J.R. Hartley Has Your Number (feat. Fortran 5)

Yellow Pages may have recently become a relic of a bygone age in the UK, with Yell officially ceasing physical publication and going completely digital in January 2019, but it leaves behind an enduring legacy for yielding one of the public's most fondly-remembered advertising campaigns. The "J.R. Hartley" TV ad of 1983 was part of an effort to reinvent their brand image, after years of being primarily associated with tales of human misery. It followed an elderly gent, played by Norman Lumsden, who is seen drifting from one second hand book shop to the next in search of an elusive publication called Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley. Returning home from an entirely fruitless expedition, he is advised by his daughter to try Yellow Pages and, after finally getting through to a store with a copy to hand, the ad closes on a twist accounting for his determination to locate such a thoroughly nondescript-sounding title - when asked for his name, he responds, "J.R. Hartley". Good old Yellow Pages! If Hartley's story doesn't raise a smile, then Joss Ackland's genial assurance that "We don't just help with the nasty things in life" certainly will. Even his example of the inescapable nastiness of life, a blocked drain, feels disarmingly quaint (it is, after all, little more than an everyday household inconvenience). This is an ad set on spewing rosiness from every orifice.

Before J.R. Hartley, Yellow Pages were hampered by the roadblock that their name had become synonymous with rotten luck and domestic calamities. The thinking behind Hartley was to represent their brand as a trusted source of guidance who could light the way down every avenue in life. Advertising agency Abbott Mead Vickers came up with the scenario of a man attempting to locate an ordinary book of immense significance to him, and it worked; the ad resonated tremendously with the public. Memorably, it was parodied in an episode of Harry Enfield's Television Programme, where Tim Nice-But-Dim is attempting to get hold of the book, mistakenly believing that its elusiveness in the ad was due to it being in high demand. Remembered, presumably, by no one but me, is that it was also parodied in a skit from the second series of The Ant and Dec Show, where an aged-up Dec was attempting to locate one of PJ and Duncan's CD singles and, if memory serves correctly, replicated Lumsden's euphoric receiver clutch from the end of the advert. I was familiar with the Ant and Dec skit some years before I saw the original ad, and it mainly confused me. Seeing the source for the very first time was such an illuminating experience, if only because it finally helped make sense of an Ant and Dec gag that had been baffling me for half my adolescence.

The book in question was fictitious, although such was the popularity of the ad that an actual book entitled Fly Fishing was written by an angling enthusiast named Michael Russell and published under the pseudonym of J.R. Hartley in 1991 - eight years after the ad had aired, although its continued resonance enabled the book to become a bestseller, and yielded two sequels, J.R. Hartley Casts Again, which continued Hartley's riverside adventures, and Golfing, which saw Hartley broaden his horizons. Unlike their advertising counterpart, copies of these books are very easy to get a hold of.

 

 

It's not hard to account for the ad's enduring popularity. It is, in a word, charming, and fortified considerably the sincerity of Lumsden's performance. Which made it perfect fodder for those cheeky techno artists to work their wicked ways with in the soundbite era. Hence, "JR Hartley", a 1992 release for electronic band Fortran 5, which was utterly bent on taking Hartley down the depths of that dreaded blocked drain and immersing him in the nasty things in life. Here, Hartley is re-imagined as a kind of omnipresent menace who stalks and obstructs the telephone lines. His repeated assertions of identity are intersected with the frantic cries of Barbara Stanwyck's character from Anatole Litvak's 1948 film Sorry, Wrong Number, concerning a woman who overhears discussion of an apparent murder plot via a crossed connection, and also a sample from Michael Franks' 1983 recording "When Sly Calls (Don't Touch That Phone)". The flurry of mismatched soundbites suggest a perilous side to telephone communication, comprised of chaos, confusion, muddled connections and ominous, disembodied voices, with Hartley's reiteration of his moniker, both forwards and backwards, becoming emblematic of this - a total subversion of the cosy, reassuring aura of the original ad and its emphasis on the redemptive power of human connection. And while the use of the Hartley sample will seem instantly humorous to those familiar with the character, Fortran 5 certainly pick up and exploit the most sinister element of the original ad - the way Lumsden insists on hitting the t in "Hartley" is surprisingly intense for such a self-professedly "nice" advert.

Actually, I suspect the reason for the ad's continued resonance has less to do with it being "nice" than with its implicit narrative, which is understatedly poignant. We never learn the circumstances under which Hartley came to be without a copy of his own book, although it can be inferred that he at one time underestimated how much it would mean to him and allowed it to slip through his fingers, whether through negligence or willfully, and later came to regret his decision. The ending strikes such a powerful chord because it makes it clear that he's been chasing a part of himself all this time, and the ultimate connection, when it seems that he and his book will finally be reunited, is an internal one. Hence, the triumph in the closing declaration - he is, in a sense, only now getting to reaffirm who he is, having successfully reconciled with the part of his identity that he let go astray, that of angling writer J.R. Hartley.

Incidentally, according to this article from Marketing Week, in earlier drafts of the ad Hartley's book was not on fly fishing but European butterflies, and in another version he was not looking for a book at all, but attempting to buy his daughter a pony, ideas that were both ultimately rejected for being "too elitist". The pony I can understand, but who out there doesn't love identifying butterflies? I assumed that Fly Fishing was chosen as the title because it is wholly generic and conveys nothing in the way of the book's actual character. So, before we get to the twist, you might be questioning why the protagonist is so driven to find this book in particular, when there must be any number of publications written on the subject of fly fishing. Truthfully, I would have preferred European butterflies. In a parallel universe where that was chosen and some opportunist had decided to pen a book on the subject under the pseudonym J.R. Hartley, I can see myself being all over that.

Euro Disney Promo '91 (aka Tomorrow Always Comes)

 

So, yes, at the end of "Itchy & Scratchy Land" there is that sequence where Frink wonders how Euro Itchy & Scratchy Land is faring with a potential animatronic uprising. We then cut to the park's French counterpart to see that, in their case, nobody actually showed up. The park is completely devoid of visitors, while an exasperated ticket booth operator has the unbearable task of imploring to an indifferent public: "Who are you to resist it, eh?" Who indeed.

This, of course, was a gag at the expense of Euro Disney Resort, which in November 1994 had barely been open for two and a half years and already looked as though it might be headed for an early grave. In real life the situation wasn't quite as dire as nobody showing up at all (I was there in its opening year, so there's that), but despite CEO Michael Eisner's high hopes for the Disney brand's continued expansion and eventual global conquest, attendance numbers during the park's initial years were significantly lower than what was expected. There are multiple factors accounting for Euro Disney's underwhelming debut. The park had the misfortune of opening while a recession was underway, which was always going to be a massive thorn in its side. Another stumbling block was the significant backlash it drew among the French populace, for reasons well encapsulated by David Mirkin on the "Itchy & Scratchy Land" commentary, when he wryly remarks that Disney was eventually able to "force that culture" onto Europe. Many locals weren't wild about the prospect of seeing the beautiful French countryside swallowed up and replaced by this garish celebration of American popular culture, and shunned it accordingly. And the rest of Europe wasn't much keener. Obviously, the park endured and came through its initial brush with impending bankruptcy*, although not without having to jettison the Euro Disney moniker early in the game and rebranding as Disneyland Paris. It is still going today and can now claim the honor of being Europe's most popular tourist destination, although it has faced a lot of ongoing debt problems across its 28-year history. The park may no longer be the butt of jokes along the lines of Euro Itchy & Scratchy Land, but if the Disney suits could go back in time, I'm not convinced they'd be in such a hurry to do this one over again.

