The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #42: Disco Ants vs Anteater (Budweiser)

Ants are not a critter typically associated with fun. Diligence and cooperation, maybe, but what do they have to teach us about loosening up and savouring existence? In the Aesop's fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant, the ant was exalted as the smart one out of the titular participants, whose foresight and application left it well-prepared for the inevitable changes on the horizon, but it frankly always struck me as rather an insufferable wet blanket (spiteful too), even if the outcome ultimately favoured it. In the late 1990s, two major Hollywood animation studios decided (perhaps not independently) that there was a public appetite for movies in which anthropomorphic ants got to be the heroes, but these were specifically ants who went against the grain of a society in which doing anything other than obediently following the line was generally frowned upon. Grasshoppers, insofar as the Aesopian perspective goes, don't make the best of role models, but Pixar and DreamWorks Animation both betrayed an at least equal distrust of the ants' model of doing things - presumably because it's easy enough to re-construe ant behaviour as a chilling metaphor for a prospective human society in which compliance and efficiency are valued over independence and variety, and individuality goes unacknowledged (unless you're royalty). This particular metaphor is also at the heart of the song "Ants Marching" by Dave Matthews Band, an upbeat tune that nevertheless bows out with the cautionary observation that, "Lights down, you up and die." That Aesopian ant, too stingy to help out a starving grasshopper, presumably makes it through the winter only to repeat the process the following spring; all the same, it will reach its deathbed eventually, upon which it might even feel a smidgeon of envy for that long-deceased grasshopper for taking the time to enjoy things like dancing and sunshine while such pleasures were available to it. "A short life and a merry one at that" could just as easily be applied as the moral to their story, if we care to follow it to its logical conclusion.

In the mid/late-90s, Budweiser ran a campaign offering up a cunning subversion of the popular perception of ants as workaholic sticklers. This particular colony of ants knew how to party down, having discovered the dual blessings of beer and disco. They still toiled diligently, but most of that work seemed to be in service of their passion for Bud, and in transporting it to their colony so as to refuel their disco energies. In doing so, they demonstrated that the ant and grasshopper's respective ethos need not be so inherently at odds, for they worked hard and they played hard.

Contemporaries of the Swamp Gang, the Budweiser ants never made quite the same cultural splash that the frogs did in the West, and their crack at the whip was relatively brief; they had greater longevity in the Chinese market, where the ants proved popular enough to feature in a series of tie-in commercials with the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I'm aware of only five commercials from the stateside campaign, which we may as well name for the disco acts each of them featured...so, "KC & The Sunshine Band", "The Trammps", "KC & The Sunshine Band II", "Chic" and either "McFadden and Whitehead" or "Bee Gees", depending on which version you saw. Something that appeals to me about this campaign is how, in lieu of any actual dialogue or Swamp Gang-esque wisecracks, the disco music effectively supplies the punchline of each ad, and much of the general character. The first of the ads, "KC & The Sunshine Band", debuted in 1995 and was directed by Simon West, the future Con Air director. It depicted the ants marching with a bottle of Budweiser to the pulsating sounds of "Lion" by Kodo, with their abrupt switch to "Get Down To Night" by KC & The Sunshine Band, post-Bud ingestion, supplying the ad's pivotal joke. "KC & The Sunshine Band II", from 1997, was a direct sequel, picking up where the original left off and demonstrating that the ants were an ecologically-sensitive group, who had procedures in place for ensuring that their emptied Bud bottles were not left discarded to clutter up the desert, but were instead relocated to the nearest recycling bins. "Lion" was once again heard while the ants performed their gruelling labour, but cause for celebration (the bottle successfully reaching the recycle bin, and not pulverising one of their number in the process) was greeted by another KC & The Sunshine Band track, "That's The Way (I Like It)".

The ants had an enemy who appeared in two of the spots - a giant anteater (actually a puppet created by The Character Shop) who was, unsurprisingly, out to guzzle as many ants as possible down its elongated mouth (note: according the backdrop, the ants were located near Vasquez Rocks in California, which is somewhat contrary to the presence of the anteater, an animal native only to Central and South America, but then we mustn't be sticklers for realism in ads centred around disco-dancing insects). In one of its two appearances, in the "Chic" ad, the anteater actually succeeded, although the story didn't quite end there. Having gorged its fill of ants, the anteater couldn't resist helping itself to the bottle of Bud Ice they were in the process of transporting, inadvertently restoring the party spirit to the ingested ants and enabling them to disco down to "Le Freak" inside the anteater's guts. Beyond an initial momentarily startled reaction, this doesn't appear to bother the anteater too much, and it carries on its way. From the outset it looks deceptively like a draw - as though ants and anteater have figured out how to co-exist in perfect harmony, thanks to the miracle of Bud Ice - but Bud and Chic are not going to protect those ants from the gruesome process of digestion, so I think it's fair to award this win unambiguously to the anteater.

The anteater's second appearance helped to balance out the odds a bit more, with the ants pulling off a victory that showed a surprisingly cunning side to the little party addicts; here, they found a way of reusing an emptied bottle of Bud in order to gain a reprieve from the toothless jaws of their foe. The ad opens with nary an ant in sight, just the anteater inserting its snout ever deeper down an anthill, only to accidentally suck up the bottle from the adjacent anthill and get it caught around its mouth. As the anteater struggles to free itself, the ants are emboldened enough to stroll into view, armed with a new bottle of Bud Ice to refill the hole. It's noteworthy that two versions of this ad exist, in which the ants celebrate alternately to "Stayin' Alive" by Bee Gees or "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" by McFadden and Whitehead; in either case, the music is key in cluing us in that the ants deliberately set a trap to inconvenience the anteater.

So yes, the Bud ants were a devious bunch, but their aforementioned anti-anteater scheme was arguably nothing more than self-defence. As indicated in either of the accompanying tracks (although more explicitly in the Bee Gees one) it's all about survival. The ants reserved their darkest side for an ad featuring a rare human encroacher, who was guileless enough to wander into the ants' territory with a bottle of Budweiser and thus made himself a viable target for a brutal mugging in which the ants attempted to burn a hole in his head by holding a magnifying glass up to the sun. Doing so no doubt enabled them to unleash a symbolic retribution on behalf of every ant who'd met their end at the hands of bored schoolchildren discovering how they could manipulate the glare of the sun for their own mean-spirited amusement, and claim a little extra Budweiser whilst at it, although from what we have to go on, this particular guy is a total innocent. He certainly does nothing to harm or threaten the ants within the space of this commercial, making their behaviour a little callous. Compared to the rest of the campaign, this ad does not immediately signpost the presence of the familiar insects - as far as we're concerned, the hiker starts out as our hero, with the ants instead becoming a creeping presence whose malign agenda becomes apparent only gradually. The conclusion of the ad once again has a disco track as its punchline - in this case, "Disco Inferno" by The Trammps - reaffirming that the ants are light-hearted and fun-loving, but then we just saw what they were capable of. The usage of said track - even more so than the tracks featured in the anti-anteater spot - makes it plain that these ants have rather a twisted sense of humor. They probably are the types to turn away a starving grasshopper, too.

