Intersections (Don't Worry, Be Happy)

What makes comparing road safety shorts the world over particularly fascinating are the cultural discrepancies that will occasionally arise. Take the issue of intersection safety, which is not a subject I've seen brought up too often in campaigns from the UK or Australia, but has an entire subgenre dedicated to it in New Zealand. I don't know what it is about New Zealand that would necessarily make their intersections any more dangerous than anyone else's, but LTSA and their successors certainly cranked out an awful lot of classic televisual trauma from the premise. Among them was this cheeky compilation, circa mid-00s, which was really an exercise in just how deliriously you can abuse the gentle warmth of Bobby McFerrin by matching it with the most flagrantly incongruous material imaginable. McFerrin's 1988 hit "Don't Worry, Be Happy" plays over clips of motorists attempting to navigate various intersections in Wellington and beyond, which starts out relatively serenely, but it isn't long before McFerrin is having to compete with a cacophony of horns honking, tyres skidding and metal crunching (along with, presumably, a few bones). I find that I'm deeply worried for quite a number of the persons involved, particularly the pedestrian and the motorcyclist who had the misfortune of getting caught up in the insanity. The results are expectedly horrific, but the presence of the McFerrin track gives the mayhem an unusually comic edge; we would expect road safety ads to be miniature horror shows, gravely undermining as the razor-thin line between the mundane and the catastrophic, but this one seems to be positively revelling in the absurdity of these stupid humans and the avoidable chaos they insist on creating.

What I can't quite figure out is whether the ad should be seen as pro or anti "Don't Worry, Be Happy". Is the song's stoic philosophy being viciously sent up by the accompanying carnage, or can it be interpreted as being somehow in on the joke? Whose narrative voice is is the track intended to represent? A good starting point might be to compare it to the Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives PIF "In The Summertime", which was very conspicuously anti the titular Mungo Jerry ditty. The song was part of the trap, both for the subjects and the viewers, the anthem for the hedonistic appetites that brought about the former's ruin, and the duplicitous host that greeted the latter before abruptly pulling the rug out from under them at the end. "Summertime" was designed to trick the viewers into thinking they were watching a more benevolent ad, with the upbeat familiarity of the track lulling us into a false sense of security, and then becoming part of the mockery once its true intentions were exposed. The words "Go out and see what you can find", heralding the haunting final shot, are put into a much darker context than the song itself originally implied, and yet an explicit endorsement of drink driving was already right there in lyrics - the outcome of the PIF is presented as the logical extension of what was already lurking within the song's lotus-eating soul. "Don't Worry", by contrast, doesn't use McFerrin to deceive the viewer, since the nature of the ad is established early on. The initial incidents are fairly minor, with build-up to the nastier accidents, but the sense of unease is instilled almost instantly. The effect of the song is double-edged, adding an obvious sense of humor to the proceedings, but also exacerbating our discomfort by emphasising the wrongness of what we're seeing.

A possible clue might lurk in the campaign tagline, "Take Another Look At Intersections", which serves as both at literal command, urging drivers to look more thoroughly before pulling out into the path of an incoming vehicle, but also asks us to reconsider our perception of intersections in a broader sense, as dangerous venues where all manner of chaos could potentially go down. With that in mind, it seems logical to interpret the song as illustrating the disconnect between the nonchalant assumptions of the drivers, who do not worry about the risks at intersections, and the stark reality, in which hardly anyone is finding much in the way of happiness. The song becomes the anthem of those who do not live in the real world, an outlook doomed to sooner or later bring them crashing down messily to earth. But that almost seems a bit too easy to me. By my preferred reading, McFerrin's song is being posited as a hopeful (if sardonic) ode to the alternative, the ideal that nobody can possibly obtain because everyone is in such a terminal frenzy. The problem isn't a lack of worry, but the perpetual sense of hurry and urgency that has everyone zipping in all directions, to the point where they don't have the patience to wait a few lousy seconds for their fellow motorists to pass. The song still represents the breezy ideal clashing with the grim reality, but it now becomes the moral locus. If we took life at a more relaxed pace, as McFerrin suggests, we might avoid bumping into one another and taking a further toll on our blood pressure (or worse).

As per the campaign blurb on the old LTSA website that I dug out using the Wayback Machine, failure to give way was, at the time, the third largest cause of death and injury on New Zealand's roads, but it's noteworthy that the issue is cited as being a relatively new one for LTSA's advertising. I also note that New Zealand's current road safety authority, NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA), doesn't cover the issue in any of its contemporary campaigns. Does that mean that the problem was at its peak in the 2000s? If so, I wonder what the story was there?

Lightyear (aka Sad, Strange Little Man)

In mid-2022, former Simpsons showrunner Mike Reiss tweeted something that really stuck with me. It was in reference to DreamWorks' Animation's latest, The Bad Guys, and how reminiscent it was of one of "those fun movies" that Pixar used to do before they started trying to "teach us the meaning of life" all the time. I still think he was only partially right. Whatever its merits, I wouldn't say that anything about The Bad Guys particularly recalls Pixar's early works (The Bad Guys is a full-on farce, more comparable to, say, The Emperor's New Groove than anything in Pixar's canon). Furthermore, at the time he made that tweet Pixar's most recent feature was Turning Red, and I'd wondered if it really deserved that knock. Or Luca before it for that matter. Both were charming, achingly personal coming of age stories with light fantasy twists and simple, unassuming messages about embracing your inner self (and resisting generational trauma, which is the prevailing concern in contemporary animation). Not necessarily everyone's cup of tea, but definitely not the kind of material that obviously warranted the specific snarky charge that Reiss had levelled against them. I was, for a time, inclined to dismiss it as a variation on those mindless remarks made by fellow Simpsons alumni Mike Scully in the 2000 documentary Wallace & Gromit Go Chicken about how animation was inherently better suited to comedy than to drama, just phrased in a more amusing way. Then Lightyear hit, and Reiss's words suddenly gained a wad of retroactive credence. If ever there was a Pixar feature that had busted had its body under the weight of wanting to say something grand and important, it was the Toy Story spin-off purporting to be the origin story of everyone's favourite upstart space toy. Lightyear is the very definition of a film that desperately wants to teach us the meaning of life when it should have been having fun. And yet here's the really goofy thing about it - I can safely say that I've had more fun with Lightyear than I have any other Pixar film from the 2020s. I do not intend that as an insult. With the exception of Onward, I've enjoyed just about every Pixar feature this decade has yielded thus far. It's just that Lightyear is the one I've found myself reaching for time and time again. Objectively, I don't think it's a good film, but I am fascinated by it nevertheless. I feel the insatiable urge to keep revisiting it, to pick over its every baffling and misguided decision, to marvel that a film so mind-bogglingly misconceived ever came to being.

Lightyear is one of those movies that exists purely to be made fun of. Although let me be clear about this one thing - hate watching is not an idea we promote on this blog. My mockery comes squarely from a place of affection. For as ridiculous as Lightyear is, and as feverishly reluctant as I am to accept this as an authentic part of Toy Story canon, it is a movie that's won my heart. It's wretchedly dorky mess, and I guess I relate to that on some level.

What Lightyear is not is a movie about the plucky action figure voiced by Tim Allen. This is a movie about the "real" Buzz Lightyear, the intrepid space explorer that toy Buzz was initially deluded into thinking was himself, voiced here by Chris Evans. This is where it lost an awful lot of people, who couldn't get their heads around the idea that there was this other version of the character, leading an entirely separate existence to the toy Buzz. Many of them heard the term "origin story" and were even more lost ("He was made in Taiwan! What more is there to say about the origins of a toy?"). The trailers did an amazingly bad job of communicating it, but this is allegedly the film within the Toy Story universe that prompted Buzz action figures to be manufactured in the first place. Allegedly. 

Released in June 2022, Lightyear was intended to be Pixar's triumphant return to the big screen, after the Covid pandemic had prompted Disney to dump a couple of years' worth of the studio's slate directly onto Disney+, even during periods when cinemas were fully operational. Lightyear should have been a safe bet, given the strength of the Toy Story brand, but it raked in surprisingly weak box office numbers, amassing a worldwide total of £226 million - a steep drop from the billion plus grosses the more recent Toy Story installments had enjoyed. There was a lot of talk in the aftermath about what was to blame, with certain outlets being all-too eager to attribute the film's failure to the presence of a brief lesbian kiss, but I doubt that was the biggest factor here. As I see it, the problems Lightyear had to contend with were threefold. First, there was general debasement of the Pixar brand caused by the aforementioned decision to send Soul, Luca and Turning Red directly to streaming, and not even as those Premier Access titles you had to pay extra for (I'm of the opinion that Disney used the pandemic as an excuse to prioritise their streaming service, and they did their pals at Pixar particularly dirty in the process). If audiences weren't convinced that this was a big event movie they had to rush out and see RIGHT NOW, they'd been conditioned to expect new Pixar titles to show up on Disney+ before very long. Which leads us into our second problem - Lightyear had a confusing and unimaginative marketing campaign that did not make it clear, to the casual viewer, what this version of Buzz had to do with the character they knew from the four Toy Story films. The third problem was the most sadly inevitable, which is that Lightyear was a misconceived project from the go. It isn't a question of what went wrong. On a conceptual level, pretty much nothing about it went right. Pixar's Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter basically conceded as much when he was asked to reflect on the film's failure a year later: "We asked too much of the audience. When they hear Buzz, they’re like, great, where’s Mr. Potato Head and Woody and Rex? And then we drop them into this science fiction film that they’re like, What?”

