The Ultimate Penny Kid Appreciation Post (aka My Bloodlines Go A Long Way)

 

The summer of 2025 was made infinitely more palatable for the presence of a snot-nosed little gremlin who helped unleash a nightmare at 600 feet and firmly won my heart in the process. And all he did was throw a coin at an inopportune moment, race down a flight of stairs, knocking aside a grown man on the way, and finally get flattened by a falling piano. Such is the morbid lot of a character in a Final Destination premonition. That's my boy Alfred the Penny Kid. Lived in splendour, died in chaos. 

What stayed with me most about Final Destination Bloodlines were the characters. Sure, like everyone else who goes to see a Final Destination installment I was primarily there for the gruesomely creative kills, but the characters are what made the experience. Having a bunch of figures we can feel genuinely invested in before their inevitable reduction to human passata is what elevates macabre pleasure into super macabre pleasure. We had some grisly kicks and we made (then lost) a few friends on the way. Of the central cast, I know that everybody loves Richard Harmon's Erik (it seems like they pulled out every last stop to make him the fan favourite), and Owen Patrick Joyner's Bobby (a jock who's a soft-hearted turtle daddy is an appealing combination), but the player who particularly stood out to me was Rya Kihlstedt as Darlene (to the extent that I'm actually kind of regretting how I bad mouthed Home Alone 3 at the end of my review of Bushwhacked last year). Nonetheless, for as much fun as it was following Stefani's family and their fight to stay a part of this mortal coil while on the big D's hit list, for me their story never quite scaled the same glorious heights as the movie's prologue, in which we bore witness to the messy downfall of one of the most hubristic buildings known to Man. The Skyview's disintegration was quite the lurid spectacle, as grand and as ghastly an opening disaster as this franchise has ever executed, but once again it was the characters who really stuck with you. Yes, even the minor ones who were just there to be fodder for the crumbling rubble. They too were such a colourful and distinctive bunch - not least the older and bolder of the two children unfortunate enough to be caught up in the misadventure. This kid, portrayed by Noah Bromley, had extremely minimal screentime all told, but as far as I'm concerned he's the Bloodlines MVP. We do know the character's real name (Alfred Milano), for reasons I'll get into later on, but the film's closing credits have him filed under the affectionate moniker "Sky View Penny Kid". "Penny Kid" is how directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky also refer to him in the Blu-Ray commentary, so that's the name I'll be predominantly using here. (Also, if you haven't seen Final Destination Bloodlines, know that there will be spoilers.)

I love the Penny Kid (to death), and I dug every scant second he spent on screen. But I get the impression that I'm something of an anomaly in that regard, and it vexes me so. In the aftermath of Bloodlines' release, I was a little taken back by how much animosity I saw for this child on certain online venues. I mean, I understand it to a point. Not everyone's going to feel so warmly-disposed toward a character who played such a vital role in a chain reaction that doomed numerous people. It was an accident, but one born of churlish disregard. Compared to the other child (Jayden Oniah) who shows up in the Skyview and sits there innocently toying with a model train (innocently, but unwittingly foreshadowing how this whole story will eventually end), Penny Kid is really not in the business of endearing himself to onlookers with any winsome wholesomeness. Rather, he represents the darker side of childhood, the amorality mixed with the uninhibited idle energy and the resentment of adult authority. He doesn't set out to cause serious harm, but he's decidedly not an innocent. He immediately feels out of place amid all those unwary adults gathered at the venue, no matter how dressed up to the nines he is. Prologue protagonist Iris (Brec Bassinger), by far the most perceptive visitor at the Skyview, seems unnerved by him the instant she lays eyes on him - although it might not be the Penny Kid per se that unsettles her so much as the weapon of mass destruction he wields and insists on taking all the way to the top of the tower. In either case, there is a certain delectable irony in having the most insidious person on the scene the one we would ordinarily be inclined to perceive as the most harmless, as this franchise already understands. You might recall how, in Final Destination 2, Kimberly Corman was taunted by a child in an adjacent car who bashed two toy vehicles together with an eerie smile on his face that seemed to knowingly anticipate the impending pile-up. But Penny is the most joyously extreme example to date. (Here there is an additional significance to having our chilling omen of what's ahead be a child, which becomes more apparent by the end of the film.)

Penny Kid is not a character designed to procure sympathy. But he gets it from me anyway.

