The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

MY LIFE WITH THE CRAZY CAPER CREW

by Hypnotoad <>

Part 1 of 4

The blind date was going badly, and I was starting to panic.

Jody and I had been pushed into having dinner together by a mutual friend. Barbara was convinced we had everything in common and would make a perfect match. Barbara and I were only the most passing of acquaintances, and Jody didn’t know her especially well either. This might account for why the two of us were doing so badly.

Those who know me better than Barbara does consider me somewhat hyperactive and fidgety. That’s not entirely true; I only get that way around other human beings. When I’m alone I am totally relaxed. When I’m alone I also enjoy silence, but around another person I become self-conscious and start to babble. Unfortunately, I saw right away that Jody was a very shy person. She had greeted me tersely and had only offered the bare necessity of words since then. It seemed she was quite capable of sitting there across from me and not saying a word for the rest of the night. This made her the natural enemy of someone like me. So I tried to hold back my impulse to chatter, allowing her a bit of room to talk and maybe open up. No luck. My restraint was only making the awkward silence between us even more drawn out and obvious.

I’m sure Jody didn’t realize she was doing it, but her eyes kept glancing unconsciously—almost involuntarily—to her wristwatch. Oh geez. I didn’t need a course in body language to see she was bored and wondering how soon the ordeal of sitting across from this drip would end. Finally, I decided to be a man about it. I would invent a meeting or appointment or other such nonsense and apologize for having to leave early: a polite and face-saving way to get us both off the hook. Time to bite the bullet, as it were.

“Sorry, what time is it?” I asked nonchalantly.

She blinked, as if she’d forgotten there was someone else at the table with her. “Ummmmm...” she murmured, looking at her watch. And then she did a strange thing. Distracted, clearly not paying attention to what she was doing, she spoke softly but in an comically eerie tone of voice: “It’s... telling time!”

“Bluh?” I said cleverly. Dear reader, I am capable of stringing words together coherently to form sentences. Honestly I am. “What did you just say?”

Jody looked up at me with a start. She hadn’t realized what she’d just said, or hadn’t known she’d said it aloud, before I brought it to her attention. “Um. Oh. That... that was a line from an old cartoon...”

“The Crazy Caper Club,” I replied. “Yes, I know.”

Her eyes widened. I doubt they were as wide as mine must have been. “You know the Crazy Caper Club?”

I grinned. “That was my favorite show when I was a kid.”

“Mine too!” The transformation in her was amazing. Suddenly the quiet withdrawn girl was gone, and in her place was this vibrant face practically radiating energy. As if the clouds had parted unexpectedly to reveal a full moon. “Wow. I never met anyone else who ever heard of it!”

“Oh, sure, I watched it every week!” I grasped for any memory of the show I could offer her, like a drowning man searching for a life preserver. “Remember the one with the tightrope?”

“Yes yes yes!” Her outburst caused people at neighboring tables to look at us. Lord knows what they thought I was doing to her. It was that scene from When Harry Met Sally all over again, except I was enjoying it as much as she was. Jody asked, “Who was your favorite character? Terry or Jackie?”

“Oh, um, Terry, definitely.” I was lying. I always had a thing for Jackie, the assertive redhead... but Terry was the shy brunette, and Jody also had dark brown hair.

“Really? I always wanted to be like Jackie,” Jody answered.

“Well, so did Terry, remember?” It was out of my mouth before my brain was aware of saying anything. And it started Jody giggling, which I would have sworn was a scientific impossibility five minutes earlier.

The rest of the date turned out to be one of the best nights I’ve ever had. I got home at 2 AM and was still high off the buzz. No, of course I didn’t try to score with her; this was someone I was going to see again and again. Somehow I knew there was no hurry. And to be honest, once I had the opportunity to geek out about old cartoons, I was enjoying that more than anything else, and wasn’t even thinking in terms of scoring.

At three in the morning I was still wide awake, using my iMac to find any information online about the Crazy Caper Crew. I wanted to have some facts and tidbits with which to impress Jody... oh, let’s be honest. Our conversation had reminded me of how utterly devoted I had been to that show and I wanted to see what was out there. It had never occurred to me to search for it before.

Huh. Why had it never occurred to me? It was such a powerful memory. An evil hypnotist was always trying to control people and make them his slaves, but four teenagers named Terry, Jackie, Todd, and Bongo were always foiling his schemes. I watched it every week. And yet I hadn’t thought of it in years until Jody mentioned it... then it all came flooding back vividly.

It wasn’t listed on TV Tome. It didn’t have a page on the IMDB. I checked websites devoted to television cartoons, but the show wasn’t mentioned there either. Not even on Saturday Morning Mind Control. Google came back with “Your search—‘Crazy Caper Crew’—did not match any documents.” No mentions in any of the television or animation groups on Usenet. Finally I posted a message on a particular web forum I frequented:

Anyone else remember an early 80s Saturday morning by this title? It was about four teens who teamed up against an evil hypnotist. TIA!

Then I went to bed, the adrenaline rush of excitement having worn off, leaving me all too aware of how full the evening ultimately had been and how sleepy I was. The following morning I checked the web forum again and saw a few responses to my query. I read them while sipping my coffee.

I think I remember that show. Wasn’t there an episode about a hypnotic song no one could resist?