To be fair, the idea of wanting to go back and explore Buzz's origins as a science fiction hero isn't the most illogical line of thinking. The original Toy Story did make it fairly obvious that Buzz Lightyear was based on some kind of pre-existing property within its universe, but never elaborated on what exactly, beyond the ultra-vague premise of Buzz needing to protect his galaxy from the advancements of the evil Emperor Zurg. We knew there was a "real" Buzz Lightyear, and that Andy and his friends had completely lost their minds over him, we just never got to see him first-hand (this is in stark contrast to Woody, whose origins in the beloved mid-century puppet show Woody's Roundup were clearly explained in Toy Story 2). It remained a loose end in Toy Story world-building, a mysterious franchise within a franchise that Pixar always had viable scope to expand on. I just think that director Angus MacLane wrong-footed himself straight out the gate in assuming that Andy had seen a movie, and what's more, a movie that was effectively his world's equivalent of Star Wars. I don't know about you, but that possibility had never once crossed my mind. My assumption was that Buzz Lightyear had started out as a character in a Saturday morning cartoon show, the kind that could very feasibly get kids like Andy hooked and wanting to buy a lot of merchandise, but likely wasn't anything prestigious.

Adding to the confusion was that some fans thought we already had a canon answer, by way of the 2000 animated series Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, which was explicitly framed as being the in-universe basis of the character. It's important to keep in mind that while Pixar provided the introductory sequence, with the Toy Story gang watching it from Andy's room, it was primarily a Walt Disney Television Animation production, and didn't necessarily represent how Pixar would choose to portray the fictitious Buzz Lightyear franchise on their own terms. I confess I never got into it, so I can't comment on how well it worked as its own thing (it was made by the same team who later did Kim Possible, one of Disney's better shows from the early 00s, so I'd expect it to at least be decently entertaining), but from the outset the existence of such a series really did make it look as though Disney weren't in on the original joke. Let's be serious - when toy Buzz recited his marketing blurb to Andy's toys ("As a member of the elite Universe Protection Unit of the Space Ranger Corps, I protect the galaxy from the threat of invasion from the evil Emperor Zurg, sworn enemy of the Galactic Alliance!") did you really think, "Sounds riveting, I wish I were watching that right now"? Or did you think that it sounded cookie cutter as hell and you knew everything about it you would ever need to know? That the "real" Buzz Lightyear should remain a total non-entity, while Buzz the toy was the one we got to know and accept as the genuine article seemed very much the point. When Woody taunts Buzz by asking if he thinks he's "real Buzz Lightyear"...well, it ends up becoming its own piece of charming irony. And while it would be a mite hypocritical for Pixar to have gone overly hard on this next point (they'd allied themselves with Disney, so they must have known what was coming), it was also easy enough to detect a slight critique of consumerism in the way Andy's infatuation with the character made him want to own everything Lightyear-related and essentially reshape his identity around him (to the point that he temporary abandoned the older values embodied in his attachment to Woody). "What did Andy see?" IS a valid question, but nothing within the Toy Story films indicates that it should be approached with anywhere near the degree of reverence as it is in Lightyear.

But that reverence is one of the things that most kills me about Lightyear. The film is so ridiculously earnest about everything it's doing, to the extent that it's almost heartbreaking. Based on MacLane's previous writing and directorial credits, which consisted of the Toy Story shorts Small Fry (2011) and Toy Story of Terror! (2013), I wouldn't have seen it coming. He had the potential to write something far goofier, and far better fitting with the details of the mother franchise, and and instead he chose to make this a sincere love letter to cinema and its ability to awaken the senses and imagination of those experiencing it early in life. He wanted to retroactively make Andy's Buzz obsession a vessel for the same kind of awe and wonder he felt after seeing Star Wars as a child. A lot of people were quick to dismiss this project as a straight-up cash grab, but I genuinely can't do that, since MacLane's passion is so palpable throughout, and there's something very warm, sweet and even admirable about it. I don't doubt for a second that the man loves the science-fiction genre and cared about creating a self-contained adventure for Buzz that treated said genre with the utmost respect. I just think that passion was mismatched with this particular project. It's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's disarming, but it also contributes to the film's weirdly (and delectably) confused tone.

For an idea of how confused the film is, we only need to look to its opening title card, which contains a concise and effective link between the respective worlds of Toy Story and Lightyear (more than the trailers ever managed), but also a massive error of judgement that will fundamentally cripple the picture for the full 105 minutes: "In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favorite movie. This is that movie." On the one hand, there is something very charming in its evocation of Pixar's beginnings, and the implication that the following film should be taken as not merely as an origin story for the character of Buzz, but for our relationship with the studio as a whole. The reference to 1995, in lieu of a more direct shout-out to Toy Story, seems designed to take the thirtysomethings in the audience (likely to be there with kids of their own) back to the experience of seeing Pixar's debut for the first time, and to the wondrous possibilities it opened up, both as the first 3D animated feature, and as the dawn of an innovative voice in Hollywood animation. It takes advantage of the fact that Toy Story, like Star Wars, was a film that changed cinema (for better or for worse), in a bid to have the viewer feel an immediate connection with Andy's enthusiasm, by reminding of us of our own excitement in getting to know Andy and his toys for the first time. The title card, coupled with Michael Giacchino's swelling score (did they miss a trick in not using "Also Sprach Zarathustra" for this one moment?), anticipates that seeing Lightyear will be akin to finding a missing piece of a puzzle, an integral aspect of Toy Story canon that's been lying dormant all these years, just waiting to be picked up and to reveal the fuller picture of how the world we know and love came together. It wants to take us back to the thrill of experiencing cinema through young eyes and discovering what it has to offer, with the awareness that we might now be instilling that same sense of discovery in our own children. That reference to 1995 carries so much potency. Unfortunately, it also ends up being one of the film's single greatest undoings. By connecting Lightyear to such an explicit point in cinema history, it engenders a set of expectations that the film itself has no intention of delivering on, which is to say that this will be a throwback specifically to the blockbusters of the 1990s. It does seem mighty unfair to evoke the nostalgia of those of us who remember 1995, and who cut our own cinemagoing teeth attending the films of that very era, and to not go whole hog with it.

Alas, there is good as nothing in Lightyear beyond the title card to discernibly connect it to the trends and zeitgeist of the 1990s. Some critics suggested that Sox, the name given to Buzz's robotic feline sidekick, was a contemporary reference to presidential cat Socks, but if you ask me that's grasping at straws (psst...Socks is a very common name for a cat with paws coloured differently to its body; I'm pretty sure this had nothing to do with the Clintons). And, speaking of Sox, what exactly is he supposed to be within the pretence of this being a live action production in Andy's universe? What special effects would have been used to render such a character in 1995? Crappy 90s CGI? An animatronic? A real cat with metallic dust sprinkled over its fur and with digitally added lip flaps (I mean, Babe had managed to pull off the latter in 1995)? Lightyear never lets on. It's so committed to upholding the reality of its internal world that it takes barely any time to explore its possibilities as a pastiche. Compare this to the sheer lovingness with which those brief snippets of Woody's Roundup were brought to life in Toy Story 2. The visible strings on the puppets. The unabashed silliness of the gags. It took itself much more lightly, and yet it had considerably more conviction and credibility as a slice of Toy Story world-building. (The marketing for Lightyear likewise missed a golden opportunity; think how much fun they could have had recreating the way trailers were put together in the 1990s. You know what I'm saying here - they should have brought back the voice-over guy!)

