Bart The Genius (aka The Kid That Made Delinquency an Art)

"Bart The Genius" (7G02) is a Simpsons episode of immense personal significance for me. This is, in part, because it was one of the first Simpsons episodes I ever saw. That in itself isn't too outstanding - I was around when the series debuted; this would have been one of the first episodes seen by most people of my age. It was, after all, only the second installment in the show's protracted history, and its initial airing, on January 14th 1990, marked one of the first really earth-shattering pop cultural turnings of the decade. One 23-minute peek into Bart's academic angst and the world was never quite the same again. "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire" had already weathered the gargantuan challenge of introducing the series as its own standalone thing, proving that the characters could handle longer-form storytelling than sketch show interstitials or candy commercials, but arguably had an easier ride of it in debuting during the holiday season, when tolerance for animated drivel tends to be a lot higher. The question of whether this unassuming cartoon show could cut it as a weekly thing, and as appointment viewing for the adult crowd still hung in the balance. "Bart The Genius" had the task of getting viewers accustomed to that more regular Simpsons flavour - which included, among other things, the first usage of the show's now-iconic opening sequence (or rather, the prototypical version, where Bart steals a stop sign and Lisa makes it home first, but all of the really important beats are already nailed - the chalkboard gag, the couch gag, Marge nearly running Homer down). It could not have gone over more swimmingly. Viewers of all ages were endeared by the underachieving underdog and his penchant for anarchy, and a thousand trashy t shirt slogans were unleashed upon an unsuspecting market.

My own first viewing of "Bart The Genius" was through a VHS release, where it was paired with "The Call of The Simpsons" (remember that The Simpsons initially aired as a Sky exclusive in the UK, so those VHS tapes were the only way most of us were going to see the show). It was an experience that changed my life, both for better and for worse. From the start, I loved the world and its characters and knew that I had to delve deeper into the series' canon. But "Bart The Genius" also sticks out for being the Simpsons episode that left me with something of an indelible psychological scar. I was only six years old at the time, and there is a very specific moment in "Bart The Genius" that went some way in teaching me what a fucked up place the world intrinsically is. To this day, the episode holds a very special place in my heart. I have likewise never forgiven it.

"Bart The Genius" is of course the episode where Bart cheats in an IQ test by exchanging his paper for that of resident egghead Martin Prince. He is subsequently assessed as a misunderstood genius by educational psychologist Dr Pryor, and strings are pulled for him to be sent to a more appropriate schooling environment, the Enriched Learning Center for Gifted Children. On arrival, Bart is greeted by his new "learning coordinator", Ms Melon, who straight off the bat has some obvious features in common with his erstwhile teacher, Ms Krabappel. Both are voiced by Marcia Wallace and both have fruity pun monikers, only hers is a lot sweeter on the ears, so it's easy to form the impression that she's Krabappel's nicer counterpart from an all-round gentler universe. But oooooh, she soooooo isn't. Melon introduces Bart to a few of his classmates, including a girl by the name of Cecile Shapiro who's standing beside a couple of hamster cages. Bart, naively assuming that the hamsters are the class pets, asks for their names. Cecile gives a response that's already unpleasant enough in itself, but mostly went over my head as a small child: "Hamster number 1 has been infected with a staphylococci virus. Hamster number 2 is the control hamster." Then the ultimate bombshell. Bart is advised by Melon not to get too attached to the control hamster, since he's scheduled for dissection next week. I had no idea what that meant, so I turned to my dad and asked him to explain. He told me they were going to cut the hamster open and look at what was inside him. And just like that, a little something inside of me died then and there. Until then I'd had no idea that that was even a thing. The hamsters do escape and flee the premises at the end, and that helped to take the sting off, sure (writer Jon Vitti explicitly states on the DVD commentary that they couldn't have gotten away with the dissection remark if they didn't later show the hamsters escaping), but it was like Artax's last-minute resurrection in the coda to The Never-Ending Story. We'd already seen that horse sink into the bog. And I'd already heard Melon announce her intention to slice that hamster open. In both cases the damage was done.

Watching that scene more than three decades on, I still feel a lingering twang of young Scampy's pain. Granted, it probably hits me particularly hard because I am both a rodent lover and a hamster owner, but there is something about that line that strikes me as entirely willful in terms of how gratuitously unsettling it is. Clearly, we're not supposed to accord with the Enriched Learning Center as an institution, no matter how ostensibly attractive some of its philosophies, such as its lessened emphasis on punctuality (Bart is told by Pryor to show up at nine-ish) and its encouraging of students to shape their own learning. The kids who communicate in palindromes and backwards phonetics instantly emit warped mirror universe vibes, Melon gives the bombastic instruction that students "discover" their desks, and there's an evident mean-spirited disdain for popular culture in their implied assumption that people who read comic books are effectively illiterate. The hamster remark, though? Doesn't it just completely poison the atmosphere inside that place? I'm not sure that anything could have turned me more vehemently against the Enriched Learning Center. I didn't want to see Bart become a part of this school. Instead, I found myself hoping that Bart would bring the entire institution down by the end of the episode. As it happened, he came close enough in blowing up the science lab, covering its occupants with a revolting green slime and allowing the hamsters to run free. Mission accomplished! As far as I was concerned, this entire ordeal was all worth it, if Bart had managed to save a couple of rodents from the scalpel. Why they insisted on working in that horrible line in is, I suspect, to create greater disparity between Bart and his new environs in a way that paints Bart in a much more wholesome colour. Bart might not explicitly oppose the pending hamster dissection, but it clearly clashes with his first instinct to want to know the creatures by name and to bond with them. That those instincts should prove so out of place within the Enriched Learning Center sets up an ugly side to these young geniuses, in depicting them as being above sentiment. Give these kids a a hamster, and they don't see it as a pet to be cared for and enjoyed but as a resource to be mercilessly exploited. In the end their keenness and their thirst for knowledge comes off as basically cold.

The one saving grace about this school, however? The lunch boxes. One kid, an obvious chess enthusiast, has an Anatoly Karpov lunchbox. Another has one themed around Brideshead Revisited. I love how, right from the start, the series had an eye for such intelligent and miniscule details, and the tremendous amount of character they inject into the furthest corners of each scene. We're not given much of a chance to get to know any of Bart's new classmates as individuals (see below), but low-key details such as this give us a world of insight into who they each are.

It's fair to say that "Bart The Genius" is a less plot-driven installment than "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire". The premise of Bart being mistaken for a prodigy and whisked away to an educational setting for the precocious is a strong one, but one that actually isn't developed all that far, at least in terms of what happens within the school itself. In one scene, it looks as though the other students might be cottoning on to Bart's fish-out-of-water-ness, but nothing too significant comes of it - they dismiss him as "rather a mediocre genius", as opposed to a total fraud, and apparently decide to shun him (we hear that nobody will volunteer to be his lab partner). And despite incorporating a moment where Bart manages to blow up a chemistry lab, the school arc reaches a surprisingly quiet and civilised resolution, wherein Bart simply tires of the deception and openly confesses. I suspect that if this same premise had shown up any later down the line (even in Seasons 2 or 3), he might have been put through more of a dramatic noose-tightening before the beans were inevitably spilled. None of these observations are intended as a criticisms of "Bart The Genius"; the developments within the school are kept reined in by choice, because they clearly aren't where the emotional heft of the episode is intended to lie. The script has plenty of sharp observations to make about the education system and Bart's endless frustrations therewith, but this is fundamentally a story about how Bart relates to the rest of his family, particularly Homer. Its greatest interests lie in taking valuable time to explore the main cast, the way each Simpson reacts to Bart's newly-declared genius offering a telling snapshot of where their own characterisation would soon be headed. Small scenes centred on the family dynamics, such as the opening one with the Simpsons playing Scrabble (a tribute to Canadian apocalyptic comedy The Big Snit), might feel like remnants of the series' origins as a collection of shorter-form sketches, but they do so much to cement who they are and how it's going to matter for the succeeding twenty minutes. Homer is an ill-educated grouch, Marge is the family mediator, Lisa is precocious and, most importantly, Bart is an audacious rebel with real creativity when it comes to undermining the rules. Bart might not be a genius, but there is an appealing inventiveness in how he plays his made-up word "Kwyjibo". As would be explored in greater depth in the Season 2 opener "Bart Gets an F", the kid's got real talent. Sadly, it's just not the kind of talent that can be channelled into any kind of academic success.