So what exactly is the kid's role in the prologue? He's present at the grand opening of the Skyview (a swanky observation tower/restaurant clearly modelled on the Seattle Space Needle) in 1968, and is first seen attempting to steal coins from the fountain at the bottom. A security guard catches him in the act and advises him that his sticky fingers will bring bad luck; Penny apologises, but keeps the change he's already pocketed. Shortly after, he boards the elevator and ascends to the top of the tower, alongside Iris and her partner Paul, played by Max Lloyd-Jones. (It should be noted that the elevator sequence is the only point in the prologue where Penny Kid is accompanied by his parents, a detail it's strangely easy to miss; at every other time we see him, he's been left unsupervised.) Iris, whose anxieties have been increasing the further she ventures into the building, is particularly ill at ease inside the elevator, which is visibly over capacity. Her reservations are not allayed by the commentary given by the elevator operator (Travis Turner), who cheerfully describes how construction of the Skyview was rushed to have it ready five months ahead of schedule (Iris: "Is that a good thing?"). Penny Kid picks up on Iris's fearfulness and teases her by jumping on the elevator floor. He's later seen on the observation deck where Paul proposes to Iris, pulling out the coins he collected earlier and releasing them down the side of the tower. As he prepares to throw the last of his coins, a penny, he's accosted by yet another security guard, who warns him that a penny thrown from a tower could turn into a lethal weapon. Penny Kid gives an ostensibly polite and compliant response, but calls the guard a "fat ass" under his breath and throws the coin anyway when his back is turned; Iris sees this and clearly has her misgivings, but turns a blind eye and follows her new fiance to the dancefloor for what they assume will be a night of celebration. Alas, the shoddily-constructed tower just wasn't made to withstand so many partygoers jumping up and down to Isley Brothers tunes, and eventually gives way. As for the dreaded penny, instead of falling to the ground and potentially getting embedded in someone's skull, it gets sucked into the building's ventilation system, eventually colliding with a pipe and causing a gas leak. One thing leads to another, a panicked guest gets set on fire from contact with a kitchen pan in the ensuing commotion, they get too close to the gas leak, then kaboom. Now the building's on fire, on top of everything else. As the guests make a mad dash for the stairway, Penny Kid climbs down from the observation deck and asserts his right to go first by means of the Birkenhead drill. Unfortunately, the stairs prove just as shoddy as everything else in the building, for as the stampede of feet starts to trample down them, they also give way, causing everyone upon them to fall to their deaths...all except the Penny Kid, who has the advantage of being both lighter than everyone else and at the front of the procession. He keeps going, and is eventually able to get out of the tower unharmed. Whereupon he's crushed by a piano falling from the flaming wreckage above and turned into, well, human passata. Atop that very piano was the penny he'd thrown earlier; its gruesome work accomplished, it slides back down into the fountain and resumes its place within the waters.

Of course, that's only the premonition, and it doesn't come to be outside of the head of visionary Iris, who proves a worthy adversary for Death. With her foresight and resourcefulness she's able to avert the disaster completely, first by getting hold of that infernal penny, then by covering the open flames in the kitchen area and finally by warning everyone that the building is disintegrating beneath their feet. They heed her words and are all able to go home safely that night. But if you've seen any of the prior installments, you already know how it goes. Death returns for Round 2, and works its way through its earmarked victims in the order in which they were originally intended to die. The twist in the case of Bloodlines is that we're not following the immediate survivors of the opening premonition, but the descendents of Iris and Paul. The former so excelled at saving lives that Death was faced with an unusually protracted list that took decades to work through, giving numerous survivors time to reproduce before their number came up. As per Death's procedures, any further descendents of unintended survivors are automatically added to the list, as they should never have existed in the first place. (This confused some viewers, who recalled that in Final Destination 2 it was put forth that the birthing of new life could have the opposite effect and invalidate a list entirely, but this was never actually confirmed.)

An anecdote I've seen repeated a lot from different commentators discussing Bloodlines is that the audience in their theatre cheered when Penny Kid met his demise beneath the piano. The thought of an entire auditorium of people cheering the pulverising of a child, even an unruly one, strikes me as a little harsh, but I get it. It was designed to be an uproarious moment (Stein and Lipovsky observe on the commentary that this is the moment that's gotten the "biggest reaction" in the screenings they've attended), in that it plays like something out of a live action cartoon. You can't quite believe your eyes the first time you see it - it's nasty, it's gleeful and of course it took serious balls (keep in mind that Tim Carpenter from Final Destination 2 was reportedly written as a much younger character, but aged up because nobody at the time wanted to involve kids in these splatter fests. I guess we as a society have moved on since then). It obviously works as a karmic death, since Penny is effectively done in by the very coin that he threw, which takes a prolonged time to work its way down, setting the piano into motion and finally crashing to the bottom just as he's leaving the building. I'm not going to shame you if you found his death funny, because on some level, I did too. I have, however, read a lot of reactions to Penny Kid that make me bristle. The most distasteful are along the lines of people claiming that they would punch Noah Bromley if they saw him walking down the street. I know it's just internet bravado speaking and most people probably wouldn't, but there's something most unsavoury about threatening to do physical harm to an actor because you don't like something their character did that becomes a thousand times worse when the actor in question is a child. Then there are those who'll suggest that he's the ancestor of some other detested character like Hunt or Carter. Not tsundere Carter from the original film. The bad, racist Carter from The Final Destination. How...dare you? (Also objectively false.) I've gotta say that I am perturbed by the number of people who are willing to lump him in with the likes of Carter, Isaac, Frankie, etc, as if being an obnoxious child is really on the same level as being a racist or a sex offender. Some folks will even go a step further and claim that he's the villain of the entire franchise, at which point I can practically feel the fissure spreading across my brain.

