There was a time when Bruce Willis was everything.: he appeared in both the most stylized science-fiction movies (‘The Fifth Element’, ‘Twelve Monkeys’) and the craziest action ones (‘The Last Boy Scout’, ‘Die Hard’) as well as comedies and roles far from his usual range (‘Pulp fiction’, ‘Death suits you so well’). But to tell you this story we have to go back to the time when movies like ‘The Justiciero’ they weren’t even on the radar of a rising star… of romantic comedy and blues: Bruno.
the king of the blues
Year 1987. Bruce Willis has become a star overnight thanks to his role in the series ‘Moonlight’, and He ends up signing his first leading role in an HBO musical mockumentary entitled ‘The return of Bruno’, in which he played a 60s rock star whose name was directly taken from the time when the actor was dedicated to being a waiter. Phil Collins, Elton John, Jon Bon Jovi or Ringo Starr joined the joke, although it did not have much impact. However, with the joke did come something that bit Willis’s itch: a record.
The influence of ‘The return of Bruno’, the blues record, may not have reached our days, but in the late 80s it had a certain amount of traction on the sales charts and even It reached fourth place on the best-selling albums in the United Kingdom. Bruce liked singing so much that he would still release another album two years later, ‘If it don’t kill you, it just makes you stronger’. But from his musical career we are only interested, beyond curiosity, in the name: Bruno.
Let’s jump back in time to the 90s, when cartoons were made (or reruns) of literally everything: ‘Robocop’, ‘The swamp thing’, ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘Cadillacs and dinosaurs’, ‘New kids on the block’ or ‘Attack of the killer tomatoes’. It’s no wonder that, in a world where Rosie O’Donnell, Michael Jordan, MC Hammer or Pamela Anderson had their own children’s series, Willis didn’t want a piece of the pie. Thus was born ‘Bruno the kid’. And, as we already know, “Bruno” was another way of referring to the actor. Here begins the journey to madness.
spykid
Let’s start from a base: if it doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because Spain only arrived, like ‘El niño Bruno’, on satellite television. After all, the biggest attraction of the series was hearing the voice of Bruce Willis, Tim Curry or Mark Hamill, because the plot was, to say the least, disappointing. From September 23, 1996 to May 26, 1997, Nickelodeon’s child fans were able to see 36 half-hour episodes whose legacy has been nil but which hid -beware- quite intelligent adult jokes. We’ll get to that later.
In the series, Bruno is an eleven year old boy who becomes an elite spy for the GLOBE organization. Thanks to his computer skills, Bruno is able to hide behind the avatar of a grown man (Bruce Willis himself, well, with a CGI of the time) so that the company does not know his true age. So, He lives life and death missions while deceiving his parents with bizarre excuses.
Of course, Willis sings the opening song (“No time for kid games, no time for girls, help the good guys saving the world”) and it became a vehicle for showing off… that it hid some secrets for a more adult publicas you taunt Sylvester Stallone (“it’s too one-dimensional”) or, quite surprisingly, Nazism: “What is the motto of the Bavarian boy campers?”, a gentleman asks a Bruno dressed as a German. “Uh, uh, were you just following orders?”, he answered. Then why didn’t she finish finding her audience.
goodbye to animation
‘Bruno the kid’ was not for children or adults: his drawing was childish but his cast of voices was adult, his plot was for kids but his jokes were not. It is normal that it did not finish finding its audience: some say that it was a series ahead of its time, but most likely it was simply clumsy. Bruno, a boy, played the harmonica and tried to flirt while being a secret agent and living a double life. Maybe it was too much. In addition, the season ended with a cliffhanger that, of course, nobody ever took up again.
Remember that it was the 90s, that moment in time when Macaulay Culkin put his voice in a series (‘Wish kid’) in which a boy finds a baseball glove that, when hit three times, grants a wish (once a week) and John Candy created a series titled, literally, ‘Camp Candy’with him as the absolute protagonist: that a famous person had his own series of drawings was his thing.
Bruce Willis has marked the history of cinema so much that his small setbacks have been forgotten by the people. After ‘Bruno the kid’ he did ‘Jackal’, ‘Mercury rising’, ‘Armageddon’, ‘The fifth element’ or ‘The sixth sense’. And he would still have years to prove his worth in ‘Glass’ or the remake of ‘The city’s vigilante’ (called, simply, ‘The vigilante’). Unforgettable, unique and with an exciting life full of intricacies.