THE DOVER BOYS IN THE FOREST
(or, a Pest in Ponyville)
“Eek! Tom! Eek! Dick! Eeek! Larry!”
The shrill voice of Dora Standpipe in distress propelled the three Dover boys into ever greater exertions. Somewhere ahead of them, in the wooded hills which overlooked their picturesque alma mater Pimento University, their fiancée lay helpless in the grip of dastardly ne’er-do-well Dan Backslide. The three of them ran in hot pursuit, dashing through the brush after their foul nemesis.
“I say, chaps,” stout Tom declared, “that rotten Backslide is making a right chase of it this time, isn’t he?”
“Astonishing when you consider his nasty three-pack-a-day habit,” dapper Dick commented.
“Never fear, lads,” the ever-positive youngest brother Larry piped up. “He’ll run out of breath by and by, and then we’ll give him what-for!”
“What with his interrupting our delightful pastoral retreat,” Tom growled, “I might even give him what-seven!”
Meanwhile, some distance ahead of the feeble wordplay and corny dialogue, the aforementioned scoundrel Dan Backslide was indeed running short of breath. The willowy form of that delicate flower Dora over his shoulder would have been a slight burden for any of the Dover boys, but the vices of the pool-hall had taken their toll on Backslide’s stamina, as had the repeated kicking and punching from his kidnap victim.
“Gadzooks!’ Backslide shouted over the repeated screaming of Dora. “I shan’t get away from those accursed Dover boys at this rate! If only there were some convenient hiding place where I could hole up with Miss Standpipe until the pursuit dies down!”
Stumbling to a halt at the bottom of a hill, Dan Backslide slumped against a tree, ignoring the continued pummeling from Dora’s pointed shoes and ring-encrusted fists. (These took quite a bit of ignoring.) Frantically his eyes darted around, looking for a cave, a hollow tree, anything which might provide a moment’s concealment.
“Eureka!” Dan shouted. “A swirling hole in thin air! Doubtless a mysterious portal leading to parts unknown!” And, indeed, some considerate person had indeed nailed a sign to a nearby tree, which read PARTS UNKNOWN --> “Providence has provided the provision for my providential escape!”
Gaining his second wind, Backslide straightened up and threw himself at the portal. To his shock, however, Dora ceased her struggles to escape and instead spread arms and legs wide, grabbing hold of the nonexistent edges of the portal. With a sound like rubber released from tension, Dan Backslide found himself thrown back from the portal, rolling along the ground before fetching up at the foot of a boulder. Picking himself up, he threw himself at the portal again and again, always bouncing off the immovable and improbable barrier of the rigid Miss Standpipe.
Giving up on rushing the portal, Backslide tried prying Dora’s fingers off of the edge of the portal, but her grip on thin swirling air was tighter than the lock on Dan’s father’s jail cell. He was still struggling with her when he heard, from the top of the hill:
O Miss Standpipe, Dora dear
Do not fret, we’ve heard your cry
The Dover boys have come at last
To give Backslide a real black eye
P. U. P. U.
We’re all for you
Yay, boo!
Dan stamped his foot in fury. “Curse you, Tom!” he said. “Curse you, Dick! Curse you, Larry!”
Towering Tom led the way down the hill, followed closely by dextrous Dick, with the rotund Larry bringing up the rear. With the power of a runaway freight train they slammed into Dan Backslide, and the four of them tumbled into the still-rigid Dora Standpipe. There was a frightful collision, and when the dust settled Dora found herself on the ground, alone. The Dover boys and Dan Backslide were gone, presumably through the mysterious portal.
Dora picked herself off the ground, dusted herself off, and shrugged. The picnic was still waiting, and with the Dover boys gone, that meant more raspberry trifle for her, assuming the ants hadn’t got into it.
Meanwhile, in the magical pony-filled land of Equestria, the intrepid alicorn Twilight Sparkle and her bubbly bubblegum buddy Pinkie Pie were enjoying a stroll in the beautiful spring sunshine.
“Uh oh,” Pinkie Pie said.
“What’s the matter?” Twilight Sparkle asked.
“Somebody’s narrating again,” Pinkie Pie said. “That’s never good news.”
“Narrating?” Twilight Sparkle asked. “I don’t hear anything.”
Pinkie put a pink hoof on Twilight Sparkle’s lips. “Listen,” she said in a surprisingly serious tone.