Here are my two favourite takeaways from the Scrabble game:

1. The "Oxidize" joke is brilliant (a variation on the "CARROST" gag from The Big Snit) but even if Homer had recognised the word, he wouldn't actually have been able to play it. If you study the tiles on the Scrabble board, you'll see that he had no way of inserting it into what was already on there.
2. Having said that, there's also no way that Homer should have been able to play "Do" either. The layout of the Scrabble board changes between shots. An F disappears. The word "My" appears. Ah well, this must be a magic Scrabble board.
   

 

That Lisa remains the least vocal on the episode's pivotal development (after Maggie) might strike one as its most jarring facet from a modern perspective. It's hard to imagine a latter day version of this scenario where Bart is sent to a genius school and Lisa doesn't resent the shit out him. But you know, still waters run deep, and in Lisa's deceptively minimal role she gets to speak volumes. The middle Simpsons child remained something of a dark horse going into the series proper, and you can see how they were using that as a springboard for her hidden depths. Vitti's script is already laying the groundwork for Lisa being the unsung genius of her family (and to a lesser extent Maggie, who, in a wonderful sight gag, spells EMCSQU with her alphabet blocks at the start of the episode). It just doesn't place it front and centre, layering it amid the various episode subtleties for viewers to pick up on themselves. It's Lisa who plays the most advanced word during the family's otherwise vapid game of Scrabble (the girl did love her psychological parlance back in the day). She also knows that "nurturing" is the word Marge wants when she talks about encouraging Bart to grow (Marge compliments her "brainy brain", but immediately goes back to Bart). Most revealing of all, Lisa is the one character who isn't duped by Bart's test scores (Skinner too has his reservations, but brushes them aside when he learns that he can offload Bart onto another school). She knows her brother too well not to know that something is up. Bart, just as revealingly, doesn't put up any pretence in front of Lisa. When she taunts him at the breakfast table with her insistence that, "I don't care what that stupid test says, Bart, you're a dimwit", he does not refute her observation, instead retorting, "Maybe so, but from now on this dimwit is on easy street." Lisa makes no active effort to expose part as a fraud, in part because she's blatantly savvy enough to know that it isn't needed. She operates on an unspoken trust that the truth will eventually out itself, as indicated by her totally unfazed response to seeing Homer blow his top with Bart at the end: "I think Bart's stupid again." Where the episode is locked into a more prototypical version of her character is in her relationship with Bart feeling a little too fundamentally antagonistic. Her battle cry of "Yeah, Bart!" whenever Marge or Homer put him in his place was briefly carried over as her catchphrase from the Tracy Ullman days. Compare it to "Bart Gets an F", where Lisa's purpose was still to explicitly remind Bart of his failings, but from the perspective of wanting to steer him in the right direction. And yet Lisa isn't entirely at odds with Bart throughout the episode. When the family attend their first opera and Bart and Homer are inclined to riff their way through the utterly alien experience, Lisa ultimately succumbs to the same temptation and giggles along with them. On this occasion she can't help but see the funny side to Bart's subversive desire to rewrite the rules of the game.

The character who I do think comes off as really undefined at this point is Marge. She's a little all over the place in this episode. The most significant character development she gets is in interpreting Bart's alleged genius as a cue to start introducing the family as a whole to more highbrow cultural fare like opera and Scandinavian arthouse. During the Carmen sequence, she gets to be the solitary sensible Simpson with an ideal of how she'd like the family to be, and is inevitably mortified when they fail to conform to it. Homer would be cast in the exact same role in "There's No Disgrace Like Home", suggesting that the writers were still fairly open at this stage with regard to the family's internal dynamics, but this is an important first step for Marge, in establishing that she privately hungers for something outside of her bland domestic sphere. Elsewhere, I kind of get the impression that Vitti wrote her to be as much of an airhead as Homer, just from a sweeter-tempered angle. Take Marge's response on being summoned to Skinner's office on account of Bart's vandalism: "He's a good boy now and he's getting better, and sometimes even the best sheep stray from the flock and need to be hugged extra hard." It's a much nicer and more sensitive response than Homer's go-to angry outbursts, but as a solution feels every bit as vacuous. Marge, like every other adult in this episode, is applying her own preconceived narrative to Bart's behaviour and is failing as much as anyone to get to the root of why he's acting out the way he does. It's this tendency toward preconceived narratives that keep the adult characters from realising the truth staring them square in the face the whole time - that Bart is not a kid genius, just a kid with a particular adroitness for subversion and bluffing.

"Bart The Genius", much like "Bart Gets an F", deals with the cruelties of the school system and its eagerness to pigeonhole students into categories that stifle personal development more than encourage it. We get some insights into the horrors of being pegged as an underachiever in the first act. Edna Krapabbel, making her debut appearance, has already written Bart off as incorrigible and is astoundingly upfront in her acidity ("There are students in this class with a chance to do well. Will you kindly stop bothering them?"). We can see just how callous and unsupportive her remarks are, following a visually inspired nightmare sequence in which Bart makes a sincere attempt at working out a math problem before the process overwhelms him. And then when Pryor pigeonholes him into another category, that of the misunderstood genius, Bart soon grows just as weary with having to live with that designation. It drives a wedge between himself and his peers, leaving him friendless and alone; the prodigies won't accept him, and his old friends Milhouse, Richard and Lewis no longer want anything to do with him (for reasons that the script doesn't make overtly clear, but they're presumably angry at Bart for how he upped and abandoned them). The adults, meanwhile, prove frustratingly obtuse in picking up on Bart's fraudulence, something that should make it easier for Bart but in practice gives him nowhere to go; much like Edna K, they've already made up their minds about Bart, and their responses are every bit as unhelpful in weighing up his educational needs. When Bart can't make a simple experiment work, Pryor's immediate assumption is that the Enriched Learning Center isn't challenging this brightest of sparks enough. Eventually, Bart learns to play into Pryor's preconceived narrative, when he advocates his reinstatement to Springfield Elementary, on the understanding that he'll be conducting some kind of covert scientific enquiry into the psychology of the average child (like Jane Goodall and the chimps, as Pryor so condescendingly puts it). But he's only willing to play along so far. In the end, Bart decides that maintaining the ruse is more trouble than it's worth and just confesses, stating what should always have been patently obvious to Pryor, Melon and co. Still, for as woefully as Pryor misconstrued the situation as a whole, there is one matter on which he probably was always entirely correct, and that's that Bart's rap sheet of unruly behaviour represents his lashing out at a system that doesn't value him. For this much, Pryor has no solution, nor any enthusiasm for understanding Bart's discontent, and this is the bleakest thing about the episode's resolution. Bart must return to a normality in which he was already flat-out told that he had no future social status or financial success. When the narrative can't be spun into something as joyously positive as your disobedience being a symptom of latent genius, you're very much on your own. Bart's trajectory ends up upholding the one nugget of paradoxical wisdom he was able to bestow on his classmates at the Enriched Learning Center - you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

Somewhere at the back of Bart's sorry tale is the tale of a real young genius who's also ignored, at least by the narrative progression. "Bart The Genius" introduces us to Martin Prince, who good as disappears after the first act, but dominates every scene he's in (Russi Taylor was a legendary voice actress and is very much missed). He's another character who doesn't seem to be fully nailed down at this stage - obviously, he's the anti-Bart, but the script seems to vary on just how knowing he is in his anti-Bartness. He can't help being an insufferable goody two-shoes, compelled not only to report Bart's act of vandalism directly to Skinner but to comment on the carelessness of his vandalism in not using the preferred spelling of "Wiener" with the i before the e (though conceding that "Weiner" is an acceptable ethnic variant). To begin with, Martin doesn't come off as being motivated by spite; he simply can't bare to see such flagrant disrespect for the school grounds, and makes a sincere, if socially inept attempt to get Bart to see it that way. The next thing you know, he's reminding Krabappel that Bart is supposed to face the window during exams, lest he be tempted to copy his neighbour's paper, and there's such unmistakable joy in Taylor's delivery that you just know the little snot is doing it on purpose. Then later on, he's making rude faces at Bart from beneath the tree. Given that Martin is basically the victim of the story, I would guess the intention was to make him a little unsympathetic. But that's a loose end the script leaves hanging - we don't find out what the consequences were for Martin when he gets saddled with Bart's miserable score, and it's something that's always nagging at the corner of my mind whenever I watch the episode. His narrative is allowed to fade into the backdrop, a brief reappearance with his parents among the spectators of Carmen being the nearest thing he gets to closure. It's not clear if Martin was even vindicated in the end; Bart admits to cheating but doesn't explain how he accomplished this. Here, Martin doesn't get to be a whole lot more than a plot device and a further reflection of Springfield Elementary's endless hostility toward Bart. But what an enduring first impression.