Odie Henderson, reviewing the film on Roger Ebert's site, potentially saw something that I didn't: "Director Angus MacLane and his co-writer, Jason Headley do a very good job gently mocking the type of space movie that would have existed in the 1990s." Thing is, I can't help but feel that Henderson immediately undermines that point by citing a list of visible influences on Lightyear, NONE of which are from the 90s: Star Wars: Return of The Jedi (1983), Avatar (2009), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Last Starfighter (1984). Because how many iconic space-bound sci-fi adventures came to being in the 90s anyway? It wasn't exactly a golden age for the genre. Obviously the Star Wars special editions don't count, and The Phantom Menace didn't make it until the very tail-end of the decade. Before then, I remember going to see precisely one space movie, the big screen adaptation of Lost in Space from 1998. How prophetic the title wound up being. It was a film that went absolutely nowhere (in terms of both its internal narrative and its cultural impact), and that nobody other than myself now remembers (their loss? Maybe? We'll pick this up in another entry...). It is nevertheless my default yardstick for what a space movie that existed in the 1990s would have looked like. Bombastic, choc full of special effects that have aged hideously, and so desperate to sell itself as macho when it is so very, very camp. I suspect Henderson picked up on Lightyear's own palpable eagerness to be taken seriously and assumed it was part of the joke. It was no joke at all.

The dead giveaway occurs in the first act, which is the one where Pixar is most conspicuously straining to teach us the meaning of life and, in fairness, also happens to be the film's strongest. We open with Buzz heading out with his fellow space rangers to explore an uninhabited planet, and accidentally damaging the Star Command vessel, getting the 1200-strong crew stranded in this unknown world. Buzz becomes obsessed with righting the wrong, devoting all of his time to the testing of a highly unstable hyperspace fuel that could potentially get them home, while the rest of the crew makes peace with their situation and establishes a thriving colony. Every time Buzz goes into hyperspace, he ages only minutes but returns to the colony to find they've had a good few years in his absence. Time dilation, you rascal. If this is all sounding oddly familiar to you, it might be because it's essentially the same scenario as the Michael Radford short, "Addicted To The Stars", in which Daniel Craig plays an astronaut who ages only ten minutes up in space while some 80 years have passed on Earth, and reacquaints with his son, now in his 90s. The main difference is that Buzz, unlike Craig's character, only loses four years at a time and has ample opportunities to give up and become an active part of the terrestrial community, much like his commanding officer Alisha (Uzo Aduba), who finds love, gets married, raises a son and becomes a grandmother all while Buzz is popping in an out of hyperspace. He bears witness to these developments from an angle in which he only gets the highlights, not the lived reality. (Side-note: I wince every time I hear Buzz say, "You got engaged to someone you just met?", because it sounds like one of those bad attempts at self-aware humor that modern Disney is so fond of inserting into their own films.) Inevitably, there comes the mission where Buzz arrives back to find Alisha gone. She has, however, left a hologram message through which to say her goodbyes. "Sorry I won't be there to see you finish the mission," she tells Buzz. "To infinity.." She extends a trembling hologrammatic finger. "And beyond," Buzz mournfully responds, meeting her finger with his own. The moment is played with such thoroughgoing seriousness, as is most of the material involving Buzz's peripheral relationship with the colony (but for the welcome comic relief facilitated by the introduction of Sox the robot cat, voiced by Peter Sohn). But I fear the attempt to reconfigure Buzz's most iconic line into a more poignantly profound statement about the nature of life and death couldn't help but harpoon it. There are several points throughout the script where Buzz recites classic snippets of dialogue from his Toy Story counterpart, repurposed for a brand new context, and while this largely comes off as a cute (if distracting) touch, in this instance it's wholly detrimental. "To infinity and beyond!" might be the dialogue we most associate with Buzz, but it is, by design, goofy as hell, the kind of catchphrase you'd expect to hear spouted by a broader, more bombastic hero. Because Buzz is, by design, kind of an inherently goofy character. This evocation of his inherent goofiness really takes me out of the moment, and I'm snickering when I should be in floods of tears.

Still, I did say that the film's first act was its strongest, and there is a sliver of poetic beauty in that sequence where we see Alisha's life play out from Buzz's perspective, in breathtaking motion. It captures something of the ephemeralness of life, and the wonderful things that will pass you by if you can't figure out how to embrace them in the moment. Of course, it's also very reminiscent of something Pixar had already accomplished, in their 2009 film Up, in which we see Carl and Ellie's married life whizz by in just a few minutes, with all the grand plans they'd made while they were young not being realised (at least not in the way Carl had always anticipated). Heck, it's also got shades of the "When She Loved Me" sequence in Toy Story 2 (which is still, for my money, the single most emotionally devastating sequence Pixar has ever crafted), where Jessie witnesses Emily growing up while she stays the same and inevitably gets left behind. The sequence in Lightyear suffers by comparison, but it's not without its own quiet power.

It's also where the movie peaks. Buzz learns that Alisha's successor, Cal (Isiah Whitlock Jr), does not intend to authorise any further hyperspace missions, believing the colony is safe where it is. This comes just as Sox, who has dedicated Buzz's continuous stretches of absence to conducting his own research, has finally figured out how to keep the fuel stable. The authorities apparently decide that Sox's newfound knowledge is a threat and decide to have him terminated. Upon hearing this, Buzz grabs Sox and escapes into hyperspace with him. They arrive back twenty-two years into the future to find the colony under siege from a mysterious army of evil robots, who communicate using only one ominous word: "Zurg". On the outside, Buzz and Sox encounter an inexperienced defence fighter named Izzy (Keke Palmer) who transpires to be the grown up granddaughter of Alisha, and has aspirations of following in her grandmother's space ranging footsteps, despite suffering from a crippling astrophobia. Izzy introduces Buzz to her two teammates, Mo (Taika Waititi), a chaotic Kiwi with no threshold for stress or danger, and Darby (Dale Soules), a tech-savvy convict whose participation in in the defence forces amounts to some kind of work release program. (They've got a robot sidekick of their own, DERIC, voiced by MacLane himself, but he's quickly dropped from the narrative action, only reappearing during a post-credits scene.)  All in all, not the types that Buzz would necessarily choose to accept as his cadets, but he makes do under the circumstances, and the five characters get up to the expected hi-jinks in the second act, evading the Zurg bots, and the aggressive insect lifeforms endemic to the planet, all while seeking to blow up the Zurg mothership that powers the robots below.

Until they stop to eat sandwiches, at which point the movie suddenly gets baffling as hell all over again. Buzz is perturbed to discover that the sandwiches of the future are made in reverse order, with a single slice of bread in the middle and the filling now forming the two outer layers. (Why? Was there a bread shortage somewhere in the colony's timeline?). The results look spectacularly ugly, like someone removed the sandwich's internal organs and but them on the outside of its body. It is a ridiculously impractical way to eat a sarnie, and despite Mo's insistence that getting grease on your fingers is the main attraction (I'm sorry, what?), you can only imagine the level of mess you'd have to clean up when working with ingredients like hummus, mayonnaise or peanut butter, so I doubt this would catch on. My assumption, the first time I watched this film, was that the sandwich would form the basis of an analogy that would prove vital in the third act, about doing things in an unorthodox order, but that doesn't happen. Instead, Buzz's sandwich alienation gets to be its own bit of stand-alone weirdness. And here's the kicker - it isn't even played as one of those absurd things from the future that Buzz has to get used to (a la the similarly temporally misplaced Fry from Futurama). It's played with total melancholy, with Buzz finally conceding that the future sandwich tastes pretty good that way, before a bemused Izzy asks "Bread, meat, bread...how long did you do it that way?", and a mournful Buzz responds, "Forever", as if the script is somehow in full agreement that that is a miserable approach to sandwich consumption. I'm sure the intention was for there to be something a little deeper going on here than just sandwiches, but whatever it is, it doesn't make itself known.

Amid all this sandwich nonsense, you might be wondering when the big Z is finally going to show his face. Based on how his toy was characterised in Toy Story 2, he has the potential to be such a camp, hilarious and larger than life villain, and Lightyear could definitely use a shot of that in the arm...if they're seriously stopping the story to get doleful about sandwiches. Alas, when Buzz does finally come face to face with Zurg, it really does serve as the final nail in the coffin with regards to this being a functional precursor to the Buzz franchise as we've known it (spoilers follow). The Toy Story films were vague on the specifics, but there was one significant nugget of Lightyear lore that was openly touted and fans had happily accepted as canon, which is that Zurg was Buzz's biological father. This was revealed in a comic interaction between the Zurg action figure and a second Buzz Lightyear figure in Toy Story 2, as a playful nod to Darth Vader's kinship with Luke Skywalker. I'm surprised that MacLane, being such an avid Star Wars fan, didn't retain it in his film. But no, that would have been too easy and straightforward a choice (a bit cliched, sure, but that was precisely the point), and judging by this film's track record, you surely must have anticipated they'd do something way more discombobulating. MacLane and co-writer Jason Headley do at least appear to have been conscious of this particular point when crafting the story (unlike the matter of the film supposedly hailing from the 1990s), finding a way to acknowledge it, if not actually adhere to it. "Dad?" Buzz asks, when Zurg removes his suit and is revealed to look a lot like himself, only older. "Guess again", says Zurg, as a much more beat-up version of Sox limps into view and to his side. Shocker - Zurg is really Buzz himself, from an alternate future timeline. Definitely not his father then. True, you could make the argument that it was toy Zurg, not the "real" Zurg, who claimed blood (plastic?) relations, and toy Zurg might not have known what he was talking about. But then Lightyear does very heavily imply, through all the deliberate parallels it draws, that toy Buzz came with an innate possession of the original's thought processes, speech patterns and tendencies, so I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for toy Zurg. His presumption that he was Buzz's father had to have come from somewhere, and that toy was fresh out of the box. How, according to this film's take, did future Buzz come to acquire the moniker Zurg? Apparently it all comes down to his robot underlings saying "Buzz" with an accent.