There was one where the villain, a sexy blonde, wore this perfume that caused men to fall madly in love with her, including two of the heroes. Then the two girls steal the perfume and wear it themselves, to “cancel out” the villain wearing it. But it makes the villain swoon over the other two girls! Wow... I can’t believe I remember that.

Never saw it, but apparently it was created by a guy named Al Sioris, who had some pretty radical ideas about animation. Ran from September to December in 1982; the show was cancelled after only 13 episodes.

As soon as I’d showered, shaved, and dressed, I responded to that last message privately via e-mail.

Thanks for confirming my recall on the CCC toons. Is there a source for further info on the show or Al Sioris? I know it’s not on DVD—any eps available on VHS or thru BitTorrent?

I sent this to Mike right before heading to work. My friend Mike is an expert on cartoon history. He actually worked at Hanna-Barbera in the Eighties, and got to meet and talk shop with a lot of the older guys who’d done animation on shows like Yogi Bear or Magilla Gorilla. I’d have asked more, but he was a busy guy and liked to get right to the point.

He’s also one of those people with an impossibly wide social sphere (among other things; he sometimes joked that his sheer girth created a powerful gravitational field that other people were simply drawn into) and if he didn’t know the answer any question, he’d know someone else who did. These days he owned his own business, devoted to animation art and memorabilia. I didn’t intend to pester him... but this seemed worthwhile.

What with one thing after another—her flying out to visit her sister for a week, me rushing to get the Spring catalogue done at work, her filling in for a sick coworker, me catching and recovering from a cold—Jody and I didn’t get together on a second date for over three weeks. This was not entirely a bad thing. It gave us a chance to get acquainted by e-mail and phone calls.

E-mail isn’t only for brief notes and forwarding allegedly humorous news items. It can be every bit as intimate and personal as written letters. People can say things in writing to one another they would never say in person; the medium by which those words reach you is irrelevant. In our correspondence, Jody told me about a failed marriage that had lasted only a couple of years, its painful and acrimonious end, and how it had left her wary of relationships. I told Jody about the ex-fiancee who had suddenly broken off our engagement and left me standing at the altar... metaphorically, at least.

We got to know one another, and now we could face a second encounter without fearing any repeat of the awkwardness that had started our first date. But in all this verbal intimacy, I’d kept something from Jody as a surprise.

We met at a bar near my home after work. I was positioned to watch Jody come in, timidly, her face guarded and almost expressionless.

Jody was an interesting-looking person. Her figure was boyish, almost sexless. Her ears and her nose were disproportionately large for her head, and her chin was a little too small. Her eyes were more narrow than usual and so were her lips. The overall effect was to produce a vulpine face that made the term “foxy” a bit more literal than it would usually be meant. I will hide nothing from you: my first thought was that although I’d thought of her looks as odd on our first meeting, this time they seemed to make perfect sense. The geometry was rather elegant. I was surprised by how attracted I was to her. Nothing about her looks had changed; my eyes had.

She accepted a quick peck on the cheek, and offered one in return. “Sorry I’m so late. Were you waiting long?”

“Not at all. I just got here myself.” A lie like that doesn’t even count as a lie. “How are you doing?”

“Um. Fine.” She still wasn’t much for making idle conversation. “So... where are we going to eat tonight?”

“That’s up to you. I wanted to find out what you were in the mood for.” And then my heart leapt into my throat, trying to stop me from saying the next words. “But I have to stop back at my place and get something first. It’s just a block away.”

If she hesitated at all, or seemed even the slightest bit uncomfortable, I’d have her stand in the hallway while I pretended to get my wallet. I wasn’t about to say “would you like to see my etchings while you’re here?” But Jody just shrugged and said “Okay.”

We strolled the block back to my place slowly. Part of me was chattering away as usual. Another part of me wondered if Jody thought I was bringing her there to put the moves on her, or if in fact that was what she expected, or maybe hoped for, and how I should handle it if such was the case. I was still performing these mental calculations when the elevator brought us to my floor. I unlocked the door, and prepared to ask her to wait here just one moment...but she walked in immediately. “Make yourself at home,” I said feebly.

I looked around to see if I’d missed anything in my frantic housecleaning. No, everything seemed okay. I was careful not to look at her looking at my apartment. Maybe she wasn’t interested one way or the other, or maybe she was sizing it up coldly and efficiently. Instead I glanced at the VCR. Yes, the tape was there.

“Jody, I have a surprise for you,” I announced. This caused her to look up with apprehension. If I was a creep or a pervert, this was when I would spring it on her. Dammit, that was stupid of me. I absolutely mustn’t scare her away. Feeling like an idiot, I walked to the TV set and VCR, turned them on, and pressed play.

In a moment, the screen was filled with brightly colored figures. “Todd! Terry! Jackie! And Bongo!” the stentorian announcer said. “The Crazy Caper Crew!” Then the theme music began with a brassy fanfare.

“Eeeeeeep!” Jody said. Her awestruck expression was everything I had hoped it would be. She turned to me with eyes suddenly huge again. “How? How did you find it? Where?”

“A friend of mine works in Hollywood,” I explained. “He found someone who’d kept these old tapes and didn’t want them sitting around. So we now own the entire series.” I was thinking that whatever favor Mike would want in return couldn’t possibly be enough to repay him for Jody’s look of delight. And I realized I’d said “we” and that it didn’t bother me at all.

End of Part 1