There are probably a heap of different directions in which the scenario might have been further developed, but it would have overcomplicated what's ultimately a straightforward study of the love-hate relationship between Homer and Bart. Bart might be dejected and lonely as a perceived genius, but the one bright spot of the experience is that he and Homer suddenly find it a whole lot easier to relate to one another. Homer's ill-gotten pride at the prospect of having sired this pint-sized brainiac might be based on a lie, but what it effectively gives him is leeway for connecting with Bart on the basis of the talents he genuinely has, now that he's no longer an embarrassment who gets him summoned to Skinner's office on a weekly basis. We see ample evidence that Homer actually enjoys and identifies with Bart's penchant for mischief, so long as he isn't the butt of the joke (as was the case with the "Kwyjibo" incident). He might be incensed by Bart's vandalism (particularly when Skinner indicates that the Simpsons are financially liable for the damage), but he also accords with the observation, in Bart's graffiti, that Skinner is a "weiner". And Homer and Bart are on an equal wavelength in their inability to see the production of Carmen as anything other than a snooty ritual to be taken down. There's also a genuinely tender sequence where they play baseball after dark, having ducked out of an evening at the film festival, and the two engage in some very natural father-son banter. I guess it doesn't surprise me that Rabin would go after this sequence in his AV Club review, calling it "sweet if overly sentimental and incongruously sappy", but I'm inclined to defend it. From a story perspective, it establishes what's really at stake for Bart, since he was on the verge of coming clean with Homer before their bonding exercise caused him to reconsider; even with genius school having lost his lustre, he sincerely regrets the idea of disturbing his newfound connection with his father. I also think that a little emotional vulnerability was entirely warranted in order to give the story's very gleefully unsentimental resolution its sting. We've already witnessed how Homer and Bart are fully capable of seeing eye to eye, and having the ideal father-son bond, should the circumstances allow it. But in the end that all gets thrown out the window, as their respective worst traits each get the better of them. When Bart finally confesses the truth to Homer, he points out that the two of them have grown closer as a result of the lie, and on that basis it shouldn't be seen as a bad thing, but Homer doesn't fall for it. As he shouldn't. It's amazing just how quickly Bart's confession slips from a place of brutal honesty to barefaced manipulation.

We conclude, then, with the disturbing sight of a raving Homer chasing a butt-naked, literally off-colour Bart through the house. Bart's final victory comes in being smart enough to one-up his father, who changes tactics and plays his own emotional card when his quarry conceals himself in his bedroom, promising that if Bart comes out, he will comfort him and make him feel better. Bart points out that he isn't dumb enough to fall for that, and Homer collapses into a violent rage once again. The episode bows out with the two of them still at their ridiculous impasse; Homer slamming his body repeatedly against the bedroom door, and Bart committed to the dubious endeavour of having to stay in there forever. Equilibrium restored!

As a final note, a feature carried over from the Tracy Ullman shorts that would soon be discarded was the practice of inserting prominent framed pictures into the backdrop of each scene. Unlike in the Ullman shorts these pictures no longer appeared to possess a life and animation of their own, but they were still rather odd and dislocating in their way. Check out that Droste effect going on in the one in the Simpsons' kitchen. Doesn't it just speak to the infinitely monotonous entrapment in which the characters find themselves?

Reebok: Escape The Sofa (A Darker Chairy Tale)

At the dawn of the millennium, rival sportswear brands Nike and Reebok tapped into a compelling marketing hook, one that emphasised the value of physical fitness in a manner far exceeding the usual perks of looking cool and having a competitive edge. Regular work-outs, we were reminded, are a matter of meeting a primal survival need, the ability to run and stay ahead of anything on our trail being one of the most basic and effective anti-predator tactics at our disposal. Nobody today would seriously entertain the possibility of having to outrun a sabre-tooth cat on their way to the office, but there is still a plethora of horror to be projected onto the modern world if we care to see it. It was a train of thought that allowed for some creative and tongue-in-cheek campaigning, humorously extolling the benefits of exercise by playing around with the conventions of horror cinema. Nike had a particularly infamous and controversial spot designed to accompany the 2000 Sydney Olympics, in which a gym rat is pursued by a Jason Voorhees type, who quickly throws in the chainsaw when he realises he has no prospect of keeping up with her. (Their "Run. Because of What's Out There" print ad was of a similar vein, but I am unable to put a precise year to it). Reebok tried something all the more knowingly ludicrous in 2001 with "Escape The Sofa", a miniature horror about an aspiring sportsman looking to avoid being devoured by a tatty old couch. If you're thinking that a sofa is too prosaic an item to make for functional nightmare food, then you really should see this one in action. The ad was devised by Lowe Lintas & Partners and directed by Frank Budgen, who previously helmed the "Bet on Black" spot for Guinness. The prospective sofa chow is played by Ashley Artus, whom you might recognise as one of the Death Eaters from Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.

What most amuses me about Budgen's ad is how the set-up calls to mind Claude Jutra and Norman McLaren's classic 1957 short A Chairy Tale. That too was about the conflict between a man and an item of animate furniture - a man who wanted to sit and a chair that emphatically did not want to be sat upon. Here the struggle is flipped on its head, so that the sofa becomes the dominant force in the equation, with Artus having to pry himself away in order to assert his status as a man and not the sedentary object it desires him to be. It offers a clever inversion on what we might suppose to be the actual problem going on beneath the metaphor, in which the sofa presents too safe and comfortable a haven for the occupant to have much of a mind to get his keister off of it. The sofa is instead envisioned as a maniacal entity, one intent on smothering the energy and resistance out of whomever might sit on it. It might lack facial features, yet it is strangely convincing as a beast on the rampage. The spot's most unsettling image arises from a brief interlude between the grappling, when both parties find themselves locked in a momentary stand-off and we're left facing the sofa head-on. Here, the sofa doesn't do anything other than pant heavily (how? I'm pretty sure it doesn't have lungs!), a loosened cushion hanging from its base like a tongue protruding from its non-existent mouth, a sight so eerily unnatural that it might bring out a few honest-to-god goosebumps. At the time, I was also genuinely spooked by the sofa's evident ninja prowess, during that specific moment when Artus retrieves his branded sports bag from the kitchen and attempts to make a break for the door, only for the sofa to have somehow gotten there before him. 

For all the ad's potential to inspire epiplaphobic reactions in susceptible viewers, it never loses sight of the fact that it is a story of a man who takes a physical walloping from a predatory sofa. It keeps the tone light, with one foot always in the absurdness of the matter and the other in the uncanniness. The sofa fights by stripping Artus's jeans from his body and exposing his underpants, a tactic as brutal as it is comical. The sofa is, after all, degrading Artus, shooting down his aspirations of entering the outside world and honing his athletic mettle. In that regard, he is effectively fighting himself. The sofa is the only object in Artus's apartment that appears to be alive (excepting the house plants), yet it plays as a monstrous reflection of his broader implied lifestyle. Our first glimpse of Artus in his natural habitat shows him sprawled out in an inelegant slouching position; the unvacuumed floor and haphazard piles of magazines suggest that he is accustomed to leading quite a slovenly existence. At this point, he is harmony with the sofa; it is the desire to get up and become physically active that suddenly pits him against this manifestation of his own slobbishness, one that threatens to swallow him whole. Meanwhile, the dark, somewhat chintzy leaf-patterned wallpaper in the backdrop is a subliminal clue that this seemingly calm domestic space is actually a wilderness, one in which Artus will shortly discover that he is not the apex predator. There is another implicit irony to the arrangement; we will be watching the battle play out from the "comfort" of our own sofas, our attachment to which, the ad suggests, may be consuming us through less dramatic means.