Hence why I feel obligated to make a post in which I outline why I love Penny Kid, what makes him such a fun and fascinating character, and why I think that much of the animosity he receives is just plain overblown. If I don't stick up for this littlest of guys, then I'm sensing nobody will.

The notion that Penny Kid is somehow the villain of the franchise seems to stem from two misconceptions - a) that Penny Kid is responsible for the entire Skyview disaster and b) that the other disasters in the preceding films are all connected to what went on at the Skyview. Neither is correct. Penny Kid didn't cause the entire disaster, as anyone who watched Bloodlines ought to know. The floor was already cracking before the chain reaction with the coin got underway. Because the tower itself was total shit, despite its beguilingly elegant appearance, and all the rushed construction and endless cut corners meant that it was unable to withstand anything too out of hand or unexpected. Penny Kid might have represented that element of wild unpredictability getting into the system, but he didn't corrupt said system so much as expose the terrible flaws that were already there. One way or another, that building was going down, and the hubris and irresponsibility of the officials behind it were ultimately more to blame than the disobedience of a child. He's also not responsible for the occurrences in the preceding films, with Lipovsky confirming that the Skyview disaster was not intended as an "origin story" for any of the other scenarios in the Final Destination series (it clears up much of the mystery surrounding a certain recurring character, but that's it). I'm not sure why people should be so convinced that Iris's premonition of '68 and her subsequent cheating of Death was necessarily the first time that anything like this had ever happened in all of human history? Does it have anything to do with the trailer, which invited us to "Witness the birth of Death"? All marketing bluster. I recall that, prior to the film's release, there was speculation that all of the visionaries from the previous entries would be descendants or relatives of Iris, and that the ability to have premonitions was genetic, but that turned out to be bogus. We still don't know where the premonitions come from.

Another point I'll make in Penny's defence is that there was, in my eyes, a grown adult in the disaster who behaved so much more odiously than him. The Maître d' (Bernard Cuffling) shoved Iris like a thug and doomed everyone inside the elevator. Whatever you might think of Penny, he has an intrinsic excuse in that he's only a child, but what's this guy's explanation? Yet he seems to have gotten off scot-free, at least in terms of online vitriol (in the film itself he gets messily bisected by the falling elevator). Don't call that justice.

It's important to establish that, while I've described him above as a chilling omen, Penny Kid is not The Omen. He isn't like Damien the Devil's spawn.^[1] There is nothing evil or supernaturally bad about him. Nor is he a scheming sociopath along the lines of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone or The Good Son (you can take your pick). What he DOES remind me of, in the best possible way, are the bratty children from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. You know how partial I am to those bad nuts. Like them, he's a caricature of childhood vices, exaggerated for effect but based on the honest observation that children aren't always doe-eyed cherubs who behave as adults desire. Often they are chaotic and lacking in boundaries. We've noted that Penny Kid seems eerily out of place at the adult party, but there's a way of looking at it that might even make him, if not quite sympathetic, then at least comprehensible. My guess is that he likely didn't want to be at the Skyview that evening. The celebration wasn't a family event, and it didn't exactly seem like a fun place for a child to hang out. The only other child present was a few years younger than him and tucked away at the back, so probably wouldn't be viable company. Penny was bored and frustrated, and decided to amuse himself by throwing coins from the tower. That that he's so isolated from others his age and forced awkwardly into an adult milieu marks him out as someone whose innocence has been corrupted too soon, something best exemplified in his use of adult language to combat the grown-ups he butts head with. Which also happens to be Penny's funniest trait - for me, his most uproarious moment came not in being crushed by a piano, but in his shocked reaction to Iris when last we see him, as she physically intervenes by prising the penny from his grasp, and he cries out, "WHAT the FUCK is WRONG with YOU?", with the quirkiest intonation. That line, and that delivery, is a great part of why the character holds such a special place in my heart. Stein and Lipovsky loved it too. I was delighted when they stopped their commentary just to listen to it, before confirming that the line in question was improvised by Bromley. That kid did a fabulous job in the role, and I'll look forward to seeing if he pops up anywhere else.