Twilight Sparkle heard nothing, absolutely nothing, except for the singing of the songbirds overhead, the gentle woosh of the pegasi pushing the clouds away, and the occasional rumble and clatter of a cart being pulled behind a brawny earth pony. Hardly a word of conversation, scarcely a mutter, much less a shriek, disrupted the otherwise preternatural calm of a normal Ponyville morning.
“Wow, that’s terrible,” Twilight Sparkle said when Pinkie took her hoof away. “It’s not just narration, it’s really bad narration.”
“I know, right?” Pinkie Pie said. “All that’s missing is for some line that begins with the word ‘suddenly’!”
Suddenly a swirling portal opened in the air directly above the two magical ponies!
“Called it,” Pinkie Pie sang out. Her tangled tail twitched rapidly, and with the swiftness of a disappearing cruller she grabbed Twilight Sparkle in her forehooves and yanked her out from under the portal just before three figures fell out of it with a thud.
“Ugh,” the roundest of the three figures, groaned, sitting up and removing his cap to rub his head. “Are you all right, Tom?”
“I’ll be right as rain in a moment,” the tallest of the three said, bouncing to his feet. “How are you, Dick?”
“Only stunned,” the pointiest of the three said, looking at his suit with dismay. “But that Dan Backslide owes me for the tailor’s bill. What about you, Larry?”
“I’ll bounce back,” Larry said. “Does anyone see that rotten Dan Backslide?”
“Can’t say that I do,” Tom said, looking back and forth, sparing not even an instant’s attention for the thatched-roof cottages or for the diminutive equines next to him. “He must have been thrown out of that mystical maelstrom somewhere else, worse luck.”
“Excuse me,” Twilight Sparkle spoke up, “but I’m-“
Pinkie Pie’s hoof covered Twilight’s mouth again. The pink party pony hissed in her ear, “Do you want to be caught up in this? If we don’t say anything, maybe they will go away.”
Twilight nodded agreement, because ponies have no appreciation for fine juvenile literature or the hard labor engaged in by those selfless souls who provide morally uplifting reading material for those generations who will carry America forward into the Twentieth Century.
“Well, we can’t just sit around all day,” Larry said, standing. “That Dan Backslide must be somewhere around here!”
“And it’s our job to find him!” Dick added.
“And bring him to the justice he so richly deserves!” finished Tom. “So let’s get started looking for him!”
“Is he in here?” Dick asked, poking his head through a cottage window.
“He’s not in here!” Larry said, looking in a rain barrel.
“He’s not in here!” Tom said, lifting the lid off a teapot.
“He’s not in here!” Dick said, prying open Twilight Sparkle’s mouth and looking down her throat.
“He’s not in here!” Larry said, popping out of Pinkie Pie’s mane.
“He’s not in here!” Tom shouted from the branches of a nearby tree.
“He’s not in here!” Dick said, looking between the layers of a Sugarcube Corner cake. A donut dangled from the end of his nose.
“He’s not in here!”
“He’s not in here!”
“He’s not in here!”
From one improbable hiding place after another, each Dover boy reported his lack of result, while Twilight Sparkle struggled to readjust her jaw after its involuntary opening. “Excuse me-“ she said.
Pinkie Pie shushed her again, with more urgency than before. “If we stay quiet they will go away,” she repeated.
At that moment some pony in a nearby house began playing the bassoon, and in time to the jaunty little tune the town mailmare flew slowly past at eye level, executing a perfect barrel roll with every flourish of the horn.
Meanwhile, on the edge of the Everfree Forest, Dan Backslide regained consciousness. Groggily he picked himself up off the ground and looked around at his surroundings. The portal hung over his head, showing no sign of going away. Indeed it showed no signs at all- not even a convenient sign that might say something like <--WAY BACK HOME.
“There’s no knowing where I am,” he grumbled to himself, “but wherever it is, at least it’s far away from those confounded Dover boys!”
Having said this, the blackhearted Backslide dusted himself off and set off to see what opportunities for vice, skullduggery or any deadly sin awaited him. Of course, that meant finding civilization, and at first glance all he saw was a dark deadly forest on one side and a mixture of woods and grassland on the other.
“Where’s a wretched dive bar when one needs one?” Dan muttered.
Then he noticed the odd cottage- the one that looked like it had been carved out of a hillock, with a little stream running by it. “Aha!” Dan said. “An empty house, all alone! I’ll loot it! No one will ever be the wiser!”
“Please don’t,” a soft voice said behind him.
Dan leaped right out of his patent leather shoes (which, like him, each had a hole in its sole). “EGAD!” he shouted. “How did you-“
His voice cut off as he saw the speaker- a little yellow horse, who stared up at him from about waist height with an expression of concern. “If you need help,” the pony continued, “it’d be safer if you let me get it for you.”