Still, it's a well-known fact that the saddest moment in any monster movie is when the monster dies. Here, the sofa isn't actually destroyed, but it is thoroughly vanquished when the pursuit takes it out of Artus's apartment and down a flight of stairs. The sofa becomes caught in the doorway and, while it continues to struggle, is left largely immobilised. Artus takes the opportunity to slip out from under it, refasten his jeans and exit the building, headed for the gym with his Reebok bag and his dignity salvaged. I am left reflecting at this point as to I really wanted Artus to succeed in the end, or if my sympathies were really with the sofa all along. I'm gripped with an irrefutable twang of regret in seeing this formidable beasts reduced to such a state of helplessness and vulnerability. I wonder if perhaps its intentions were really misunderstood, if it was motivated less by the desire to engulf Artus than by simple separation anxiety. Maybe it feels an attachment to Artus, likes the feeling of his body pressed against its fabric, and is fearful that his implementing a fitness regime will spell the end of their partnership. But it does also get me thinking about the nature of their relationship beyond this single incident. Artus is, presumably, not escaping the sofa for good. He is going to have to come back to his apartment later that same evening, and the sofa will still be there. This possessed item of furniture chomping at his thighs on a nightly basis is something that he's going to have to live with. In which case, is this how we should expect things to play out on every occasion where he fancies a visit to the gym? Are we to assume that the more in shape Artus gets, the more mastery he'll have over the sofa? Or will they eventually reach a peaceful compromise, as the two participants of A Chairy Tale did, one where they each aspire to see things from the other's perspective by allowing the sofa to momentarily lie on Artus? It's a thought that warms the cockles of my heart.

Kronk's Bite of Banality (Disney's Most Inexplicable Sequel?)

It might not be fashionable to admit this, but there was a part of me that, for years, was privately hoping for Moana 2. When Zootopia 2 was first announced, along with Frozen 3 and 4, while the rest of the net was fuming about the woeful lack of originality on Disney's horizon, I was largely just annoyed that we Moana fans appeared to have been overlooked. There'd been a few ominous rumblings about a live action remake, but I'm not sure how many Disney fans, even the ones who watch live action remakes, were sincerely clamoring to see the film redone a measly seven years after the original's debut (stupidest idea ever). So long as we had any possibility of a good sequel, one that expanded on the original's world in a thoughtful and meaningful way and allowed us to spend a little more time with that wonderful cast of characters (including Tamatoa - obviously - but ONLY if Jemaine Clement would return to do the voice) I couldn't say I was totally adverse to the idea. So when Moana 2 was announced a couple of months back, I was genuinely buzzing with excitement. For about a micro-second. Before I read the fine print and realised that this was really just the upcoming Disney+ series edited and repackaged as a theatrical release. A Disney+ series that, by all indications, wasn't even planning to use the original voice actors. And then my heart just sank like a stone. Look, I will ultimately suspend my full judgement until I've actually seen the thing, but I don't think that's a good starting point for any canonical sequel, let alone one to an original as strong and beloved as Moana. (As for Tamatoa, I'm calling it now - he'll appear to some capacity, but it will be a non-speaking cameo that purposely forgoes the need to re-enlist Clement.)

Part of the reason why the basis for Moana 2 fills me with such trepidation is because I feel that we've been here before. Cast your mind back to 1994, when Disney released The Return of Jafar, a direct to video sequel to its 1992 smash hit Aladdin. It too had started life as a television project, specifically the pilot to the upcoming Saturday morning spin-off (Saturday morning spin-offs of hit movies being a staple of the age, and not just for Disney), until somebody had the bright idea to upgrade it and market it as the company's formal follow-up feature (sources vary on whose bright idea, and on whether producer Tad Stones championed this upgrade or opposed it). By its nature, it was not designed to stand toe-to-toe with the original, and it couldn't. The quality of its animation and music were just too significant a downgrade (on a more positive note, it was able to get a lot of the voice cast back, just not the one specific voice who'd been the original's big draw). And yet, it sold very, very well on video (I bought a copy, so I can't exactly complain), ushering in one of the most abominable, nothing-is-sacred eras in the company's history - the era of what has been unaffectionately termed the Disney "cheaquel".

I'll concede that The Return of Jafar is one of the more distinguished of the cheapquel gallery, in that its main raison d'etre, as a story, was to account for why Iago, the secondary antagonist of the original picture, should be part of Aladdin's crew in the series (which, as a quirk of this being marketed as a standalone project, launched months ahead of its upgraded pilot, creating a continuity snafu). It had ideas that were a little more ambitious and forward-thinking than the specimens it inspired, and who doesn't love a nice redemption arc? It's just unfortunate that, in exalting that smart-mouthed macaw, it ends up doing its titular character so incredibly dirty. Jafar is still voiced by Jonathan Freeman, so that much works in his favour. He also gets at least one genuinely great line (his response to Abis Mal questioning if genies can kill - "You'd be surprised what you can live through!" - is absolute gold). The trouble is he dies at the end. And that's kind of a drag, no? Jafar did incredibly well to survive the original Aladdin, given that most Disney foes of his era were sent hurtling to their doom, so for him to have that taken away from him by a film this cheaply constructed is, let's face it, a bit of an insult to such a great villain. The real deal-breaker, though, is that Jafar looks to be in a heck of a lot of pain when he dies. At least with most other Disney villains - Gaston, McLeach and even Sykes from Oliver & Company - it would have been over for them very quickly. Jafar really suffered on the way to death, and I gotta resent that.

The reason I'm digging up this particularly soiled patch of Disney history isn't merely because I see it as a worrying precedent for where Moana 2 might be headed, but because I find it helps to keeps things in perspective in terms of Disney's current situation. We all know that Wish is a current favourite chew toy of the internet (make no mistake, it wasn't great), and what a disastrous year 2023 was for Disney on the box office front, at a time when they were almost embarrassingly intent on getting the world to celebrate their centennial. But having lived through the cheapquel era, and some of the other hopelessly bad decisions the company made during the dawn of the 21st Century (the Circle 7 debacle, and Eisner's willingness to cut ties with Pixar springs to mind), I'm not inclined to freak out. These things come in cycles. There was a time, in the mid-00s, when I honestly didn't see a way back for Disney. The rise of 3D animation, and the shifting dynamics of the Hollywood animation industry, had knocked them too high and too violently from their pedestal. I believed the company would live on, but in a diminished form, with direct-to-video knock-offs of past glories as their bread and butter, while Pixar and DreamWorks only swelled into more formidable giants still. It didn't happen, but for a moment there it all seemed frighteningly plausible. If Disney can recover from an ebb as low and as brand-degrading as their cheaquel proliferation - the age of "yes, this is good enough to be marketed as an official sequel to a timeless classic that's stood on its own for generations" - they can recover from Wish, no problem. Heck, if they can recover from Chicken Little, they can recover from Wish, so stop your hand-wringing.

The question is, are we at a point now where we might even be able look back at the cheaquel invasion and laugh about the whole thing? I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but I'll admit that glancing over their last few years' worth of output and noting just how conceptually out of hand the practice was getting brings me just a little in the way of perverse amusement. Basically, everything from 2004 onward. There are some predictable titles in there (Mulan II, Tarzan II), some more questionable entries (Brother Bear 2, an alternate reality Lilo & Stitch follow-up that doesn't mesh with the continuity of the transparent Pokémon rip-off they did two years prior), some very sick jokes (Bambi II), some seriously weird shit (The Lion King 1½, Cinderella III: A Twist In Time), and some borderline inexplicable shit - namely, The Fox and The Hound 2 and the subject of today's entry, Kronk's New Groove. With The Fox and The Hound 2, I guess it will forever amuse me that Disney got round to sequelising a title from their mostly shunned 80s era but left Hercules on the shelf (it's odd that Hercules was the ONLY Renaissance picture not to be exploited in this way, other than The Rescuers Down Under, which was already a sequel, just not a cheapquel). And 2005's offering Kronk's New Groove, which is...well, what even is Kronk's New Groove? It's a puzzle. I have never quite made sense of it.

