Ein Kaktus ist kein Lutschbonbon (1981)

Axel Adam earns his living as a comic-book artist for the adult magazine Play-Me. His comic strip, When the Bavarians Still Had Tails, appears regularly in it, but it is now about to be discontinued. Axel is outraged. While preparing his next comic, for which his friend Bruno poses as a costumed caveman, he forgets the advertising job he had agreed to do for a travel agency: making posters. Gaby Frey, the agency’s blonde receptionist, visits Axel to pick up the poster designs. He puts her off until the next morning. That morning, Gaby has collected 6,500 marks in lottery winnings for her boss and is carrying the money in an envelope. Axel persuades her to take part briefly in a publicity stunt intended to prevent the comic strip from being dropped. Gaby places a copy of Play-Me in a public phone booth, and Axel photographs the reactions of people who enter it. After a young man and a woman, visibly aroused by what they read, Pastor Strauss enters the booth and simply pockets the magazine. Gaby secretly follows him until he disappears onto a bus heading for Bad Tölz. A short time later, she realizes that she has lost the envelope of money. She thinks it may have slipped between the magazine’s pages. She and Axel set off to find the pastor and, with him, the magazine. Pastor Strauss is interrupted while reading it by biology teacher Louisa Hopf and hides the magazine in an open bag—but the bag belongs to Frau Hopf. She has an accident on her bicycle, the magazine slips out of the bag, and one of Frau Hopf’s adolescent students takes it. The magazine soon causes a stir in the classroom: condoms are turned into balloons, and young Heide suddenly finds herself being pursued by a classmate. At home, she throws the magazine out the window, where Turkish man Achmed catches it. He promptly begins having problems with his potency and his wife. In the end, the migrant workers’ wives go on strike, decrying the moral decline in the Bavarian village; by refusing to work, they bring the entire infrastructure to a standstill. To find out what caused the strike, the mayor and the strict-moraled Louisa Hopf go to the village’s migrant workers’ quarter and return with the source of all the trouble: an issue of Play-Me. Frau Hopf wants to pass the magazine on to the pastor, who is supposed to deal with the strike. Pastor Strauss, who has already told Axel and Gaby that he no longer has the magazine and that there was no envelope inside it, suddenly finds Frau Hopf’s bag in his room—the one he had put the magazine in. Miraculously, the magazine is in the bag, and Strauss takes it. God’s own voice tells him to finally take it back to where he stole it from. Strauss does as he is told and finds Gaby’s envelope of money in the phone booth, where it had slipped in between the telephone directories. Gaby gets her money back and, having been accompanied on her search by Axel—who even saved her life from bank robbers—has also found a lover in him. Axel, meanwhile, gets a double happy ending: after returning to Munich, Bruno tells him that the comic is not going to be discontinued.