Should we interpret the above scenario as the precursor to a prospective ant reckoning against humanity, and pillaging of its beer supplies? Possibly, although their subsequent manoeuvres against humans bearing Bud have been markedly more modest. One of the Chinese ads showed the ants setting up a trap for an approaching cyclist carrying a crate of Budweiser bottles by laying a rock in the road, but it transpired that all they were looking to do was to create enough turbulence to jar a single bottle of Bud loose - not trip up the cyclist and cause them to break several bones as part of their mugging procedure (as I'd fully expected to be the outcome). They're fiendishly ingenious, but seemingly quite happy to settle for meagre pickings.

EDIT: Actually, I retract the above observation, having stumbled across this ad from the Philippines. Flipping heck, these ants. Not only do they love fun, they'll kill for it.

Mr Punctuality Got A Brand New Volkswagen (But The Car Is Not The Surprise!)

Stop me if you've heard this one. A man named Vinnie (also known as Mr Punctuality) walks into a building to meet his girlfriend Elaine. She's in a tetchy mood because she's expecting him to gift her with a splashy present, and resents being made to wait for it. Is it her birthday? Probably not - one gets the impression, after spending fewer than 20 seconds with Elaine, that she's well-accustomed to the rhythms of incessant demanding and getting her every fastidious whim catered to. Vinnie assures her that he has a "surprise" for her, whereupon he blindfolds her and leads her the vehicle he has waiting outside - a Volkswagen Polo. Elaine assumes that her surprise is a new car, and is delighted with the performance she's getting from this particular set of wheels, but is vaguely perturbed by Vinnie's insistence that she keep the blindfold on, and the entire foreboding matter that she doesn't actually know where she's being driven to. Still, the ride itself is a swell experience. Finally, they arrive at a secluded beach; Elaine removes her blindfold and is bitterly disappointed to discover that the "quality purchase" she's been praising to high heaven all this time is a dinky little Volkswagen (although it does meet one of her requisites, in being European). "What kind of a surprise is this?!" she demands to know, whereupon Vinnie gives her the good, or possibly bad news: "The car is not the surprise..." A sudden look of panic flashes across Elaine's eyes.

The above scenario was the premise of a 60-second TV promotion for the Volkswagen Polo, one that never failed to make me shudder when it made the rounds back in 1996. It's yet another ad that I could see forming the basis of a unique personality test, the results of which would be determined by exactly what kind of "surprise" you assumed Mr Punctuality had in store for the unsuspecting Elaine. After all these years, the punchline remains an enigma to me, because the ad doesn't make it especially clear what conclusion we're expected to draw from Vinnie's loaded statement, but studying the finer details of that ending, my sense of personal unease has frankly only burgeoned since I was a child. All we know for sure is that Vinnie has purposely driven Elaine to a locale where they'll be safely removed from the rest of civilisation, and the implications of that (coupled with that final ominous musical refrain) are still enough to send shivers down my spine. As I see it, there are three possible outcomes for us to choose from:

• The "Benign" Surprise: Vinnie has driven Elaine out to a secluded beach so they can enjoy an uninterrupted make-out session on the backseat of that tiny, cheap Polo. This seems to be a fairly common interpretation, but the one that I personally am least persuaded by. It doesn't quite fit with the rest of the pieces; I don't detect a solitary note of genuine affection from either Vinnie or Elaine throughout, and when you factor in that Elaine doesn't seem particularly heartened by Vinnie's promise of an altogether different "surprise", something tells me that this isn't headed for a romantic outcome.
  
• The "Humane" Surprise: Vinnie has driven Elaine out to a secluded beach with the intention of terminating their relationship. And to prove that he means business, he's going to leave her stranded out in the middle of nowhere, whilst making a quick getaway back to the city in that reliable Volkswagen. This is actually what my mother assured me was happening when I asked for her opinion in 1996; still, given my age at the time, it's plausible that she might have withheld it from me if she seriously thought the above or below to be more probable.
  
• The Sicko Surprise: Vinnie has driven Elaine out to a secluded beach with the intention of terminating their relationship AND Elaine's life. For all we know he's planning to stash her body into the boot of that reliable Volkswagen and then dump it into the ocean. The harsh irony of the ad is that Elaine has just spent its duration giving the unwitting thumbs up/thumbs down to her own tomb. Macabre, or what?
  

 

In weighing up which of these conclusions has the greater thud of credibility, it's important to consider that, clearly, we're not supposed to like Elaine; as a character, she has "spoiled, obnoxious gold-digger" good as branded across her forehead. So presumably we're not being primed to anticipate an optimistic outcome for her. All the same, it would strike me as extremely odd if Volkswagen had seriously intended for us to sympathise with a prospective girlfriend killer. And, insufferable company though she may be, I can't see that Elaine has done anything quite so bad that it would have viewers baying for her blood. All of which would appear to indicate the middle path of the "Humane" surprise. But I suppose that begs the question as to whether we're actually supposed to like Vinnie either? Being the driver of the featured vehicle, he's the character with whom we would, ordinarily, feel encouraged to identify. Yet he does have rather a sinister presence, starting with the very beginning of the ad when he strolls into what is presumed to be the couple's apartment as a silhouetted figure, and with only his feet initially visible (compared to Elaine, who is first seen in full view, albeit from a reserved distance). Already there is an aura of mistrust about Vinnie, a subliminal hint that whatever he has in store for Elaine will probably not be agreeable, although its exact nature remains unclear to us. We might feel that, for much of the duration, we are in on the joke - unlike Elaine, know exactly what kind of vehicle she's praising - but Elaine's isolated reference to that most uncomfortable of questions - "Where are we going?" - is a troubling reminder that we are, ultimately, as in the dark as she. Adding to our discomfort is that the journey itself is not a particularly pleasant one, in a way that seems to reflect negatively on the state of their relationship (the overbearing infrastructure of the iron bridge is mirrored on the roof of the Polo like the bars of a cage, suggesting entrapment, they swerve past dumpsters and the blaring horn an imposing tanker, etc) but to which Elaine is entirely oblivious. This much is designed to show off the merits of the Polo, in shielding its occupants from the turbulence of the outside world, but it also conveys naivety on Elaine's part regarding the resentment bubbling away beneath the surface of the gentleman seated next to her. By contrast, their final stopping point is more open and picturesque, but it too has a sense of subliminal danger - it takes place against an orange sky, indicating a setting sun and, implicitly, the end to the couple's relationship and and the symbolic darkness that lurches not far off on the horizon. Whilst, intellectually, I still believe that "Humane" was indeed what the ad's creators were going for, on a gut level, everything about this ending has my amygdala squirming. The Sicko outcome is, perhaps unintentionally, suggested, and as the ad closes it still seems every bit as viable.

Of course, the real punchline of the ad lies not in Vinnie's vague assurances of the surprise still to come, but in the marketing slogan, "If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen" - the implication being that either Elaine or Vinnie's greatest fault has been in failing to measure up to that modest but dependable Polo, although it is not clear which if them this is condemning. Has Elaine failed in being an acceptable girlfriend to Vinnie, hence why he's dumping her but (possibly) keeping the car? Or has Elaine just enjoyed a perfectly smooth ride on a quality set of wheels, but with a dangerous companion who's potentially intending to do away with her at the end of their journey? Once again, either interpretation seems equally credible. But given that neither participant comes off as particularly desirable company (although I would sooner take my chances with Elaine than Vinnie), I'm inclined to see it as a condemnation of them both. One way or another, their relationship is doomed; just how desperately doomed is left queasily suspended for our own imaginations to have their way with, but it seems fair to say that they are a sorry reflection of the general messiness of human affairs, in contrast with the steadfast fluency of the vehicle in which they've been travelling this entire time. And perhaps, for the purposes of this ad, that's the only conclusion that matters - if your baggage is rotten, don't be faulting the carrier.

