format of writing these episodes, because like Red Panda was charming as all get out in this episode.
And like the little squabbling between him and Kit, like it felt really good. It felt like genuine to their characters.
But it also felt like it gave them an opportunity to grow and to like impress each other and to make an impact on each other and like see little bits of development for them going through because this isn't, you know, Red Panda is special because the characters do grow and they do change throughout, even as they stay the same.
And that's really wonderful. And it's one of the things I appreciate about it so much. And that's why I've, you know, I'm like my third listen of Red Panda Adventures.
So, yeah, that being said, this was a good episode. And again, it's funny because it's like it's not really a memorable one. Like I do it. It does stick in my mind.
But like when I see the name, the Sweet Tooth Lighter, oh, that episode, that's kind of weird, kind of funky. And like it never like it went a totally different direction than I expected it to go.
And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just and again, I've been praising it for the last little while. So I'm definitely not. It's not demerit. It's just interesting because I wouldn't have gone there necessarily.
Let me see. I kind of wanted to reference something that I have been planning to write, but I don't think I'm going to do that. Let's not belabor things here.
Other than the fact that I really like this like a battle of hypnosis. And I think early in season one, like there were a few battles of hypnosis. And this is the first I believe this is the first battle of hypnosis in season two.
This is 13, 14, 15. This is the fourth episode of season two because each season is 12 episodes, I believe.
And I like that this lady was using some strange form of hypnosis with, you know, plant materials or synthetic. I only get synthetic drugs.
I think it was natural materials that she was using for her hypnotic. I don't know, drugging of Kit and other girls.
And I like that Red Panda was able to recognize that based on her behavior. But then he also has like the chemistry background to know how to break hypnotic agents.
I don't mean hypnotic agents like him. I mean, you know, substances that are hypnotic that lead people to be open to being hypnotized and suggested to.
And I think that's pretty cool that he's you can see he's like, you know, like a Batman. He's got all this background and more like the shadow.
Like, there's a really cool scene in the shadow book, which I think you've described before, which I found out about.
I oh yeah, I mentioned before I stumbled on a razor fist was talking about.
I stumbled across that and it was a really neat scene that he described.
And then I listened to the book that that was in and I thought, wow, that's really cool.
It's really neat what the shadow guy does and who he is.
And it's nice that the Red Panda is an iteration of the shadow to like capture those things, those parts of the essence of the shadow
and bring them to a new audience at a new time with like classic style and quality.
So anyway, I did want to keep things a little bit shorter and I am going a little bit longer than I wanted to.
So I should really pull back and stop myself.
So yeah, this was a really good episode. I had a very different energy from the last episode when darkness falls, which had a little kid and an old lady.
That's very funny. But yeah, what else? What else? What else?
So to say, I'm not sure what else to say. I really enjoyed this episode. It's a good one.
It's solidly creepy. Oh, so there's a lot of not comedic tone changes, but there's just like a lot of variety or diversity in the tones that you get here,
because at some point, while this mad woman is talking about her plan and what she's been willing to do and how many more lives she's willing to take,
she is a mass murderer. I expected her to have like super strength or superpowers of some sort based like on the potency of the life force she had, you know,
pulled from these other women, these women and many others. And she didn't.
And at some point, Kit gets out of her stupor. She's like she's a little messed up. We learn later.
She's a little messed up from being on these hypnotic drugs, but she's mostly in her right mind.
This is very in keeping with who Kit Baxter is as somebody who's listened to all of her story so far.
And she asks Red Panda to throw her crowbar and she wails on this old woman.
She hits her like three or four times and it is insane. It's insane. I can't believe he kept that.
I can't believe he wrote that. I can't believe he wrote it. I can't believe he kept it.
I would think he would have toned that down a little bit.
But then I think it kind of is the blow on it is softened a little bit because Red Panda at some point later calls out
and says like, oh, you did meet an old woman with a crowbar. So I think you need to be, you know,
here in the layer recovering while I'm out on patrol. And that was again, that was like that's super charming.
And that weird like they have a very weird relationship like. Yeah, I won't say anything.
They have a very interesting relationship and they're a couple of interesting characters who are very, very, I'm very fond of them.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the next Red Panda adventure. I hope you are too.
Join me in the future.
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Until next time, be well. This is MJ signing out.
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