Penny is a wonderful throwback to the likes of Augustus, Veruca, Violet and Mike, right down to the fact that his childish rebelliousness ultimately brings to him to a sticky end. The bad nuts don't actually die in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (except maybe in the stage musical), but they do receive gruesome comeuppances that, in most cases, entail some grotesque form of damage being dealt to their bodies, a concept Bloodlines takes to its extreme, in having Penny's body be wrecked beyond recognition. His story is a cautionary one that works on the same brutally visceral level as Roald Dahl's novel, in being all about consequences and the misfortune you'll potentially bring on yourself by venturing beyond your limits and not adhering to adult authority. Dahl's novel followed a fairytale logic, in which a wayward child might be transformed into a blueberry and dejuiced back to their original state (but for the detail of remaining blue). Bloodlines follows quite a different logic, that of the urban legend. The warning Penny is given by the second security guard, that he could kill someone by throwing a penny, is an old wives' tale. Throwing a penny from a tower is still an inconsiderate thing to do, because if it hit someone it would certainly hurt them, but the part about it plunging directly into their skull has no basis in fact. It's just something people tell us will happen, and might even have happened to an acquaintance of one of their own acquaintances, and which we too pass on, in spite of our healthy scepticism, because the narrative of such a small and childish act reaping such terrible consequences is too irresistible not to. Bloodlines takes the idea to demented new heights, so not only does Penny Kid beget his own demise by throwing the penny, it causes a whole lot of additional, gleefully improbable damage on its downward trajectory, sending an already nightmarish situation hurtling out of the frying pan and (literally) into the fire. His story is a lesson in the pitfalls of pushing back against authority; despite having assimilated too much of that adult culture for his own good, Penny really seems to dislike his elders. At best, he feigns politeness with the security guards, but insults one of them behind his back. He shoots Iris a standoffish glare as she enters the elevator and goes on to tease her. The saddest observation to be made about him is that he doesn't seem to have a particularly strong bond with his parents. Not only is he seen alone in most of his appearances, during the attempted evacuation he does not try to reunite with them. (It's also true that he ran off after the stairs gave way, grinning with elation at his own seeming good fortune, but was there anything he could actually have done to have assisted those on the other side of the gap?)

The spectre of the urban legend haunts Bloodlines in a broader sense still. Perhaps inevitably in a series that's all about mundane situations going horribly wrong, the various mishaps depicted feel suggestive of this brand of folklore, the kind that speaks to the anxieties of the modern world, offering unsettling reminders of our mortality and innumerable vulnerabilities, even when surrounded by technologies and creature comforts, and functioning as warnings against deviant behaviours and misplaced trust alike. The sequence where Iris and Paul are invited to join the overloaded elevator, on the operator's foolhardy insistence that there is still sufficient room, has eerie, seemingly deliberate echoes of another old legend, as recounted by Bennett Cerf in the 1944 publication Famous Ghost Stories, where a woman interprets a dream as a warning not to enter an elevator that subsequently breaks and falls. There are countless urban legends concerning food and beverage contamination - the glass shard in the lemonade ice is not a variation I'm sure I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's out there. Finally, there's the film's epilogue, in which yet another hoary myth is evoked involving the childish misuse of pennies - in this case, the possibility that a coin placed on a railway track could cause a train to derail - in an obvious echo of Penny Kid's earlier misadventure.

Though before we touch on that we should shed light on the fate of Penny Kid. We know that his being crushed by a falling piano didn't actually come to pass, thanks to Iris's interventions, but after the flashback sequence, by which the older Iris (Gabrielle Rose) recounts how she confiscated his penny, he isn't seen again. I'll admit that this was contrary to my expectations when I first watched Bloodlines; then, I could have sworn that they were setting the youngster up to be of greater significance later down the line. Given that he'd died so late in the premonition, for a while there I was fully anticipating seeing Penny show up again in the present as an adult. When it was established that Death was currently up to Iris, my heart sank because I knew that, as per the rules of this franchise, he'd already have to be dead. Since I had so much investment in the character, I was really curious to know how he met his demise for real and what kind of life he'd led in his borrowed time. Fortunately, the answer to that is included within the finer details of the film, as an Easter egg for those eagle-eyed enough to spot it. Among the documents that Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) inherits from Iris is a timeline made up of newspaper clippings detailing all of the fates of the Skyview survivors and their descendants. If you study it closely, you can make out the various headlines and stories, and it's pretty fucking obvious which one is supposed to be Penny Kid. He's this guy, Alfred Milano.