Pokémon Chronicles: A Family That Battles Together Stays Together! (aka The Reports Of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated)

Let's talk about one facet of the Pokémon anime that seldom gets much attention: the blink-and-you'll-miss-it spin-off series Pokémon Chronicles, which received its belated US debut in mid-2006, having already run in the UK and Canada the previous year. Chronicles was comprised predominantly of a series of specials, or "Side Stories", which initially aired as part of the Weekly Pokémon Broadcasting Station slot in Japan between December 2002 and September 2004, and were designed to give viewers an occasional reprieve from reruns. The attraction of "Side Stories" was in getting to see the kinds of adventures that took place wherever the series' regular protagonist Ash (aka Satoshi) was not, with the spotlight regularly shifting between members of the cast who had, up until now, been regulated to supporting duties. If you were one of those fans who was sore about Misty being booted from the series proper (Pokéshippers, mostly), then "Side Stories" gave you a bit of a peace offering. Maybe you were curious as to what Tracey's new life looked like after settling down in Pallet Town as Oak's assistant (if so, then you sad bastard) or what kind of nefarious schemes Butch and Cassidy got up to when they weren't antagonising their ostensible teammates Jessie and James (as it turned out, and for all of their posturing, they weren't really accomplishing very much more than Jessie and James). Jessie and James themselves were the focus of a couple of Side Stories, and we also had a small collection of mini-adventures following an ill-fated alliance between Meowth and the alley-dwelling Pokémon previously featured in the Pikachu short Pikachu & Pichu. The one constant is that Ash was never the star of the show, although his name came up frequently enough. When 4Kids collated the full run of "Side Stories" specials into Chronicles, they took the opportunity to throw in a few additional peripheral Pokémon stories they hadn't yet gotten round to dubbing, including a handful of seasonal Pikachu shorts and The Legend of Thunder! TV movie (here broken down into three separate installments). The result was an uneven grab bag of tangential Pokémon material - easy enough to ignore, but to do so would have been your loss entirely. (Well, maybe.)

Plus, how's this for a dubious honor -  Pokémon Chronicles was the very first thing I ever researched on Wikipedia, back when I'd randomly discovered the series in the summer of '05 and was frantically trying to dredge up some kind of context for the thing's existence. In those days, I had stopped watching the main anime some years prior and hadn't given the franchise much of a thought in the interim, but one afternoon I happened to blunder into a scene from "Putting The Air Back In Aerodactyl!" whilst channel surfing, and was intrigued by the unusual combination of characters: Gary Oak, Ash's former rival, and Tracey, Ash's former travelling companion, facing off against Butch and Cassidy, the Rocket duo whose major distinguishing feature was that they weren't Jessie and James. My bemused curiosity was enough to keep my fingers safely off the buttons on my remote, and lucky me, an entire Pokémon Chronicles marathon happened to playing on Toonami, enabling me to waste hours on this strangely compelling nonsense. Such is the desperation of an undergrad stuck at home during the tediously long summer recess, and the lengths to which they'll go to fill in three months' worth of empty space. As we've established, there wasn't exactly a great deal going on at the local multiplex that year to divert me.

I find Pokémon Chronicles a fascinating series, in concept, in part because the basic idea resembles a premise the production crew behind The Simpsons had been kicking around for some time, but which never got off the ground - the Tales From Springfield spin-off series, which would have offered a glimpse into the private lives of numerous Springfieldians, demonstrating that not everything in their universe need revolve around the Simpson family (think the "22 Short Films About Springfield" episode, except the stories would have run on a little longer). Like Chronicles, the focus would have shifted with each installment, so that different characters would get their turn in the protagonist seat every week. Given the scope of the series' supporting cast, it was a promising idea, albeit one that was never likely to happen while the main series was still in production. Still, Pokémon Chronicles largely demonstrates what I suspect Tales From Springfield might ultimately have borne out too, had it materialised - namely, that supporting players don't always thrive when subjected to the sweaty, gruelling conditions of the focal spotlight. Many shrivel up and perish then and there. A persistent bugbear of Chronicles is that the majority of featured characters just aren't strong enough to be capable of carrying their own 20-minute narratives. It's not that Ash was an amazingly rich or well-developed character either, but there was a compelling enough story to be had from his chosen occupation of travelling the various corners of the Pokémon globe and challenging Gym Leaders, especially since it mirrored the trajectory of the core series of games, making it easy enough for the viewer to project themselves into Ash's shoes. By comparison, most of the heads in the Chronicles roster weren't leading interesting enough existences that would justify their extended focus. The strongest installments, bar none, are the two starring Jessie and James, who weren't exactly strangers to the limelight at this stage. The Meowth adventures are certainly cute, and the stories centred on Misty are fair enough, I suppose. Tracey, who was frankly already pallid enough as a supporting character, absolutely doesn't benefit from being the centre of attention, but the dullest protagonist on offer would be Ritchie, who was, by design, an ersatz Ash with no particularly striking personality quirks or flaws of his own (unless you count his propensity for giving his Pokémon cheesy nicknames). It's worth noting that for a couple of the featured protagonists - Ritchie and Casey - Chronicles proved to be the final stop before oblivion; we haven't heard from either of them since (according to Bulbapedia). Which, given the developmental dead ends they appear at at here, is not surprising. One of the more appealing aspects of Chronicles, for me, was the generous amount of screen-time given to Butch and Cassidy, who had featured only sparingly in the main series, but were here upgraded to go-to antagonists - I can attribute my investment in that Chronicles marathon in no small way to their tendency to keep popping up all over it. Even so, and loathed though I am to admit it, they also don't have a whole lot going for them as characters outside of their vitriolic rivalry with Jessie and James - it's probably not a coincidence that their strongest turn is in "Training Daze", the only Chronicles episode to pit them against Jessie and James, proving that they're at their best when used as foils. You could say that, overall, I'd consider Chronicles to be more of an interesting series than I would a successful one. Nevertheless, it remains a guilty pleasure of mine.

Chronicles opened with its serialised version of Legend of Thunder, and was followed by one of the winter Pikachu specials, comprising the two mini-stories "Delibird's Dilemma" and "Snorlax Snowman". For now, I'm going to skip over those and go straight to the first of the actual Side Stories, "A Family That Battles Together Stays Together!" As a disclaimer, I should clarify that I don't intend to focus too extensively on the differences between the original Japanese and the English dub. If you're interested in that angle of Chronicles, then this site can help you out. For the most part, I'm going to attempt to swallow the 4Kids dubs on their own terms, although there are occasions where it will prove impossible not to comment on the disparities - particularly with this episode, in which we witnessed an ostensibly minor plot detail the dub had misrepresented some years ago hilariously come back with a vengeance to rip them a new one.

