I Married a Strange Person!: Limited Deluxe Edition (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jun 05, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Bill PlymptonRelease Date(s)
1997 (March 31, 2025)Studio(s)
Italtoons (Deaf Crocodile Films)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
I Married a Strange Person!: we’ve all felt that way at one point or another, amirite?
Actually, in this case, no. That’s because the feature film I Married a Strange Person! comes from the mind of Bill Plympton, an animator who’s never been particularly interested in naturalistic examinations of the human condition. Oh, there are some universal truths contained at the margins of his work, but he’s always been far more interested in superficial textures—and what he does with those textures has to be seen to be believed. In animation, if you can imagine it, you can create it, and Plympton has never let his imagination be fettered by boundaries of any kind. You’ve been warned.
While Plympton couldn’t possibly be farther removed stylistically and thematically from the late great Tex Avery, they both share a unique vision for taking advantage of the limitless possibilities of the animation medium, untethered to any pretense toward logic, continuity, or the laws of physics. Anything is possible in the world of animation, and both Avery and Plympton have taken full advantage of that fact. Yet Plympton has been even more overtly surrealistic, building on the way that Avery visualized language literally in Symphony in Slang and taking it to the next level (you’ll have to see for yourself what he does with the phrase “bedroom eyes.”) It’s a style of humor that Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker brought into the live action realm with The Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane!, and Top Secret!, but Plympton returned it to its proper animated roots. As a result, however relatable that the title I Married a Strange Person! may seem, there’s nothing relatable about the film itself. It’s I Married a Monster from Outer Space filtered through the inner space of Plympton’s rather singular mind. Again, you’ve been warned.
I Married a Strange Person! begins, as many things in life often do, with two birds enthusiastically copulating in mid-flight (well, at least one of them is enthusiastic about it, but that’s also an unavoidable fact of life). That semi-natural event sets off a Rube Goldberg style chain reaction that results in something far more unnatural and disturbing. The immediate victims are a pair of newlyweds, Grant and Keri Boyer (Tom Larson and Charis Michelson). They struggle to come to a meeting of the minds (and other parts) while attempting to consummate their marriage, a situation that worsens when Grant starts to display otherworldly powers (and girth), including the ability to manipulate reality on a whim. His talents eventually draw the attention of the Smilecorp Corporation and its chairman Larson P. Giles (Richard Spore), who’s desperate to find a new hit for his flagging television network. He orders his paramilitary security team lead by Col. Ferguson (Chris Cooke) to obtain the source of Grant’s powers, which ends up putting this strange person in the crossfire between his wife, her parents, and corporate America itself. Will Grant’s newfound sexual prowess eventually bring Keri to come around (so to speak) and join his side? Inquiring minds want to know.
In Plympton’s best work, reality in general and the human body in particular has been fully plasticized and transmogrified, able to be pushed, pulled, and prodded into any shape that he can imagine, often violently so. The results have frequently been quite gruesome, as demonstrated in his earlier shorts like Your Face, One of Those Days, and Push Comes to Shove, Yet aside from occasional more perverse shorts like How to Kiss and How to Make Love to a Woman, he hadn’t addressed human sexuality in an overt fashion prior to this point. Well, the gloves came off with I Married a Strange Person!, which unleashes Plympton’s surrealistic sensibilities on the relatively mundane subject of marital sex. Also, non-marital sex, elderly sex, avian sex, and even mechanical sex, as Col. Ferguson sheepishly explains to Larson P. Giles:
“When’s the last time you tried to tell two fifty-ton tanks to stop having sex?”
In other words, I Married a Strange Person! is an irresistible sexual force meeting an immovable sexual object, and as in any such scenario, something has to give. Even the machinery of warfare isn’t immune to its siren call. Grant’s otherworldly sexual prowess may have been the inadvertent side effect of a (happy?) accident, but that mishap was the result of the sexual force being so irresistible that a randy bird couldn’t even wait until he reached the ground before expressing his desire to his (semi) willing partner. Grant’s new wife Keri, on the other hand, is desperate to get a little action, but Grant is trying to stay focused on his job until her own siren call eventually unleashes more than she bargained for. Big things often start small (so to speak), but once they grow, they grow all out of proportion. In biblical terms, “one flesh” was used as a euphemism for the sex act, but in I Married a Strange Person!, flesh becomes not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine, something more akin to the biblical usage of the term “strange flesh” (which means something entirely different and far more alien than how it tends to be interpreted today). In the end, Grant isn’t a strange person at all, but sex in all of its fleshly permutations is every bit as strange as Bill Plympton can imagine—and he can imagine quite a bit, as you’ve already been warned. Twice.
Long live the New Flesh.