If nothing else, I think Kronk's New Groove is one of the more harmless DTV sequels. Understand that "harmless" is not a characteristic I would attribute to a great very many of them. I think a number of them are very actively harmful to the movies whose characters and legacies they flagrantly mishandle. The paradox with most Disney cheapquels is that they enter in with the pretence - nay, the delusion - of being wholly reverent to the original, when by their very nature they cannot help but be anything other than grotesquely irreverent. It's like trying to shoot a respectful follow-up to Citizen Kane called Citizen Kane II: The Rosebuddening on your iPhone in your back yard. It can't be done. The Lion King 1½ (2004) marked something of a turning point in that regard - a cheapquel with a smidgeon of self-awareness that its existence amounted to a tampering with the original's legacy, not a meaningful expansion on it, and for once seemed to wear that irreverence freely on its sleeve. It's as if somebody at Disneytoon Studios said, "If we have to keep making this direct-to-video junk, couldn't we at least try having some fun with it? You know, just as an experiment?" I don't look on The Lion King 1½ as a resoundingly successful experiment, but it pissed me off less than Simba's Pride and I'll give it marks for effort. Kronk's New Groove, likewise, is a lot more flippant about its existence than most other cheapquels. It has no pretensions to being a serious follow-up, although that has much to do with the fact that its predecessor had no pretensions to being a serious picture, period, and it needed to follow suit. Switching the focus to Kronk (Patrick Warburton), the villainous henchman from the original, was on paper a solid enough step in attempting to succeed something as gleefully rebellious as The Emperor's New Groove. It meant forgoing the obvious route suggested by the rules of the cheapquel formula - which is to say, a plot about a mature Kuzco parenting a disobedient child who desperately wants to be a llama. You just know that someone pitched that exact outline, however.

Instead, Kronk's New Groove follows Kronk's endeavours, post-Yzma, to land a wife and become a homeowner. If those strike you as awfully prosaic plot goals following a first installment where the lead character gets turned into a talking llama after a failed assassination attempt, you would be dead on. Kronk's New Groove plays less like The Kronk Movie then The Alternate Reality Kronk Sitcom - the narratives in which it places Kronk play conspicuously like the kinds of trite situation in which the protagonist of a nondescript sitcom is likely to find himself. I say "narratives", because there are actually three of them playing out in succession. Kronk's New Groove belongs to a particularly cynical subcategory of cheapquel known as the anthology cheapquel, in which a triad of individual 20-minute stories were strung together to create a single feature. Whenever you got one of those, it was usually a safe bet that you were looking at the upcycled remains of an abandoned television series. Atlantis: Milo's Return (2003) was one such Frankenstein creation, comprising three episodes of a TV spin-off that was canned when its predecessor nosedived at the box office. Before that, there was Belle's Magical World (1998), an unsightly glimpse into a Beauty & The Beast cartoon show that never made the grade. Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (2002) was hotly rumored to have been salvaged from yet another discarded television project, but I don't know if this was ever confirmed. (If so, then little mystery as to why it was discarded. Holy shit, was that thing dull. The most interesting thing that apparently happened after Cinderella married the prince was Jaq becoming human so that he could bone Cinderella - while she was still married to said prince, no less. Come to think of it, a scenario that steamy has no business playing out as tediously as it does.) So it follows that we would approach Kronk's New Grove with a similar level of suspicion. Was this also an abandoned TV project? Are we indeed watching a spin-off Kronk sitcom that might actually have been in another universe?

I have to admit I'd find that hard to fathom. I'm not sure how far into development a prospective Kronk sitcom could get before conventional wisdom kicks in that Kronk is, simply put, not a strong enough character to front his own series. Comic sidekicks in general don't tend to thrive in the limelight, which is why they were made the sidekicks to begin with. True, Timon and Pumbaa might be considered an exception - they had their own TV show long before they landed their own cheapquel - but they were also  a duo with an established Ren & Stimpy dynamic. They had one another to play off. Kronk was hilarious in The Emperor's New Groove, but he was hilarious primarily as a foil to Yzma - his slow wit and artless pride in his home cooking provided the perfect contrast to her extravagant fury. Remove Yzma from the equation (or at least, greatly diminish her presence) and Kronk as a whole suddenly becomes a lot less fun. As it happens, there's barely enough to be mined for a one-off feature; his stand-alone quirks run out of steam distressingly soon into this film's 72-minute running time. But if Kronk's New Groove isn't an upcycled television project, then it begs the question as to why on earth it should play like one. My take would be that there had already been enough anthology cheapquels by now for the format to have become a formula unto itself. And while it would probably be giving Kronk's New Groove a mite too much credit to suggest that it was consciously conceived as a send-up of a lost TV spin-off, there are at least sparse moments where the film seems attuned to its sitcom-esque triteness and positively revels in it. Bare in mind that the entire thing is building up to that very hoariest of sitcom scenarios - the predicament where one character has to pose as another's spouse in order to ward off some intruding relative. Anyone with a television set will have seen over a dozen variations on this particular storyline. Even a sitcom as intelligent and ground-breaking as The Simpsons couldn't get further than its ninth season without resorting to it. This is the enigma of Kronk - the way it hangs between a state of half-parody and half not being hip enough to get the meaning of its own jokes.

The intruding relative in question is Kronk's father, Papi (John Mahoney, who was also Frasier's dad and by extension Sideshow Bob's). He sends an urgent llama-gram (llamas, for their significance to the original tale, are worked in only arbitrarily here) to announce that he'll be paying a visit to see the new life his son has procured for himself - a life that, so Kronk's prior communication has led him to believe, includes a wife and a grand abode. Kronk was in fact jumping the gun when he told his dad he had either of those things, and spends the next two acts recounting to Matta (Patti Deutsch), the waitress from the first movie, how he came to acquire a house and then lose it, and how he met the love of his life only to royally alienate her. So far, so very like watching a clip show to a garden-variety series that never existed. What's truly devastating to Kronk is the thought of missing out on his opportunity to finally secure Papi's approval - growing up, Kronk was never able to impress him with any of his talents (his baking and his squirrel whispering) and has since craved the infinite validation of receiving a thumbs-up gesture from his dad. So when Papi shows up, Kronk resolves to bluff his way through the situation, as sitcom characters do, by convincing local villager Pacha (John Goodman) to dress in drag and act like they're married.

As strange as it might sound, Kronk's New Groove is the DTV entry that merits the most direct comparisons to the Echidna of all cheapquels, Return of Jafar. Tonally, the two would seem utterly non-comparable (Jafar took itself seriously as an adventure story, while Kronk does not take itself seriously on any level), but the premise is remarkably similar. The villainous sidekick of the original, having parted ways with the primary bad, is plopped in the protagonist chair (Kronk is simply more upfront about this move than Jafar), and tasked with reaffirming their commitment to the path of innocuousness when their ex-boss sneaks back into their lives and tries to lure them with another nefarious scheme. The main difference being that, with Kronk, that's only one third of the conflict. Some might argue that Kronk, unlike Iago, was never truly evil to begin with, but let's not split hairs - the man might be a lovable goofball, but he is an attempted murderer. He knowingly put poison (or what he assumed to be poison) into Kuzco's drink. And his "redemption" in the original film was, by design, entirely shallow. He had the occasional quibble about the morality of what he was doing (hence the interjections from the shoulder angel/shoulder demon), but his final reason for turning against Yzma was because she bad-mouthed his spinach puffs. From there, everything he did to help the heroes was basically by accident. With that in mind, I can't help but feel that the opening to Kronk's New Groove slightly misrepresents the events of the original. The first musical number, "True To Your Groove", tells us that Kronk lost his groove "when he fell in with a woman who wanted to take over the world" (Did she, though? I don't remember Yzma saying anything about global conquest in the original, she just wanted to usurp Kuzco as emperor). Kronk also claims, in the prologue, that he "helped save the emperor", and technically that's true, but definitely overstates his role in the predecessor's resolution. Kronk's New Groove opens with the premise of Kronk now being a universally beloved and accepted pillar of his community, and while I'm all for magnanimity, there is something about this set-up that's kind of disingenuous. At least Iago's crimes weren't totally disregarded, and not 100% pinned on Jafar.

