The Big Yellow Fellow (RiffTrax Shorts)

RiffTrax Year:  2020

Riffers:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett

"Hey Jackie!  Who's your friend?"

"I don't know, but he's already hit two bikers and a dog."

Jackie is in a real pickle.  You see, a school bus has followed him home and he's not sure what to do with it.  After much consideration by his parents, they allow Jackie to keep the school bus.  However he must learn the ins and outs of bus safety in order to do so.

This is a really strange short and not because it's hard to understand.  It's rather easy to understand really, it thinks kids are stupid and throws a idiotic premise at them disguising safety education because they might think it's funny and will accidentally learn something.  The Big Yellow Fellow is so low effort that it can't even maintain what it's premise is.  Jackie is allowed to "keep" a school bus, but every safety rule he learns is on the presumption that other people drive it and he only sees it twice a day to go to school and go home.  Characters aren't even the same from one scene to the next, introducing themselves with wildly comedic personas to start before switching to stern lectures for the rest of the short.  Even if we throw reality into the wind, the premise lacks even the basest of cartoon logic because it doesn't even follow its own rules.  The most effort The Big Yellow Fellow puts into itself is that it gives the bus a little grin on its grill to give it a little smiley face.

I don't know if it worked on kids, but I have this gut feeling I'd watch this at a young age thinking "...the hell is this?"

It's not hard to see why the short was selected to be riffed, because it's such a bizarre presentation of what should just be a bus safety film.  When the short goes through the motions the riffing feels tired.  It feels like we've seen dozens of shorts making these points before and what else is there to possibly say?  However when the short goes full blast with trying to be cute and funny for children there is more to work with, such as the wild exaggerated facial expressions of the father character that leave Mike, Kevin, and Bill horrified or the climax as some oddball claims the bus is his and he allows Jackie to keep it, as Mike warns them urgently that they should under no circumstances accept a gift from this man.

The Big Yellow Fellow is a bit of a seesaw of dryness and amusement.  There is probably one joke that puts me over the top in recommending it though, which comes at about halfway through when the bus driver irately asks all of the kids on board to quiet down and they immediately sit and behave, causing the riffers to sit in awe as it's the first time in the history of school buses where that actually worked.  I laughed quite a bit at that and it lingers with me after the short ends.  Based on that, I say take a ride on the Big Yellow Fellow.

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