Life of a Dad: Max and Ruby

So once you're the parent of a two year old you start to get acquainted with some of the TV shows and movies that your kid likes to watch. You may not get to see the shows in question from end to end because life is nuts and you have grown up things to do but after the show has been run about twelve dozen times you are probably piecing it together in your sleep and against your will. Case and Point, Max and Ruby; a strange children's show about two bunnies who live in a house in a town of other bunnies. Ruby is seven and Max is four and every episode I've seen involves the two of them competing for worldview dominance in who will play what game. You would think that this could be an opportunity for children to see good sibling relationship and conflict resolution at work... instead you get a checklist of how NOT to raise your children. My personal theory is that Max and Ruby are either very evil and dangerous murdering bunnies or they are a delusion inside Ruby's mind.

Let's start with the "Max and Ruby are Evil" theory. Max is evil. This is a generally accepted theory on the internet. He gets this look on his face which may have originally been supposed to communicate mischief, but it's become an internet meme for purposeful acts of evil... Ruby says stay put, Max runs off. Ruby explains that she needs to sell chocolate bars and Max eats one from every box making them unsaleable and wasting as much as possible. Ruby is innocently playing with her friend and Max sends his obnoxiously noisy truck / car toys to stop their game. For a four year old boy he is already will acquainted with trolling and psychological warfare.

Then there's Ruby, the micromanaging and nagging older sister whose overactive imagination and lack of life experience result in frequent life threatening situations for Max. In one episode she leaves Max alone outside while she talks to her dolls, Curly Shirley, Tooth Fairy, and Rapunzel about what they would like to eat for breakfast while her four year old brother hops in his toy car, leaves the yard, drives down the road, over a bridge (river underneath) and over to grandma bunny's house for ice cream. In another episode Max says that he is hungry but she sees that he has food all over his mouth and decides he needs a bath. She leaves him alone in the bathtub to go get toys, bath robes, and towels while Max tries to eat his sherbet in a drowning hazard. Then there's the episode where Ruby and her friend essentially kidnap Max from his playing markers and force him to play doctor with them, making him stay in bed for a sickness he doesn't have. Other parents only find Ruby annoying. I say she should be taken away by bunny services for woeful neglect and abuse!

Then there is the issue with their parents. As far as anyone can tell they either packed up and left or are dead. They never appear in any episodes, are never talked about, and other young bunnies have parents so it's not as though this bunny world is a Never Land only full of children. Their absence explains some of Ruby's micromanaging tendencies as she attempts to both play mommy and be mommy at the same time. It also explains Max's developmental delay as he is functionally mute except for one or two words every so often. So what happened to their parents? Well Max is evil so maybe he killed them. Maybe he put his toys on the stairs or dropped a bowling ball on their heads while they slept or chased them around with a knife after locking all the doors while Ruby played outside with her dollies. Maybe Ruby killed them. She is oblivious to common sense things and prefers to stay in her own little play world where others take on whatever role she imagines for them. Maybe she left electronics in the bathtub and forgot about them or baked a cake with bunny poison instead of baking soda. Maybe mother and father bunny asked for her help in sorting out a piece of machinery but she went off to play games with her friends and wasn't around to turn something off.

Maybe nobody says anything because they are afraid that they might be next.

Then there is the delusion theory. What if everything is just pieces of Ruby's fractured mind and she's actually hallucinating in a mental asylum. It would explain why the animation style is so... disjointed, because nothing is actually real. The bunnies and their toys are drawn like you would expect any cartoon, but the backgrounds appear to be computer generated with varying levels of texture fidelity. The houses and furniture have depth but the characters do not and look like paper cut-outs. The trees and vegetation in the background look like a seven year old copy / pasted and cut out different textures in MS Paint before dropping them into the scene. 

In any case, I am not the first or only one to suggest that Max and Ruby are either evil or a delusion. If you enjoy some horror fiction then check out Creepy Pasta's story in the hidden Max and Ruby DVD...