Pepper Ann ("Dances with Ignorance," "Girl Power," and "Miss Moose")

This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire


This late nineties cartoon is one that I caught on TV a few times as a kid, but that failed to make much of an impression on me. Kind of a catchy theme song. I recall it being fairly well written, as these type of shows go. But by that same token, "American TV cartoon about a middle-class teenager dealing with the rigours of being a middle-class teenager" was a saturated market in the late nineties and aughts. I recall Pepper Ann being one of the better shows of its kind, but not really distinguishing itself exactly.

But, I didn't see that many episodes. And some things might have gone over my head, despite me having been in the target audience agewise. So, we shall see. The three episodes I've been commissioned to review today are from the show's third and fourth seasons. After watching them, my opinion is...changed, a little bit, I guess? I can definitely see how Pepper Ann was intended to be a much more politically conscious, socially progressive series than most of the others of its kind. I'm not sure if this attempt really ended up elevating it above the throng, though. Good intentions, but decidedly mixed results.


The first episode in the order, "Dances With Ignorance," is probably the poster child for how this show often fails. Specifically, by highlighting a problem and then walking right past the obvious solutions to it and instead gesturing at something less pertinent.

One of Pepper Ann's teachers is asking for a presentation about one of the cultures in each student's ethnic background (the words "some of the spices in our great melting pot" are the teacher's words, not mine). Pepper Ann doesn't find anything in her family history that she considers interesting or exciting. Despite her mother's family being an incredibly diverse Ashkenazi clan with roots in every country in central and eastern Europe and her (divorced; I will give the show full points for acknowledging that single-parent childhoods are not that unusual) father being a first-generation British immigrant. Her eyes light up when she finds out that her dad is one-eighth Navajo and has the heirloom to prove it, though.

She decides that her tiny Navajo percentage is the most interesting thing about her heritage, and that she is "an Indian." Complete with banging her hand against her mouth and screaming at the slightest provocation and finding excuses to quote Disney's "Pocahantas" whenever she can.

Heh, I forgot what a textbook ADHD case Pepper Ann was.

Granted, I also either forgot how stupid and stubborn she was, or this episode is just a particularly unflattering portrayal of her. What follows is a montage of Pepper Ann deciding she knows everything there is to know about the Navajo based on gut feelings and cringey pop culture Native American shit, despite the persistent effort of her much-smarter friends to get her to open a goddamned book.

This reaches a head when Pepper Ann's mother decides that the best way to set her daughter straight might be to reach out to an actual Navajo family in their city. And uh. Here's where the episode does a couple of things wrong, in my opinion.

First: I'm not indigenous myself, so I can't say too much about this with any confidence, but. Something about the way this family is portrayed just feels really off to me. The ratio of "traditionalist" to "assimilated" feels, how to put this...like the show is trying to do a model minority thing. With the Navajo. Yeah. For another, the degree of patience that they show for Pepper Ann's wilfully-ignorantly racist shenanigans seems...I don't know. They do get sick of it at a certain point, but the way they're written up until then feels less like "steeling themselves and exercising extra patience on account of this being a literal kid," and more like "longsuffering wise indigenous character who exists to teach white kid important lesson before fading into the mists of the past where they belong." It helps that they DO get sick of it eventually, but the way it's handled up to that point...I don't know.

Like I said. Not indigenous. Maybe I'm making more of an ass of myself with this commentary than the episode itself is. But...I don't know.

Second, and much more confidently: what the everloving fuck is wrong with Pepper's mother? She seriously just invited these people over and LET her daughter put on a Halloween "Indian" costume and set up a literal mock-teepee and smoke signals up for them in front of the door? She doesn't say anything for the entire meeting until after the family has gotten disgusted and left, and then she just kind of gives Pepper a milquetoast "yeah, you really should have listened to what they were saying instead of trying to talk over them" speech.

So, Pepper learns her lesson (or so the episode seems to think) and...I swear to fucking god...her mom brings Pepper Ann over to the Navajo family's house so that she - the thirteen year old - can apologize to them.