"A Family That Battles Together Stays Together!" was the only Chronicles episode centred on Brock (or Takeshi, as he's known in his native tongue), who was at this point still travelling with Ash and otherwise too close to the main action. This story takes place during a small window at the start of the Pokémon Advanced saga when he and Ash had temporarily parted ways so that Brock could pay a visit to his family in Pewter City. If you were following the anime from the beginning, then you'll recall how, as depicted in his introductory episode, "Showdown in Pewter City", Brock was once the Leader of the Pewter Gym, which specialises in Rock type Pokémon. Brock was unsatisfied with the Gym Leader's life, for he had aspirations of venturing into the world and schooling himself in becoming a Pokémon Breeder (this does not mean what you think it means), but was hindered by familial obligation; not only was he responsible for the Gym, but he was also the primary caregiver to his numerous younger siblings. His absent father, Flint, finally returned to him at the end of the episode, taking charge of the family and the Gym, and enabling Brock to pursue his own goals. In this story, Brock returns home to find that he might have made a grievous error of judgement in assuming that his father could handle his respective duties as patriarch and Gym Leader. Flint's life has been thrown into disarray by none other than Brock's mother, Lola, who has since rejoined the family, and desecrated the once-proud Pewter Gym by with her tasteless decorating style and by converting the Gym floor into a playground for her team of Water type Pokémon - which as any novice trainer could tell you, don't make the best of bedfellows for Rock types. Flint's reluctance to uphold the Gym's core Rock-loving values comes as a heavy blow to Brock. It's doubly distressing to Forrest, the oldest of Brock's siblings, who had ambitions of becoming the Pewter Gym Leader himself one day, but now can't wait to hit the road and blow this joint.

Back in 2005, I wasn't so well-versed in the differences between the original Japanese and the 4Kids dub of Pokémon (I knew about the "banned" episodes and, like everybody else, I'd enjoyed a giggle at 4Kids' attempts to pass onigiri off as "jelly donuts", but that was the extent of it). So when I read the synopsis for this episode, I remember thinking, "Huh? Didn't Brock's mother, like...die?" That is indeed what we were told in the English dub of "Showdown in Pewter City". In Flint's own self-deprecating words: "His good-for-nothing father left the family to become a Pokémon trainer and they never heard from him again. Brock's heart-broken mother tried her best to hold things together but sadly she passed away." Turns out, the dub had taken a few liberties with that second statement. In the original Japanese, Lola was as much a deadbeat as Flint - she up and abandoned her family when the going got rough. We can only speculate as to why 4Kids insisted on rewriting this particular portion of Brock's backstory, although presumably they found a scenario in which both parents had willfully neglected their children to be more distasteful than one where a parent left the picture through no fault of their own. They might also not have liked that Lola remains unaccounted for by the end of that episode, meaning that, while Flint ultimately returns and takes responsibility for his family, she gets off scot-free. They would have gotten away with it too, if the crew behind "Side Stories" hadn't decided that it might be fun to do an episode in which we finally got to meet Brock's mother, exposing 4Kids' filthy little lie to the western world. Now 4Kids found themselves painted into something of a corner; if they were to dub this episode, they had to accommodate the fact that it revolved prominently around a character they had already taken it upon themselves to kill off in their own continuity. And to be honest, if they were really that committed to said continuity, whoever designed Lola had given them a very obvious and easy way out - since she looks little like her children, who all take after Flint, it might have been entirely feasible to tweak the script, incorporating some dialogue establishing that Flint had remarried and Lola was Brock's new stepmother. 4Kids decided not to go that route, however; they allowed Lola to maintain her status as Brock's biological mother and handled their self-inflicted continuity error by not addressing it at all. Maybe they figured it was better not to keep on entangling themselves in a web of invention, lest it ended up backfiring again later on down the line (if so, then too bad they didn't apply that same mindset to the rest of Chronicles, where multiple characters claim to own Pokémon they don't actually have in the original continuity). Maybe it happened long enough ago that they no longer cared or even remembered what once had been said. To be totally fair to 4Kids, as gratuitous as their earlier fabrication was, and as brazen as it was for them to ignore the matter altogether, it's not as though continuity was the biggest priority for the Japanese original either, as we'll discover when we get to the "Training Daze" episode.

But since we've summoned the continuity police, the events of "Showdown" are recounted in this episode, and it seems like everyone has a hazy recollection as to what actually went on therein. They certainly didn't demonstrate that type advantage isn't the be-all end-all of battling prowess in the way that Brock is suggesting here:

Brock: Do you remember Ash? He's a friend of mine who once beat my Onix with his Pikachu, an Electric type Pokémon.

Flint: Wow, how'd he do that?

 

If you remember how the gym battle in "Showdown" went, Pikachu technically didn't beat Onix. Ash had "supercharged" Pikachu in advance by hooking him up to an old water turbine, rendering his electrical discharge insanely potent, but Onix nevertheless managed to maintain the edge. The gym's sprinklers were then inadvertently activated, weakening Onix, and Ash withdrew from the battle because he felt that this tipped things unfairly in his favour. Brock awarded him the gym badge anyway because he deemed the sportsmanship Ash had demonstrated to be as worthy as any victory (which is all well and good, but it did set an unfortunate precedent for the rest of Kanto, where Ash earned only three of his eight gym battles the conventional way). What's more is that Flint was heavily involved in the events of said episode - he had a direct hand in helping Ash to bulk up Pikachu's power - so his amnesia on the matter is a little eye-rolling.

The other thing that leaps out to me about "Family" is that there is potentially quite a misogynistic subtext to this story. I mean, it's not exactly subtle, is it? Brock spends the episode attempting to get his spineless father to man up and reclaim his gym from a female usurper who has refashioned the gym with a more overtly feminine motif. I get that the idea here is more about Brock once again having to compensate for the short-comings of both parents and their persistent failure to take responsibility for the family and its assets, even when they're fully present and on the scene, while also setting up Forrest to become Brock's successor; it is, nevertheless, unfortunate that the main conflict should come down to a dispute for dominance between the story's only significant female character and the three most prominent male figures in the family. With that in mind, the title 4Kids picked for their dub of the episode is honestly kind of bemusing, given that the outcome of this scenario doesn't exactly involve the family discovering strength in unity. The conflict is entirely internal, and any motion toward compromise is posited as expressly unacceptable - Brock and Forrest are appalled when, midway through the story, Flint and Lola announce plans to rebrand the Pewter Gym as a dual-type gym catering to both Rock and Water types. Brock isn't prepared to let those filthy Water mons befoul the sanctity of his all-Rock gym, so he challenges Lola to a battle to settle this once and for all. When his Onix manages to defeat Lola's Mantine, despite the type disadvantage, the only recourse for her Water Pokémon, in Brock's words, is to "pack their bags and find another lake." "Family" is not a story that celebrates change or diversity of any variety, just the preservation of the same old order, and that's a surprisingly straight-laced message to my ears. It has me questioning just how adequately things have been resolved when, shortly after being ordered to shut up and keep her watery inclinations out of the family business, Lola is seen cheerfully waving goodbye to Brock with all the others, apparently not in the least bit perturbed by an ending that requires her to completely toe the line. I guess it bothers me that the final outcome boils down to simply neutralising Lola and stripping her of all her jurisdiction, rather than finding some alternate use for her talents as a Water type trainer (thus affirming all Pokémon paths as valid and worthwhile). Again, this is an episode that seems hyperallergic to the very notion of compromise. Oh, but Brock restored Forrest's faith in Rock types, so I guess we're all good.

