Fridge Door Reviews

With the last of the Noodles comics having reached its roundabout conclusion a month early, I was worried about what I would fill the last month with.  As it turned out, the Sunday Fridge Door feature continued on without Gamboli's presence.

For the most part, I wasn't terribly interested in what infantile kids had to say, and mostly skipped this section, though I made an exception while browsing the Sunday section for notable articles, and it was a good thing I did, since it captured a snapshot of the general mood of what it was like back then.

There was great social unrest and upheaval over the Referendum on whether Quebec should separate or not.  It was a slim majority that wasn't completely over 51% that saved us from becoming an early model for Brexit two decades later.

Then, a little later, there was a request to send in reviews of what kids liked, which was a wise move, since they were more likely to talk about what they were most passionate about, which just so happened to be videogames, movies and young novels.  Of course, back then, Young Novel Paperbacks were more along the likes of short 180 page short stories rather than Harry Potter bricks, so your taste in young literature might vary.

Naturally, I saved the ones that had amusingly drawn pictures of movies, or at amusing as they seemed back then, when perceived sequels were going to continue draining what little originality a beloved property once had.

As I said before, the majority of children's literature and media consumption in the 90's were much more limited, so in addition to children's books, ranging from as little as 30 pages to an average of 64 pages to the ceiling of 164 pages.  Only Betty & Veronica comes close to Harry Potter levels with a whopping 200 pages, but you could still flip through that with your eyes closed.

Later, there were the occasional videogame review, but these weren't too frequent, and soon enough, games got enough of a reputation that they eventually got their own section in the paper, pushing children out of the way.  Let adults do the work that these infants can't elucidate properly on their own!

After that, quality control reverted back to familiar levels, and there wasn't much interesting material to look at anymore.

Fridged and a Closed Door

So, after the rather uneventual breather episode of last month, we get a return to normalcy with a state of hibernating away from hunters.


Picking up on the theme of broadening expectations, this is just a serene prelude to the next big serious issue.


Yup.  Eugene gets shot and doesn't walk (Float? Crawl?) away from the incident unscathed.

As if this incident wasn't disturbing enough, it occurred just around the time of the Polytechnique Massacre on December 6, 1989, a horrific attack against women, leading to 14 deaths, and was the prime motivation for gun control in Canada.  This goes far beyond the special message that happened not that long ago.

Around this entire remaining story arc, we never get to see Noodle's face, let alone Eugene's reactions.  Sensing a certain uneasiness around current events, Gambioli possibly tried to soften the blow.

 It's also the only time that the Word of the Week feature is left suitably blank.


And yet, despite these hopeful words, we never get to see Eugene ever again.

You could be forgiven for not noticing the floating piece of fuzz outside the cave if it wasn't mentioned in the feature index on the top of the sectioned page.


And thus, we've come full circle to the beginning of my first entry of the last three months of The Fridge Door, where I mentioned that this hunting accident.  Though it was most likely overlooked or forgotten by people who didn't notice it in the first place.  In the absence of Eugene's presence, something was lost.  The cartoon section of The Fridge Door tried to continue in a new format based on reader input, but the rambling format and loss of control wasn't enough, and it was promptly retired with nary a response.

Still, how many children's newspaper features can you name that had a gun-related death in them?

What a Lovely Little Fridge Door

After the disastrous events of last month, Eugene and Noodles get to enjoy a moment of relative calm, complete with singing rocks and living noodles.


Nothing of terrible significance here... save a moment of shocking honesty that comes completely out of the blue, yet isn't that uncharacteristic.

And for reference, this is a Male Raccoon expressing his fondness for a male alien worm.

I'm only including these images because Noodles happened to show his head on the upper-left hand side of the page.

Even though the events from the last few weeks should be routinely forgotten, Noodles is still rather naive.




Next month - a shocking development that will shake the foundations of The Fridge Door, after which, nothing will ever be the same again.

A Very Special Fridge Door

When a creator's been working on a title for any extended period of time, they get a sense of importance, and feel the need to be doing something serious with their time.  That in order to get recognized as a platform of notoriety, they should be contributing something of substance to their work, which can wind up being offputting in execution.

At least, that's my interpretation after seeing multiple iterations of what I've seen from multiple works, some with some success, some less so.  And this was present within the features of The Fridge Door with the introduction of a completely new frenetic character, that accurately matches the Word of the Week.

This guy is Morder, and he has something to sell you.






There's a certain ominous quality to these Word of the Weeks throughout the month lately.

Morder's look can't seem to look consistent from one week to the next, which could be representative of his mental state.  One day, he's got bugged-out eyes.  The next, he's wearing glasses and a fancy suit.  The next, he's wearing Dark glasses and a tank top, looking more like one of Antonio Prohias' Spy Vs. Spy.  Oh, and his hair and nose certainly look like weed, and not the plant kind.  Subtle, this ain't.



After a month of idly standing by and watching the scenario play out in front of him, Eugene finally decides to intervene with his alien powers.



And so ends the Say NO to Drugs segment of The Fridge Door.  Needless to say, we won't be seeing this guy again anytime soon, though we will be encountering another important message near this feature's run, which would wind up defining it for better or for ill.

For next month, a welcome return to silly meaningless shenanigans.

Summer Days of The Fridge Door

It's August, and that means that in addition to quickly running out of valuable vacation time from school, we also get some thematically-appropriate comics of The Fridge Door as well.

And just to rub salt in the sugar wound, the Words of the Weeks don't get any time off either.  Why should we have it easy?



After the usage of archaic words, the level of difficulty of the Words of the Week takes a massive nosedive.


With this feature using words such as Didgeridoo and Fiddle-Faddle (like all the hip kids down with the lingo do), you wonder exactly just what age bracket this was aimed at.

No commentary for this.  Sometimes you just can't come up with a good joke for every single drawing.  Or a joke, period.

Here's a word that also means to cackle, but is unusual for being widely known for being a collective noun.  In fact, it's only used as a collective noun, so put in any other context other than a group of geese would be approaching confusion.





As predicted, the majority of submissions exclusively revolved around a certain species of birdfowl, because when your main audience is children, what else are they going to choose?

Next time, we'll start approaching the weirdness quotient of the Fridge Door and learn a very special lesson in the process.