Ah, but everybody knows the story of Euro Disney's teething troubles. For now, I want to focus on a time when, for those of us of a certain age, the park represented hope, optimism and a bold new future. If you owned a copy of The Little Mermaid on VHS back in 1991 then you might recall that announcer who had the audacity to speak over Sebastian's end-credits reprise of "Under The Sea" to advise that we stuck around for "a special sneak preview of the most magical kingdom on Earth". If you obeyed then you were treated to this gem:

 

 

The promo (originally in French, although it is the English dub with which I am primarily familiar) could not possibly have been soppier in tone, and my brother and I used to riff on it pretty mercilessly back in the day. Cynical adult me would love to make some crack about Paul's dreams looking suspiciously like the products of corporate banality than any actual child's dream (apart from the detail about being zapped into oblivion by Captain EO, of course) but, truthfully, there are few things as purely, harrowingly nostalgic to me as the random odds and ends you found lurking at the opening or closing of a Disney VHS tape, particularly when they were still dark and spooky and patrolled by Sorcerer Mickey. For as hokey as this promo might be, my childhood hopes and fears are so firmly welded to it that revisiting it after all these years is such a bittersweet experience. It takes me back to another time and place, when the very idea of a Disney park opening up in Europe seemed proof positive that the world was slowly but surely becoming a more magical place. Naturally, nowadays there's a share of sorrow involved too. Not just because of the troubled realities in bringing the park to fruition, and the dream's insistence on becoming a nightmare early on to those who had backed it, but because 1992, the year when the magic was touted to go down, has come and gone and is now almost three decades into the past. It definitely plays like a faded dream, the promise of a brighter tomorrow that, irrespective of whether it actually became reality, inevitably became yesterday too soon.

What always stood out to me as strange about this promo is that Paul, despite ostensibly being the hero of the piece, actually gets a lot less focus throughout than the rest of his family. He mainly just hovers about in the background with that costumed Winnie The Pooh character while his sister gets to meet Snow White and the seven dwarfs and his parents make cuddly observations. Something that I didn't piece together as a child is that the Winnie The Pooh character is presumably supposed to be Paul's own Pooh plush come to "life" into the fantasy - look closely and you'll notice that the plush itself disappears after the first balloon ride and doesn't reappear until we return to Paul's reality. Actually, it strikes me as just as curious that something like that would be regulated to background detail and not be part of the narrative focus.

Also noteworthy is that, as Euro Disney Resort was still under construction at the time this promo was being put together, most of what you see here was actually filmed at Walt Disney World in Florida. The plot may get thicker still, however. I have no way of verifying this, but the YouTube user who uploaded this promo, thingsandtings, speculates in their description that the "real" portions of the advert were filmed at the site of the park's future lakeside hotels...which, if true, would make for a pretty bleak twist in my opinion. For all of the ad's efforts to paint Euro Disney as a mystical paradise - a manifestation of childhood wonder at its most untainted and sincere - those lakeside bookends have a quiet, idyllic charm that stands in direct contrast to the busyness of the park vignettes. Viewed from that perspective, then it's not hard to reinterpret that final line as a threat; the family's days of peaceful picnicking amid the glory of nature are now firmly numbered, as seen in Paul's premonition of impending destruction. Even if it's not the same location, there is still an unintentional subtext to be had in the polarity - the natural splendor of the lake versus the overbearing artificiality of the park, the real ducks seen splashing about the waters at the start of the promo versus the caricatured Disney representations, etc. It seems to me that the family are already have their haven right where they are - one way or another, the arrival of that ominous tourist attraction can only be a disturbance.

*The idea of an amusement park going bankrupt strikes me as particularly grim, because it instantly calls to mind the game over sequence from the 1994 game Theme Park. I should touch on that some time.

Itchy & Scratchy Land (aka Bort, Retry, Fail?)

Let's take a look at one of the strangest and most ambitious installments in The Simpsons' classic run, "Itchy & Scratchy Land" of Season 6 (2F01), an episode born out of much the same thirst for rebellion as "Treehouse of Horror V", which aired shortly after. As then-showrunner David Mirkin explains on the episode's DVD commentary, it came about at a time when media violence was one of the hot political issues of the day, and tighter regulations were being enforced in an effort to sanitise the airwaves. Fox had recently informed The Simpsons that they could no longer use Itchy and Scratchy, and that any further installments from the cat and mouse would be met with a swift visit from Fox's censorship scissors. Unfazed, the show's creative team called Fox's bluff by concocting an entire episode set around the bloodthirsty antics of Itchy and Scratchy, daring their overlords to whip them into line. Kyle Ryan, reviewing the episode on the AV Club, suggests that Fox's objections were indicative of a fundamental failure on their part to understand the point The Simpsons was looking to make: "the preposterous violence of Itchy and Scratchy satirized cartoon violence—the message behind was clearly concerned about the content of entertainment geared toward impressionable children. In their own way, the Simpsons writers were Helen Lovejoys: “Won’t someone think of the children?!”" Were they, though? Not according to Mirkin himself, whose own words on the DVD commentary are "comedy violence, I think, is therapeutic and not troublesome", before descending into a full-blown rant of the "I was raised on a steady diet of cartoon violence and it didn't turn me into a serial killer" ilk. (I do not disagree with the point Mirkin raises, although I kind of wish he hadn't taken up a third of commentary time in making it, meaning that we don't get to hear anecdotes about the road trip the family takes in the first act, including one of the series' finest and most underrated gags.)

Itchy and Scratchy are two of the longest-standing supporting characters on The Simpsons, having made their first appearance all the way back in the Tracey Ullman era. They are profoundly useful characters, providing an easy analogue by which the series can make self-reflexive gags about itself and the animation industry in general. Their main raison d'être, however, has always been to satirise anxieties surrounding media violence and its hypothetical effect on those who watch it. Their first Ullman short, which opens with Homer complaining that Itchy & Scratchy is too violent and ends with him throttling Bart, points an obvious accusatory finger at the hypocrisies of the family values brigade which painted television as the root cause of familial disarray. The issue was revisited, in greater depth, in the Season 2 episode "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge". There, Marge's crusade against cartoon violence is depicted with more sympathy than was Homer's in the aforementioned Ullman short, while the purveyors of senseless violence, Meyers and his cronies, come across quite unfavourably. It's still evident that the writers are not on her side, however. Overall I think the series backs Mirkin's stance about media violence providing a valuable and healthy outlet for our emotional debris, albeit from a distinctly double-edged angle that also satirises the very nature of that fascination. The Simpsons celebrates the vital role that violent imagery plays in our lives and the well-defined need it meets, all while making no bones about what a perverse and ugly need that frankly is. The Itchy & Scratchy Show might be senseless violence, but its depraved energy in always wanting to push the boundaries of good taste engenders a kind of admiration, even if that admiration is ultimately tempered by the uproarious laughter with which the characters react in-universe. They laugh just a little too loud and hard at the sight of a mouse making mincemeat of a cat. This becomes more salient two or three seasons in, when the series shifted away from the Tom & Jerry model and took to depicting Scratchy as an innocent victim who is butchered by Itchy for no discernible reason. The characters' total indifference toward the plight of this hapless cartoon cat is disconcerting, even if it is all make-believe. I feel that one of the protestors in "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" raises a sound philosophical point on their signage in positing: "What if they blew up a cat and nobody laughed?"