Then suddenly Yzma returns (having largely, but not entirely reversed her feline-isation from the first movie) and like Jafar before her, she's the character done the most flagrant disservice by the cheapquel - although, also like Jafar, they did get her original voice, Eartha Kitt, to reprise the role, so it isn't a total wash. I am not sure which villain is ultimately treated worse. Yzma does slightly better than Jafar in that she doesn't die. (Maybe...the film ends with a brick joke where she's attacked, now in rabbit form, by a couple of newly-hatched condor chicks, but since we don't actually see them finish her and the situation is played wholly for laughs, I don't find it overly ominous.) Jafar, though, still had the basic dignity of getting to be the single greatest threat to Aladdin and co for the entirety of his cheapquel, even whilst making bad Psycho references. Yzma barely qualifies as a threat this time round. Her scheming peaks with a hackneyed plot to fleece a bunch of old folks with a fake youth tonic (working in a left-of-field bid for her to become emperor again, which the script openly acknowledges as utterly nonsensical), before she's removed from the action after only the first flashback. Again, there's a smidgeon of self-awareness in the distinctly glib fashion in which Kronk attempts to gloss over her thwarted intrusion ("Let's all reflect on these lessons on our way home tonight"), but it doesn't cover these sins any more aptly than would the glibness of an actual sitcom. Really, the most interesting thing we have to reflect on is how remarkably unsubtly the youth tonic plays as an allegory for heroin addiction, with the old folks selling all of their worldly possessions to fund their habit. I also want to make note of a joke where Yzma announces that she's come to Kronk with a proposition, only for Kronk to screw his face up in disgust before she specifies she means a business proposition (yep, that old chestnut). Based on the nature of their interactions, I'm not sure just how well the cheapquel cottons on to the subtle implication that Kronk, in the original, was basically Yzma's gigolo. You might recall that one of the animators in the documentary The Sweatbox explicitly introduced Kronk as "Yzma's boyfriend." Which honestly tracks with the sardonic way Kuzco describes him in the movie proper ("Every decade or so she gets a new one. This year's model is named Kronk.") and that intensely awkward dinner table conversation in which Kuzco probes Yzma about Kronk's age  ("He's what, in his late 20s?") To circle back to Wish for just a moment, you'll have heard by now that the original plan was for Magnifico and Amaya to be partners in crime, and mutually evil, as countless fan artists and YouTubers lament the loss of what could have been Disney's first villainous couple. I'd say that's only true in the sense that they'd have been Disney's first open villainous couple. Before them, there were at least two antagonistic pairings who could be easily interpreted as physically intimate behind the scenes. Yzma and Kronk are one. Prince John and Sir Hiss from Robin Hood are another.

Alas, we move on swiftly from Yzma, and to a story centred on Kronk's newfound calling (cemented at the end of the first film) as a Junior Chipmunks scout master, heading a troop that includes Pacha's two older children, Chaca (Michaela Jill Murphy) and Tipo (Eli Russell Linnetz). Here, he encounters the prospective new woman in his life, Ms Birdwell, who unfortunately happens to be the leader of the rival troop on course to beat them in the camp championships. You know how it is. First the bitter competitiveness, then the realisation of the bubbling erotic tension. By all rights, this should be the most tedious section of the movie - no Yzma, a trite conflict that's played mostly straight, and a standout candidate for the script's most insufferable joke (Chaca and Tipo debating whether the correct term is "spit and polish" or "snot and polish"). Yet it's propped up immeasurably by the casting of Tracy Ullman as Birdwell, doing a sweeter variation on her Emily Winthrop voice from the Simpsons episode "Bart's Dog Gets an F". It's a strong vocal performance, enabling Birdwell to sound appropriately sensitive in a scene where she helps one of her charges overcome their fear of the water, but officious enough that she'd initially rub Kronk the wrong way. Ullman is a very good match for Warburton, and while it's nowhere near as fun as the dynamic he had with Kitt in the first film, it works well for the purposes of this story. This episode also contains what has to be the film's most mind-bogglingly weird sequence, a protracted interlude where Kronk and Birdwell, having admitted their feelings for one another, are dad dancing to "Let's Groove" by Earth, Wind & Fire. As in, the actual song, not some cover version performed by the characters in-universe. And that's jarring as hell. Anachronistic humor is part and parcel to The Emperor's New Groove, I know, but there's something about having the characters jive to a real-world disco track (or post-disco, if you please) that completely disrupts the reality of their world. I will give it a pass (just) on the grounds that its presence is presumably non-diegetic (the characters are clearly reacting to it, but the sequence is largely a shorthand for their mutual euphoria, is it not?), but it's still bafflingly out of place. Also, it literally now occurred to me that they used this song (as opposed to "September") because it has "Groove" in the title. Anyway, the goodwill between Kronk and Birdwell predictably doesn't last, when Tipo sabotages Birdwell's troop's entry in the camp cheerleading contest, and Kronk admits to having previously encouraged the impressionable kid to resort to cheating. Alone again, naturally!

You might have noticed that the one character from the original I have yet to say anything about in relation to the cheapquel is Kuzco himself. He is in the spin-off, and is still voiced by David Spade, but has easily the biggest downgrade of all the main players, popping up only intermittently to provide a running commentary from some weird space outside of the story's reality. Here, he's every bit as self-obsessed and obnoxious as he was in the original, but his lack of direct involvement in the narrative action means that we get no functional sense of his development in the previous adventure being undone. Honestly, that's a pretty smart move that allows Kronk's New Groove to have its cake and eat it with regards to Kuzco. The problem is that his interjections become increasingly superfluous and annoying as they go. The most interesting, and telling, thing that Kuzco gets to do is to flash up a sample of preliminary concept art for the film's DVD cover, which seems a lot more honest about the nature of the feature than the cover we eventually got (see several paragraphs above). The final cover shifted emphasis away from Birdwell, Chaca and Tipo, putting all of the focus instead on the returning fan favourites. It's move that's downright deceptive, given how very little time we get with Kuzco and Yzma in this installment. Heck, Bucky the squirrel has less screen time here than he did in the original, and contributes nothing that's functional to the narrative progression, besides showing up to warn Kronk about the presence of a rival troop. One character who does get a hugely increased amount of screentime, besides Kronk, Chaca and Tipo, is Rudy, the elderly man defenestrated on Kuzco's orders at the start of the original. As a presence, he doesn't exactly benefit from the expansion, but this at least enabled his voice actor, Disney veteran John Fiedler, who died a few months before the film's release, to go out on a substantial enough closing note.

