Captain Scrummy: Michael Stipe’s legendary cameo on a kids TV show
It’s not every day that your favourite rock star randomly shows up on your favourite television show, with no advanced promotion, and proceeds to deliver one of the strangest, silliest, and objectively pitch-perfect performances in the history of musicians trying to act. Then again, it was the early 1990s, and stuff like this kinda happened all the time.
The year was 1992, to be precise, and the performer in question was none other than REM frontman Michael Stipe, an indie rock icon at the apex of his mainstream fame, right in between the releases of his band’s biggest records, Out of Time and Automatic for the People. The television show, which may be considerably less familiar to British audiences and only vaguely remembered by most Americans for that matter, was The Adventures of Pete & Pete, a quirky Nickelodeon kid sitcom about an introspective adolescent named Pete Wrigley and his precocious little brother… also named Pete Wrigley.
A cult gem if there ever was one, Pete & Pete ran for three series and was usually eclipsed in viewership by the other Nickelodeon fare of the era: Clarissa Explains It All, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, All That, etc. For a specific subset of outcast suburban Millennial kids, though, the Petes were where it was at, as the show’s absurd humour, cool needle drops (this is where I first heard the Magnetic Fields, Miracle Legion, Luscious Jackson, and the Apples in Stereo, among others), and an insane line-up of guest stars made for appointment viewing.
In the fictional town of Wellsville, where the Wrigley family lived, Steve Buscemi and Iggy Pop each made regular appearances as the dads of main characters; Gordon Gano, LL Cool J, and Syd Straw all played teachers at the Petes’ school, and everybody from Debbie Harry, David Johansen, Marshall Crenshaw, and Juliana Hatfield showed up as unusual characters in the neighbourhood. It was Michael Stipe’s appearance that really set the standard, though, as his two-minute cameo came in one of the earliest episodes of The Adventures of Pete & Pete, a one-off special titled ‘What We Did On Our Summer Vacation’, which actually pre-dated the official launch of the first proper Pete series in 1993.
Why on Earth would one of the biggest pop stars of the moment agree to play a shabby, seaside ice cream man named “Captain Scrummy” on an upstart, little-known kids TV show? The simple answer is that the episode’s director, the great Katherine Dieckmann, had worked with REM several times in the past, including the videos for ‘Stand’ and ‘Shiny Happy People’. Those experiences enabled Dieckmann to convince both Michael Stipe and his ‘Shiny Happy’ pal Kate Pierson of The B-52’s to make appearances in this episode, which would hold up as one of the best in the Pete & Pete catalogue.
Stipe, as Captain Scrummy, really embraces his role with adorable commitment. At this point in the plot, the elder Pete is searching for Wellsville’s most popular ice cream man, the mysterious Mr. Tastee, who has gone missing—much to the dismay of the neighbourhood kids. When Pete approaches the decidedly less popular Cap Scrummy, Stipe—with a hilarious cracking voice—asks him if he’d like a chocolate ice pop called a “sludgesicle”.
“You look like a bonafide sludgesicle man,” Scrummy says with a sideways smile. When Pete explains that he and the other kids are looking for their friend Mr Tastee, Captain Scrummy defends the ice cream man’s code of solitude and privacy. “Tastee knows the rules,” he says. “Why do you think he wears that plastic head all the time? To keep kids like you from asking too many personal questions.”
“Why? What are you guys so afraid of?” asks Pete. Stipe now delivers his Oscar clip. “Look, aren’t we here on the first hot day of every summer?” he says with conviction. “Don’t we carry 49 different flavours, including Pineapple Blurt? What else do you want from us?”
If the essence of 1992–with its grungier proclivities but pre-internet innocence–could be neatly condensed into one scene of a children’s cable television program, Michael Stipe as Captain Scrummy feels like it’s the one. And though Pete decided to pass on the sludgesicle, I’d happily pay a quarter for one right now.