"Itchy & Scratchy Land" might have been conceived as a gigantic FU to the FCC, but what it ultimately endures as is the most flagrantly (and deliciously) anti-Disney episode the show ever yielded. In this one, The Simpsons really sharpens its claws and goes after The Big D - which, these days, obligates some acknowledgement of the fundamental ironies of life (how much longer until guys in ridiculous Bart Simpson suits are getting kicked in the shins by kids at Disneyland?). It's also pertinent to note that, as the Simpsons universe expanded over the years, so too did the cultural significance of Itchy & Scratchy. Earlier episodes never let on that they were anything other than a crudely conceived and animated junk cartoon that fascinated kids but was generally looked down upon by the adult populace, who wished they could be watching something more constructive (I note that Bob kept Itchy & Scratchy during his brief tenure as top TV clown, even when he revamped everything else, but this may have been a contractual obligation he had no control over). Later, it was established that the characters, and their bloodthirsty antics, had a rich and long-running legacy dating back to the Golden Age of Animation. By the time we reached this particular installment, it was clear that the characters are this universe's equivalent of Mickey Mouse, an institution as powerful and iconic as that of Walt Disney. Such expansion was necessary to satirise other aspects of the animation industry beyond the Simpsons' own televisual turf (although as a side-effect, the larger Itchy & Scratchy grew in magnitude, the greater the suspension of disbelief required that these world-renowned toons would be made in Springfield, of all places). Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie, from the Season 4 episode of the same name, was potentially inspired by the actual Tom and Jerry: The Movie (it predates that film's stateside release by several months, although I'm sure that others in the animation industry were aware of the film's existence at the time the episode was written), but the story seems to have been conceived more as a reaction to the newly-awakened Disney Renaissance, the recent success of Beauty and The Beast having done a lot to restore the commercial and artistic credibility of the animated feature.* Suddenly, the industry was ripe with optimism. Here, the main gag seems to revolve around the absurdity that the prospect of seeing this ridiculous cartoon translated onto the big screen should be hailed as such an earth-shattering cultural milestone. Bart is denied seeing the much-anticipated film as a punitive measure by Homer, and since the viewer sees the episode predominantly from Bart's perspective, we share his frustration at being shut out of the event; at the same time, and for all the plaudits heaped on it by the rest of Springfield, the viewer is plagued by a nagging doubt as to just how good this movie could actually be. Common sense would dictate that a formula as aggressively basic as Itchy & Scratchy's does not lend itself to long-form storytelling. And yet the accolades get all the more ridiculous. The movie receives a novelisation by Norman Mailer, runs for eight months and wins nine Academy Awards. When, in a flash-forward forty years into the future, Bart and the viewer are finally awarded a glimpse of the forbidden feature, it frankly comes as no surprise to see that there is nothing to distinguish it from your common or garden Itchy & Scratchy cartoon (an aged Bart and Homer watch the film in mild bewilderment, and Homer opines that "Itchy's a jerk" as if this has just come as an epiphany to him). In a clever visual gag, we see that, in this inverted universe, the acclaimed Beauty and The Beast has attained only B-movie status, as an extra attached to the main attraction.

By Season 6, Itchy and Scratchy's popularity was gargantuan enough for them to have an entire amusement park constructed in their honor - there, the Disney allusion is finally completed when we learn something of the original creator of Itchy & Scratchy, Roger Meyers Sr, an unsubtle stand-in for Walt Disney. How unsubtle? We're told that Meyers Sr loved almost everybody and that he, in return, was beloved by the world "except in 1938 when he was criticised for his controversial cartoon, Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors." A hilarious gag, and one certain to piss off the Disney aficionado in your life, it does more than just provide a cheeky nod to Walt's alleged (though hotly contested) antisemitism. It suggests that there's a dark underbelly to the purported magic of the Itchy & Scratchy empire - this malaise manifests itself all over the park, but the reference to Roger Meyers Sr's fascist leanings make it especially alarming when, shortly after, Bart is apprehended by a couple of sinister-looking security personnel and hauled off to the Itchy & Scratchy equivalent of Disneyland Jail (that's an actual thing).

This was not the first time that The Simpsons had taken a swipe at Disneyland. Duff Gardens, the shoddy amusement park visited by Bart, Lisa and Selma in the Season 4 episode "Selma's Choice", was ostensibly a parody of Busch Gardens, a park similarly owned by a beer company, but many of the attractions were digs at some of the most iconic features encountered at Disneyland (Small Word ride, Hall of Presidents, Main Street Electrical Parade). There the joke didn't go much further than the park being badly-run and a colossal letdown. Itchy & Scratchy Land, on the other hand, is a whole different level of evil, one that by turns plays like a nightmare vision of a dystopian future, or a glimpse into a twisted parallel reality. So much about the park feels profoundly, eerily wrong, and not just the violent motif that has Marge so repulsed. In the second act a lot of the really troublesome stuff tends to be happening on a more muted level. There's a park executive who seems to be stalking Marge, showing up a little too conveniently every time she expresses her reservations. A disturbingly large percentile of the park's visitors identify to the creepy and unpleasant moniker of "Bort". To say nothing of the horrors Maggie encounters when she's dumped in The Ball Room for the duration of the family's visit. The park is an odd, off-kilter place, one that plainly doesn't adhere to the same reality as the rest of the world. Part of this taps into the paradoxical discomfort brought on by the zealous measures deployed by Disneyland to maintain a strictly controlled environment. George Ritzer has something to say about this in The McDonaldizaton of Society, when he describes the almost utopic qualities of the Disneyland milieu - "Visitors will likely not have their day disrupted by the sight of public drunkenness. Crime in these parks is virtually nonexistent" [although still existent enough to necessitate Disneyland Jail] - before hinting that there may be a hidden price to all this cleanliness:  "Disney offers a world of predictable, almost surreal orderliness." (p.112-13) In the Itchy & Scratchy equivalent, there is a heartless, calculated coldness to the efficiency, one that shows little regard for anything below the most surface level of emotions. This is particularly evident in The Ball Room, where the babies' inactivity is equated with satiation; the daycare staff are oblivious to how much the babies dislike the plastic balls, the physical weight of which renders them unable to play. When Maggie and the other babies finally manage to claw their way to the top of the ball heap, the staff are alarmed, and their go-to response is to bury them under even more balls.

On arrival, the family are transported to the main body of the park by helicopter, where they are assured by the pilot that, "Nothing can possi-blye go wrong." He then insists that his mispronunciation of the word "possibly" is the first thing that's ever gone wrong, something that does little to quell the family's unease. The appearance of the helicopter is a nod to Steven Spielberg's latest action blockbuster Jurassic Park (1993), and at this point it's worth acknowledging that the episode first aired on October 2nd, 1994, making the plot an obvious product of Jurassic Park hype (although it clearly predates Pulp Fiction - there is a wry jab therein at the state of John Travolta's career pre-Pulp). Jurassic Park, of course, was centred around a revolutionary theme park in which specimens from the age of the dinosaur were resurrected and showcased for the amusement of guests, and which offered enormous and very obvious potential for things to go spectacularly wrong. In one of the film's most iconic one-liners, Jeff Goldblum's character contrasts the hazards of the park with the relative orderliness of Disneyland, noting that, "if the Pirates of The Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists." For viewers with Jurassic Park still fresh in their minds, the helicopter scene would have provided a major tip-off as to the nature of what would inevitably to go wrong at Itchy & Scratchy Land, a promise finally fulfilled in the third act when the park's animatronics malfunction and turn against the guests - although the presence of killer robots in place of dinosaurs has the outcome more closely resemble that of the 1973 film Westworld, directed by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton (the pilot's self-defeating assurance is a variation on a gag used on the Westworld poster, which told us that "Nothing can possibly go worng."). The family are abandoned and forced to fend off armies of renegade robots by being obnoxious tourists and directing the flash on their cameras here, there and everywhere. It's an exciting finale, and one that realises a personal nightmare of series creator Matt Groening, who has spoken about his childhood phobia of robots in numerous venues. But, let's face it, it's a less persuasive nightmare than the one we've already experienced, concerning how the park operates on any given day. The Jurassic Park/Westworld homages, while cute, are neither the backbone of the episode, nor the real anxieties articulated in the verbal flubs of the helicopter pilot. That has more to do with how Disney endeavors to manufacture the perfectly immaculate family day out, in which all of our enjoyment is carefully pre-determined, our every need hotly anticipated, and our desires all aggressively funneled. To an extent, we welcome the surveillance, and the predictability - the last thing we want is for anything nasty or unexpected to happen when we ride Pirates of The Caribbean, after all. But there's something kind of stifling about it too - and still ample room for error, mechanical or human, to worm its way into the most airtight of systems.

