Learning Day: Jot the Dot (Patreon)

In the beginning, there was Gumby. Created as a green, racially neutral symbol of life by Art Clokey, Gumby and his horse friend Pokey went on a series of stop-motion adventures and eventually reached the pinnacle of their fame when they got their own Game Boy Advance game that was marginally more entertaining than eating plasticine.

But then, everyone had a game on the GBA. Pre-podcast Joe Rogan had a GBA game. The Harlem Globetrotters had a GBA game. The concept of Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots had a GBA game, in case you hated the tactility and kitsch value of the original toy and thought that maybe it could offer a deep competitive experience on the go. It could not, and developer Full Fat does not list it among their works on their website, so they are presumably more embarrassed of it than their adaptation of The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, which looks like a really, really upsetting porn parody of the first movie.

Now, Gumby was probably fine for the mid-20th century. I mean, what else were you going to do back then besides watch this mild-mannered clay man go on his stupid little adventures? Participate in the counterculture? Die in a Vietnamese jungle? I don't have anything against Gumby, really, but he was such a mild image of 1960s entertainment that Eddie Murphy portrayed him as a megalomaniac director producing his life story on 1980s SNL and that was the entire bit, just what if Gumby was a jerk.

People thought this was really funny. God, comedy was so fucking easy forty years ago. In modern terms, it would be like if SNL did a Backyardigans sketch today and Sarah Sherman played one that kept barfing diarrhea everywhere. I mean, that would be the case if time worked now the same way that it did in the '80s, which obviously it doesn't. So I guess it would be more like if they did an Italian Brainrot sketch on a week when Walton Goggins was guest hosting and made him play Tralalero Tralala.

But despite Gumby's milquetoast nature, he wasn't quite enough of a pussy for easily-offended Christian audiences of the era. For these viewers, Art Clokey created Davey and Goliath, which featured a boy and his moralizing, talking dog whom only he could hear.

But despite making an explicitly religious program intended to teach valuable Lutheran lessons to children, Clokey was still an artist. Davey and Goliath might have been plodding and slow, but it rarely actually mentioned the Bible, sometimes got into sort of serious subjects like racism and death, and clearly demonstrated a commitment to craft.

And so, the good people at the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission looked at Davey and Goliath, and they were displeased. Too entertaining in its storylines! Too artful in its stop motion! Too blasphemous in its depiction of an ensouled canine! Possibly too ethnic in its Lutheranism! A cry rang out for a shittier show, a cheaper show, a more Southern Baptist show. Thus was born Jot the Dot.

I cannot overstate how fucking awful this show looks. And despite being less than nothing of an idea, it's possible that the dullards who created Jot actually ripped off the smiley face in designing him. Yes, that smiley face. Like the high-five, it's hard to imagine that there was a time before it existed. But while there were probably other versions before it, the most iconic version of the Smiley was invented by a contractor in the early 1960s to fix a morale issue at a Massachusetts insurance company. He got paid $45 dollars, which works out to roughly $500 today. He looks like Matthew Lesko became a terrible Batman villain named "The Smiler" who the Joker killed because he was horning in on his racket.

Jot showed up a couple of years later. He's a whale abortion of a character by the worst kind of children's television producers — the ones who desperately want to convey a lesson rather than actually expand children's minds or even entertain them, and who think the way to do that is by making everything as simplistic as possible. Every character looks basically the same, and Jot's only real "thing" is that he changes colors depending on his mood, because that's easier to animate than actual earth human expressions.

Each episode was made with a budget of less than $25,000, and I know for a fact someone involved in the production was skimming off of that, because the stories are each about four minutes long and the "animation" is an insult to the word. Whenever Jot moves, his limbs disappear and he becomes a featureless orb that skips to the next scene, because walk cycles are hard and God's ok with cutting corners if it's in the service of evangelizing and/or enriching yourself. I've seen bad animation before, but I've never seen a cartoon where it seems like the creators resented the concept of animation itself.

Since Jot cartoons were only a few minutes long, they couldn't air as full-length half-hour shows. Instead, they were shown on several locally-produced variety programs. One of these was Peppermint Place, which was one of the longest-running series in children's television. It was hosted by "Mr. Peppermint," which sounds like the moniker of a fanciful talking dog who might hang out with the Woggle Bug but was in fact the father of Butthole Surfers singer Gibby Haynes.

Incidentally, Mr. Peppermint was the first person to report on the Kennedy assassination in the Dallas, Texas area. He had ducked out during lunch to go watch the President's motorcade, and ran back to the station to broadcast the news. As a result of this quirk of history, there exists an audio recording of someone asking Jerry Haynes, "Did the President's assassination ever play into Mr. Peppermint?"

