Courage the Cowardly Dog season 1 episode guide, ratings and reviews.
Pilot Episode
The Chicken from Outer Space
Synopsis
In the Bagge farmhouse, an evil alien chicken invades and attempts to turn the Bagges into chickens like himself, using some kind of diseased egg.
Rating: ****(out of *****)
This cartoon short is well-remembered as being the origin of the Courage the Cowardly Dog series, and, even though it is now only available to watch on the Internet, it is easy to see why it managed to spawn a four-season series.
This episode, while without dialogue, has all the creativity, style, and humour of the Courage series with a weird villain, Courage's charming character, and Eustace and Muriel being highly amusing. Even without words, the characters are displayed perfectly. As well as all this, it has elements of the actual series, Muriel being oblivious, Eustace's mask, a grotesque transformation and a scary ending, all of these which are echoed in the actual series.
The character designs, while different to the ones in the series, are very good too and well-drawn.
This episode has a lot of humour that makes you want to almost laugh out loud, but as well as this, it has an unsettling feeling of creepiness and claustrophobia, as well as a few violent elements(e.g. chickens getting strangled.)
The series went a long way from here, but this pilot should be remembered to have all the charm and nostalgia that makes Courage what it is today.