That's the other weird thing about Kronk's New Groove - the way it's caught between the slavish need to recreate the familiar beats of the original whilst feeling entirely disconnected from anything that actually happened within the original's world. It plays overwhelmingly like a calculated effort please the cult following Disney had surely noticed Kuzco and co acquiring in the five year gap between the two features (I assume that Kronk's New Groove was created off the back of that following; this was blatantly not a sequel rushed into production before there'd been a chance to gauge response to the original, which is presumably how Brother Bear 2 came to be). Switching focus to Kronk, the breakout character, was already a massive act of fan service in itself (though given the massively reduced roles of Spade, Kitt and Goodman, I haven't ruled out the possibility that Warburton simply had greater availability). For much of the time, the film is looking to very consciously evoke the experience of watching the original, right from the prologue, where a distraught Kronk promises to fill us in on how he came to be covered in cheese like a human pizza, just as Kuzco promised to account for how he came to be a llama (Kuzco, obviously, has the juicier story to tell). Fan favourite gags are recycled at every turning, a few of which work - I have to admit I chuckled at Yzma telling Kronk to pull the lever, reassuring him that "I worked out the bugs" - but most of which feel like superficial bids to replicate its predecessor's charm. It's of no surprise that the shoulder angel and shoulder demon should reappear wherever Kronk is on the verge of a moral dilemma - which in this movie happens regularly enough for the characters to rapidly wear out their welcome, but more fatally still, they're used in ways that suggest an intrinsic failure to understand their appeal the first time round. There, the joke was that the angel and the demon were both equally incompetent and had zero clue what they were each doing. Here, the angel consistently makes valid points and always has the upper hand over the demon (no fun). It's also noticeable how much more timely and unsubtle the appetite for popular culture references had gotten in the post-Shrek world. Consider that in the original Emperor's New Groove, the most explicit movie reference was a shout-out to the 1958 film The Fly (the fly screaming "Help me! Help me!" before being devoured by a spider). In Kronk, Rudy does a direct impersonation of Gollum as portrayed by Andy Serkis in the Lord of The Rings series, which immediately dates this feature to the mid-00s, when everyone and their grandma was doing impersonations of Gollum as portrayed by Serkis. Elsewhere, Kronk gets a couple of personal assistants called Marge and Nina, purely so he can spin a groan-worthy Andrew Lloyd Webber pun out of their names (which I won't spoil here, on the off chance you haven't figured it out).

It goes without saying that Kronk's New Groove is in no way a meaningful expansion on The Emperor's New Groove, but to be fair, it's not as though The Emperor's New Groove was the kind of picture that warranted meaningful expansion to begin with. It too was light and silly. The difference being that it was light and silly in ways that seemed daring and subversive - a full-on deadpan farce at a time when Disney was renowned mainly for its epic melodramas. It was lightning in a bottle, which was really nothing short of miraculous given the tortured conditions under which it was made. What Kronk represents is a commodification of all of that, the taming of this utterly spontaneous Disney world into something altogether safer and more familiar. What we get is a window into an alternate reality in which a once distinguished character becomes a vehicle for weekly outings with banal stakes and pat resolutions. Like the hackneyed comedies it's recalling, it's just about inoffensive enough to make for a pleasant(ish) time-killer. I doubt that the phantom Kronk sitcom it's inexplicably peddling would have racked up even 13 episodes before its inevitable cancellation, but it wouldn't have been completely intolerable if you had absolutely nothing else to do. What I find both intriguing and frustrating about Kronk's New Groove is how, every now and then, it does appear to be on the verge of doing something a little more knowing and playful with this omnipresent mundaneness. There is, notably, a point during Papi's third-act visit when the spiralling farce that obviously ensues swells to mind-boggling proportions, with everyone in town chiming in and attempting to pass themselves off as Mrs Kronk. Here, the cheapquel does, if only evanescently, feel like it's somewhat in on the joke, in making a winking concession to how overly familiar a jam this all is. Just as Kuzco manages to weasel his way into the climax (also posing as Mrs Kronk), so too does a trickle of the original's subversive spirit. Right before it culminates in an unconvincing moral reflection where Kronk, drenched in the physical manifestations of a lie blown up in his face, realises that the people he's helped and the friends he's made along the way are the real wife and house he was seeking all along, and enough to earn him the coveted thumbs-up from Papi.

And then he gets to marry Birdwell anyway, albeit as mainly an afterthought. She shows up at the end with Tipo, who's apparently managed to straighten things out with her off of screen. An epilogue plays out over the end credits, showing us what happens in the immediate aftermath for Kronk and Birdwell by way of a series of holiday snapshots. We see that they spend their honeymoon in France, where they visit the Eiffel Tower and...hold up guys, you do know the Eiffel Tower wasn't built until 1889, right? Unless the implication is that Kronk and Birdwell gained access to a time machine on their travels, then these anachronisms have officially gone too far.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #49: Bet on Black The Snail (Guinness)

The first thing I want to flag up about this entire concept is, doesn't beer kill snails? I'm pretty sure there's a technique used by gardeners that involves baiting and fatally intoxicating them with the stuff. The final image of this ad, which shows Black inside an overturned Guinness glass, filling his snail guts up with stout, is slightly ominous for that reason. The union of booze and mollusc is, nevertheless, one indispensable for the purposes of this ad. The snail is one with the Guinness, because the snail is the Guinness. The snail's name isn't given as Black within the ad itself (if we look closely at the board where all of the odds are written, however, we can pick out that his handler's name is Rey Rojo), and is discernable only from the title, but it tracks with the general theme. He's called Black because Guinness itself is black. And white, and it doesn't make sense. Much like the central scenario in this perky slice of germinal Y2K insanity.

"Bet on Black" was the third ad in Guinness's "Good Things Come To Those Who Wait" campaign, and the first to not be directed by Jonathon Glazer. Instead, this one was helmed by Frank Budgen, whose other advertising credits include "Tag" for Nike, "Escape The Sofa" for Reebok and the infamously traumatising "Cartoon Boy" for the NSPCC. After the all-out arthouse sombreness of "Surfer", "Bet on Black" represented a return to a more familiar formula for the brand - upbeat Latin soundtrack (in this case "Babarabatiri" by Beny More) and little indication that it was taking itself especially seriously. It might be considered more of a direct successor to "Swim Black", in that it also focussed on a local sporting event and the eccentric customs of small communities, although tonally the two scenarios still seem worlds apart. "Swim Black" told a charmingly down to earth story about an ageing professional swimmer competing in an annual race that, unbeknownst to him, is fixed in his favour. "Bet on Black", by contrast, is about as far as the "Good Things" campaign went in embracing the dynamics of a full-fledged cartoon. "Dream Club", Glazer's third contribution to the campaign, boasted some fairly baffling imagery involving anthropomorphic squirrels, but with more of a dream logic presentation. "Black" was as knowingly, unashamedly silly as "Good Things" was prepared to get, with the cunning twist that all the silliness follows on from what is an extensive and relatively grounded build-up. What I love about "Black" is that it effectively trolls you as to what the punchline is going to be twice over.

"Black" was shot in (and is, I presume, set in) Cuba, and much like "Swim Black" it opens with a pseudo documentary approach that provides us with a small flavour of the featured community, before dropping us into the heart of the narrative action. We see glimpses of people in their houses and out on the streets, lingering in anticipation, while others set up for the day's big event. That the ad is about snails is hidden from us until about 40 seconds in; it becomes apparent that these people are preparing to race some form of small animal (judging by the size of that track they're laying out, but what they actually have in those cigar boxes is at first a total mystery. The instant our first mollusc appears, the ad is effectively flipped on its head - all of this meticulous build-up for something as out there as snail racing? Well, we have already had our first glimpses of spectators swigging out of Guinness glasses before the snails show up - we know what's being advertised and should have been on our toes. The snail handlers align their respective racers upon the starting line, then everyone seems momentarily flummoxed when the pistol is inspired and the slimy critters yield very little in the way of kinetic action. They still seem to be treating this ridiculous situation as serious business, and the joke appears to be squarely on them. I mean, it's well-known that the garden snail is one of the slowest-moving creatures on Earth (of which Guinness should be all-too aware, given that they keep records on such things). The ad allows us to wallow, for 13 gut-wrenching seconds, in that dead, empty inertia, caught between our expectations of how the world works and the characters' evident assumption that snail-racing should be fast and riveting. It is naturally, a metaphor for the protracted length of time in which it takes a pint of Guinness to pour, where you may think that nothing much is happening, when something truly glorious is gearing up to transpire.

Suddenly, before you can wrap your head around the sheerness wrongness of what you're seeing, those little blighters are off. And boy, can they move. Now, the joke is on us, as we get to grips with the fact that this is an alternate universe that obeys a very different set of rules to our own, one in which snails might actually be some of the fastest creatures on Earth, and these folks know exactly what they are doing. This too is a metaphor for the exhilaration of Guinness consumption, and for the prudence of the Guinness consumer in being willing to endure that extended pour time. The point at which Black glides over the finishing line is where our stout-facilitated exaltation peaks, and where the ad gets particularly fearless in flaunting its absurdity - it has Black do a victory jig with his antenna, before he goes and gets truly plastered in his liquid counterpart, along with his adoring fanbase.