Brock's issue with Flint and Lola's proposed Rock/Water Gym is that Water Pokémon tend to prefer an aquatic-based battling field, whereas Rock Pokémon prefer a solid terrain on which to stand. Rock types do not, by nature, tend to be good swimmers, as we saw in the first act when Flint's Golem went up against Lola's Marill and required resuscitation. Brock has questions as to how the Rock half of the Pewter Gym could be expected to function, and this is a perfectly valid concern. I do, however, have three musings on the matter:

1. Pokémon with the dual Rock/Water typing do exist, and have done so since Generation I - at this point in the series, we already had Omastar, Kabutops, Corsola and Relicanth. Not the most common of dual typings, but still, it's not exactly accurate to claim that Rock and Water are inherently incompatible.
2. I don't suppose splitting or rotating the field would have been an option? I mean, we had seen flexible battling fields elsewhere in the Pokémon world, although I think mainly in leagues/championships. Maybe Pewter Gym just doesn't have the budget for that kind of thing.
   
3. There's an odd scene where Flint and Lola unveil their new, improved Rock/Water Gym signage, which we see being held up by Flint's Golem and Lola's Blastoise. The two Pokémon promptly collapse, which Brock points to as evidence of the doomed typing union, given that "they can't even hold up a sign together." The collapse itself occurs off-camera, making it unclear why it happened and what this specific mishap really has to do with one Pokémon being Water and the other being Rock. Flint insists that "They can learn", but naturally Brock isn't prepared to explore what that learning might look like. Really, why shouldn't Blastoise and Golem at least be capable of figuring out how to hold up a sign together? What exactly is the problem here?
   

If it sounds as though I'm coming down harshly on "Family", I should confess that, while I'm not exactly wild about everything is ultimately resolved, this is definitely one of the better installments of Chronicles on entertainment value alone. Because, let's face it, as conflicts in the Pokémon anime go, this is an especially inane one, and Brock's indignation at what his parents are doing to the Pewter Gym plays just fine when taken as a bit of over the top melodrama. Forrest likewise gets some hilariously overblown dialogue ("Look at Golem wobbling! It's like watching my future crumble before my eyes!" he hollers on observing his father's poor performance in his match against Lola), and Flint and Lola may be horrible parents, but they do make for very enjoyable characters (they're much more fun than Ritchie, any day). If there's a downside to all this japery, it's that the episode's efforts to introduce a note of seriousness in the third act inevitably ring hollow. Brock has a personal heart-to-heart with Forrest, who finally gets to talk about his own ambitions, his disillusionment in his parents, and the second thoughts he's been having about the path in life he had, up until now, been intent on pursuing. Forrest's dilemma hinges on his trepidation that, having watching his father's Pokémon suffer repeatedly at the hands of his mother's, it would perhaps be a mistake to focus his training career on Rock type Pokémon, feeling that they're invariably fated to lose to Waters. Naturally, if this is Forrest's attitude then he's setting himself up for a lifetime of perpetual dissatisfaction, because the whole idea with Pokémon is that every type is strong and weak to something. Rather than point out this simple fact of existence, Brock assures him that he'll show him the true power of a Rock type during his battle with Lola. Forrest's concerns feel as lightweight as anything else in this scenario, and yet I can't help but feel that there was potential for a little legitimate emotion between the two brothers, given the poignancy of their mutual backstory. Here we have two young people who've figured out early on that they can't depend on their parents and have been tasked with taking on responsibilities prematurely - firstly, in Brock's devotion to his family, and now in Forrest's sense of obligation toward his family's gym. Occasionally, you can see shades of that legitimacy puncturing through, such as when Forrest talks about how eager he now is to leave Pewter City and develop on his own terms. There was a much more serious family drama to be mined from this particular group of characters, I'm sure, but then serious drama was never really the Pokémon anime's forte.

"Family" is such a light and easily-digested affair from beginning to end that the darker spots in this family's history are by and large downplayed. If you came to this episode without first having seen "Showdown in Pewter City", then you might be spared a lot of unnecessary confusion regarding Lola's presence among the living, but would you have picked up that Brock and siblings had, in the past, been subject a period of all-out parental abandonment? Here, Brock isn't in the least bit surprised to find Lola at the Gym, and their dialogue would indicate that she's been around for at least two of his prior visits, whenever we're to assume they took place (I suppose he might have been able to squeeze in a couple of quick trips to Pewter City during that brief window where he was staying with Ash's mother). Flint and Lola's respective chunks of absence without leave are not explicitly acknowledged; there's a scene where Lola assures Flint that, despite her fickle track record for dabbling in various hobbies and passtimes that are swiftly abandoned, the one area where her interest has never wavered is with regards to him, and I have to wonder how their period of separation factors into that. At one point, Flint and Lola go off on an incredibly drawn-out tangent about how the spark of romantic attraction was first ignited between the two of them (as I understand it, this reminiscence is exclusive to the dub; in the Japanese original, they were discussing the future of the gym), and it's possibly just my own gutter-lurking imagination at work here, but I'm going to accuse 4Kids of implementing this change simply so that they could crowbar in as much highly suspect Pokémon-related innuendo as possible. The way you commanded Graveller, it gave me goosebumps indeed.

The other glaring 4Kids alteration on which I can't possibly avoid commenting involves the fate of the Pokémon team Brock has on hand when arriving at Pewter City. One of the main purposes of this episode was to provide a handy exit arc for most of said team so that he could begin Hoenn with a near-clean slate (much like Ash, who had ditched all of his Pokémon except Pikachu with the beginning of Advanced - it was one way of avoiding the mistake made during the interminable Johto era, which had the main characters bring across the same teams they'd been using in the previous series, only to then have to deal with the fact that they were, nearly all of them, redundant). Here, the dub retains the part where Brock suggests that Onix remain at the Pewter Gym with Forrest so that he begin training toward becoming its new Leader, but curiously omits a sequence where he also leaves his Geodude and Crobat in the care of Forrest. Why, I have no idea, since it creates yet another dub-exclusive plot-hole, when Brock shows up in Hoenn with only his Forretress. Was it excised due to simple time restrictions?

Another one-off special centred on Brock and his family aired in Japan in early 2011, where Forrest battles Nurse Joy's Latias and is officially recognised as the leader of the Pewter Gym, and we see that Lola's Marill has assumed a new niche as the family pet. We're still waiting for The Pokemon Company International's English-language dub of that one, although I personally am not holding my breath.

Finally, something else I should probably specify, lest anybody feels the need to point it out, is that I am aware that, in Takeshi Shudō's novelisation of the anime, it's implied that Flint might not actually be the biological father to most of Lola's children, and that she went through a whole succession of partners who kept knocking her up and running. I am not, for the life of me, prepared to accept Shudō's novel as canon, however. I mean, look at those children. Look at Flint. Life would just get too weird.

Lisa's Substitute (aka Actually The Range Was Far From Home)

If there's a single episode of The Simpsons to which I feel especially indebted for getting me hooked on the series, it's "Lisa's Substitute" of Season 2 (episode 7F19), which first aired April 25th 1991. This was the installment where I really had the inkling that, far from being just another disposable cartoon fad, this show was something genuinely quite special. As a result, it's an episode for which I'll always feel a tremendous amount of affection. (It also introduced me to the word "spirochaete", which has clearly stuck with me over the years, so in a way it has a lot to answer for.)