Another pony stood next to the yellow one, its alabaster coat shining in the afternoon sun. It tossed its purple mane, revealing a single pointed horn in the middle of its forehead. “Fluttershy, my dear,” the white horse said, “I appreciate the thought, but perhaps a little caution is in order.” She raised a hoof and added, “I mean, just look at that horrid eyesore of a suit. Purple suit, pink shirt, green bowtie, and aquamarine skin? Either the poor thing’s utterly colorblind or else he’s a petty criminal!”
“Oh, dear,” Fluttershy said. “How tragic! But I have some colorblind test images in my cottage. They came in so handy when Mr. Raccoon kept getting sick from eating unripe apples.”
Backslide gawped at this conversation- not at its contents, for he’d heard far worse, but at the simple fact that it was happening at all. His jaw dropped even more at the sight of the horn on the white pony’s head and the feathered wings tucked tightly to the yellow pony’s sides.
“Gadzooks!” he shouted. “Unicorns and pegasuses! I’ll sell them to the circus! I’ll make a FORTUNE!”
“Um,” Fluttershy murmured, “I don’t think an eye test is going to help with that.”
“So adorable, so helpless,” Backslide continued to gloat. “This will be simpler than taking candy from a baby!”
The unicorn raised an eyebrow. “You’re new here, aren’t you, darling?” she asked.
Dan Backslide paid the remark no mind. He stretched forward his hands to grasp each pony by the scruff of the neck. “In me power!” he chortled.
The basso rumble of an animal growl and the sensation of hot breath on the nape of his own neck cut Dan’s chortling short. He slowly turned his head, and there behind him stood a great grizzly bear, teeth bared, little red eyes glaring right down into his own.
“Please don’t hurt him too badly, Mr. Bear,” Fluttershy murmured.
An instant later a Backslide-shaped cloud of dust stood in front of the bear. Then the dust screamed and scrambled to catch up to Dan, who had leaped over the brook in a single bound and kept running over the hill beyond.
“Well, he might be a criminal,” Rarity said as she and Fluttershy watched him vanish into the distance, “but he certainly can run.”
At that moment, to the sound of jaunty music played on a bassoon, the Ponyville town mailmare flew slowly by, performing a roll in midair every other measure of music.
Dan Backslide leaned against a tree, catching his breath. The bear hadn’t pursued him this far- in fact, the bear hadn’t pursued him at all, but since he hadn’t looked behind him for a mile and a half he didn’t know this.
“Curses!” he growled. “I’m not leaving here without some captive unicorns and pegasuses! But how to get them?”
His fingers tapped on the tree he leaned against, and the tiny vibration shook loose and apple to fall squarely on his pate. Backslide caught the apple on the rebound and stared at it. “Eureka!” he shouted. “Ponies love apples!”
“We sure do,” a scratchy voice agreed from the treetop.
Looking around himself, Dan noticed several baskets full of apples under a nearby tree. He also noticed a pair of large, well-muscled ponies without horn or wings next to them, one a great red brute of a stallion, the other an orange mare wearing some sort of cowboy hat. Getting to the apples without being seen by either pony would be most difficult.
“I shall vary my skullduggery with a little burglary!” Dan murmured. Tip-toeing to another tree, as close as he dared get to the farmer ponies, he watched for his chance.
“Hey, whatcha doin’?”
Backslide froze in his tracks. Out of nowhere a blue pegasus with a shock of polychromatic mane hovered in front of his eyes, her face radiating innocent curiosity.
“Rainbow Dash?” The orange farm pony looked over to the tree where Dan Backslide had failed to hide. “What in tarnation are you doin’ over there? And who’s that you’ve got with you?”
Totally rumbled, Dan Backslide saw only one option. With a rapid lunge and stretch he grabbed the handles of the nearest basket without lifting either foot. Once the basket was in his grasp, however, his feet lifted with alacrity, carrying him and the apples off through the orchard towards the dark forest beyond.
“HEY!” Applejack shouted. “You come back here with them apples!”
Before she could give chase, a head popped out from the apples in another basket. “He’s not in here!” Larry Dover shouted.
Tom Dover’s head poked out of a knothole in another tree. “He’s not in here!”
Dick Dover lifted himself out of the farmyard well by the bucket rope. “He’s not in here!”
From inside the Apples’ farmhouse, Granny Smith’s voice called out, “Land sakes, what’re you doin’ in there?”
