The ever-reliable BoingBoing featured a bizarre Japanese (but I repeat myself) television show from the 60’s called Gimme Gimme Octopus. Now, I don’t speak Japanese, and I don’t take drugs, and I’m not sure, from viewing this, which would help more, but it seems to me that the baby octopus is like the MacGuffin in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, being carted around from place to place, always in danger (in this case, of being turned into yummyyummy tako servings) and never actually able to take action to save itself even when, as happens in this video, it gets dropped into water.

OMFG! The octopus fell in the water!!!! What will we dooooooooooo?

Apparently, take more drugs.

The set design comprises, as these links mention, the kind of background pattern Joan Baez might have worn on a skirt, and the costumes are very H.R. Pufnstuffian, although it must be said that the trio of “dragons” look more like Sigmund the Sea Monster, the Grimace, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, all after having gone on the Anna Nicole Smith “Trimspa” diet. And that walrus is channelling Tammy Faye Bakker with all that mascara.

Man, I miss Sigmund. And that curly-headed friend of his who was also on Family Affair? I think he was my first love.

In any case, I hereby present Gimme Gimme Octopus video. Prepare to scrub out your eyeballs with bleach afterwards, if you’re not still on a second-hand high.

Here you can actually purchase this chemical-fuelled monstrosity. It’s worth the twenty bucks for the marketing copy alone, which will thrill and amaze your friends (at the thought you’d pay $20 for this thing).

The most accurate summary of this late 60’s Japanese kids show we have read states: “An octopus and a peanut are in love with the same walrus.” Playing kind of like a Sesame Street segment on an entire sheet of acid, Gimme Gimme Octopus boggles the mind with it’s impenetrable story lines and bizarro characters. In one segment the octopus and the walrus steal a sleeping dragons smoking bowl. They then sit in a tree and sniff the smoke. Soon their eyelids are half open and they seem to be laughing and swaying back and fourth. Makes the Mighty Mouse magic dust controversy seem tame in comparison.

The whole series (four, count ’em, four DVDs) is available here in case you can’t find your old Thunderbirds tapes and need some brain food. And here, if you’re still looking for punishment, are some more free episodes.

Now I know why psychiatrists call them “episodes.”