What the everloving fuck is wrong with Pepper's mother?

Pepper ends up being forgiven and learning some real history from the family, and then gives a decent presentation on the Navajo for her class. And this, along with the show not seeming to realize how badly the mom comes across, is one of the big problems I had.

The catalyst for this entire drama was Pepper Ann being disappointed that her family history wasn't sexy and exciting enough, and then fixating on the 1/16th of it that she could exoticize. She's essentially learned the degree to which her Navajo heritage is completely irrelevant to who and what she is. We started out learning that she has living grandparents with encyclopaedic knowledge of their very interesting and extensive Ashkenazi family, and that even her father has plenty of interesting stuff going on with both English and Spanish ancestors on top of the one Cherokee grandparent. I thought the resolution was going to have her accepting that she has an identity to explore instead of feeling like she has to go look for (effectively) a foreign one to appropriate and consume.

Oh well.

Credit where it's due, this episode has a really great gag when she's talking with the grandparents, and they have a literal tree growing in their backyard that they use to keep track of their family history.

And also the stump of another tree that they chopped down when Pepper's parents got divorced.

My own Yiddish-accented grandparents died before I was born, but I've had enough exposure to my aunts and uncles on that side of the family to know that this portrayal is only a very slight exaggeration.

Also, there's a throwaway joke where Pepper Ann is supposed to be researching Navajo history, and instead she just discovers a video game where you play as a nineteenth resistance fighter up against the US cavalry. Complete with sick execution combos where you can pull dudes off their horses and and 1hk them with your tomahawk. I didn't find the joke especially funny, but I would play the hell out of that game.

The next episode on the list, "Girl Power," actually comes right after the previous one in the show's third season. This time we're talking about gender instead of race. Particularly, the intersection of gender politics with entertainment media. Oh hey, I talk about that sometimes! This one is for me!

Eh...it's better than "Dances With Ignorance," but I still didn't love it.

This one centers on Pepper Ann's tomboyish little sister, Moose, with Pepper herself serving as more of a side character. Moose is super into a character named Tundra Woman (she seems to be sort of a cross between Thundarr and Red Sonya). She gets super excited when a Tundra Woman animated series starts airing, only for it to be a cutesy, Barbie-ish, in-name-only adaptation meant to sell accessories to a girly-girl target audience.

Unlike the previous episode, the mother actually makes a pretty good showing here, encouraging Moose to make her voice heard if she feels so strongly about this. Resulting in a fairly amusing montage-sequence that shows this little kid's cartoon feminism salt going inordinately far.

I liked the part where the mother warns Moose that corporations are adept at shrugging off pressure from activists and spinning the media against them, and that she therefore shouldn't accept anything that looks too good to be true. Unadulteratedly good message there, show.

Anyway, the studio initially brushes them off, citing the profitability of the girly-girl audience who wants content like this and will buy shit because of it. When the protests get big enough, they finally decide that they have more to lose by not caving than they do by caving, so the new season of Tundra Woman comes with a complete reimagining. We go from doing a sendup of insipid girly-girl shit, to a sendup of dark-and-edgy reimaginings. Tundra Woman is now an antiheroic mute beastwoman who goes around killing every creature she can find and eating it. Which horrifies Moose even more than the previous incarnation.

The protests resume. It culminates in the studio deciding that poking at female role models is too fraught, and cancel Tundra Woman TAS entirely to make another show about a male-coded skateboarding robot. Still, Tundra Woman has inspired Moose to be a warrior who fights for what's right, and that's what's really important.

Once again, I feel like this episode sort of looks past the real problem here. That being, IP laws. It was clear that the studio had no respect or consideration for the source material, and may not have even read any of the comics they were allegedly basing the show on at all. Tundra Woman being held hostage by this specific group of pricks was the root of the problem, with the intersection with gender issues being sort of left aside by the episode's midpoint. I guess raising the subject of IP, especially as it concerns the animated medium, might have not been a good idea for the creators of Pepper Ann, though. Did I mention this series was aired by the Walt Disney corporation?