Jot also appeared on Joy Junction, which makes it the second-worst thing that's ever been associated with that program. He was created by Ruth Byers and Ted Perry and voiced by Lou Kelly, none of whom are known for any other children's entertainment. I'm fairly certain they're all dead now, and it may be distasteful for me to mock their shitty kids' show, but then again, the Southern Baptist Convention only came into being when southern churches left the national Baptist convention because they loved slavery so much, and they didn't apologize for that until 1995, so fuck 'em.

Here's a typical Jot storyline: Jot steals a cupcake — cupcakes that were, mind you, intended for dessert — and lies to his mother about having done so, saying "no mam" when she asks if he's hiding one. So, in addition to all of its other failures, this show produced by a children's educator can't even fucking spell right.

Jot is then tormented by physical manifestations of his misdeeds, as the words "no mam" not only thwart his efforts to eat the cupcake, but prevent him from playing basketball and interacting with his beloved (non-talking) dog.

Soon, he is ushered into a psychedelic nightmare in which he is chased by the words while an eerie version of "London Bridge is Falling Down" plays.

I am reluctantly forced to admit that this one sequence is kind of sick, if only because it looks like the final boss fight of Earthbound drawn from memory by a chimpanzee on ketamine.

Jot is rent asunder by the sheer force of his guilt. The very stuff of his self is obliterated, his atoms scattered to the corners of the universe. What was once his body now sags into a despairing mass of flesh. He has no mouth, yet he must "no mam."

Jot finally confesses to his mother, who reassures him that being assailed by a riot of color and light is a perfectly normal consequence of swiping a cupcake.

Jot isn't fucking around. None of this "oh gee Davey, I think we're supposed to be nice to people" horseshit. Begone, devil dog. You are an abomination unto the Lord. And children, if you lie you are no better than Goliath. Hey, what else did the Southern Baptist Convention think constituted an abomination around the time Jot was made?

God hates a lot of things, like lying, and premarital sex, and race mixing. But it's not all fire and brimstone. In another episode, Jot tells his friend about how his grandma broke her hip and God made the hip better again. Not modern medicine, no. God.

The obnoxious teenage atheist in me is screaming Bad Religion lyrics right now. But it's hardly worth saying this is dumb as shit, right? It's a cartoon from the 1960s made by incurious cretins to indoctrinate children into a worldview that officially supported the Lost Cause for the majority of the 20th century. Of course it's fucking stupid.

"Great!" Jot's friend exclaims upon hearing of God's wondrous life-giving powers. But Jot goes on to say that grandma got sick again. He and his family prayed for her, but this time God decided to take her into his sweet embrace.

I'm not sure what exactly the animator was trying to convey with the expression on Jot's face when he rubs the chair of his now-deceased grandma. It's definitely not sadness, and it's not a quiet happiness that she has left behind the earthly realm of sin and pain for eternal paradise. It looks unmistakably like Jot is smiling to himself and thinking, "with that old bag out of the way, I just got my white ass a sweet new chair."

Today, there are only two reasons anyone under the age of dead remembers Jot. One is that the Animaniacs improbably parodied it in their 2020 series, which I never saw because millennial bait reboots of '90s children's properties make me a little too keenly aware of my own mortality. The other is that Jerry Falwell's TV channel, FamilyNet, started showing it in the late 2000s. Since then, Jerry and FamilyNet have both been through some changes. FamilyNet is now the Cowboy Channel, which is somehow still an extant cable network, and Jerry Falwell doesn't exist, which rules.

When FamilyNet started showing the old Jot episodes, they also made him their mascot, presumably because they wanted to really get the most out of the twenty bucks they paid for the rights. They commissioned a couple of crudely rendered bumpers featuring the character, including one in which he is sprayed down on an Easter egg assembly line, sets off an alarm, and is taken away by a crane.

FamilyNet also cut the Jot episodes down from their original bloated length of four and a half minutes to a slender 112 seconds or so each. These are the ones that are easiest to find online. However, uncut versions of some of the episodes do exist in English as well as Spanish, because like so many of the USA's other crimes, Jot was exported to South America. It was broadcast on a Chilean evangelical show called Puntas Abiertas, which I think means "split ends?"

Just as Jot's hands are stained with mud from playing outside when his mother told him not to, America's hands are stained with the blood of innocents from playing at imperialist adventures in the global south and exporting its destructive ideologies. Inshallah both shall be brought to justice and Gumby gets an adult animation series where he says "fuck" in our lifetimes.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Lane Haygood, who appreciated Moral Orel without ever watching Davey and Goliath.

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