Oh, but I've gotten way ahead of things here. At its heart, "Itchy & Scratchy Land" is an episode about the Simpsons taking a family vacation, something we hadn't seen them do since as far back as the Season 1 episode "Call of The Simpsons". Marge, who has a pre-established distaste for the violent antics of Itchy & Scratchy, was hoping for a more peaceful vacation at the Highway 9 Bird Sanctuary (home of a diner-shaped bird feeder, on a really high pole) but is eventually won over by the promise of recipe-related bumper cars. She has some lingering reservations, however, based on her experiences in past vacations. Marge yearns for an ordinary family vacation, instead of one where "we end up in a big fight and we come home more miserable than when we left" (do you want to tell her or shall I?). And, for as wild as the episode gets in its third act, it starts out in a fairly down-to-earth place, and is quite happy to take its time in getting to the main attraction. The family do not arrive at the pivotal location until a third of the way into the episode - before then, we get to experience the drudgery that accompanies any extensive road trip. The mileage the episode gets out this is just as toothsome as the Disney skewering, what with the endless roadblocks, the dull landmarks and the jabbering AM radio. There's a shrewd reminder that it's not just our amusement parks that artfully distort and command our desires - in a wonderful, wonderful gag, Bart and Lisa become increasingly enraptured by a series of billboards advertising their increasing proximity to a Flickey's eatery, for no other reason than that it offers relief from the monotony. When Homer curtly denies them the stop, the kids are immediately greeted by another a billboard, seemingly positioned only to taunt onlookers with the information that they are now 25,000 miles from the next Flickey's (I see what you did there), and that their chance for salvation has passed them by. The power of the sequence lies in the viewer's empathy for Bart and Lisa, their youthful curiosity as to what might lie ahead and their frustration in being utterly at the mercy of parental control. But it's equally hilarious just how much anticipation is built up for the looming eatery through such a hopelessly banal succession of imagery. We feel Bart and Lisa's disappointment whilst being wise to the unlikelihood that they missed out on a one-of-a-kind experience, for Flickey's is almost certainly no different to any other eatery they're bound to encounter along the way. All that the relentless signage does is prey on the need for alleviation from tedium, and in that regard we might see Itchy & Scratchy Land as doing more-or-less the same thing, in convincing consumers of a magical reality lying straight up ahead.

On the surface, the sadistic violence of Itchy & Scratchy would appear to be the very antithesis of the wholesome values and fairy tale fantasies embodied by the Walt Disney brand (although I would note that the "Steamboat Willie" parody from "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" is probably less disturbing to modern sensibilities than the real thing). But they meet much the same end, in offering their clientele the realisation of dreams they were probably unaware they even had until they were packaged and sold to them as the ultimate in wish fulfillment. Sara Raley, in McDonaldization: The Reader, defines Disneyland as "every child's media-generated fantasy" (p.127), which is echoed here in Bart's observation that the hideous robot parade, "is so much like my dreams, it's scary" (the true banality of the experience, meanwhile, is summed up in Homer's proclamation that, "It's the 12:00 robot parade! Hurry up or we'll have to wait for the 12:05 parade!"). Visitors to Itchy & Scratchy Land are pre-conditioned to find their escapism in violent fantasy, and to that end Itchy & Scratchy certainly offers the ultimate in barbarous wish fulfillment. The very premise of the cartoon is one of cruelty without consequence - Marge challenges the executive who insists otherwise with a hilariously pedantic example ("On TV, that mouse pulled out that cat's lungs and played them like a bagpipe, but in the next scene the cat was breathing comfortably!"), but neglects the most obvious, which is that none of Itchy's demented antics have any kind of lasting impact on Scratchy. The cat always comes back, alive and unharmed, and the viewer is not encouraged to have stakes in the outcome of any given episode. The climactic showdown, in which the animatronics direct their homicidal programming at the park's guests, can be seen as the logical progression of this, with a society that revels in simulations of blood and mangling finally having its fantasies made a little too real and turned back on itself. This is a point that Marge puts to Bart and Lisa in the very last scene, in offering the episode's ostensible moral: "I hope you realize now that violence on TV may be funny, but it's not so funny when that violence is happening to you." The sincerity of the message is immediately undermined by Bart's response, "But it would be funny to someone who was watching us," thus tapping on the fourth wall and implicating the show's own audience in the ongoing fascination with violent fantasy. The Simpsons' disastrous visit to Itchy & Scratchy Land was our own joyous escapism, and the episode posits that it is as essential to us as the feel-good fantasies of Disney's happily ever afters.

 

Of course, for a park founded on the reassurance that nothing can possi-blye go wrong, Itchy & Scratchy Land seems awfully determined to tempt fate, as we see when the family takes a ride on the log flume, a heinously unsafe amalgamation of Splash Mountain and Pirates of The Caribbean that ends with the carriage being severed by a ripsaw and the occupants having to leap out to safety onto a heap of mattresses below. This sequence highlights the other, somewhat incongruous fantasy on which the park has built its public image - the promise of refuge from the realities of family living, aka the one on which Marge has pinned her own emotional investment for the visit - and how this, too, is fated to fall apart. The ride starts out serenely, accompanied by the sounds of a twanging banjo that is obviously designed to replicate that heard at the start of Pirates of The Caribbean, but puts us on edge for how eerily reminiscent it also is of certain details from the movie Deliverance. Marge comments that, "This is just what I was hoping for...spending the day together as a family," and even before the ride suddenly gives way to a stomach-rending drop, there's a falseness to this image of immaculate family bliss, brought on by the crudeness of the ride's cheesy cardboard props, a ludicrously unconvincing realisation of actual imagination. The log ride splits the family down the middle (although not literally, as it so easily could have done), and Marge willfully abandons her visions of family togetherness so that she and Homer can head off to the park's big draw for the adult set, Parents' Island (a play on Disney World's Pleasure Island), in search of a very different kind of escapism - one in which time stands completely still. The attractions of the island are rooted heavily in a nostalgia for the past and a resistance to the realities of time, although there is a small disturbance to this fantasy in the signage of Itchy's 70s Disco, which recreates the 70s down to the smallest detail but advertises itself as being established in 1980. More telling is Marge's exchange with a waiter at T.G.I. McScratchy's, where New Year's Eve is being celebrated in a continuous loop (a nod to an actual practice at Pleasure Island, in which every night was New Year's Eve for fifteen years straight). Marge tells the waiter that, "It must be wonderful to ring in the new year over and over", to which he implores her to kill him. Visitors to T.G.I. McScratchy's want the symbolic promise of the new year - the renewal and the optimism for what might lie ahead - but none of the ramifications of the passage of time, ie: a world that is constantly changing and the unwelcome reminders that they are adding further years to their own lives. The actual horrors of being permanently stranded in such a hollow spectacle are indicated in the plight of the waiter, who, we later learn from the surveillance team in the park's ominous underground quarters, has gone out to the roof of the bar and is threatening to jump. Their words also make it clear that he is not the first employee to be driven to suicidal despair by the monotony of the park's routines. One person's escapist fantasy is another's stifling nightmare.