When I first watched it some time in the early 90s, it was only the sixth episode of The Simpsons I had ever seen - due to the series still being a Sky 1 exclusive in the UK at the time, my exposure to the show was largely restricted to the VHS tapes put out by Fox Video as part of their Simpsons collection (released in Europe and Australia, although strangely not the US). I managed to get a hold of "Lisa's Substitute", which was packaged alongside "The War of The Simpsons", and I remember being really taken back by that entire double bill, because both episodes were a great deal more emotionally weighty than I had come to expect from my (admittedly limited) impression of the show. In my mind, I still thought of it as a fashionably crude cartoon about this somewhat grotesque-looking family; that these bug-eyed, overbitten freaks might actually be able to convey something in the way of genuine human emotion - what's more, stoke up genuine emotion in me - was an outcome for which I was totally unprepared. "The War of The Simpsons" had me on the edge of my seat because it my first real glimpse into the "trouble in paradise" dimension to Homer and Marge's marriage (not having seen "Life on The Fast Lane" at this stage), and I was a little taken back by just how vulnerable the pivotal tie that held the family together suddenly seemed. By comparison, the central conflict of "Lisa's Substitute" is less apocalyptic - if the relationship between Homer and Lisa breaks down completely, it might result in some long-lasting psychological fall-out, but needn't spell the end of the unit as a whole - but the climactic sequence where Lisa finally loses it with her father and chews him out for his insensitivity feels somehow even more searing and bitterly explosive than Marge's comparable bursts of indignation all throughout "War". Firstly, I don't think there was any real precedent for seeing the predominantly quiet and unassuming Lisa get quite this enraged (unless we count her momentary blow-up with Marge in "Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment") - you can see how her anger toward Homer has been slowly building throughout the episode, but when that diffident top of hers finally blows, it's still alarming. Secondly, there's also the matter that, unlike Marge, who does have the option of walking away from Homer if she so wanted, Lisa remains fundamentally powerless to change her situation, a fact of which she's painfully aware. Hence, there's a greater air of desperation in her final tirade, which is less a threat to the status quo than a grudging concession to its supremacy. What drives Lisa to her breaking point is the realisation that her beloved Bergstrom was merely a character of the week, whereas she's stuck with her oaf of a father for all eternity, and her angry outburst is but a vocalisation of her helplessness in the face of that. She accuses Homer of being a baboon (in Homer's words, the stupidest, ugliest, smelliest ape* of them all), yet there's an irony in that Lisa seems to have assumed the more primitive approach in this scenario - finding herself backed into a corner, her only recourse is to spit and shriek uncontrollably. Even more startling than Lisa's full-blown fury is the way her usual articulateness seems to fade away as it consumes her, to the point that all she can effectively do is bleat the same insult over and over (a childish insult it is too, although it seems to strike a nerve with Homer, possibly because they are finally communicating at the same level). She warns Homer not to see her outburst as being based on emotion, but are we going to perceive it in any other way?

I noted in my review of "Marge Be Not Proud" that Homer's relationship with Lisa went largely unexplored in Season 1. There were no episodes centred specifically on them as a pairing, and moments where they had any kind of meaningful interaction were few and far between. There is a nice sequence in "Moaning Lisa" where Homer attempts to hear Lisa out on her childhood angst, and later in "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", when Lisa stands up for Homer against one of Patty's broadsides, but overall the state of their early relationship felt like it was best encapsulated in an exchange in "Bart The General", for which Lisa wasn't even present - Homer objects to Marge's attempts to weigh in on Bart's Nelson troubles with the rejoinder, "C'mon Marge, I don't bug you when you're helping Lisa." Homer, it seemed, had very little interest in Lisa at the beginning - possibly due to a traditionalist outlook that overseeing a daughter's personal and social development was more the mother's domain. As Lisa's character developed, it was established that she was a sensitive and precocious child who was starved for affinity in general, but her interest in all things creative and intellectual, in stark contrast with her father's more visceral pursuits, made it particularly difficult for she and Homer to connect on the same wavelength. "Lisa's Substitute" wasn't the first episode to pit Lisa's ideals against her father's - that honor goes to "Homer vs Lisa and the 8th Commandment" from earlier that same season - but it is the first to really attempt to get to the heart of their relationship, exploring Lisa's unexpressed resentment over Homer's lack of parental availability toward her, and the extent to which she and Homer, in spite of their blatant differences, will ultimately always find kinship in one another. Their touching father-daughter relationship demonstrates the core durability of the ties that bind the Simpson family perhaps more cogently than the repeatedly-tested union between Marge and Homer; clearly, the writers realised they had stumbled into a wealth of material here, because episodes centred on Lisa and Homer would become a regular feature of the series ahead, with Season 3's "Lisa's Pony" and "Lisa The Greek" continuing to build on the insights of this particular tale.

The plot of "Lisa's Substitute" involves Miss Hoover taking a leave of absence on the (as it turns out, erroneous) belief that she has Lyme disease, and being replaced by Mr Bergstrom, a substitute teacher with an unconventional but empathetic approach that Lisa immediately responds to. Bergstrom is like no other adult authority figure Lisa has ever encountered - he's warm-hearted and conscientious, always seems to know what he is talking about, and has an eye toward encouraging each of his young charges to embrace their individuality in lieu of forcing them through the same rote educational meat grinder. He picks up on the fact that Lisa is a girl with boundless potential, but that she doesn't receive a staggering amount of encouragement in her daily life, not least from the father who seems to have very little awareness of her talents. The episode title refers ostensibly to Bergstrom's status as a substitute for Miss Hoover, but more potently to his role as a substitute father figure to Lisa, in answering a need that Homer has left vacant. There are echoes of "Life on The Fast Lane", in that Lisa's infatuation with Bergstrom, and what it says about the derelict state of her relationship with Homer, is obvious to everyone around them - Bergstrom, Marge and Bart all very openly comment on it, and Homer's reaction to Bart's words on the matter suggest that he himself isn't completely oblivious, if reluctant to take charge of the issue. On that note, "Lisa's Substitute" also sees the origin of one of the show's quirkiest running gags - Homer's brain berating him as though it were a separate entity, indicating that not even someone as unrepentantly swinish as Homer is above a little self-disgust.