“He’s not in here!”
“He’s not in here!”
“He’s not in here!”
“And how in th’ name o’Sam Hill did you even get in there in the first place?”
The three Dover boys whisked out of the house, through the barn, and on towards the forest, to repeated shouts of, “He’s not in here!”
Applejack snorted. “I don’t know what this is all about,” she said, “but I’ve had enough of it. Dash, you go get Twilight Sparkle. We’re gonna put a stop to all this malarkey.”
Dan Backslide had not merely stolen a basket of apples. His plan also required that he steal a crate and a substantial length of rope, and this he had done. He could have got the large stick from any number of trees in the forest, but he had stolen that too, purely on principle.
“Such a cunning trap!” he congratulated himself as he balanced one end of the wooden crate on the end of the stick. “The unicorn shall enter the box to get the apple, I shall pull the rope, and the beast shall be my helpless prisoner!” He laughed aloud and added, “Nothing could possibly go wrong!”
Placing one of the stolen apples at the back of the crate, he tied one end of the rope to the stick propping up the front. With the loose end in hand, he snuck around a gnarled old oak tree to hide and await his victim.
But before he could settle into his hiding place, his eyes beheld a wondrous sight- an immense chest, lid open, overflowing with shining gold coins!
“Gold! GOLD!” he shouted, letting the rope fall from his filthy fingers. “I’m rich! Rich! RICH!” Rushing forwards, he plunged his hands into the chest, letting the gold coins run through his fingers.
Then he noticed how much darker it was around the chest. He looked up and saw the low wooden ceiling above him. He looked behind him and saw the very large stick and the rope tied to it.
“Oh, drat,” he muttered.
The stick came away, and the large crate slammed to the turf.
Moments later the Everfree Forest echoed with one voice after another shouting, “He’s not in here!”
Tom Dover picked up the turf carpeting the forest floor and looked under it. “He’s not in here!”
Dick Dover crawled through a fallen log, scaring out two snakes and a cockatrice. “He’s not in here!”
Larry Dover bent down and lifted up the edge of the immense wooden crate to peek underneath. “He’s… he’s IN HERE!” he shouted triumphantly.
His brothers were with him in an instant. “IN HERE!” they shouted, and all three dove under the crate, letting it slam down on top of them.
There was a moment of stillness.
Then lavender light surrounded the crate, and it rose to reveal a large steel cage, where Tom Dover, Dick Dover, Larry Dover, and Dan Backslide stood, looking out from between the thick iron bars with identical looks of disgust on their faces.
Then they stared as, to the tune of jaunty bassoon music, six ponies sauntered by, three with wings flying slowly through the air, three without wings shuffling along the ground. Every other measure the unseen bassoon player would be joined by a flute flourish, and when this happened the purple alicorn and the blue and yellow pegasi would do a roll in air, while the white unicorn and the pink and orange ponies would skip and wiggle their hooves in the air.
Unnoticed by them, the pegasus who handled the Ponyville mail slapped a label on the end of the cage: SHIP TO: PARTS KNOWN, POSTAGE DUE.
And with this image we must leave the Dover Boys, strong, thickheaded Tom, dapper, thickheaded Dick, and thick, thickheaded Larry.
Farewell, boys. Better luck next time.
Author's Note
I was intrigued by the contest when it was announced, but I went through three ideas that didn't fit the rules before I settled on this. (I might do the Tasmanian Devil one someday, or not...)
The problem is... well, really old cartoons don't really have characterization as such. The characters don't have personalities- they're just drawings that move and cause mayhem. And, to be honest, outside of Disney, Warner Brothers and Fleischer Studios, that pretty much stayed that way until after World War 2. If I wanted a crossover character with a personality, I would be stepping on all the other entrants' toes- and I wanted to do something no one else would attempt.
So I settled on the Dover Boys.
The thing is, the Dover Boys have even less personality than, say, Woody Woodpecker or Felix the Cat. (The Woody with personality came in the 1960s with the TV cartoon; early Woody was a sadistic troublemaker and not much else.) So, in an effort to get something, ANYTHING to work with, I actually went back and read a few chapters of the source material- the series of Rover Boys books of which the Dover Boys cartoon is a brutal parody.
My advice: DO NOT READ THOSE BOOKS. They are TERRIBLE.
In fact, after deliberately writing this story in a style similar to those books, it's going to take me ages to get back to writing non-crap. The horrible writing style and dialog of those century-old stories is infectious.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed this little bit of crack. Now I can get to work on other things.
(Like taxes... ugh...)