By now, it shouldn't surprise you that Zurg is neither a camp nor fun villain, and has instead been bitten by the same seriousness bug as everyone else. It's all a bit confusing, but Zurg is supposedly Buzz from his original timeline, in which Buzz evaded arrest by Cal by escaping centuries into the future and gained access to advanced technology. He eventually figured out how to travel backwards in time, and in doing so created some kind of timeline split with the Buzz we've been following. Zurg's goal is to go back far enough to prevent the Star Command vessel from ever landing on the planet, thus ensuring that the stranding will not happen and that everything in the aftermath will be undone. He has, however, exhausted his time travel fuel supply, and needs to obtain some from the current Buzz in order to complete his journey. This Zurg isn't in it for the evulz, he's just a sad, strange little man who's been warped by his obsession - the very lonely path that our own Buzz was destined to tread, had he not been convinced to pal up with Izzy and friends and learn about the value of social connection. Buzz's problem was that he was always too distant. He might have forged a close bond with Alisha, but he wouldn't allow himself to become a part of her new life on the colony. Even his relationship with Sox, while he obviously cared about him, was initially more functional than tender (he mistook the purring that came out of the cat for the sounds of malfunctioning when Izzy gave him an affectionate belly rub). Zurg-Buzz claims to be doing everything for the benefit of others, but lets his real motivation slip when he tells Buzz, "We're supposed to be space rangers. We're supposed to matter." What Zurg wants, even if he's not fully conscious of it, is the esteem of being the hero, and he doesn't see the irony of what he's turning into in that pursuit. Our Buzz demonstrates that he's grown in a way that Zurg-Buzz hasn't, when he contemplates that Alisha found happiness and a whole new purpose within the colony, and all that would be taken away from her if the vessel was prevented from landing. He points out that Izzy would not exist in the new timeline, but Zurg-Buzz never met Izzy, so the argument is lost on him.

This is Pixar in barefaced meaning of life mode, although the message itself is honestly nothing more radical than the kinds of morals the studio conveyed from the beginning. Was it not the implicit message of the very first Toy Story, when Woody assures Buzz that being a toy is a better deal than being a space ranger (an assertion that, with hindsight, comically undermines the value of spending time with Buzz the space ranger)? That a humble life filled with small but beautiful moments, even if they cannot last, is more fulfilling than one of fame and glory. Toy Story 2 had a variation on this same theme, when Woody rejected immortality as a museum artefact, deciding that he would sooner live life than watch it pass him by from the other side of a glass pane. Which is what Buzz was doing here, more-or-less, in that first act, when he was watching Alisha's life play out but not participating, to the point that he effectively squandered their friendship. I reject Reiss's assessment that Pixar started out as this fun studio who lost their way when they started implementing messages about what's really important in life, because it is the same damned thing they've been doing since 1995. But perhaps there is an argument to be made that the need to impress critics and adult audiences with its weighty theming has constrained Pixar, to the point where they couldn't make a picture that's first and foremost about the gleeful insanity, like The Bad Guys. In the case of Lightyear, that constraint was twofold. MacLane wanted to make a film that lived up to the Pixar model, and to sell it as a film that inspired Andy on a profound level, even though Andy was canonically six years old in 1995, and most of this would have gone over his head anyway. Wouldn't a child of his age have preferred something with more colour and kinetic energy? If ever there was a Pixar project that demanded to be light and tongue-in-cheek (with an obvious heart at the centre), this was it. There's a haunting parallel to be drawn between Lightyear itself and the corrupted Zurg-Buzz. It fervently believed that it needed to be grand and important, when it just needed to connect with people on a far simpler level.

The film gets to have its cake and eat it at the end, once Buzz defeats Zurg and returns to the liberated colony, where Cal forgives his past transgressions in light of his recent heroism, and agrees to hire Buzz as the leader of his new squad of space rangers. Buzz is given the opportunity to create a team from scratch with the colony's most elite soldiers, but chooses to retain his current team of Izzy (now astrophobia-free), Sox, Mo and Darby. Because being a space ranger is as brilliant as being a toy after all, so long as you're sharing the experience with people you love. The film concludes with Buzz blasting off with his crew toward their next adventure, and one final melancholic iteration of "To infinity and beyond!", even though this is the one place in which it would have been entirely appropriate for him to say it with the usual bombast. But stay tuned, because there are a couple of extra tidbits to come after the credits. First a comedic one in which we pick up where we left off with DERIC, who has sadly been forgotten by his friends. Then, at the very end (after Luxo Jr has made his appearance), a more dramatic stinger where Zurg, having been flung into the depths of space, is revealed to have survived, and is presumably set on menacing Buzz and co on another day.

With that, I've found a way in which Lightyear obviously recalls Lost in Space '98 (well, actually two - both films involve the protagonists interacting with alternate future versions of themselves in a way that feels a bit tepid as our third act conflict, especially when they had an entire universe filled with possibilities to play around with). They both end with hooks for sequels that were never realised. Both films had high hopes of being the next big thing, but underperformed at the box office and were stopped in their tracks, and now we'll never get to know what else they had planned (society's loss? Maybe?). I'm possibly being a tad presumptuous in concluding there'll be no Lightyear follow-up - as we know, the window for sequels with Pixar is a long one, and there's every chance that this could acquire a cult following down the line, a la Tron - but given its catastrophic failure to launch I doubt it will be a priority for Pixar any time soon. The 1990s had no shortage of these event picture blockbusters intended to kickstart franchises, that came with a blitz of marketing and merchandising, and then in a few short weeks had been all but memory-holed by the general public (Dick Tracy, The Shadow and that terrible American version of Godzilla, to name a few others), so it wouldn't be at all out of place in that regard.

Call me obstinate, but I will not accept Lightyear as the canon explanation for Buzz's origins in the Toy Story universe. The two worlds don't mesh, even in the context of one being a fictional franchise within the other. I've a sneaking suspicion that a toy Sox will show up somewhere in the upcoming Toy Story 5, which might make it harder to keep the two separate, but for now I still prefer my old assumption that Buzz came from a cartoon, be it Buzz Lightyear of Star Command or any other. I am, however, very glad that this film exists. I look on it as a failed experiment in the spin-off potential of the Toy Story franchise, with a handful of things that are legitimately good (the animation is beautiful and Sox is a charming enough character), and a lot that's endearingly ludicrous. I've got sympathy for MacLane, because I think he came to this from a position of love, but I also think he was seeing things in Buzz that weren't actually there. From there, almost every decision he made was either misconceived or incomprehensible, and the resulting picture is a glorious mess that's so wrong it's right. Lightyear is a head-spinning curio for the ages, one I will love and cherish every step of the way.

Andy thought it was the best movie ever. Allegedly. But what does a little kid who plays with cowboy dolls know about quality anyway?

Homer Loves Flanders (aka Something About Being Gay)

The first thing to be said about "Homer Loves Flanders" (episode 1F14)  is that it contains one of my all-time favourite low-key Simpsons jokes. The kind that you don't necessarily register on your first viewing, or even your second or third, but which suddenly hits you like a ton of bricks on the fourth. Early in the episode, we find Homer driving to work and listening to the radio, leading to the all-important plot development of the call-in competition to win tickets to the upcoming Pigskin Classic football game between the Shelbyville Sharks and the Springfield Atoms. Before that though, we catch the closing notes of an eerily tortured-sounding a cappella performance, followed by the announcement, "That was Bobby McFerrin's new one: I'm Worried, Need Money." Now I love Bobby McFerrin. I think he's supremely talented, and The Voice is one of those under-championed albums I'm constantly recommending to anyone who cares. Still, I've got to appreciate the humour here. McFerrin ended up with the dreaded "One Hit Wonder" tag, with his 1988 single "Don't Worry, Be Happy" being his only significant chart success. In public perception, a one hit wonder will often appear more of a failure than a none hit wonder. No hits might imply that you just never got your lucky break, or that your music wasn't mainstream enough to catch on with the masses. One hit implies that you had the momentum but couldn't sustain it. For a second there you were on top of the world, and you blew it. This was one of several gags littered throughout Season 5 at the expense of musicians whose chart glory was merely flash in the pan. Carl Douglas was described as a one trick pony in "Bart Gets Famous". "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" had that ironic joke about us not having seen the last of Dexy's Midnight Runners (note: this refers to US perception of the band - Dexy's Midnight Runners are not regarded as a one hit wonder in their native UK, where they had another number 1 single, "Geno"). The McFerrin jab feels particularly caustic, though. There's the fact that the title "I'm Worried, Need Money" goes directly against the ethos expressed in "Don't Worry, Be Happy". All the more biting is the unmistakable, half-broken discomposure in the voice of the alleged McFerrin as he wails out those final disconcerting strains. This is a man who's lost his wits watching his momentary empire crumble around him, wrecked by the fickle nature of success.

