Post by andreipopescu on Aug 5, 2022 12:42:42 GMT -6
Has anyone else considered Penny to be the unreliable narrator of the story? In other words we are actually looking at her playing and imagining stuff.
Unreliable narrators are usually children or people with mental issues and Penny is both: she is a child and the fact that she has no friends apart from her uncle and her dog indicates that she is traumatized by the loss of her parents.
Whenever her uncle goes to work she is worried that he may die too. This is shown in episode "Gadget Goes West" when she can't even pay attention to the teacher. As a way to calm down she probably imagines herself being there for her uncle and helping him survive.
Sometimes she would even try to follow him like in episode "The Amazon" when she and brain sneak into his can and then for some reason we see Gadget actually doing a good job while chasing Dr. Claw. But what does Penny do? Does she use her gadgets to hack Dr. Claw's car as she usually does with other MAD vehicles? No, she doesn't! She is just scared to death and can not use anything because her gadgets are nothing but a normal watch and a book which she only pretends are some kind of James Bond gadgets. After Dr. Claw escapes and Gadget meet with the chief to get his new instructions we can see the chief looking at Penny and Brain for a moment and then ignoring them since the show suggests that he knows who is really doing the job (most of the time Penny is the one requesting backup once she finds out what MAD is up to - I mean why would Gadget call her and tell her to tell the chief what he could tell him directly in the exact amount of time.). From this moment on Gadget is again an idiot and Penny is again the one doing a good job. This is due to the fact that the chief and her uncle found her and stopped her from following him. The rest of the episode until the point her uncle returns is again just her imagination. In episode "Race to the Finish" her uncle even tells her "It's all your imagination." after she tells him that she saw Dr. Claw.
Gadget is not even a cyborg since on some occasions we can see he has normal feet like in episode "Weather in Tibet". At most he probably has a prosthetic arm or some metal rods due to him getting injured on the job. In order not to scare his niece he probably joked that he is now some cyborg policeman(I would say like Robocop - but movie didn't exist back then.) and as a result she imagines him as such.
When not on a mission Penny is never seen playing or even talking with other kids. However when on a mission she quickly befriends the kids she runs into and they team-up against MAD. The explanation is obvious: those kids are also part of her imagination showing her desire to have friends which in real life she can not because of her being to shy.
The messages that always blow up in the chief's face are also imaginary and they are a manifestation of her hatred towards him for endangering her uncle.
In episode a star is lost Penny saves her favorite singer from MAD and he dedicates a song to her as a way of saying thank you. What really happened is either he dedicated the song to another Penny (maybe Joker's mother, Penny Fleck 🙂 ), or her uncle told him, while he was providing security for him, that his niece is a big fan and the singer dedicated the song to her as a way of thanking her uncle.
Gadget's missions are probably not even that dangerous and interesting as they seem. For example: in "I.G. Saves Christmas" he doesn't go to the north pole to save Santa from MAD, but instead he is just called to the mall because a "Santa" working there got robbed or got into a fight with a customer.
Unreliable narrators are usually children or people with mental issues and Penny is both: she is a child and the fact that she has no friends apart from her uncle and her dog indicates that she is traumatized by the loss of her parents.
Whenever her uncle goes to work she is worried that he may die too. This is shown in episode "Gadget Goes West" when she can't even pay attention to the teacher. As a way to calm down she probably imagines herself being there for her uncle and helping him survive.
Sometimes she would even try to follow him like in episode "The Amazon" when she and brain sneak into his can and then for some reason we see Gadget actually doing a good job while chasing Dr. Claw. But what does Penny do? Does she use her gadgets to hack Dr. Claw's car as she usually does with other MAD vehicles? No, she doesn't! She is just scared to death and can not use anything because her gadgets are nothing but a normal watch and a book which she only pretends are some kind of James Bond gadgets. After Dr. Claw escapes and Gadget meet with the chief to get his new instructions we can see the chief looking at Penny and Brain for a moment and then ignoring them since the show suggests that he knows who is really doing the job (most of the time Penny is the one requesting backup once she finds out what MAD is up to - I mean why would Gadget call her and tell her to tell the chief what he could tell him directly in the exact amount of time.). From this moment on Gadget is again an idiot and Penny is again the one doing a good job. This is due to the fact that the chief and her uncle found her and stopped her from following him. The rest of the episode until the point her uncle returns is again just her imagination. In episode "Race to the Finish" her uncle even tells her "It's all your imagination." after she tells him that she saw Dr. Claw.
Gadget is not even a cyborg since on some occasions we can see he has normal feet like in episode "Weather in Tibet". At most he probably has a prosthetic arm or some metal rods due to him getting injured on the job. In order not to scare his niece he probably joked that he is now some cyborg policeman(I would say like Robocop - but movie didn't exist back then.) and as a result she imagines him as such.
When not on a mission Penny is never seen playing or even talking with other kids. However when on a mission she quickly befriends the kids she runs into and they team-up against MAD. The explanation is obvious: those kids are also part of her imagination showing her desire to have friends which in real life she can not because of her being to shy.
The messages that always blow up in the chief's face are also imaginary and they are a manifestation of her hatred towards him for endangering her uncle.
In episode a star is lost Penny saves her favorite singer from MAD and he dedicates a song to her as a way of saying thank you. What really happened is either he dedicated the song to another Penny (maybe Joker's mother, Penny Fleck 🙂 ), or her uncle told him, while he was providing security for him, that his niece is a big fan and the singer dedicated the song to her as a way of thanking her uncle.
Gadget's missions are probably not even that dangerous and interesting as they seem. For example: in "I.G. Saves Christmas" he doesn't go to the north pole to save Santa from MAD, but instead he is just called to the mall because a "Santa" working there got robbed or got into a fight with a customer.