 

When the above image first started circulating online, there was some preliminary debate about which post-it note alluded to him - whether he was Alfred Milano or Kirby Dylan, and if he had a daughter named Francesca or no descendants at all. Since then, it's been accepted that the way the post-its align with the wider timeline would appear to identify him as Alfred. In addition, Francesca's associated clipping indicates that she was killed in a gas leak, which ties in with how her father's actions were once fated to inadvertently trigger such a calamity. My boy Penny, though? It seems that he was run over by a piano-moving truck whilst trying to make off with someone's wallet. If there's a crumb of comfort to be extracted from this, it's in the likelihood that he would presumably have died a mercifully quick death, as he did in Iris's vision. I'd imagine it would have been a lot like Terry's in the original Final Destination. And he died doing what he loved - gallivanting with ill-gotten change.

Was I disappointed that he never changed his ways and progressed from being a pouty brat to a petty criminal? Maybe...for about ten seconds. The truth is that it all makes perfect sense. He was never going to change because of the sheer futility of doing so. Iris might have thwarted Death's plans at the Skyview, but the people within remained bound by the fate already chosen for them, and however much borrowed time Iris (and their procreating urges) had secured them, there's a level on which they all remained permanently mired in that moment from 1968. The question of how much control we have over our own destinies is a particularly intrinsic one to Final Destination, where characters are traditionally called to match their supposed free will against forces much greater than themselves, and it's a point that Bloodlines emphasises through the recurring motif of circles. As Stein and Lipovsky facetiously put it on the commentary, "Circles kill". The Skyview is absolutely plagued by the little round devils. There is, yes, the penny, but the building itself also assumes a circular shape when viewed from above. The prophetic Johnny Cash tune heard playing on the radio as Paul and Iris approach the tower laments not simply of falling into fire but into a burning RING of fire. There's the ring Paul offers to Iris when he proposes to her, a classic symbol of eternity. And of course Iris's own name, alluding to the circles in her eyes, which foresee the impending destruction before it happens. Circles kill because they symbolise the inevitability of fate, for whatever move you make will eventually take you right back to where you started (something Stefani discovers in the film's epilogue, when she finds herself reliving various details from Iris's prologue experience). It is the bottom line on why I can't really hold any of what happened at the Skyview against Penny Kid - Death had decided that this particular group of mortals' time had come, and one way or another it was going to make it happen. The penny IS fate (ie: Death), and it knew exactly where it needed to be. There was no transcending the path already ordained, however prolonged. In Penny Kid's case, he never overcame his magpie tendency to pilfer shiny change, and continually found himself pushing up against authority, which shifted from meddling elders to law enforcement (the discernable details in his associated article would indicate he was a repeat offender). His desperation to avoid the police is what caused him make a fatal error and blunder into the path of that truck. And, once again, he died under a piano, even if it wasn't the piano per se that killed him. Lived in splendour, died in chaos.

Admittedly, not everything about it adds up. The timeline indicates that he perished some time in the early 1980s, but considering that he died so late in the premonition I would have expected him to have stuck it out at least a decade or so longer. (I'll concede that while he was the third-to-last character we saw die onscreen, ahead of Iris and JB, he wasn't necessary the third-to-last to die overall - there were a bunch of falling people who may have yet to hit the ground at the precise moment the piano squashed him.) A bigger problem is the visual inconsistency regarding his age. We don't know exactly how old Penny Kid was back in 1968, but he clearly can't have been much over 10, meaning that if he'd died in the early 80s, he'd have been in his mid-20s at the time. Yet that age doesn't align with the pictured individual, who looks a lot closer to his mid/late 30s - which is roughly the age bracket I'd have anticipated Penny Kid making it to before Death got round to him, based on the premonition. A great deal of care and attention evidently went into the construction of that timeline, and I look forward to combing through with greater scrutiny in the future and uncovering further macabre treasures, but there might have been the odd bit of oversight here and there. If he did die in his 20s, then the really tragic implication is that Francesca must have been a particularly young age when she lost her father, and soon after her own life. We have only speculation to go on where she's concerned, but it's noteworthy that she had her father's family name, implying that he was either married to her mother or in a stable relationship with her. The point is, he found someone who liked him, so there. Although it's too bad that her involvement with him ultimately landed her with two very traumatic losses.

