ABSTRACT - ENNIS, GARTH & DILLON, and STEVE –JUDGE DREDD – THE MAGIC MELLOW OUT – in the EMERALD ISLE collection, 2001
Titan Books. 2000 AD Possibly the most extreme and bizarre surreal Judge Dredd story of all, serving as an unexpectedly ingenious tribute to the popular children’s animated series, The Magic Roundabout. The similarities to the TV show are far from coincidental. There is even an Eric Thompson building in the story (Thompson being the narrator of the old TV show). Many as a thinly disguised satire on 1960’s drug culture saw the Magic Roundabout. In the Judge Dredd take, that aspect is given very literal life and energy. The Mellow Out of the title is a licensed theme
park at which wealthy guests are surrounded by cute puppet like
druids that are very similar to Magic Roundabout characters, i.e., a stoned rabbit called Lennon (Dylan in the TV show). Florence, Dougal, Zebedee and Ermentrude also have their counterparts in the theme park. However, the park drugs are leaking out too fast and people are having such bad trips that they are committing suicide. The robot puppets are innocent bystanders to all of this looking on in confusion and surprise as a visitor hangs himself on a tree before their eyes. Dredd asks the park owner, Flashback Gordon, the ultimate spaced out hippie, to turn off the hallucegenic gas pipes, but when he gets into the park, the leak causes even him to have a bad trip, until he activates his respirator breathing mask. He ends up killing half of the puppet druids quite brutally and then arrests Flashback Gordon for his gross negligence, leaving the few surviving puppets wondering about their uncertain future. Deeply silly and exciting at the same time, this is Dredd at the most imaginative cutting edge of comic bookdom.