This fascination with faded stardom was indicative of an underlying anxiety that would intermittently surface during The Simpsons' run in the mid-90s, back when David Mirkin was the man in charge - the possibility that its own popularity was finite. From the beginning, The Simpsons had taken a healthily leery approach to its status as a pop cultural phenomenon, with examples of meta humor, like the plot trajectory of "Dancin' Homer" and the Macy's Parade gag in "Bart vs. Thanksgiving", suggesting that the series was experiencing a form of imposter syndrome and fully expected the public to see through it before too long. By Season 5 it had been around long enough to know that it had staying power, and to openly contemplate how amazingly far it had already come; "Bart Gets Famous" was an entirely upfront post-mortem of the Bart Mania that had characterised its initial wave of success, from the perspective of a series that had survived the pressures of getting so very popular so early on in its career. Compared to the apocalyptic rumblings that became all-too explicit during the back half of Oakley and Weinstein's reign, life under Mirkin seemed relatively complacent and at ease with itself. But it's here that we can also pinpoint arguably the most direct precursor to that Season 8 brand malaise, in a couple of small but critical moments of "Homer Loves Flanders". Bart is perturbed by the episode's central development, which sees Homer suddenly becoming very chummy with Ned Flanders and wanting their respective clans to hang out together. Lisa is less concerned, having grown savvy to the rules of the game: "It seems like every week something odd happens to the Simpsons. My advice is to ride it out, make an occasional smart-aleck quip, and by next week we'll be back to where we started from, ready for another wacky adventure." As the episode nears its conclusion, Homer and Ned's friendship seems stronger than ever, prompting a dumbfounded Lisa to contemplate the unthinkable: "Maybe this means the end of our wacky adventures."

"Homer Loves Flanders", which first aired March 17th 1994, can be categorized as part a trilogy of Mirkin-era episodes that dealt with the consequences of something being fundamentally off within the Simpsons universe, and where the threats to the characters are happening on an existential level. "The Last Temptation of Homer" and "Lisa's Rival" offer variations on this same theme, although in both of their cases the disturbance is set in motion by the intrusion of an uncannily perfect outsider who is (however unintentionally) threatening to usurp the established territory of one of the family. "Homer Loves Flanders" takes as a different approach, in having the crisis arise from a simple rearrangement of the show's internal dynamics. What's intrinsically hilarious about the notion of Homer and Ned's friendship posing a danger to the very fabric of the Simpsons' world is that it is, on the surface, an entirely plausible and logical development within said world. One day, Homer could very well wake up to the reality that being friends with Ned is more fulfilling than stewing in constant resentment toward him. After all, Ned's a really generous and helpful guy, and of course he's got that neat rumpus room we'd first seen in "Dead Putting Society". Why wouldn't Homer grow to like him, if he could just be persuaded to give Ned a chance? And why would this spell an end to the Simpsons' adventures in general? How many of them were actually dependent on Homer's dislike of Ned? This isn't exactly comparable to Homer dumping Marge for Mindy, which would break the premise of the series completely - in most regards, life could continue pretty much as normal for the family. The answer is, of course, that such a change, however benign, would still go against the status quo, which by now had firmly entrenched rules about what could and couldn't happen. In 1994 The Simpsons had long proven that it had a successful formula, but the prevailing anxiety that seemed to pop up every so often under Mirkin had to do with this formula being nevertheless a fragile one, and the possibility that the slightest amount of tinkering could cause it to completely unravel. It doesn't take much for your fortunes to drastically change. One minute you're on top of the world and feeling happy, and the next minute you're deeply worried and wailing about your desperate need of money.

In making sense of Bart and Lisa's statements on the matter, it's important to keep in mind that while they are a part of this supposedly threatened world, there is a greater extent to which they're serving as audience stand-ins. It's done a touch more subtly than in "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", but it's still conspicuous enough. For the most part, they are passive observers of the episode's developments rather than active participants, the Flimpsons picnic being the only point at which they themselves come into any direct conflict with the Flanders (first through their respective efforts to introduce sugar into Rod and Todd's diet, then by introducing Zesty Italian dressing to their eyes). Lisa is effectively advising Bart that if he doesn't like where a particular Simpsons story is going, not to worry, because there'll be another one next week and the events of this one won't have any lasting impact. Her remark about making the occasional smart-aleck quip alludes to the banalities of sitcom convention, and to the extent to which the viewer is complicit in this process, in favouring what's safe and familiar over anything more challenging or substantial. (It's notable that Lisa's position is at odds with her earlier stance in "Bart Gets Famous" - here she openly welcomes a non-sequitur utterance of one of Bart's catchphrases as being within the spirit of things). Her most telling observation and the one with the bleakest implications, is "And by next week, we'll be back to where we started from". It suggests something of a paradox, in acknowledging both the passing of time and the fact that the Simpsons themselves are at the exact same point in life they've always been. On the one hand, it might be reassuring to know that the family and the world we've come to love so much aren't going anywhere. But what is being denied to the characters in this whole cycle is the opportunity for any kind of meaningful growth or improvement. An eventual friendship seems like a perfectly natural trajectory for the Homer-Ned relations, but it cannot happen - in no small way, because the viewer has grown accustomed to a world in which Homer's hatred for Ned is off the charts.

Heck, Ned himself has grown to accustomed to a world in which Homer loathes him, which allows for the episode's most startling development - Bart and Lisa might do a bit of hand-wringing from the sidelines, but it's Ned who copes the least smoothly with this challenge to the status quo. There's a bit of misdirection in the second act in which it looks as though the main conflict will be about Homer prioritising his time with Ned over time with his own family (making it momentarily reminiscent of your typical Home-Wrecker episode), but this doesn't go anywhere outside of Homer forcing the two families to come together for the aforementioned Flimpsons picnic. "Homer Loves Flanders" is really a character study about Ned and his own complicated, not universally sunny feelings toward Homer. Though Homer insists that the deity he recognises, a waffle tossed up onto the hallway ceiling by Bart (a strange gag, but there are stranger gags still to come), is silently mocking him, it is quite blatantly Ned who is the target of this week's round of cosmic taunting. A little Homer goes a long way, and faced with a Homer who suddenly wants to smother him with his presence 24/7, Ned's status as the mellow and tolerant one in the equation is also thrown into disarray.

 "Homer Loves Flanders" opens, appropriately, with focus on another state of longstanding disharmony between neighbouring forces, that of Springfield and Shelbyville, whose football teams are playing against one another in the much-anticipated Pigskin Classic. Why should these two communities, so alike in abrasive indignity, feel so much animosity for one another? It can't all come down to a lemon tree and disagreements about marrying cousins. More likely it's a variation on the same problem facing Homer and Ned, in that people who are stuck together can't help but get on one another's nerves. As per Lisa's account, the rivalry between the two burgs might have started out as a bit of healthy competition, but has escalated into something altogether less wholesome: "They built a mini-mall, so we built a bigger mini-mall. They made the world's largest pizza, so we burned down their city hall." Shelbyville has apparently gotten its revenge by spiking Springfield's water supply (which it kind of already was, by Springfield's own doing). It's clearly in the interests of both cities to put aside their petty grudges and restrict this contention to the sporting arena, but alas, they're too far along that the same path of destructive bitterness, with no prospect of alleviation or self-improvement. The futile rivalry has become too great a defining point for their respective locale's sense of pride and character. Homer of course wants to be there to cheer on the Atoms and jeer the Sharks, but has bad luck securing a ticket, despite missing eight days of work to camp out in the line outside the Shelbyville Stadium (so, the implication is that he's been there for at least ten days?). The only person in front of him happens to be a scalper, who takes all of the tickets (ironically, Homer was advised only moments earlier that a scalper would have been an affordable option if he hadn't forgone all those days of working). He later attempts to win two tickets via the radio call-in, but is beaten to them by none other than Ned. When Ned, ever the genial and thoughtful soul, shows up at Homer's door to offer him his second ticket, Homer immediately takes that as the ultimate sign of the Ceiling Waffle's mockery. He eventually accepts (but not without first contemplating knocking Ned out with a lead pipe and stealing the tickets), and to his surprise actually enjoys the time in Ned's company. The decisive factor that finally convinces Homer that Ned is truly top notch buddy material is when Ned is revealed to be on first name terms with the Atoms' star player, Stan Taylor, who attended Ned's Bible group. Stan offers Ned the game ball as a token of thanks for the spiritual guidance, and Ned persuades him to give it to Homer instead, on the grounds that he would enjoy it more. For once, the kindness of Ned's gesture isn't lost on Homer, and he resolves to spend more time with Ned. He also goes home and tosses out his wedding photo in order to make space for the football (affectionately named Stitchface) upon the family mantelpiece. Homer's infatuation with Ned is such that he's basically replaced Marge in his affections. Although there is one need of Homer's that Ned presumably isn't meeting, requiring him to periodically fall back on Marge - when he brushes off Marge's attempts at initiating conversation with a curtly robotic "Can't talk, see Flanders," he adds the promise of, "Later sex."