 

By the time we get onto Stefani's story, Penny Kid and his bloodline may be long extinguished, but there's a sense in which he still lives on. He has a counterpart in the present. Enter the Penny Lady (Ethel Pitchford). She's first seen during the hospital sequence, where she briefly interacts with Erik, before reappearing and playing a more significant role just as the picture is tying up. After confiscating the penny from Penny Kid, Iris had kept it for all these years, taped up in her morbid scrapbook where it could cause no harm; it's transferred to Stefani's possession, but "escapes" outside the hospital, whereupon Penny Lady finds it and picks it up. The penny has unfinished business, and Penny Lady has arrived to help complete what Penny Kid helped to start. She and Penny Kid are, in many deceptive respects, polar opposites. Significantly, one is a child while the other is a senior, indicating the beginning and the end of the line. One is male and one is female. One's a rapscallion, the other seems utterly guileless. But they are nevertheless soulmates - two sides of the same coin, if you will. They share that same magpie attraction to shiny pennies, and they bookend the narrative in where that attraction ultimately leads them. Of note, if Penny Kid had lived, he would be in his 60s by now, and I'm guessing that's the age bracket she's in. (Here's a crazy idea, but could she even be Penny Kid's aforementioned widow? Probably not, but I'm toying with making it my headcanon until proven otherwise.) And, in both cases, the character's involvement evokes a classic piece of modern folklore pertaining to pennies. Unlike her younger counterpart, Penny Lady doesn't purposely discard the coin upon the railway tracks; rather, she absent-mindedly releases it while engaged in the most wholesome act of of purchasing cookies from a children's bake sale. It finds its way down to the tracks, as it was always wont to do, and derails a train, spelling disaster for Iris's remaining bloodline. In practice, Penny Lady's sweet-tempered obliviousness proves as lethal as Penny Kid's churlish deviancy; in the landscape of urban myth, both are equally inviting of misfortune. Their mutual mistake was in assuming that they had mastery of the penny, by holding it in their hands, when in actuality they were merely pawns in the hands of Fate.

There is a slight twist, however, in that, unlike her young counterpart, Penny Lady does not get caught up in the disaster she helps unleash. There's been some debate among fans as to whether anyone besides Stefani or Charlie (Teo Briones) was killed by the runaway train (we see houses get demolished, but we can't say for certain that anyone was in them at the time), but as the train derails, it goes in the opposite direction to where Penny Lady was lurking, so we've no reason to believe that she was affected. When Erik had encountered her earlier in the hospital, he was sizing her up (presumably none too seriously) as a potential murder victim whose remaining lifespan could be stolen, on the advice of Bludworth (Tony Todd - RIP), and asked her if she had much time left. "I think so..." she'd replied, visibly rattled by the question (as you would be). Though she plays into the hands of fate, Penny Lady noticeably does not tempt it for herself. Her presence might signify the end of this particular (blood)line, but as we've established, fate's preferred form is not a line, but a circle, and it will keep renewing itself over and over. Penny Lady is not yet done, just as fate is not yet done. There is one last name to be crossed off Death's list in the form of Bludworth (although that will have to be resolved off-screen, for obvious reasons), but after him there will still be plenty more macabre stories left to tell. The same chaotic cycle of lives being brought into the world only to be helplessly snuffed out will continue, and there's not a whole lot to be done about it, other than what Bludworth finally suggested, which is to make the most of whatever comes in between. It's a point the film accentuates by showing the penny still in motion as the closing credits play, rolling alongside items from Iris's collage, with it still to be determined (at least from our perspective) where it will land next on its deadly journey. Penny Kid's clipping is featured in this closing montage, although not as one of the stories seen in close-up.

In a manner of speaking, Penny Kid lives. I mean, sort of. He himself is obviously dead, but his spiritual successor lives on, and that's good enough for me.

[1]  Not that I don't have my share of sympathy for Damien too, but we'll save that discussion for another day.

$pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)

For this one review, I guess I should forgo my usual practice of complementing the official Simpsons episode titles with an awkward alternate title of my own. On this occasion, it feels as though the actual title already did the job for me, and is consequently enough of a mouthful without me adding to it. Instead, let's consider what episode 1F08, which first aired on December 13 1993 as part of the show's fifth season, gains through its quirk of boasting two proposed titles, one concise, the other more deliberately unwieldy. "$pringfield", with the "S" stylised in a manner that I presume was intended to pay homage to the 1978 Michael Mann-created private detective series Vega$, is the less interesting of the two, although it neatly establishes that a) the episode is going to be more focussed on the character of the town at large and not specifically the Simpsons, and b) for those who get the reference, there is going to be a strong Las Vegas theming. It should have sufficed as a title on its own, yet they insisted on adding that extra layer, transmuting it into a parody of Dr Strangelove (or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb), for reasons that feel less inexplicable once you've absorbed the implications. You've got to love the subtlety with which legalised gambling is equated with the atomic bomb, with the implicit suggestion that the outcomes of embracing it might be similarly apocalyptic. The double title becomes a sly joke in itself, in which the glitz and decadence promised by that alluring dollar sign is counterbalanced by the threat of where this could potentially all be headed. The consequences of Springfield legalising gambling and erecting a glamorous casino upon its waterfront do indeed prove nigh-apocalyptic, for it ends up attacking the most fundamental tie that binds, jeopardising the Simpson unit by prompting Marge to turn her back on her responsibilities. We have another scenario in which Marge's devotions to her family are tested by the arrival of a seductive new presence, one that has no corporeality but does eventually gain a name, thanks to Homer: Gamblor, the neon-clawed entity who wills that Marge's fingers are never far from the slot machine lever.