In spite of everything, by the third act Marge does appear to have come around to the park, for she is seen purchasing t-shirts with the slogan "Best Vacation Ever", although by this point she has shed her emotional baggage in the form of her entire family - Homer has wandered off and is about to cause her a world of embarrassment by harassing a costumed employee and getting dragged to the same detention facility as Bart. Following the robot rampage, Marge is all prepared to condemn the vacation as a write-off, although Bart and Lisa attempt to counter this by pointing out how it met all of her requisites for an ideal family outing - in their battle against the renegade animatronics, the family were brought together and got a lot of exercise outdoors. Ostensibly, Marge agrees, but then immediately goes back on her final requisite, that the family create a lot of happy memories, with her instruction that they never speak of it again (a call-back to something said by Homer earlier on in the episode, when his impromptu shortcut caused the family unspecified grief en route to the park). On a meta level, it's a reference to the unlikelihood of the episode's events being brought up again in the show's continuity, so Marge knows intuitively that it's easier just to nod her head and move on. A lot of your trauma gets conveniently consigned to oblivion when your life follows an episodic structure.

Some random observations:

• Among past family vacation embarrassments is a trip to Amish Country, which recreates a scene from Peter Weir's 1985 film Witness. Homer harasses the non-violent Amish by smearing them with ice cream, like the tourists in that film. Here, Harrison Ford isn't around to kick his ass, but an actual ass manages just as well.
  
• The short-lived "Itchy & Scratchy & Friends Hour" is often assumed to be a reference to the late 80s/early 90s animated series Garfield and Friends - I suppose because their names are kind of similar and they both involve cartoon cats? I'm not really feeling that connection, however. I suspect that the "Itchy & Scratchy & Friends Hour" was intended more as a nod to the 1980s trend for cartoons featuring cute, non-threatening characters designed with their greeting card potential most in mind (which makes the inclusion of a character named Ku Klux Klam all the more disturbingly inappropriate). Garfield and Friends itself was one of the early shows to consciously move away from this trend - Mark Evanier, who wrote for the series, has been very outspoken in his criticisms of what he calls the "pro-social" cartoons of the 1980s, which he (not inaccurately) saw as promoting conformity, and in Garfield he took the opportunity to extend his middle finger through a trio of characters known as the Buddy Bears, who emphasised group harmony and explicitly discouraged independent thinking. The Simpsons, in their early days, had taken their own potshot at such cartoons with The Happy Little Elves, characters which, as I noted in my coverage of "Some Enchanted Evening", the show largely stepped away from as the trend dissipated and the satire became less relevant. Elsewhere in the animation industry, however, it seems that a number of other writers still had a lot of anger in their system for these pro-social pricks, hence the utterly savage eviscerations we continued to get well into the 90s through shows like Garfield and Friends and Rugrats.
• Ku Klux Klam himself, meanwhile, might be an additional reference to the reputed racism of Walt Disney. I notice that the character is positioned beneath an unnamed bear resembling Br'er Bear from Song of The South. Subliminal mise-en-scene?  

• For all of Groening's musings about how being cornered by a homicidal robot would be the most terrifying thing ever, the most disturbing aspect of the final showdown comes not from the mindlessness of machinery, but the vindictiveness of humanity. The family finds possible rescue on an emergency helicopter, but are denied entry by costumed employee, who recognises Bart as the one who harassed him earlier and boots him off, yelling, "When you get to Hell, tell 'em Itchy sent you!" Another reminder that acts of violence entail consequences, although the employee's retribution seems somewhat...disproportionate - given that it involves kicking a ten-year-old and abandoning a family to their presumed deaths. I would say "what the hell, Itchy?", but come to think of it that's pretty much the entire basis of Itchy's character. Itchy's a jerk.
  

* Of course, it may also have represented wish fulfillment following The Simpsons' own recent failure to get a movie off of the ground. Consideration was at one point given to expanding the plot of "Kamp Krusty" to feature length, but it didn't work out.

No Idea (Earth Leakage Trip)

The Prodigy might have traversed some subversive territory with their 1991 hit "Charly", but there were freakier combatants still who threw their hats into the Toytown Techno arena. "No Idea", a hypnotically unnerving concoction by electronic duo Earth Leakage Trip (real names Tony Lobue and Neil Sandford), encompasses many of the same themes as "Charly" - mind-altering substances, children in peril, an ironic wariness of adult authority - all while taking an artifact from 1970s childhood and teasing out the sinister undertones that were lurking there along. Most of the dialogue heard throughout comes from Happy Monsters, a quirky children's record from 1975, which tells the story of two stray kids, Bobby and Betty, who take a wrong turn in the woods and end up in The Land of Ooog, a fantastical realm populated by monsters with an affinity for well-behaved children and a passion for funk music. Ooog shares many of the same features of our world, but everything has been tweaked and rearranged, evoking a world that seems eerily distorted and operates on an entirely different logic to our own - hence the track's most prominent sample, concerning Bobby's observations on Ooogian architecture: "The doors are where the windows should be...and the windows are where the doors should be..." In "No Idea", the sample has been slowed down, making the voice seem noticeably older but also as though the speaker is surveying their surroundings with the stupefied fascination brought on by a drug-induced high. In the original recording, Bobby utters this phrase just once, but here it is repeated over and over, creating the sensation that Bobby is trapped in a single looping moment, spiraling along a dizzying infinity of misplaced doors and windows. The sample dominates the track, and the effect is disconcerting. For what could be a more mundane, and yet more threatening subversion of the established order than a house where the doors and the windows are in the wrong place?

As was the basis of Toytown Techno, "No Idea" is all about evoking a kind of long-lost childhood euphoria, rendered accessible once again by the pleasures of the rave scene. That euphoria is, however, disturbed by the intermittent cries of Heather O'Rourke, who can be heard shrieking, "I can't hear you, mommy!", at various points throughout the track - this sample comes from the 1982 movie Poltergeist, a story of another child abducted by otherworldly beings. Its juxtaposition with the Happy Monsters sample is a sly reference to the potentially darker implications of Bobby and Betty's mind-bending excursion. On the album sleeve, Happy Monsters promises "a pleasant adventure into the impossible Land of Ooog", where "only good children can visit and talk with the happy monsters." The adventure is certainly a pleasant one, for nothing overtly menacing happens to Bobby and Betty in Ooog, but there is a more troubling subtext to be gleaned, in that it concerns a couple of lost children who, for all we know, never find their way home. The narrative, which occupies the entirety of Side A, amounts to something of a shaggy dog story, an extended build-up to a punchline in which the listener is instructed to turn over the record to hear the concert the monsters have promised to perform before their human guests. The problem facing Bobby and Betty at the start of the record - how to navigate back to their family's farm in an approaching storm - is left dangling. Meanwhile, Bobby's concluding observation that, "Even if it's not for real, it's such a happy place here," is a jarring reminder that Ooog apparently exists only in fantasy, making us question what, exactly, is happening in the "real" world. Are the children stranded in the woods and hallucinating from the hunger Bobby professes to feel at the start of the recording? Is this all escapism in order to avoid having to face up to the frightening reality of their situation? It seems that every little extra dash of whimsy in Ooog adds further apprehension to the mix.

