Jim and Kate’s Online Adventure

The children’s book team of Jim and Kate McMullan of Sag Harbor has branched out with a pilot for an Amazon Original Series that can be seen for free at the website of the retailer turned budding network. Episode one of “The Stinky & Dirty Show,” based on the McMullans’ “I Stink” and “I’m Dirty” books, is a 12-minute excursion into a Utah-like desert landscape a la Chuck Jones’s immortal Road Runner and Coyote cartoons for Warner Brothers, where, as then, towering rock formations figure in the plot.

Repeatedly asking out loud “What if?” Stinky the Garbage Truck and Dirty the Backhoe put their metal heads together to attack the problem of a boulder blocking an intersection. “What if we threw melons at it?” Stinky, a chipper and fun-loving sort despite his trash-hauling lot in life, says more than once.

Short story shorter, the two almost literally reinvent the wheel before bringing in their friend Chip, who hints at his mechanical prowess when he says, “I know the drill.”

“Nothing is just garbage,” as Stinky puts it, and so the giant rock winds up at his personal dump. Where he can throw melons at it.

The McMullans are executive producers on this Brown Bag Films production, which is written, directed, and animated by others. But fear not, the artwork is true to Jim, as it were, with big, bold characters richly textured, resembling paper cutouts.