There is, from the start, a more obvious problem with this supposed peacetime between the Simpsons and Flanders abodes, which is that Homer comes on so strong in his affections that it doesn't quite seem genuine. The fiery enthusiasm with which he greets the prospect of getting to hang with Ned every day isn't terribly dissimilar from the fiery enthusiasm he had for, say, acquiring a used trampoline earlier that season in "Bart's Inner Child". Or indeed his over the top exuberance on hearing the guitar riff in Eddie Money's "Two Tickets To Paradise" from earlier in the same episode, which causes him to forget his predicament in not having tickets to the game, but only temporarily. You can count on Homer to feel intensely about anything in the moment, but for that passion to peter out just as abruptly (did he even mention the trampoline in the back half of "Bart's Inner Child"?). As sure a sign as any that the friendship is not fated to last is that his obsession with Ned feels more like one of his random crazes than any rational effort to get to know a man he's been reflexively spurning for eight years. Ned's willingness to lay out the welcome mat for Homer remains something the latter can fundamentally abuse, his tendencies to permanently borrow household items from Ned being no less considerate than his newfound tendency to invade the Flanders' space by encroaching on their family dinners, destroying their pool table and interrupting their anodyne television viewing (I don't know if the sheep show Rod and Todd are watching is a parody of an actual cartoon, but it's priceless, as is Todd's somewhat baffled response to its moral implications: "That's all well and good for sheep, but what are we to do?"). Homer is nevertheless touched by the Flanders' seemingly limitless efforts to accommodate him, and attempts to return the favour by initiating Ned into his own family (by which he means his fellow booze hounds down at Moe's), and then by having his biological family join the Flanders for a picnic, an arrangement that, unbeknownst to the wilfully oblivious Honer, the Flanders are every bit as cheesed off about as the Simpsons. This culminates in quite possibly the darkest sequence we had yet seen in any non-Halloween Simpsons installment, in which Ned heads up to the top of a clock tower, pulls out a gun and proceeds to fire upon the innocents below, sensing Homer's presence in them all. Granted, it is a dream sequence, but by Season 5 standards this is still pretty extreme.

For as shocking as this sequence is the first time you see it, and as chilling as it remains on subsequent viewings, the execution is simply beautiful. There's the eerie, Hitchcockian shot of the endlessly winding staircase Ned climbs to carry out his depraved deed, the ominous silence that greets his ascent, the sickly green skies above him, the washed-out blues of his unsuspecting targets down below, and their terrified screams as they realise what's happening. It doesn't immediately betray the fact that it's a dream, but we can tell right away that something is off, and that Ned is headed for some very out of character dealings. The only mitigating detail is that he doesn't appear to have had much success in his attempted massacre, since there are no bodies on the ground. It escalates into something all the more viciously exaggerated, when a mailman shows up and starts firing his own gun back at Ned. As a child, the visual of a postal carrier with an assault weapon concealed inside his mailbag always seemed like such a random bit of weirdness, until I learned that the term "going postal" was coined for a reason. Ned wakes up in a cold sweat, and has some disturbing news to share with Maude - he thinks he hates Homer Simpson.

I'll be honest here - I don't think the hatred Ned professes that to feel for Homer here is really anything new. What's lurking deep within a Springfieldian's soul can't always be detected from the surface - take what we also learn about Moe, and his surreptitious practice of reading literary classics to the residents of hospitals and shelters while tearing up at the sentimental parts (note: those are not valid quotes from either My Friend Flicka or Little Women). On a similar token, there's some level on which I suspect Ned has always privately disliked Homer, way down in the bowels of his psyche. I believe this was evident enough in "Dead Putting Society", when Ned demonstrated that he could actually be pretty darned tetchy with Homer if he really got going. You couldn't hold it against Ned for harbouring those sentiments - he tries so hard to be a good neighbour to Homer, and Homer's always so rude to him in return. Often Ned might come across as being merely oblivious to Homer's position, but I don't think this is the case. Ned isn't stupid, and he recognises those clear displays of animosity on Homer's part. It's more that he sees it as his Christian and neighbourly duty to rise above it and to always be the bigger man - as Homer puts it here, to turn every cheek on his body. Under the usual state of affairs, Ned has grown acclimatized to dealing with Homer's rudeness, so that he doesn't take it personally and keeps his own urges for retaliation in check. It's easy enough when Homer is mostly going to be blowing him off and he can simply walk away from him in the aftermath. But now the situation has changed, and he has to figure out how to deal with a Homer who is as obnoxious as ever, but from the angle of constantly wanting to be in his face and having zero respect for his family's boundaries. This is why the imbalance in the status quo proves particularly dangerous for Ned. It forces him to confront those buried and dormant feelings he'd long considered conquered.

A knock-on effect is that Ned's image as an upstanding citizen begins to deteriorate, both in the eyes of his family and the general public. This is paralleled with Homer's own reputation getting a major boost, when he attempts to assist in Ned's charity work at the shelter and his desire to get it over with as quickly as possible is mistaken for enthusiasm by an adjacent journalist. Once we've reached the third act, Homer's behaviours get ever more cartoonishly silly, to the point where he's chasing the Flanders' car a la the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The story remains grounded, however, by the very real, very painful consequences Ned's itches for a little respite start to bring. First he appears sinful in front of his sons, when he manages to get rid of Homer by telling him that he already has plans that day to take the boys to see their grandmother (presumably the one on Maude's side who later got taken hostage in the Holy Land, and not the beatnik who doesn't believe in rules). Rod and Todd are excited to hear this, at which point Ned attempts to introduce them to the concept of a white lie, and how sometimes it is okay to tell untruths when the goal is to spare another person's feelings. Rod isn't having any of it ("Lies make baby Jesus cry!"). Then when attempting to escape from Homer in the family Geo he gets pulled over for speeding by Chief Wiggum (yeah, well, unlike lying, which might be permissible under certain circumstances, reckless driving is always a bad idea, Ned - don't make me tap the most disturbingly ironic use I've ever seen of Bobby McFerrin, from our friends the LTSA in New Zealand), who accuses him of being high on goofballs in front of a busload of people from the First Church of Springfield. "Where's your Messiah now?" Wiggum asks tauntingly, echoing Edward G. Robinson in The Ten Commandments. Where indeed.

Things come to a head that Sunday, when the church parishioners collapse into a flurry of distrustful whispering as Ned walks through the door, but applaud Homer for his work at the homeless shelter. As Reverend Lovejoy (who teases an upcoming sermon under the spiteful title of "What Ned Did") asks everyone to bow their heads in silent prayer, Ned becomes transfixed with the intrusive sound of Homer's relentless nasal breathing and, unable to bear it any more, blows his top in front of the whole church: "Can't you see? This man isn't a hero! He's annoying! He's very, very annoying!" The parishioners accuse Ned of being jealous of Homer and angrily round on him, but to everyone's surprise, including Ned's, it's Homer who comes to his defence. For as ridiculously exaggerated as Homer's affections might have been up until now, in his climactic speech he suddenly seems achingly sincere, owning up to his history as a less-than-pleasant neighbour and how commendable Ned always was in showing him so much patience. "If everyone here were like Ned Flanders," he argues, "there would be no need for Heaven. We'd already be there." The rest of the church is moved into apologising to Ned. In turn, Ned approaches Homer and thanks him for standing up for him. The two of them reconcile and head off for a game at the Pitch N' Putt, triggering a second round of existential anxiety in our young onlookers, who are bothered that there's now less than a minute on the clock and no sign as yet of things returning to normal.