The vocals heard at the start of "No Idea" are those of The Interpreter, a disembodied voice who directs Bobby and Betty around The Land of Ooog, but refuses to make itself visible on the basis that "Things are not always as we see them." It assures us that since we are "good children", the monsters who inhabit The Land of Ooog have looked forward to our "make believe visit". Already we can see a kind of subversion along the lines of that conveyed in The Prodigy's "Charly", for the rebellious ravers tripping along to Bobby's doors-and-windows fixation would likely not have regarded themselves as "good" children who were keen to follow the rules, while the specification that the visit to Ooog is only "make believe" is suggestive both of a parallelism between childhood fantasy and drug-induced hallucination and of the deceptive, potentially dangerous world we are traversing. There is a sinister ambience to Ooog that seems at odds with the values ostensibly being preached. Throughout Happy Monsters, there is repeated emphasis on the supposed condition that Ooog is accessible only through virtue - The Interpreter insists that Bobby and Betty must be "good" children, or else they would not have come there -  although what constitutes a "good" child is never expounded on. The closest we get is The Interpreter's presumption that Bobby and Betty would have done their homework and "studied [their] XYZs", suggesting that it has to do with a basic adherence to adult authority. And really, we have to take The Interpreter's word for it, because Bobby and Betty are never called upon to demonstrate their virtue, nor is their entry to Ooog precipitated by any kind of moral choice. They certainly seem like nice enough children, but we learn effectively nothing about them. Also not explained is why the monsters are so eager to meet with Bobby and Betty in the first place, a question explicitly put to The Interpreter by Betty that it seems to purposely duck out of answering. The story's apparent attempt to offer up some kind of moral teaching - "Every place is happy when children are good" - is so vague as to hardly seem sincere. The paradox of Happy Monsters is that, for all of its insistence on being "good" and following the rules, it is a story that revels in embracing the strange and subverting the established order, hence those spooky Ooogian houses with the doors and the windows in the wrong places. The Land of Ooog is both threatening and seductive because it does not obey the rules, the story engaging for the beguiling manner in which it explores the allure of the strange and the unknown, even if it is a fascination that goes against whatever parental authority (and Charley The Cat) might have told us. And, in order to reach this land, professedly open only to the obedient, the children have had to leave parental authority behind.

The implications of the Poltergeist sample are similarly two-fold. O'Rourke's voice, like that of The Interpreter, is disembodied, deriving from a scene in which her character, Carol Freeling, is calling out to her parents from another dimension (in a manner strongly reminiscent of the Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost"). Her passage to the other side is facilitated by her family's subservience to a very different authority - that of the chattering cyclops. Poltergeist is a film that speaks to parental concerns about the increasing dominance of television, that ultimate source of mind-warping stupefaction, within the family home, and the possibility that it could supplant adult authority, should the parents be negligent enough to delegate their own responsibilities to the blinking light box. The television, ostensibly, is safe and domestic, but it offers a portal through which outside forces are invited to freely pervade the family home, and through which the child's soul, if they stare into it too long, could potentially be lost. The preoccupation, once again, is with the allure of the strange and unknown over the safe and familiar, and the horror and exhilaration this engenders. O'Rourke's cries emphasise a wedge between parent and child that is certainly disturbing (reminding us of the fate that might possibly have befallen Bobby and Betty), although her repeated insistence that she can no longer hear her mother is equally suggestive of a kind of gleeful liberation from parental control. These are renegade children who've left their comfort zone behind. Whether they'll be alright in their new environs remains up in the air, and that delicious uncertainty is to be savoured.

 There are gulls heard all throughout the track too, but I can't explain what those are all about.

Sam and Ralph (aka The Club Tie, and The Firm Handshake)

I don't think there was a Looney Tunes series that struck as raw a nerve with me as that featuring Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf. As a child, I was always captivated by the shorts, depicting the daily working lives of a dog and a wolf (both voiced by Mel Blanc), who every sunrise set out to the same field, each with very different objectives regarding the flock of sheep around which their respective jobs revolve. At the same time, I was always deeply unsettled as to how these two characters, who greeted one another with such warmth and cordiality during their initial morning encounters, could unleash such brutality on one another the second the working day began - only to drop everything and apparently be reconciled by the end of the day. It was an ingenious formula, and one more profoundly disturbing edge than the more traditional breed of Looney Tunes short in which the characters were at loggerheads for the full duration. The Sam and Ralph shorts were all about contrasts - the gentility of the opening and closing sequences versus the all-out savagery that lay between. Sam and Ralph are on warring sides in the occupational equation (although they both work for the same employer), yet the bookends of each short would indicate that neither takes this arrangement in the least bit personally. The characters are able to maintain their personal friendship, in spite of their professional enmity. And while the notion that two natural enemies could both embrace the conflict and be the best of friends in spite of it (or even because of it?) was nothing new to animation - it is, after all, the paradox at the heart of Tom and Jerry - what made Sam and Ralph such a unique example was that there were very clear distinctions between where one facet of their relationship ended and the other began. Their lives were governed by the whistle atop the punch clock they operated every morning and evening, which clearly signaled when they were to be friends and enemies.

Ralph is often mistakenly assumed to be the alter ego of a much more famous Looney Tunes creation, Wile E. Coyote - understandably so, as they share a near-identical character design (adding to the confusion, I could swear that I once rented a Wile E. Coyote VHS tape that included a Sam and Ralph short). They are, however, canonically separate characters. One way to tell them apart is by the coloration of their noses - Ralph has a red nose while Wile. E's is black. Also, when Ralph speaks, he does so without Wile E.'s refined Mid-Atlantic accent (Wile E. was, of course, completely silent in the Roadrunner shorts, but was always happy to speak up whenever Bugs Bunny was his nemesis). The real distinguishing feature, however, is one of simple tenacity. Wile E. Coyote is willing to endure non-stop pain and humiliation in his never-ending pursuit of the unobtainable Roadrunner, because he doesn't know when to quit. Ralph, on the other hand, knows precisely when to quit - at five o'clock every evening when the whistle blows. In this world, the whistle is king.

Production of the Sam and Ralph shorts spanned over a decade but the series as a whole was relatively brief. Only seven shorts were made in total, and it took multiple goes to get the formula right, meaning that even fewer deal with the characteristic theme of Sam and Ralph being friends in their personal lives but enemies on the job. It's interesting to watch the shorts in order and chart the evolution of the concept - from the beginning, the punch clock was the all-important prop that determined the unique flavour of the series, but the gag was initially quite limited, and it was a case of each subsequent short finding a way to expand on that gag, until finally we had landed on the familiar formula. The debut short, Don't Give Up The Sheep from 1953, establishes the basic conflict between the sheepdog and wolf but plays itself almost entirely straight. Here, only the sheepdog punches in and out and the wolf does indeed appear to be seeking a slab of freshly-killed mutton, and not a paycheck for his efforts. Adding to the confusion, the sheepdog is explicitly addressed by a peer as "Ralph", while the wolf is never named. The short ends with "Ralph" the sheepdog cornering the nameless wolf and proceeding to clobber him, whereupon Fred, a replacement sheepdog who works the night shift, shows up and takes over wolf-beating duties while "Ralph" goes home. The second short, Sheep Ahoy from 1954, follows a similar formula, only here the punchline with the clock is taken a full step further, so that not only does Sam (still referred to as "Ralph") hand evening duties over to Fred, but the wolf (addressed here as "George"), also punches out and exchanges pleasantries with his own nighttime replacement (addressed here as "Sam"!). A revolutionary idea that nevertheless did not go quite far enough. By the third short, Double or Mutton of 1955, however, the series really was cooking with gas. Not only had Sam and Ralph settled on their official monikers, but the central conceit of them behaving markedly different beside the punch clock to out on the field was also cemented. Here, we see Sam and Ralph walking to work, greeting each other, undertaking another day's worth of cartoon brutality, and finally bidding each other a cordial farewell when the whistle blew. Double or Mutton was the first to explore the idea that Sam and Ralph were a whole lot friendlier to one another when they weren't working, and it would only keep building from there until, by the seventh and final short, Woolen Under Where of 1963, Sam and Ralph were also roommates (or at the very least ate breakfast together).

