John Buck: Deer Detective

A sketch of John Buck by Jailor Eckman

Mentioned in Hypnosis Doesn't Work Like That!, John Buck is an animated movie released a few years before which seems to have made a bit of a media splash. It's successful in that every supermarket had shelves filled with tableware, bed linen, lunchboxes, and stationery bearing pictures of the characters for nearly a year.

The main characters seem to be a deer with a deerstalker and magnifying glass, and a dog in dark glasses. The deer occasionally has trouble getting his antlers through doors, which is mostly played for laughs. One sad moment in the movie is when an otter is locked up, but it's not mentioned why. There is a little adult humour in the movie, designed to keep the parents entertained, but it would mostly go over the kids' heads.

John Buck is known to organise clues by visualising them in his 'mind forest', which is a kind of running joke. Although he talks about it a lot, there is no onscreen representation of the mind forest. But each time he mentions it in the movie, the action soon cuts to a scene taking place in a forest somewhere. A certain group of fans has taken to yelling "Cut to mind forest!" or similar after they notice the trend, followed by theatrical groans of disappointment when it is revealed yet again to be a real forest. There is also a rather silly fan theory that all forests are in fact corporeal manifestations of the great detective's mental process, giving a "rational" explanation for why the weather in the woods often seems to mirror his current mood.

The antagonist is 'Detective Doug', a duck who turned to a life of crime after he got sick of everyone misreading his name and assuming he was going to be a dog (stereotyped as being the best animals for solving mysteries)

There is a series "Deer Detective on the Road" (mentioned in Unexpected Daddy chapter 16) following on from the movie a few years later, which takes a different tack. It is mostly computer generated, and features John Buck and his love interest Ruby Rabbit travelling around the country solving crimes. It is a cartoon for older children (or at least older than the target audience of shows like Paradise Pen and Bibi Babi Miko), where there are enough clues for a child to be proud of solving the mystery before the detective reveals the answer. The opening sequence features higher quality animation than most of the show, and features Buck racing along a country road in a red sports car, while Ruby lies across the back seat playing the harmonica (the opening theme starts with his solo).

It's mentioned in Unexpected Daddy that John Buck uses a whole notebook on each case he solves. Not mentioned yet, but I can imagine a pile of them in the footwell of his car, where he throws them when he's done and never gets around to typing up his notes as a memoir. Sometimes Ruby is seen writing them out, which may be the "source" for there being a TV series about him (which exists in-universe, but is more a docudrama thing). Also mentioned that the squiggles in his notebooks, if you zoom in on the relevant frames, are all critical path and segmented tree diagrams (nothing to do with detective work) labelled with 'Englishman/Irishman/Scotsman' jokes transliterated into old Germanic runes. Oswyn is probably the only viewer who has ever decoded them.

Investigation Party

There is also a board game, which is based on the rules of Clue/Cluedo. The playing pieces are 7 different characters from the movie, formed from different coloured plastic with the same 3 colours of paint used to add some details. The plot says that Carly Black, the spaniel, has several deliveries to make and one of them is really, really urgent. But she's forgotten what was supposed to be delivered to who, and has so hired John Buck to work out which delivery was the important one. Cards represent possible items, the people they need to be delivered to, and the places where Carly left them. The rules are pretty much standard Clue besides that. A lot of players (including Oswyn in Unexpected Daddy) talk about the 'thief', as if they were trying to track down someone who has stolen something – a very common plot in the TV show, but not what the game's rule leaflet actually says.

• People - John Buck, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?
• Items - Harmonica, Cookies, ?, ?, ?, ?
• Places - School, Treehouse, Stables, ?, ?, ?, ?

(Thinking about it now, a better plot might be helping Carly prepare for a friend's surprise party when she's forgotten where it's being held, what she's bringing, and who it's for. She can't ask anyone because she doesn't know whose party it is, so they have to search for clues. So the 'clues' are like receipts for gifts someone else has bought, pictures or reminiscences of a character's birthday earlier in the year, and information about what a particular venue is being used for tonight)