It's sad, really. At the end of the episode, Homer and Ned had demonstrated that perhaps there was a basis for a genuine and healthy friendship between them after all. Homer had Ned's back when it really counted, and Ned recognised the value of that. Both neighbours were able to move past their respective reservations and reach a shared understanding that looked as though it might reap mutual benefits. The notion of that this kind of growth represents a threat to the series is a little troubling, even when the comic implications are golden. Is there not some part of us that wants to see the characters rewarded with meaningful development when they make an honest effort to better themselves? But, like it or lump it, Lisa's prediction for how this will all pan out proves entirely correct. In the story's epilogue, which onscreen titles helpfully inform us takes place the following Thursday at 8:00pm, Homer arrives home with the deeds to an allegedly haunted property, courtesy of his late great uncle Boris, and plans for the family to prove those superstitions wrong by spending the weekend there. Ned appears at the Simpsons' window to say hello and is told by Homer to get lost. Ned cheerfully accepts and goes his own way. No explanation is given, and Bart and Lisa seem alone in possessing any recollection of the previous week's happenings, furthering the sense that they represent the viewer's perspective - the show's internal world has simply reset itself, and the events of this episode might as well not have happened. The telltale clue is in that oddly specific detail about this occurring on Thursday at 8:00pm, which back in 1994 was when new Simpsons episodes were debuting on Fox. This is in effect, a faux preview for the next episode, airing March 24th. In reality, there wasn't a new episode that aired on that date (the following installment, "Bart Gets An Elephant", had to wait until March 31st), so while I doubt that writer David Richardson and the crew could have foreseen this at the scripting stage, it plays as its own bit of irresistible meta humor. This is effectively a preview for a lost episode.^[1] Brilliant!

There, is however, a bit more to unpack in this epilogue than the inexplicable reset between Homer and Ned. Richardson's script is sly enough to weave in a subtle warning on how, by denying progression and keeping the characters trapped within the same time loop ad infinitum, there might be a price to pay sooner or later. The set-up for Homer's haunted house story, coupled with the name drop of a deceased relative we'd never even known existed until now, sounds dubious as sin. Obviously, it exists in quotation marks, as code for the kind of creaky sitcom devices we'd ordinarily regard as being beneath our favourite show. That's how we know the script is having some fun with us. But it's also a playful concession to to the likelihood that if The Simpsons persisted on its current path, it was going to struggle to stay fresh. Change is risky, sure, but is stagnation any more enticing as an alternative? Where else did The Simpsons have to go from here, if it wasn't permitted to do a little evolving? These are questions that Oakley and Weinstein would grapple with more consciously throughout their upcoming tenure, and for all the experimentation and world-building that was allowed to happen in their time, they arrived at basically the same conclusion. There's not a world of difference between the underlying implications of this ending and Troy McClure's foreboding in "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" on the potential developments in the series' future ("Did someone say long-lost triplets?!"). Both are snide reminders that if you get too limited in your options, eventually you're going to end up in shark-infested waters, and you can bet then that you're going to start jumping. 

Now this wasn't the first instance in which the series had implemented a faux preview for the purposes of mocking the hoariness of lesser sitcoms. It happened previously at the end of "Treehouse of Horror II", where the preposterous set-up of Homer having Burns' head stitched to his neck promised to pave way for future hi-jinks with the two of them butting their connected skulls over whether to attend an all-you-can-eat-spaghetti dinner or a reception for Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Homer even had a potential catchphrase in the works ("I hate having two heads!"). Sometimes you've just got to lampoon crummy sitcoms for the pleasure of lampooning crummy sitcoms. On this occasion, though, the outcome is more obviously linked to the wishes and expectations of outsides forces, through our audience surrogates Bart and Lisa. That's not to say that the onus is being played on the viewer for this predicament - Bart and Lisa had little direct influence on the situation, after all - but the viewer is rather being implicitly not to get too comfortable with the current state of things, because sooner or later something has to give. Consider what Bart and Lisa are actually doing in this scene. They're so relieved for the confirmation that Homer and Ned are no longer pals that they don't bat an eyelid at the kind of wacky adventure Homer is proposing, which is to spend the weekend in decrepit old house that's potentially haunted. Surely they'd be much safer staying in Evergreen Terrace while their dad and Ned enjoy a friendly game of pool in the rumpus room next door? Instead, they assume that since the world appears to be running according to its usual rules, they know what they're getting from it and all is right within. In actuality, they might be headed for something that is, by the standards of their universe, all the more profoundly wrong. The final moments find the Simpsons inside the house (which we only see from the exterior), and Homer reassuring the others that the place definitely isn't haunted, before the lights go out and the family screams in unison at some off-screen horror. We leave the Simpsons face to face with the dark unknown - which is precisely what Bart and Lisa were looking to avoid. Moral of the story: just because you're in familiar hands, don't assume that they're necessarily good hands.

 

 [1] A variation on this set-up later showed up in the Season 7 episode "Bart The Fink", with further jokes about how improbably hoary it was. It was quite blatantly a different situation, however. There it was Homer's great-aunt Hortense who'd passed away (not the same aunt Hortense who was already dead in "Bart Gets Hit By A Car", surely?), and they didn't get the house itself, they just had to spend the night there to get their financial inheritance. It's a standard clause.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #52: How To Explain Pixels To A Dead Hedgehog THE PROLOGUE!

Okay people, this is a big one. I recently experienced a "Eureka!" moment that was, on a personal level, utterly tectonic. After much tireless searching, I am finally able to close the book on a television mystery me that's been haunting me for over 30 years. As a young child, I have very distinct and very uneasy memories of being repeatedly exposed to an advertisement that confounded the living daylights out of me - in part because I couldn't make head nor tail of its intended message. By then, I was just about worldly-wise enough to know that the purpose of advertising was to attempt to sell you something, but basically paranoid enough to not put it past the powers that be to throw in random bits of stimuli just to make your sleep at night a lot harder. I had no other means of explaining the existence of this ad, which had no discernible agenda other than to whack you with a weird, confusing and, above all, disturbing scenario entailing the apparent imperilment of a small, fuzzy animal (albeit one obviously played by a puppet). I know I've mentioned it in these pages at least once before, in my review of "Who Shot Mr Burns?: Part One", when trying to explain the personal anxieties I associated with the term "To Be Continued...", so let's just copy and paste the synopsis I gave back then:

"There was a short period, some time in the early 1990s, when the bane of my TV-watching existence was a most peculiar and disturbing TV ad in which stock footage (I presume) of an enormous truck hurtling down a desert highway was interspliced with the cries of a terrified critter, apparently in the path of the truck and in danger of being crushed by it. The creature itself was of no discernable species - the most we ever saw of it was its huge plastic eyes rolling open and shut as it stood there, seemingly powerless to alter its fate. Then, the action came to an abrupt halt, the words "To be continued..." were flashed across the screen in big bold letters, aaaaand I never did figure out what that was all about. As far as I'm aware, the scenario never was continued, and maybe that was the joke in itself, but it was never apparent to me what the advertisement was actually selling, and it's haunted me ever since. If you're wondering why you've never seen this featured as a Horrifying Advertising Animal, it's because I've never been able to find it. Not having a clue what the campaign in question was for has seriously impeded the whole search process. I would love to put the matter to rest once and for all, because as things are, that whole scenario still lies suspended in my head, with no clarity as to the fate of that plastic-eyed critter or what the heck I was even watching."

 

I was never quite able to shake the psychological baggage the experience left with me. A barrage of questions lingered. Did the ad actually make good on its threat of continuation? Did the animal in question escape being crushed beneath the wheels of that hulking great truck? Was the animal a species or character I was intended to recognise? What the hell was that advertisement trying to sell me? As I entered adulthood and the bewilderment persisted, I knew the only way to overcome it was to confront the source head-on and to go in search of my televisual demon. After all, the establishment of YouTube had made it so much simpler to access nostalgic advertising online, if you knew what you were looking for. Problem is, I didn't. After all this time, I couldn't even second-guess what brand the ad had been covertly hawking, which made it very hard for me to narrow down my searches. The best I could do was take a stab at the specific period in which I was likely to have seen it (I knew it was either late 1992 or early 1993 - I could swear I had seen it on CITV around airings of Tiny Toon Adventures, but this was pre-Animaniacs), scout out uploads of adverts from those years and hope for the best. In practice it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. For the longest time, I got zilch. Nada. Bupkis. Which surprised me, because I seem to recall this ad being horribly ubiquitous back in the day. It's a good thing that I'm so enthusiastic about old school advertising in general, so trawling through upload after upload for years on end wasn't a total waste of time. I got to relive plenty of other memories, some fond, some unsettling in their own way. But none quite so prized as the Holy Grail of traumatic advertising, which continued to taunt and elude me, an image too persistent for me to cast it aside, and yet one so elusive it was beginning to feel as though I was the only person on the planet who bore its terrible weight of its memory.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when I happened to find the infernal thing, tucked away in an obscure YouTube upload. Now finally, I have the answers I craved. They weren't necessarily the answers I wanted, mind. I pulled back the lid on this thing and, well, it turns out there's actually a pretty fiendish twist to this story that I was totally unprepared for. At the time, I'd suspected that the whole "To Be Continued" thing was intended as a parody of melodramatic television cliffhangers (this was post-Truckers, which had always ended with Edward Kelsey giving those exact words in his eerie sign-off each week, so I was able to attach some theatrical significance to the term) and that the joke was that the scenario wouldn't be continued. I couldn't logically link that joke to any identifiable product, but I was certain, looking back, that I must have missed a trick - perhaps it was part of a bigger ad and there was another segment I hadn't noticed it had always segued into. But no, the actual answer was far more distressing. I did indicate in the above synopsis that if I were ever to uncover this ad, I would cover it as a Horrifying Advertising Animal, so here we are.