Arguably, the intrinsically friendly relationship between Sam and Ralph ensured that there was always a safety net to the proceedings. We knew that, no matter how ugly the mayhem got throughout the day, the characters didn't really hate one another and were merely "acting" (although the trauma Sam inflicted on Ralph was certainly real enough). Nevertheless, there was something that I found intrinsically sinister about the arrangement. The two modes struck me as inherently incompatible, even if that was the joke. And while Ralph might have been the "villain" of the scenario, it was always Sam whom I found more terrifying. To a degree, this was an inevitable side-effect of showing the narratives predominantly from Ralph's point of view - as with the Wile E. Coyote shorts, we spend most of our time in the company of the hunter, and it is he who commands our sympathies. But whereas Wile E. Coyote's own worst enemy was ultimately himself (that and the biased cartoon physics of the Looney Tunes universe), the greatest threat to Ralph always lay with Sam. Any direct confrontation with Sam would put Ralph on the receiving end of a world of pain, so it was in Ralph's interests to avoid Sam altogether. And yet Sam was absolutely everywhere. He was omnipresent in the most mind-bending of ways. No matter where he ran, Ralph simply could not elude him, and since we shared Ralph's perspective of events we too came to dread the all-seeing, all-knowing sheepdog who was inexplicably always a step ahead. There was more to it than that, however. What made Sam such a startling creation was the contrast between the non-threatening dog we saw at the beginning and end of each short and the ominous, hulking brute who tormented Ralph in between. The gulf was so great that it was as if Sam had transformed into a different character altogether, a Pavlovian response upon hearing that whistle blow. This was true of Ralph too, to an extent - he would typically kick off the working day by twisting his face into a more malevolent expression, to better suit the demands of his role. With Sam, though, the contrast was more marked. Outside of work, not only is he an immensely more amicable character, but he's also depicted as something of a klutz, stumbling as he walks and intermittently bumping into trees (gags are often derived from the design quirk of having Sam's mop of red fur hang over his eyes - at the start of some shorts, he has to lift the fur to be sure that it is Ralph to whom he is speaking). He doesn't seem like he should present much in the way of opposition for the clever and efficient Ralph (who in the opening of one short, A Sheep In The Deep, uses an ingenious contraption to speed his way through his morning routine and make it to the punch clock ahead of Sam) and yet every day at 8:00 am he acquires a stealth and a killer instinct that far exceeds Ralph's. Another unnerving difference is that, for all of the harmonious small talk that Sam and Ralph happily indulge in around the punch clock, out on the field the only communication is delivered by tooth, claw and fist - neither character will speak to the other while on the job. This, in part, is to recreate a similar kind of non-verbal slapstick routine to that which worked so well for Ralph's coyote doppelganger, but it also reinforces the division. Not talking enables the characters to maintain a detachment, not merely from their opponent's individual identity, but also their own. They become less "Sam" and "Ralph" than "sheepdog" and "wolf", two long-standing adversaries enacting the same ongoing feud that has been waged by generations before them.

Again, we can look to that safety net for reassurance. The sheepdog and wolf are inevitably going to drop the warfare and go back to being Sam and Ralph at the end of the day, their diurnal savagery instantly mitigated by their crepuscular civility. There comes a point, however, at which we have to question if the reverse scenario is perhaps more persuasive - that is, if the brutal beatings Sam dishes out to Ralph all throughout the day actually serve to undermine the legitimacy of their friendship. A question the series never openly explores, but which always simmers uncomfortably beneath the surface, concerns how great a mate Sam is really, if he's willing to pound the snot out of his best friend every day in exchange for a paycheck.

I was thinking about this recently after reading an article by Russ Fischer of Birth Movies Death, who suggests that those of us who believed that Sam and Ralph always liked one another, in spite of everything, were reading it wrong, and it's in the opening and closing bookends, and the duo's apparent friendship, where the real insincerity lies. As per Fischer's reading, when Sam and Ralph go to work: "they allow their violent instincts to run wild. When the five-o’clock whistle blows, they slip the masks of society back on -- or they remove their bloodthirst." This, I have to admit, caught me slightly off guard. I always took it as a given that the Sam and Ralph we saw chatting amicably as they made their trek to work every morning were the "real" Sam and Ralph, and that the sheepdog-and-wolf routine was just an act to suit the demands of their respective jobs. The former, Fischer counters, is simply a ruse that our heroes live out in the interests of convincing themselves that they are fundamentally civilised, and the workplace is where they go to let it all hang loose. If Fischer is correct in his assessment, then the series just jumped up several points on the sinister meter, because the safety net is an illusion - Sam and Ralph do indeed hate one another, as primal instinct dictates they must, and the pleasantries around the punch clock are a thin facade that, at best, provide momentary reprieve from the bloodletting. And yet, by the end of the article, Fischer appears to concede, based on Chuck Jones' own commentary, that this was likely not the creator's intent - said Jones, “The story of Ralph and Sam comes down to Lewis Brown’s idea that there are no judges, only people judging, no tramps, only people tramping, and so on?”. Concludes Fischer, "I admire Jones’s optimism...The example of Sam and Ralph may be a fantasy, but I’m going to keep it in my pocket as an ideal. We’re always at one another’s throats, but the dream is that we don't have to be. We can find a space to explore and express our differences, but still shake hands across the aisle, and go home as colleagues, rather than cowering alone like animals."

The absurdity of wild animals attempting to mask their savage tendencies with gestures of  civility was the basis of a gag in an earlier Chuck Jones short, Operation: Rabbit (1952), in which Wile E. Coyote attempts to predate Bugs Bunny using nothing less than genteel (if egotistical) reasoning: "I am more muscular, more cunning, faster and larger than you are, and I'm a genius, while you could hardly pass the entrance examinations to kindergarten. So I'll give you the customary two minutes to say your prayers." When this fails to yield a positive response from Bugs, a bemused Wile E. retreats back to the drawing board, pondering, "Why do they always want to do it the hard way?" I wonder. The Sam and Ralph shorts operate on a similar kind of absurdity, of animals conducting their brutal business with apparent decorum, but what makes their relationship more complicated is that, although I have previously described them as "natural" enemies, arguably they are not. The sheepdog (like the sheep itself) is a man-made creation, the product of multiple generations' worth of selective breeding, and a descendant of the wolf. The sheepdog's natural instincts have been carefully honed and manipulated to suit the needs of their human masters, and the punchline to the original short, "Don't Give Up The Sheep", was derived from the notion that the sheepdog would go about his duties like any typical workaday stiff, disregarding his selectively bred inclinations the instant the whistle blew. The extension of the punch clock routine to Ralph takes it up a whole other level. It entails the added absurdity that a wolf would likewise drop its natural predatory inclinations at the end of the working day, and raises additional questions as to who would "employ" a wolf to pilfer sheep in the first place. But the kinship shared by Sam and Ralph when they are not working also conveys the poignant observation that, deep down, we are perhaps not so different, and there's more scope for common ground between people of all walks of life than we might assume.