Also, this episode unironically does the "more female drone operators!" thing. Like, almost word for word. One of the Tundra Woman protesters is an army lady who gives an aggressive speech about how reading the original TW comics inspired her to enlist. So, um. Well. Nineties, I guess.

I liked the gag at the end, with Pepper being a big fan of the skateboarding robot. She mostly just contributes jokes and peanut gallery asides in this episode, but that was probably the best one that she contributes.

The third and final episode on the list, "Miss Moose" from the show's fourth season, is easily the best of the lot. And also one that feels ahead of its time rather than behind it. It's another Moose-centric episode, though it's one that gives Pepper much more to do and lets them be more or less co-protagonists. The inciting incident is Moose being transvestigated.

Well, sort of. Approximately that.

Pepper Ann is increasingly disconcerted by how many people mistake Moose for a boy, to the point of people who don't know their family very well asking Pepper how her "brother" is doing or mentioning that they saw "his" latest triumphs on the elementary school sportsball field. This comes to a head when a pair of Floridian mall cops travel back in time from 2024 to charge into a women's restroom after Moose and drag the fifth grader out while threatening "him" with serious legal repercussions. When they're told of their mistake, they drop Moose on the ground and dust their hands off like they're afraid of cooties.

This leads to Pepper Ann fearing for Moose's safety, and feeling like perhaps she should be trying to provide her little sister with a more feminine role model. There's a dream-sequence here that...well, this is actually unironically really good. Both because of how well it captures the goofiness of Pepper's overactive imagination, and because of how well it captures the then-nascent subgenre of gender horror. Pepper has a nightmare about Moose being liquidated by the government for failing to perform femininity to satisfaction, with the doctors assigned to dissect her musing offhand about how it's really too bad; this one had an older sister who should have been able to set her right before it was too late.

Really made me think of Early Contrapoints. Like, from back when she was still good and also hadn't deleted all her early work yet.

Anyway, after waking up from this dream Pepper Ann decides she needs to force-femme her little sister. Which is made even more awkward by the fact that Pepper isn't all that traditionally feminine herself, and would probably have some of the same issues Moose does if she happened to have a slightly squarer jaw and deeper voice.

It gets to the point of constant bullying and attempts to hijack virtually everything in Moose's life. To the point where I half-wondered if we were going to do a surprise gear shift and have the lesson of the day be about boundaries rather than gender expectations. To Moose's credit, she shows the same spine that she did in the Tundra Woman episode, refusing to put up with any of Pepper Ann's shit and giving back as good as she gets in response to her sister's escalation. But, as we saw in the Navajo episode, once a stupid idea gets into Pepper Ann's head it takes a lot of time and pressure to get it out again.

The resolution for this one comes after Pepper Ann convinces their mother to take them to a fancy restaurant to celebrate Moose's recent sports accomplishments, instead of buying Moose a gift that she'd actually enjoy. Pepper Ann finally gets it through her head when, due to her obsessive shadowing and policing of her sister's behaviour at the restaurant, she herself gets a stern lecture about how a proper little girl is supposed to behave from the stern maitre'd.

Only uh...for some reason the turnaround needs to have the maitre'd playing the heel for Pepper and Moose to turn around and scold back. Even though this confrontation only happened because of Pepper running around acting like a lunatic in the middle of the restaurant.

Like, sure, the way that Pepper Ann behaved was a problem in and of itself rather than because of how it conflicted with gender expectations, so it was kinda messed up for the lady to make it about gender. And sure, this *type* of misbehavior isn't seen as "unmasculine" if a boy were to do it, even if it is still seen as misbehavior, which is part of the problem. But, because of the circumstances, it's kinda hard not to take the maitre'd's side despite all this.

Definitely the best of the three. Didn't trip over itself at any point, unlike the others. Had some snappy writing and decent gags throughout as well, mostly centered on the back-and-forth between the sisters as Moose meets Pepper's escalations.


Anyway. This show is okay. It means well. Just...it's not especially good at what it was trying to do, at least based on this sample. Not terrible, but not good.