Bergstrom was voiced by guest actor Dustin Hoffman, although like a few of the show's earlier guests he did not wish to be credited, fearing that an association with this silly cartoon would reflect badly on the state of his present-day career (we weren't quite at the point yet where a guest appearance on The Simpsons was a sign that you were truly notable). Which certainly didn't discourage Hoffman from delivering one of the all-time greatest guest performances this series has ever seen. As with Karl, Homer's Harvey Fierstein-voiced assistant from "Simpson and Delilah", Bergstrom speaks with a passion, wisdom and benevolence that immediately marks him out as an outsider - he seems to have wandered in from a different universe altogether, possibly to impart a little enlightenment to the unfortunate denizens of this one, before the cosmos inevitably realigns itself and reasserts its predominantly cruel order. Like Karl, we sense that he's too pure and kindly a soul to take root in Springfield for particularly long, and from the start our gratification at the rapport Lisa forges with Bergstrom is tempered by the knowledge that, by the very nature of his profession, his place within Lisa's life can only be finite. The paradox with Bergstrom is that one of his main provinces, having set foot in Lisa's life, is to point her attentions to the wider world outside of Springfield, and to the possibility that she might some day find herself gravitating in its direction (not so long ago, in "Dancin' Homer", Lisa had flat-out stated that she never had any ideation of leaving Springfield, a statement that seemed to spring more from resignation than from loyalty to her home turf), only for that same outside world to eventually claim Bergstrom for its own. As Bergstrom himself so caustically puts it (in a manner that both undercuts the sentimentality of their final encounter, and makes it that much more harrowing), "That's the problem with being middle class...anyone who really cares will abandon you for those who need it more." It's essentially a more pointed variation on what Bleeding Gums Murphy had already informed her in "Moaning Lisa", upon airing her familial grievances via a midnight jam session: "You play pretty well for someone with no real problems." In both cases, Lisa learns that she is but a tiny component of a vast world overflowing with suffering, and in the scheme of things her own suffering matters no more than the next middle class suburbanite's. Bergstrom's words appear to damn her to a life of perpetual loneliness, which at first glance seems like the worst fate imaginable (earlier, we were reminded of the plight of Charlotte the spider, whom, as E.B. White took a disturbing amount of relish in assuring us, was completely alone when she died). Yet Bergstrom's parting message to Lisa is that she can ultimately survive on her own - the note he hands Lisa before exiting her life forever, which he insists contains everything she needs to know whenever she feels alone or unable to rely on anyone, offers only the stark reminder that, "You are Lisa Simpson."

I can remember watching "Lisa's Substitute" for the first time and feeling real suspense in between the moment when Bergstrom hands Lisa his note and when she opens it, wondering what he possibly could have written that might turn this distressing situation into something halfway redemptive. And I was not disappointed; as a child, I wasn't entirely certain what was meant by "You are Lisa Simpson" (I'm not sure if Lisa herself knows, either, for she does not reflect on or even mention the contents of his note again), but this was was the first occasion on which I felt that the series had conveyed something genuinely profound. Bergstrom's note is beguiling in its simplicity, in a way that hints at a greater potency while not entirely undercutting the bleakness of the scenario. Nowadays, I'm inclined to see a call to self-affirmation, in assuring Lisa that she has everything she needs right inside of her, and that she shouldn't have to depend on anybody, be it Bergstrom, Homer or anyone else, to confirm the worth of her many good qualities. In that regard, it is empowering. But the implication is also that, in the end, the only thing you can be certain of really having is yourself, which is at once liberating and depressing. Still, there is perhaps something even more damning than the threat of eternal solitude implicit in Bergstrom's note. After all, his exact words are "You are Lisa Simpson" - whether deliberately or not, he reinforces her alignment to that dysfunctional Simpsons clan, an awareness of which, as Lisa herself observed in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", was enough to destroy the once-successful Herb Powell.

Bergstrom's tenure in Springfield is a gift to which only Lisa (and Bergstrom's neighbour) are seemingly privy. The other children appear happy enough during his lessons, although they mindlessly mock his eccentricities and do not exhibit any visible feelings of loss when Hoover returns and Bergstrom is forced to move on. We are reminded that Springfield as a whole is a stifling venue that does not cherish curiosity or learning, with the news that its natural history museum has been earmarked for permanent closure due to lack of footfall. The shot of the T-Rex skeleton at said museum seems to subliminally reinforce the idea that the joint values embodied by Lisa and Bergstrom are threatened by a pending extinction. But the most valuable lesson Bergstrom has to teach, in Lisa's words, is that life is worth living; he invigorates her will to go on surviving, first in being a kindred spirit, and second in stipulating that, far from finding themselves at a dead-end, somewhere out there is a wealth of possible growth and broadened horizons that are theirs for the taking. The tragedy is that, as Bergstrom himself ventures forward to take advantage of those fresh possibilities, Lisa is unable to follow him, leaving her stranded in the aloof and stagnant Springfield, where she doomed to repeat the same cycle of fruitlessly scratching the walls for 30 seasons and counting.

Bergstrom is an awe-inspiring figure, and it's worth considering what Hoffman's casting specifically brings to the character. His Jewishness is highlighted repeatedly throughout the episode - Lisa comments on his "Semitic good looks" and later considers using Bergstrom's presumed pork avoidance as her starting point for an invitation to a dinner with the Simpsons that sadly never materialises. Before "Like Father Like Clown" of Season 3, in which Krusty identifies as Jewish and attempts to reconnect with his estranged Rabbi father, Bergstrom was the show's first really prominent glimpse into Jewish culture and here it is treated as part of the character's otherness (to the extent that he might arguably be categorised as the Magical Jew to Bleeding's Magical Negro and Karl's Magical Queer). Bergstrom's Jewishness, and his soft-spoken, unthreatening demeanour set him apart from the world to which Lisa has been predominantly exposed for her first eight years of life, in a way that is perhaps evocative of how the casting of Hoffman in the role of Benjamin Broddock in Mike Nichols' 1967 film The Graduate dramatically defied the conventional models of masculinity favoured by Hollywood at the time (Homer, by comparison, is hardly Steve McQueen, but he nevertheless advocates a more traditionalist view of masculinity when he mocks Bergstrom for his outward display of emotion). "Lisa's Substitute" is sharp enough to twist Hoffman's unwillingness to make his involvement explicit into one of the episode's great underlying gags, as the viewer is repeatedly taunted into speculating that it might indeed be him. The voice is instead credited to the joke name "Sam Etic", an obvious pun alluding to Bergstrom and Hoffman's aforementioned shared ethnicity ("Semitic"), and a sequence is included directly evoking Hoffman's role in The Graduate, when Edna Krabappel attempts to coax Bergstrom into a sexual liaison, with her leg arched suggestively a la Anne Bancroft (who would go on to provide her own memorable Simpsons guest performance later on down the line). To make the pastiche totally overt, Bergstrom even yields a modified version of Benjamin's most iconic line, "Ms Krabappel, you're trying to seduce me..."

The allusion makes for a subversive in-joke, one that manages to be both celebratory of and at the expense of its guest star. It also ties in with the episode's wider theme of parent-child disconnection and the yearning to get away from your roots, The Graduate being the story of a young man who (ostensibly, at least) rejects the values of his middle class parents and the perfectly plastic future they have laid out for him, by finally persuading his romantic interest to flee her own preordained future, in the form of an arranged marriage, and board the next bus to uncertainty with him. The ending to The Graduate (directly recreated in the Season 5 episode "Lady Bouvier's Lover") is an unsettling one, because it seems to superficially convey triumph while intuitively suggesting anything but - the young have taken on the middle-aged establishment and defied their elders, but the Greek chorus of Simon and Garfunkel implies a hollowness to that victory, one that effectively takes us right back to where we started, with the same mournful ode to The Sound of Silence. The overall sense is of inevitability; as H. Wayne Schuth puts it in his Twayne's Theatrical Arts Series study of Nichols, "they both still must live in the world." (p.59) So too must Lisa, having brushed up against that alternate reality in which she might have belonged with someone as gentle and learned as Bergstrom, eventually return to Earth and resume her place at the Simpsons' table. This is where the universe, in is infinite callousness, decreed to put her, and it is a connection she will never be able to transcend, no matter how far away she might eventually hope to flee. Her lot is a cruel entrapment, but in the final sequence we are shown the ways in which it might also be a tremendous blessing. Homer admits that he cannot fix the hurting Lisa feels over losing Bergstrom, but offers to repair her broken doll house (an obvious symbol of fractured domesticity), demonstrating that, whatever his failings, he is capable of providing his family with a fundamental degree of warmth and stability - an environment where, however much pain and anger is explosively aired, once the dust has settled, forgiveness and solidarity will ultimately prevail. That is the real perk of being a Simpson - it is a humble belonging, but a belonging nonetheless, and no matter how adrift and alone Lisa feels in the universe, she'll always have that one unshakable foundation on which to land.