Sam and Ralph's crepuscular friendship is based on the mutual recognition that they are each only acting on the hands that nurture and nature have respectively dealt them. And yet their shorts are dominated by the troubling fact that, every day, they willfully put their friendship aside and go to war with one another. And this is where I must disagree with Fischer's concluding assessment that Sam and Ralph are to be regarded as a kind of "ideal", as I, for one, never found the Sam and Ralph shorts to be all that optimistic. I think there is a darker narrative at play, although not quite the one that Fischer initially proposes. Perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that both dimensions of the characters' lives are equally "real" - that Sam and Ralph do like one another, and yet what happens during the working day, when they are forced to suspend their emotional attachments, has visible ramifications. The fundamental fallacy underpinning Sam and Ralph's assumption that they can clearly differentiate their personal and professional lives is illustrated at the end of two shorts in particular,  Steal Wool (1957) and Ready, Woolen and Able (1960). Fischer correctly observes that, based on what we see of their domestic situations, both Sam and Ralph are "comfortable in success", inhabiting nice houses on the same street. In their crepuscular "reality" they both live and regard one another as equals (at the start of Steal Wool, Sam is a good neighbour, and throws a paper left outside Ralph's garden into his porch). And yet the two aforementioned shorts end on sour notes, in which Sam and Ralph do not walk home as equals, despite their efforts to cover the ugliness in plain sight with unflinching cordiality. Fischer's suggestion that Sam and Ralph have "a space to explore and express [their] differences", seems to gloss over the reality that, every day, Sam pounds Ralph into a pulp, the traumas of which inevitability spill over into their non-working existence. Sam always heads home happy and unharmed, whereas Ralph's dedication to his job is clearly having a detrimental effect on his health, both physically (as in Steal Wool) and mentally (as in Ready, Woolen and Able). Alright for some, in other words.

Steal Wool ends with Sam and Ralph returning home after another day's work, the latter bruised and in a sling. Sam, on noting his colleague's condition, makes the condescending observation that Ralph has been working too hard (condescending, because Sam is responsible for several of the day's injuries) and suggests that he take the following day off, assuring him that, "I can handle both jobs." "Thanks, Sam," says Ralph, as he staggers back toward his house. "You're a pal." The joke at the very end is based on Sam's ludicrous assertion that he can fulfill the roles of sheepdog and wolf simultaneously - how exactly this will play out is better left to our imaginations. And yet the short's final punchline comes from Ralph thanking his colleague and assuring him that he is a true friend when we have visible evidence to the contrary. The fact that this is the final line makes it feel as though we are being prompted to question, more so than in any other Sam and Ralph short, the authenticity of their friendship. If nothing else, it highlights the paradox behind their relationship, for it was, after all, Ralph's clashes with Sam that put him in that position in the first place. Ready, Woolen and Able, meanwhile, ends with Ralph suffering a mental breakdown (caused by Sam's apparent omnipresence) and being carted away in a straitjacket. Along the way, he passes Sam, who wishes him goodnight. Ralph regains his composure for long enough to respond with his own pleasantry: "See you tomorrow, Sam", before collapsing once again. That Sam doesn't bat an eyelid (or at least, it can be assumed he doesn't, under his mop of red hair), suggests that he's quite used to the working day sometimes concluding in this manner. Ralph's own response, meanwhile, carries an evident degree of resignation, acknowledging his entrapment in the endless cycle that is gradually throttling him. Neither character seems willing to acknowledge that anything is wrong, much less question if there are alternatives to their arrangement.

The ending of Steal Wool also underlines one of the series' other key absurdities, as Sam's closing proposition is based on the peculiar presumption that the wolf's presence is necessary in order for the sheepdog to do his own job. The implication could be that the conflict is so well-entrenched that the idea of going to work unopposed, even for one day, is unthinkable to Sam. But it draws attention to the troubling question hanging over the entirety of the series - namely, just who is employing these characters anyway? Hiring a dog to watch the sheep might make sense, but why then would you employ a sheep-killer to waltz in and cause mayhem? We probably can't pin this scenario on Mother Nature - after all, sheepdogs were not her idea. Which leads me to suspect that the higher powers employing Sam and Ralph and forcing them to duke it out every day are none other than the same purveyors of biased cartoon physics in Wile E.'s cartoons. Which is to say the cartoons' creators. Sam and Ralph undergo their grueling daily routine not for the benefit of anybody who has any use for a field full of sheep, but for the viewer's own entertainment. Wolf and Sheepdog are, therefore, both equally necessary in order to initiate conflict. To that end, I would argue that Sam and Ralph are really the logical extension of those shorts pitting Wile E. Coyote against the Roadrunner, or any number of Looney Tunes set-ups about two rival animals dueling. In all cases, the characters are trapped in an eternal struggle with no prospect of resolution, yet Sam and Ralph seem to possess a self-awareness that the others lack, being willing to break character and go home once they've fulfilled their quota for senseless mayhem, albeit in the knowledge that they'll have to come back and do it all over again the following day. And I suppose this is what I find so troubling, and so enthralling, about the Sam and Ralph shorts - they emphasise, more so than any other Looney Tunes series, the horrors, and perhaps some of the comforts, of inhabiting a routine that isn't quite brilliant but has nevertheless become familiar. The all-important punch clock, which enforces the boundaries between the characters' personal and professional lives, ends up reinforcing the monotony of the inescapable cycle, the whistle representing the screeching demands of whatever authority likes seeing them pitted against each other (be it man, nature or deity). The tragedy of Sam and Ralph is that they would sooner be friends, yet every day they go out and produce antipathy on demand in the interests of the roles ordained by their routine, with the lingering traumas endured by Ralph pointing toward a (not so hidden) cost.

Having said all of that, the last of the Sam and Ralph Shorts, Woolen Under Where (1963), ends with a glimpse of that genuine ideal of which Fischer speaks. In this short, Sam and Ralph do indeed walk home side by side, as equals, and with no visible injuries from their day's work, while making the following exchange: "Nice day, eh, Sam?" "Yeah, good to be alive, Ralph." Compared to other Sam and Ralph shorts, this ending feels less like a sour dig at the inherent cruelty and absurdity of the characters' routine, and more as if it's making a profound statement about the transitory nature of conflict - spats will come and ago, and yet their friendship endures, and each passing day brings the promise of new relish atop the renewed aggro. In that sense, it almost reminds me of the ending to The Big Snit, with the characters putting aside their personal differences in order to appreciate the mutual pleasures in life. As much as I wish that the Sam and Ralph series had yielded more than just seven shorts, I'm also glad that it ended with this particular installment. That final image of their silhouettes walking into the sunset, with Sam's arm around Ralph's shoulder, really does feel like the perfect place to leave these characters - it's charming, offbeat and more than a little poignant. We know they'll be back to squaring off against one another come 08:00 tomorrow, but for now their shared appreciation for the simple joys of another day could not be more awe-inspiring.

Sam and Ralph later had a cameo appearance in the 2003 feature film Looney Tunes: Back In Action. They show up in the backdrop of a restaurant scene, where Ralph opens up his lunch box to reveal that he's captured and hoarded one of the sheep, and Sam promptly clobbers him. While it's nice that the movie acknowledged their existence (a step up from Space Jam, where only Sam was seen), this scene never sat particularly well with me, as it flat-out violated the series rule that there are clear distinctions between how the characters behave when they are on the job and when they are undertaking casual pursuits such as dining out. If they were on their lunch break, then Ralph should not have been attempting to slaughter a sheep, nor should Sam have beaten him. My greatest disdain, however, is reserved for an episode of Taz-Mania (an otherwise fine show) which had Taz substituting for an absent Ralph through a temping agency called "Predators R Us". Here, Sam doesn't see fit to reference Ralph by name, acknowledging him only as "that coyote". In-universe, I should be absolutely appalled by the implication that Sam has been working with Ralph since 1953 and hasn't even memorised his species, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the writer of the episode in question was under the common misconception that Ralph and Wile E. Coyote are the same character. Which doesn't excuse the ending of the episode, in which Sam is apparently so impressed with Taz's temping that he wants to work with him on a regular basis, and I'm not sure where that leaves Ralph. Ugh, Sam, I know you make a living out of punching your best friend in the face every day, and that's already kind of questionable, but stabbing him in the back is a whole new low.