I Married a Strange Person! was hand-animated by Bill Plympton and photographed on 35mm film by John Donnelly. While it’s appeared in a variety of different aspect ratios on home video, it was always intended to be shown at 1.66:1, and that’s how it’s presented here. This version is the 2019 remaster, which is based on a 2K scan of the original camera negative, with the final results approved by Plympton. It’s been carefully cleaned up so that any actual damage has been eliminated, but all of the artifacts from the original animation process have been preserved. While Plympton got his start hand-drawing all of his frames on paper, sometimes cutting the foreground elements out and pasting them on acetate in order to avoid redrawing the backgrounds, I Married a Strange Person! was produced using traditional cel animation As a result, all of the backgrounds are much more stable, and yet there was occasional dirt, debris, and even small scratches on the cels. All of those have all been left alone in this remaster. That means that the textures of the paper, acetate, and even the film itself have all been retained—and texture is everything when it comes to Bill Plympton. His typical pastel pencil color scheme has also been reproduced accurately. It’s a fantastic upgrade over the outdated DVD release of the film.
Audio is offered in English 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English SDH subtitles. There’s no appreciable noise, distortion, or other artifacts, and the dialogue and effects are always crystal clear. Yet like The Tune before it, much of the film is driven by an eclectic collection of music and songs (some of the latter by longtime Plympton collaborator Maureen McElheron), and mono or not, they’re all well-recorded and they sound quite good here.
The Deaf Crocodile Films Limited Deluxe Edition Blu-ray release of I Married a Strange Person! includes a 60-page booklet featuring introductions by Patton Oswalt, Chris Miller, and the great Jerry Beck; essays by Walter Chaw and David B. Levy; and a host of illustrations by Plympton himself (many of them NSFW). Everything comes housed in a rigid slipcase featuring new artwork by Beth Morris. There’s also a card tucked inside with a QR code that can be scanned in order to access transcribed versions of the bonus content. Note that Deaf Crocodile is also offering a Standard Edition that omits the booklet and the slipcase, although it still includes the QR code. The following extras are included, all of them in HD:
- Audio Commentary with Adam Rackoff, James Hancock, and John Holderried
- Interview with Bill Plympton (43:41)
- Guide Dog (5:46)
- The Loneliest Stoplight (6:18)
The new commentary features James Hancock of the Wrong Reel podcast with producer Adam Rackoff, both of whom have worked with Plympton on various short films, joined by John Holderried of Plymptoons Studio. They go over the history of I Married a Strange Person! on home video, including its various aspect ratios and cuts, noting that this is indeed the uncut version—although they do point out that technically all of Plympton’s films are unrated since he’s never submitted any of them to the MPAA. They provide plenty of details about Plympton’s working methodology—he does indeed draw every single frame by himself, and he doesn’t feel that it’s work (to be fair, it’s worth pointing out that once his drawings were transferred to cels, they were hand-painted by others). They also offer a full-throated appreciation for I Married a Strange Person! with all of its quirks, calling it the Citizen Kane of anthropomorphic sex—and it’s hard to argue with that.
Speaking of Plympton, the Man himself appears via an online interview with Dennis Bartok of Deaf Crocodile Films. They open by discussing the evolution of his animation, including his eventual move into the fully digital world in 2005, which he says shifted his expenses away from being primarily technical-related (although they do explain his technical process during the cel animation period). They also cover the extended period between The Tune and I Married a Strange Person!, when he had tried to make the shift into live action with films like J. Lye and Guns on the Clackamas, and why he returned to the world of animation. Plympton says that he wanted to make truly adult animation like Ralph Bakshi’s work, but filtered through his own unique sensibilities. He chooses flat, deadpan voice actors in films like I Married a Strange Person! because he wants the humor to remain visual (that’s also why he animates first and records the dialogue later). Yet he was willing to let the music be filled with verbal non sequiturs, which is why his lengthy collaboration with Maureen McElheron has been so fruitful.
Finally, Deaf Crocodile has included two more Plympton shorts on this release: Guide Dog (2006) and The Loneliest Stoplight (2015). Guide Dog is a sequel to his Oscar-nominated 2004 short Guard Dog, showing the further adventures of the misguided dog who just wants to help but only succeeds in making everything worse. After accidentally killing off the owner that he was trying to protect in Guide Dog, he’s desperate for work, so he applies to be a guide dog for the vision-impaired—and it goes about as well as you would expect. The Loneliest Stoplight takes a very different tack, telling the story of a stoplight at an intersection who loses his sense of purpose when a superhighway is built next to him, but when disaster strikes, he’s called into service again. Patton Oswalt plays the stoplight and serves as narrator.
The only extra that’s missing here from the DVD, oddly enough, was the only extra on that disc: the film’s trailer. While Plympton retains ownership of the film itself, it’s possible that the trailer may be tied up by his original distribution deal. In any event, that’s not much of a loss, and the addition of the new commentary, interview, and classic shorts makes this the definitive I Married a Strange Person! to date. It’s never looked or sounded better, either. Deaf Crocodile is turning into the premiere boutique label when it comes to international and independent American animation, and since Plympton is one of the premiere independent animators, this release is another jewel in their crown. Highly recommended.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).