Tale Of Terror Turns Tale Of Triumph

This year's Regular Show Hallowe'en special opens with a couple of ruffians pelting Skips's (voice of Mark Hamill) house with eggs -- classic prank -- until a raging Benson (Sam Marin) appears, dressed in his Clint-Eastwood-in-A-Fistful-Of-Dollars-inspired costume, and chases them off. ...I mean, he eventually chases them off? It's hard for an anthropomorphized gumball machine to exert much authority, even over sassy pre-teens -- and as I said aloud while we watched the episode last night, "How is Benson supposed to get his way with people he can't fire?"

And look, I'm not saying that constant threats of termination are the best way to manage staff, but Benson's not trying to become a Six Sigma, and given that more than half all but one of the employees who work for him are basically useless, it's become the only arrow in his quiver. Benson's management-by-fear is so well established, in fact, that when challenged to scare everyone still remaining at the park's Hallowe'en party with a tale of terror, Benson's management style is a key plot point.

As we all well know, Rigby (William Salyers) doesn't sleep on a bed, but -- due primarily to laziness -- on a mini-trampoline. But in his ghost story, he dares to buy himself a bed from "UMÄK." Unfortunately, moments after Skips has finished building it for him, Rigby learns in a TV report that his exact bed -- they've matched up the SKU and everything -- was made partly out of "dangerous murderer Johnny Allenwrench," and sure enough, the bed immediately becomes possessed by the late Johnny and takes Rigby hostage, threatening him with the only weapon available, and if you've ever been to Ikea, you know exactly what it is. (If not: an allen wrench.)

When the rest of the Park staffers burst in and are horrified to see their friend about to be allen wrenched to death, Benson springs into action: he's sympathetic to JohnnyBed's plaintive declaration that he's just so tired of running, and offers him a job at the Park.

But because this is Rigby's fantasy, not only does Benson take Rigby's side over anyone else -- in this case, by colluding with Rigby and everyone else to chop up JohnnyBed into pieces. (I would take a screen grab, but I prefer to remember JohnnyBed in happier times, content to be useful watering a flower bed. I mean, a reformed murderer of a bed frame couldn't have fit in working at the Park? There's already a GHOST on staff!)

Best of all, in Rigby's fantasy, Benson is actually capable of delivering a compliment: "Way to plan that ambush, Rigby!" "Way to lie to his face," Rigby smugly responds. Benson: "You're getting all the promotions!"

If Calvin Wong and Toby Jones, who wrote the "Killer Bed" segment, started with the idea for that freeze and wrote backwards from there, that payoff was 100% worth it.