"Lisa's Substitute" is also a story of romantic awakening, pre-puberty - unsurprisingly, given Lisa's age, her attraction to Bergstrom is of a wholly chaste and innocent nature, although her guilelessness is intermittently contrasted with the experiences of the adult women lurking upon the sidelines of the story, namely Miss Hoover and Edna Krabappel, neither of whom are strangers to the heartache of abandonment, in a way that underscores the endangerment of this innocence. Lisa is not oblivious to the turbulence that characterises a good percentage of relationships in the adult world - the episode opens with Miss Hoover walking into the classroom in fits of tears, and a sympathetic Lisa speculating that, "My god, she's been dumped again". Bergstrom is an appealing figure, in part, because he seems thoroughly uninterested in the sexual matters that have the rest of the adult set so stupefied, keeping him firmly entrenched in Lisa's own unsullied world - stealing a voyeuristic glimpse of Edna's attempt at propositioning Bergstrom, Lisa is visibly jealous of Edna's advances, and feels validated when Bergstrom rejects her invitation, insisting that, "It's the children I love." As is illustrated in the sequence between Edna and Bergstrom, the sexual drive is posited as a threat to the idealistic purity over which Lisa and Bergstrom are able to bond, a disturbing reality constantly seeking to disrupt the callow equilibrium - at the start of the episode we get a nod to the ugliness of the reproductive process in general, when Bart shows his classmates a horrifying home video revealing the traumatic means through which Snowball II entered the world (and raising a few questions in the process - for one, it implies that Snowball II's cannibalistic mother was also owned by the Simpsons at one point, and I don't recall there being a scrap of evidence anywhere else for that). Sex (now that I've got your attention, vote for Bart) constitutes adulthood at its most intrinsically corrupted, gratification-seeking and, in the end, self-destructive; Bergstrom sets himself apart in remaining focussed on his mission to encourage and educate the children, and refusing to be sidetracked by carnal desire. But perhaps this is finally mitigated in the way the episode ends, when Homer, having helped each of his children to reach some kind of resolution to their problems of the week, returns to the kitchen to find Marge still anxious as to whether or not he managed to patch things up with Lisa. Rather than bring her up to speed on the matter, Homer suggests that they go to straight to bed, because, "I'm on the biggest roll of my life." In some respects, this is a jarring ending, with its immediate shift from the sentimental to the sexual - Homer goes directly from dispensing warm reassurances to his children to fucking his wife right under their noses. If nothing else, it is a deliciously subversive Simpsons twist on our expectations for a happy ending in which the family demonstrate that they are a functional unit after all. Perhaps the intention is that we are finally shown a positive example of an adult relationship, the stability of Homer and Marge's marriage (the events of "War" notwithstanding) contrasting with the disarray that has befallen Krabappel and Hoover. But this privileges sex as the be all and end all, the grand answer within the scheme of all things, and the supreme driving force behind adult preoccupation. The juxtaposition of sex with loss concedes that it is a necessary indulgence, essential not just in replenishing new generations through further traumatic kitten births, but as a coping mechanism in navigating life's despairs (even if, as with alcohol, sex is often the cause of said despair).

"Lisa's Substitute" might be as perfectly crafted an episode as The Simpsons had made at this point, although it does have one tiny flaw, and we might as well address that right now. In the ending sequence, when Homer has his big emotional heart-to-heart with Lisa, he tells her that, "I'm lucky, because I never lost anyone special to me." Erm, are you quite sure about that, Homer? I mean, it hadn't escaped my attention that one of your own parents isn't around any more. At this point, the series was still extremely vague on the subject of Mona Simpson and what became of her - she was seen, briefly, in a flashback in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", but we still knew next to nothing about the woman (not least that her name was Mona), other than what was already self-explanatory...that she was Homer's mother, and there was presumably a good reason why her appearances should be restricted to flashbacks (indeed, it was precisely because the show had taken so little time to develop this particular blind spot in the family's backstory that, when the writers did finally take an interest, during Season 7, they realised they had sufficient wriggle room for establishing that she'd been alive all along). She had always very blatantly been around at some point, however. So it feels jarring that Homer's loss of Mona not only doesn't factor into the final discussion, but is actively undermined by it, and I suspect this likely came down to Mona still being such a non-entity as far as the production staff were concerned. You could argue of course that Homer isn't being entirely truthful - that he's purposely downplaying his own feelings so that he can make a nice and comforting speech for Lisa. The problem there being that when Homer says, "Everyone special to me is under this roof", Lisa groans, indicating that she doesn't buy it, prompting him to insist that, "No, it's true." In order for the emotional integrity of this scene to work, we clearly do need to believe that Homer is being 100% sincere on this point. Which he so blatantly can't be. Also, since we've brought up "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?"...shouldn't Herb Powell technically count as another special person whom Homer has lost? He hadn't known Herb for too long, but it's clear that he'd forged an emotional connection with the man, to the point that you are supposed to feel a sense of loss when Herb disowns him at the end of the episode. The idea presented here, that Homer has never experienced loss at all, is frankly a bit much to swallow, in a way that somewhat impedes the naked emotion of his final speech. You do have to love how he basically ends up going nowhere coherent with it, however: "You'll have lots of special people in your life, Lisa. There's probably some place where they all get together and the food is real good and guys like me are serving drinks." Say what now?

Is there anything else I'm overlooking? Oh yes, the episode also has a really great Bart subplot in which he runs against Martin Prince for the prestigious title of class president and, egged on by Homer, appears to gain a substantial edge in the race...until his tactic of discouraging his classmates from taking the election at all seriously reaps devastating consequences (in the end, only two students can actually be bothered to cast votes - Martin and Martin's wingman, Wendall; guess who they both voted for?). This being a Lisa story, and thus a more emotionally-centred one, a lighter subplot is somewhat necessary to add comic levity and appease those who tune into to The Simpsons primarily for the funnies. But it serves an additional purpose in providing a refuge for Homer throughout the episode, in the form of a truly ludicrous pursuit in which he can subsume his attentions, when he knows as well as anybody that there's a mounting conflict with Lisa he probably should be confronting. It also intersects very nicely with the A story at several moments, particularly in the final sequence when Homer, fresh out of enabling Lisa to see the light at the end of the tunnel, helps Bart to get over his loss by encouraging him to partake in a remedy of 100% pressed sour grapes. The subplot also yields one of the most gleefully barbed gags from the show's earliest years - when Martin declares that his priority, as class president, would be to create a science fiction library featuring an ABC of all the great names of the genre: Asimov, Bester, Clarke, etc. Wendall brings up Ray Bradbury, to which Martin dismissively responds, "I'm aware of his work". As a fan of Mr Bradbury, I'd say that he did not deserve that jab. But then I suppose you underestimate The Simpsons at your own peril.

* A baboon is actually a monkey, not an ape, but I wouldn't necessarily expect Homer to differentiate.