"Rangeboy" originally aired December 19, 1993
“Rangeboy” isn’t the best episode of The Adventures Of Pete And Pete. It’s not the episode that everyone talks about when they reminisce about the show, and people never really mention guest star Frank Gifford. It is, however, a pretty funny episode full of heart, and that’s good enough for me.
Here’s the gist: Don Wrigley manages a sweet, enormous double-decker driving range. (Why that makes sense, I don’t know, but it does.) After losing 10 rangeboys to insanity and forced relocation, he’s enlisted his older son, Pete, to do the job for the end of the season. Pete’s making $3.50 an hour driving around in the cart that sucks up golf balls, but he can’t let anyone see him, lest they make his social life a living hell. “Even amoebas laugh at rangeboys,” he says.
Pete avoids all human contact at the range, stays in his cart, and never goes to the bathroom. Then, horror of horrors, Pete’s nemesis, the fantastic Endless Mike Hellstrom shows up at the range to drive some balls while he thinks about Pete’s head. Don starts telling Endless Mike that, in fact, Pete is the rangeboy, to Pete’s horror. Luckily, Artie — at the range practicing for the annual long shot competition — throws a club into the forest several miles away, wrapping it around a tree and drawing Don’s Ire. Pete’s saved.
The next day, instead of, as Ellen suggests, being “true to [himself] and not car[ing] what other people think,” Pete puts on a bear costume and gets in the cart. You see, bears were once native to Wellsville and roamed free before they were driven out years before by civilization. (“They say the last bear in these parts died choking on a baloney and cheese sandwich.”) The range is even called the Mighty Bear range, so it makes sense.
Unfortunately for Pete, some local hunters driven to madness by a bad hunting season stumble onto the range and offer to pay twice as much for a bucket of balls if they can aim directly at the bear. Bear season’s open, and Pete’s nearly driven to madness himself by the constant onslaught of hatred and golf balls directed at him.
On the last day of the season, Don and Little Pete draw up an “unmask the bear” contest where whoever hits the bear with a ball gets to unmask him. Pete quits, of course, but after Don faces a barrage of angry golf balls himself once he says the bear went into early hibernation, he realizes there was more bear inside him than he knew and decides it is, indeed, time for him to finally go be a mighty bear.
Long story short, Artie beans the bear while trying to cure his turtle pal Clark of his turtle amnesia. (“Tell the boy about Paris. You, me, Hemingway, the shiny tugboat.”) Artie’s not concerned at all about unmasking said bear, taking off with newly memorable pal Clark, but Pete unmasks himself, showing that the bear is, indeed, just a rangeboy, much to everyone’s dismay. All in all, it turns out okay for Pete. He’s not a rangeboy — he’s a rangebear. Plus, he got to make $3.50 an hour.
For what it’s worth, that Artie and Clark subplot is one of my favorites throughout the whole series. As Artie, Toby Huss really gets to go for it here with physical comedy and facial expressions, hitting golf balls with clubs pulled from a headless Santa lawn ornament “golf bag” with such aplomb and voracity that it’s just amazing to watch. He uses a hockey stick, a pipe, and, after that club throwing incident, gets a club duct-taped to his hands for “smashing time.” Instead of “fore,” Artie says “five,” which is adorable, and when he accidentally hits Clark, he mumbles “unpipe.”