On that note, we might also want to consider to whom the "I" in the secondary title actually refers. In the case of the Stanley Kubrick film it's homaging, it was intended to sound humorously reminiscent of the titling conventions of self-help manuals, and perhaps there is no deeper significance here. It would, nonetheless, be a natural assumption to suppose that it refers to Marge, who succumbs the hardest to gambling fever despite her strong set of established values, yet it doesn't quite match with how her arc plays out. For one, Marge does not seem particularly worried about the introduction of gambling to Springfield - at the town meeting where the motion is approved, she shocks everyone by offering no opposition (a callback to the events of the previous season's "Marge vs. The Monorail", in which she was the lone opponent of an idea that had everyone else unreasonably excited). It would likewise be a stretch to suggest that Marge ever grows to "love" legalised gambling - the really chilling thing about how her gambling addiction is depicted is that it doesn't seem to bring her much in the way of exhilaration. We see only momentary flickers of a buzz - she gives a joyful little murmur when she first uses the slot machine on a whim and scores some extra change, and later reports with pride to Homer that she won sixty dollars in a single night. But, for the most part, Gamblor ensnares her by making her totally impassive, shutting down her awareness of anything unfolding around her and cancelling out whatever drive or emotion she might have outside of the mindless compulsion to keep pulling at that lever ad infinitum.

Marge being occupied elsewhere, for whatever reason, leaving the rest of the family to come apart at the seams without the benefit of her emotional adhesive was by now a familiar Simpsons scenario, one that we'd seen play out on at least three prior occasions. "$pringfield" might honestly be the most down to earth variation we'd had since "Life on The Fast Lane" - an observation that frankly seems strange to make about an episode that is, in most other regards, an absolute fever dream. But if we focus strictly on what happens within the Marge story, it is a lot less outlandish than the competition. "Homer Alone" eventually transforms into rather an unlikely little caper, with Maggie slipping from Homer's oversight and going for a wander downtown, while "Marge in Chains" doesn't treat the matter anywhere near as seriously as it should (and has the problem of running out of time before anything truly unique can be done with it). Notably, "$pringfield" was written by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who had previously penned the latter episode, and feels like a second, more sincere attempt at getting the formula right. The impact on the family is fairly low-key, with dishes going unwashed and food supplies depleting. In "Life on The Fast Lane", Homer was at least capable of feeding the family in Marge's absence by ordering take-out, a survival skill that seems to have waned here - he becomes willing to confront his family's problem only after a failed attempt to subsist on a diet of frozen pie crusts, Tom Collins mix and cloves. The stakes here are lower than those of "Life on The Fast Lane" (there's no hint that Marge's gambling addiction might imperil her marriage to Homer) but still feel as real and as startling. Marge had promised to help Lisa make a costume for her school's upcoming geography pageant, at which she's planning to represent the state of Florida, but the clock is ticking, and as Marge gets increasingly lured in by Gamblor's lustre, it becomes all but inevitable that she will let her daughter down. This is an outcome practically unheard of in Simpsons lore, in which the one person on whom Lisa (or anybody) can surely always depend is Marge.

 