My description of what happened in the ad was fairly accurate, but for a few minor details. The eyes of the fake animal turned out to latex rather than plastic, and they didn't roll open and shut. Instead, they showed the reflection of the approaching vehicle, a detail I clearly didn't absorb at the time. I also couldn't say for certain whether stock footage was used for the visuals of the truck (Maybe? I don't know). I was only majorly wrong about one thing. The onscreen threat that this ominous scenario was "To be continued" was no joke. There WAS a follow-up ad. And this is where it all gets bitterly ironic -  it was one that I'd been well-familiar with for all these years. In fact, I'd already covered it in this very series all the way back in 2020, not realising there was ever a connection. I've termed this the 52nd Horrifying Advertising Animal, but that's something of a cheat. This is really a revisit of the 27th.

Remember this guy?

That's right. This flat-out nightmare of an ad, which at the time I had registered as a baffling one-off, transpires to have been a prelude to the equally nightmarish (but marginally more comprehensible, at least from the standpoint of it existing to sell me a product) ad for Sonic the Hedgehog 2, in which Steven O'Donnell fiddles with an unresponsive hedgehog in a fruitless attempt to revive it. It was all a teaser, to account for how the hedgehog got so unresponsive in the first place. The animal seen cowering in terror at the approaching truck was none other than the same hedgehog puppet we later saw with a coroner's tag on its toe and in the questionable care of O'Donnell. The answer was right under my nose all along. I'd just never put it together. Seriously now, was I supposed to? Aside from the fact that they feature the same spaghetti western leitmotif, there's not a lot to overtly connect the two ads. The hedgehog puppet doesn't look amazingly recognisable in its stationary form, and the follow-up doesn't incorporate any flashback material, at least not in any airing that I saw. I surely can't have been the only person confused by this?

Here's a far pettier nitpick of the ad's execution. The vehicle in question looks like an American-style truck (with the elongated snoot) and the landscape it's hurtling down very much like an American desert. It even sounds, to my ears, like the hedgehog is saying "Uh-oh!" with a discernible American accent. Which is flawed, because hedgehogs aren't found in the wilds of America (judging by its colouration, this is meant to be a European hedgehog and not an African pygmy hedgehog, which is the kind you can keep as a pet). If you'd asked me to guess what type of animal it was intended to be from the teaser alone, I'd have ventured armadillo. (I'd also remembered the puppet as having more cat-like features, another factor that evidently kept me from connecting the necessary dots.) The hedgehog is also implied, in the follow-up ad, to have ended up in some twisted parallel universe version of St Tiggywinkle Hospital in Aylesbury, UK, so something strange is definitely going on with the campaign's sense of geography. Actually, I'd wager that the truck and the desert highway in the teaser were intended as a homage to the movie Duel - which does have the added effect of making it seem as though the truck is assaulting the hedgehog on purpose, the honk of its horn resonating as a murderous battle cry. The spaghetti western music likewise reinforces the sense of a deliberate showdown between these two blatantly mismatched forces. The poor hedgehog didn't stand a chance.

The upload I have to thank for getting me reacquainted with this childhood nightmare was not one of the random advertising blocks I've been trawling through for years, but an obscure educational VHS titled Sega Invades Your Schoolwork, which was apparently intended to be shown to school kids as a teaching tool on the value of marketing. They included both hedgehog ads, as examples of how Sega's advertising proved that they were better than the competition, and I've now got the answers I've been seeking all these years. As I say, though, they weren't exactly the answers I was hoping for. I refer you back to what I said in my "Who Shot Mr Burns?" review about how "that whole scenario still lies suspended in my head, with no clarity as to the fate of that plastic-eyed critter or what the heck I was even watching." It is undeniably a weight off my mind having closure on the latter (since the question was only going to chew away at my sanity the longer it went unaddressed). With regard to the former, I think I actually preferred living in blissful ignorance. Knowing the scenario didn't end well for the imperilled critter really is a massive bummer. I had always assumed that if the cliffhanger had been picked up again, it would have found some way to escape the incoming vehicle. The heinous truth could only sour my elation in having untangled this longstanding mystery. Do you understand how deflating this is? I located my white whale and it took a big salivary bite out of me.

I'd already considered the chief installment ,with O'Donnell prodding the inert hedgehog, to be disturbing enough on its own merits, but now that I've put the whole narrative together this is easily one of the most singularly, purely horrifying ad campaigns I've personally come across. If I were tasked with picking out the advertising animal I'd rate as the most purely horrifying, I would, without question, go for Kevin the Levi jeans hamster (with the irony that I did not technically cover Kevin as part of the Horrifying Advertising Animal retrospective, since I wrote about him before it occurred to me that I could spin a whole series from the notion - although you can consider him a proto Horrifying Advertising Animal, along with the Coca-Cola swimming elephant and the bizarre menagerie in that Roysters crisp ad). The only detail that makes the Sega campaign slightly more palatable is that, unlike the Levi's ad, which used a live hamster and a stuffed one according to the needs of the story, they never used a real animal at any point. The doomed hedgehog is clearly always a latex imposter (its little lifeless eyes are still enough to rupture your heart, however). But it's still an amazingly grim and mean-spirited premise through which to sell a video game that was, at the end of the day, supposed to be a bit of innocent diversion. For context, it was part of a wider "Sega TV" campaign, which was renowned for taking a weird and edgy approach to hawking the Sega Mega Drive to UK audiences. The release of Ecco The Dolphin, for example, was teased with a faux commercial for "Ecco" washing powder (what, they didn't want to keep the theme going and do a teaser with a dolphin puppet struggling in a tuna net?). On those terms, the sheer WTF-ness of the Sonic campaign at least fits in perfectly with the broader brand. But I do find it a bit astounding that nobody influential enough within Sega's UK arm apparently remarked, "The dead hedgehog? Bloody hell, don't you think that's a bit much?" (as opposed having a giant image of said dead hedgehog plastered across their headquarters at the time of the game's release - I mean, seriously? And they had a miniature Sonic making the peace sign in the corner as if he wouldn't be deeply mortified by this mockery of his species). Sonic The Hedgehog is supposed to be a kid-friendly franchise, after all. Did kids really want to have it sold to them by having a dead hedgehog shoved in their faces? Did adults, for that matter?

I've reflected on it, and I've come to the bleak conclusion that Britain must have gone through a cultural fascination with dead hedgehogs in the 1980s that trickled over into the early 90s. After all, BBC sketch show Not The Nine O'Clock News very notoriously incorporated a sketch where a hedgehog was gruesomely crushed by the wheels of a truck, followed by a faux apology in which they clarified that the hedgehog was stuffed, and then suggested that responsibility for promoting hedgehog abuse ultimately lay with the hedgehog taxidermists, whoever they were. This was such a defining example of NTNON humor that they adopted a dead hedgehog as their go-to mascot and had it brazenly centred on the covers of their LP releases, most memorably between slices of bread and cheese as a hedgehog sandwich (I should emphasise that this was a real hedgehog, in their case, not a puppet). Pictures of dead hedgehogs sold records in the 1980s, apparently. So perhaps it wasn't such a huge leap to suppose they might sell video games too. We can trace this campaign to the release of Sonic The Hedgehog 2 in November 1992; thus, it represented the tail-end of the UK's sordid love affair with hedgehog misfortune. What was coming in 1993, however, was to change zeitgeist forever. The Animals of Farthing Wood was set to take the UK by storm, and it too featured a critical scene in which a couple of hedgehogs were crushed beneath the wheels of a hulking great lorry. On this occasion, the occurrence was presented as a tragedy, a harrowing consequence of humankind's encroachment upon and indifference toward the natural world, and the nation was left collectively traumatised by what they saw. After that, we couldn't go back. To quote Farthing Wood's own Fox, there was nothing to go back for.

Now that I've got my closure on this matter, I can't tell you how eager I am to move on from it. I do need a new advertising white whale, however. How about the cat food ad where the guy eats his cat's food (and loves it), mistaking it for leftover stew his girlfriend prepared? I only remember seeing it once, but you're not going to convince me that I dreamed it.