All very daft, but done with more panache than DreamWorks' Turbo, right?

The ad, in its original form, is 100 seconds long, although most advertising blocks naturally went with a 60 second version that moves more hastily through the initial phase of the story - the build-up to the race was shorter, and the inertia point, in which the snails momentarily refuse to budge, was reduced to a paltry six seconds. And you know, mores the pity. Any snips to these snails, and to their handlers, feels like a concession to the reality that folks generally don't have the time or patience to sit through anything with so ambitiously protracted a build-up.

They might, though, have the patience to sit through an actual snail race. This ad makes light of the concept, but it's a real thing. The World Championships are held in Congham every summer.

Swim Black (Marco Against The Pint)

Jonathan Glazer might have been responsible for an impressive percentage of the really memorable TV and cinema ads from the turn of the millennium, but it wouldn't be terribly controversial to suggest that the absolute cream of the crop was the trilogy of ads he directed for Guinness as part of their "Good Things Come To Those Who Wait" campaign. Some of them resonated with the public better than others - viewers awed by the bold metaphors of "Surfer" were simply baffled by the surrealist garnishings of "Dream Club" - but all are classics in their own right. Nothing ever quite scratched the same daringly inventive itch as Glazer's visions of the enigmas that lurked within those Guinness glasses.

Devised by Abbott Mead Vickers in 1998, the thinking behind the "Good Things" campaign was to take what was then perceived as the Irish stout's most crippling negative - the extended time required to pour a full pint - and to openly tout it as a virtue. "Swim Black" (or "Swimblack", if you prefer), the ad tasked with first selling the public on this audacious point, explicitly proclaims 119.5 seconds as the length of time the anxious patron looking to wet their whistle must endure. Hence, the ads made under the banner, while eclectic in subject matter, all emphasised the value of patience. Certain elements of the preceding campaign, Ogilvy and Mather's "Not Everything in Black and White Makes Sense", were retained - an appetite for the visually weird and a continuing respect for the uniquely bewildering power of the black and white image were both put to delectable use in "Surfer" and "Dream Club" - but "Swim Black" pulls in a different direction. This is by far the down to earth of Glazer's contributions - it has no stout-swigging squirrels or giggling horses, hinging instead upon a story that's very human and relatable, told with an irresistible wit, a rapid-fire energy and, to top it off, an ingenious twist that manages to be at once hilarious, poignant and triumphant. It is, above all, a tremendously fun piece of advertising. The moody indie tones of Arab Strap, which dominated the later "Black and White" ads, were here traded in for the feverish zest of  Pérez Prado's "Mambo No. 5" (which would penetrate public consciousness even further the following year, when it became the basis for a hit dance track by German singer Lou Bega). This was something of a legacy move on the brand's part, another of Prado's tracks, "Guaglione", having featured in an earlier Guinness ad, "Anticipation" (I haven't covered that one, but the Dancing Man scared the wits out of me as a child, so I'd say it's only a matter of time).

"Swim Black" remains one of the most fondly-remembered installments of the "Good Things" campaign, seriously competing only with "Surfer" for that honor - it seems a lot of people could identify with the plight of ageing professional swimmer Marco, and his yearly battle to keep his (already somewhat mythologised) legacy as an Olympic hero alive. Given that "Black and White" was deliberately conceived as an attempt to make the brand more appealing to younger consumers, "Swim Black" must have seemed like a flight in the face of all that, in centring upon an older man and his fear that the best years of his life will soon be behind him. Marco's Olympic career peaked with him coming in fourth place (meaning that he'd have garnered no medals for his efforts), but he received a champion's welcome on returning to his Italian home town (anonymous, but the ad was shot in Monopoli), and has remained the toast of the community ever since. It's clear that the real crowning glory of Marco's existence lies not in his historic Olympic participation, but in the extended epilogue that's played out among his people on an annual basis. "Swim Black" is narrated by Marco's brother, who goes unnamed, using a pseudo-documentary approach in which his Italian is translated into English by an overlaying voice over. He tells of the beautifully symbiotic relationship that he and Marco have forged - he's opened up a successful bar off the back of his brother's celebrity and, every year, allows Marco to exhibit his aquatic prowess by hosting a popular event in which Marco is tasked with clearing the town bay in faster time than it takes to pour out a pint of Guinness. His brother is responsible for giving the signal for when to start the clock, once Marco has passed on offshore buoy, and year after year Marco just clinches victory over the pint, much to the delight of the mass of spectators who always turn out to see the event.

"Swim Black" anticipates a few of the basic components of "Surfer". Both are stories of men battling the elements to demonstrate their mettle - in both ads, water, although in Marco's case the element is really  the Guinness itself and, by extension, time. "Swim Black" finds a clever means of incorporating the product's infamously long pour time directly into its narrative action, allowing that trademark "Guinness Time" to become the all-important deciding space in which its protagonist's legacy lives or dies. It's also a far more narrative-driven piece than "Surfer", which put more emphasis on its visual poetry and on capturing both the raw intensity of the moment in which our titular surfer sets out to master those horse-shaped waves, and of the urges that propel him into such a formidable arena. In "Swim Black", Marco receives more biographical build-up, and we get a strong flavour of not only who he is, but also his brother and the community as a whole. The intimate angles and punchy edits keep us immersed in the action, giving us a front row of not only what Marco is grappling against, but the enthusiasm he brings out in his audience. There, is evidently, a whole lot riding on Marco's yearly performance - it's not just his own legacy he's fighting to preserve, but also his brother's business and the town's broader sense of identity. Mixed in with the annual jubilation is Marco's trepidation about where all of this might be headed and how, by recreating the same victorious moment over and over, he is in effect setting himself up for inevitable defeat. His body cannot outrun the clock forever; Marco is feeling his age and has confided in his brother that he suspects the year may soon be coming in which the pint will have the last laugh.

Marco's fears look to be unfounded, however, as his brother assures him that he will NEVER lose. This takes us to our big twist, where we cut back to the start of the race to reveal that the brother is (presumably unbeknownst to Marco) giving him an increasingly generous head start every year. Judging by the gap already between Marco and that buoy, we can infer that if the race were being timed correctly, then Marco would have lost some years ago. That, though, is not what anybody wants to see, which is why it will not be allowed to happen. In actuality, the annual event is not a test of Marco's enduring physical prowess, but a testament to the town's willingness to remain insulated in that same wonderful moment, even if it has by all rights long passed.

There's a thread of melancholy nestled somewhere amid the ad's fearless vigor - the acknowledgement that we all grow old, and that change is inevitable - but it's all ultimately subverted. What's important about this twist is that, while it technically does come at Marco's expense, it's presented less as a cheat than as a cunning way of adapting to change and of circumventing the unwelcome disruption to the town's annual festivities. Marco's successful arrival at the bar before the pint has finished pouring, by whatever means, represents a victory over time, and his brother is merely doing his bit to make that ongoing victory possible. One suspects that the entire town, and not just the narrator, may be in on the ruse. At the very least, they're not concerned if the outcome is genuine. For them, it's just about inhabiting a moment so joyful that you can't blame them for wanting it to last as long as it can.

There were at least two different versions of this ad - the full 90 second version and a 60 second edit that omitted some of the biographical information about Marco (including the detail that he came fourth in his historic Olympic race), focusing instead on the town's present-day tradition. Also removed was the moral supplied by the narrator: "It takes 119.5 seconds to pour the perfect pint...but the best time is kept when you don't wind your watch too tightly." A seemingly contradictory statement advising that we will better make the most of our time wherever we don't get too hung up on its passing (hence, you shouldn't be too concerned about how long it will take for your pint of stout to pour). The ad itself is certainly a glittering example of ageing gracefully - amazing to think that it's already exceeded a quarter-century and time has put not a chink in it. It still feels as fresh and invigorating today as it did back in 1998. Some moments really do deserve to stay perfectly preserved forever.