Stay Tooned! - Part 25 - Return to Roof and Room 5D - Spindly Findley
2There is only one room left in this apartment building we haven’t explored, and this video will take us there. As you might figure, this room is also the most important room in the whole building, because Room 5D is where Mr. and Mrs. Findley live. Mrs. Findley is the owner and landlord of this apartment building, so it goes without saying that they’re important, but there is an underlying reason why the toons like picking on her whenever she emerges outside of this room (and it’s not just because she’s a terrible person).
Bear in mind that from here on out, this description will contain SPOILERS for the endgame.
As you can see, we can’t even enter Room 5D even when we have access to the fifth floor, because Mr. Findley will not allow us in, not before we fix the cable service. He is a man addicted to television, and while the development team might not have realized it, his behavior at this doorway displays real withdrawal symptoms like his irritability. (Mr. Findley previously turned up in the adventure room, Room 5C in this playthrough and Part 23 for you, as the man watching TV in the Rube Goldberg contraption.)
(Fast forward to the modern day, and sadly, there are a lot more people today like Mr. Findley. In particular, Netflix’s model of releasing an entire season at once feeds into this television addiction. As an aside, my father watched enormous amounts of TV every day to the detriment of his well being and productivity, and I fear that as the demographics that grew up on Netflix reach his age, there will be even more people like him. Maybe it’s because of lessons learned from him, but I don't binge watch. I won’t watch more than one hour of a TV show per day, though I may watch an episode of some other TV show afterwards. This is reflected in how I rarely put up videos on YouTube more than one hour in length.)
A number of lingering quests end here. Remember how in Part 13, the bullfight room, we got the Ruby Red Slippers from the crater at the end, and in Part 16, after the pirate room, we gave them to Frank to free up the pay phone? Well, this is what the phone is for: we need to call the cable guy so he can come over and fix the cable, though to get him to cooperate, we need to give him the missing sock we picked up in Part 9 in the laundry room.
The apartment building’s cable box is on the roof, and it’s here that we get one more minigame. We’re given a grid of 20 TV screens. Half of them show a very quick animation, while the other plays a sound. To clear this minigame, you’ll have to match all of the animations to their sounds. I can imagine this would be unfair to people who are hard of hearing or deaf, though at least there’s no penalty for guessing wrong, and you can just brute force your way through. Completing this minigame will fix the cable, and Mr. Findley will allow you in.
You can explore two rooms of 5D: one is the living room, which has Mr. Findley, the TV setup, and a bunch of cats, and not much else. Also, it’s upside-down. The second room, meanwhile, is that room where Mrs. Findley’s musical sequence took place, the combination kitchen/dining room and her favorite place to be. It is here that we finally find the remote control that Fiddle and the TV announcer at the beginning had begged us to find! It is hidden in the meatloaf, which was hinted at in Part 9 in the cellar, where the rats hinted that Mrs. Findley and her meatloaf would be important. It’s also hinted in Part 19, the A/V room, where the meatloaf in Mrs. Findley’s musical sequence is shown emitting sparks of electricity.
This is where the last item we picked up comes into play: Mitty’s oven mitt, as acquired in Part 5, the carnival room. The meatloaf sits in Mrs. Findley’s oven and is still baking when you enter her kitchen. Without the oven mitt, the meatloaf is too hot to touch.
And with possession of the remote control, it’s time to put the toons back into TV Land—we will hunt them down and zap them back in the next video. Stay tooned.
Here are some cultural notes, though most are context for in case the technology of the 90s was before your time:
0:03 - Cable television runs on coaxial cables, the same cables used for most wired household Internet connections. if the signal ever gets disturbed, someone from the company needs to come in for maintenance, much like how you might call your ISP if your Internet stops working. (Coaxial Internet goes wrong in the very same ways as cable TV.)
0:55 - Before cell phones became ubiquitous, pay phones were how you'd call someone outside of your home. You find a pay phhone, you pay a small amount, and you're allowed one phone call.
0:55 - Home Shopping was how people would buy stuff from home before online stores like Amazon. They'd call the number and make the order. People still do that nowadays, of course.
6:45 - "Thank you, thank you very much" was a signature phrase Elvis used to end his concerts.
8:33 - Blister is a parody of the party game Twister.