It is, admittedly, a very barebones treatment of the scenario, sharp and punchy enough to work as the emotional nexus to which the episode keeps returning, but not developed into anything more substantial than a synopsis. Marge promises she'll spend less time at the casino, only to swiftly break that promise, prompting Homer to eventually intervene, and that's about it. The Simpsons' story isn't given a whole lot of room to grow because there is so much else going on the episode (and yet so little), which has a unique conundrum in that Oakley and Weinstein's script can't sit still for a minute. In spite of its deceptively familiar set-up, "$pringfield" is a deeply confounding experience, emerging as not only one of the strangest entries of Season 5 (a season that was unafraid to go to some pretty weird places), but the classic era as a whole. For better or for worse, there isn't another Simpsons episode quite like it. Tonally, it feels so out of place within the series, and I've spent a long time puzzling over that, trying to put my finger on exactly what makes it such an oddity. Some years back, I wrote a piece entitled "The World's Strangest and Most Unsettling Simpsons Endings", where I described it as the Simpsons episode to most closely resemble an episode of The Critic. Which was obviously enormously silly of me. The Simpsons episode that most resembles The Critic is very blatantly going to be one overseen by Al Jean and Mike Reiss - y'know, the actual creators of The Critic ("Marge Gets A Job" would, in all seriousness, be a much better contender for that title). What I was getting at is that "$pringfield" has an extremely threadbare story held together by a steady stream of random and disconnected jokes, though in truth I think the jokes in "$pringfield" are even more random and disconnected than you would expect to find in your typical Critic. As Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood observe in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, it all amounts to "a series of bizarre moments rather than a story". What we get is a rather baffling collection of vignettes that shifts continually across the townspeople, seemingly to showcase how the seedy psyche of the title community is further warped by the coming of the Burns Casino, yet doesn't compare to "22 Short Films About Springfield", which feels considerably more structured. There is a certain flow and rhythm in how that episode flits from one segment to the next, whereas "$pringfield" lurches about all over the place, having its action unfold in bitty little chunks. A morsel happening over here, a tidbit going on over there. It is, I would say, the most staccato episode of The Simpsons. You get the distinct impression that Oakley and Weinstein pitched the idea of Springfield legalising gambling and becoming a miniature Las Vegas (reportedly inspired by an article they'd read about a town in Mississippi that had recently legalised riverboat gambling), and brainstormed a bunch of ideas about where this could potentially go, writing various short pieces involving multiple characters. Then, when it came to narrowing down the strongest ideas and developing those into a fuller narrative, they found that they couldn't bear to cut any of their material, so they strung all of their pieces together and called it a day.

I'm not saying that "$pringfield" particularly suffers for these choices, mind. I actually like how strange and unique the episode is. And, in fairness, some of the best gags are among the most disconnected from the main narrative. The entire stand-alone skit with Krusty's attempt at blue humor could have been easily ditched on the cutting room floor, but it's hilarious. All of that early stuff with Homer finding Henry Kissinger's glasses in the power plant toilet and adopting them as his shiny new plaything goes basically nowhere and is completely forgotten once the casino story gets underway, but it results in Kissinger being hospitalised after walking into a lamppost, and who doesn't enjoy a cathartic giggle at that man's expense? Professional boxer Gerry Cooney makes a guest appearance just so that he can be knocked out in a single blow by Otto, allowing the show to make good on a gag they had previously aspired to do with Joe Frazier in "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?", but were there denied. Flamboyant magicians Gunter and Ernst are inserted primarily for a thinly-veiled jab at Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, the Vegas-based entertainment duo famed for their acts involving large leucistic cats. On this particular night, their performing tiger Anastasia realises how greatly she resents being abducted from her natural habitat and forced to ride a unicycle under hot stage lights, causing her to savagely turn on her handlers, just shy of a decade before Horn was critically injured by one of his own tigers. (In recent years, there's been a lot of hoopla about the so-called clairvoyance of The Simpsons, but as the production crew themselves point out on the DVD commentary, you get no points for predicting that making dangerous wild animals perform unnatural stunts before a Vegas audience would one day take a spectacularly ugly turn.) Anastasia later has a smidgen more relevance to the overarching story, in a troubling sequence that illustrates how far into Gamblor's clutches Marge has sunken, when she shows only passing concern for a neglected Maggie almost becoming tiger chow. Gunter and Ernst also reappear, none the worse for their brutal lacerating, so that we might have an allusion to the sexuality of their real-life counterparts through their exchanging of covert pick-up chat with a casino patron.

 

From this grab bag of giddy diversions and offbeat side attractions, two subplots eventually take shape. One revolves around Burns' venturing into the casino business, in an effort to (in his own words) tighten his stranglehold upon the dismal town. He brands the casino in his own monstrous image, having not being sold on the merits of a Woodstock or British-themed establishment (as a Brit, I will make the most predictable nitpick I possibly can and point out that the waitress allegedly fresh from the streets of Sussex doesn't speak with a Sussex accent), and marvels as it proves ostensibly to be the perfect gravy train ("People swarm in, empty their pockets and scuttle off!"). The second sees Bart opening his own casino in his treehouse, at the taunting suggestion of the Squeaky-Voiced Teen, so that Springfield's younger population need not miss out on the joys of blown pocket change or magic acts that result in someone being violently mauled (in this case, Milhouse getting repeatedly clawed by a couple of house cats). The two subplots play off and echo one another more than they do the main conflict, culminating in an inspired development where Bart breezily pilfers the entertainment gig secured by Burns from singer Robert Goulet, the second guest star of the episode, by greeting Goulet at the airport and misdirecting him to his treehouse. Goulet has some misgivings about the situation, but is only too happy to adjust his repertoire for his unlikely young admirers, gaining a more appreciative reaction to his lounge rendition of the subversive schoolyard favourite "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells" than he presumably would have for a straight gig at Burns' casino. Bart is the one character who's able to thrive as the town lies deep within the belly of Gamblor, with its gambling fixation teasing out his latent entrepreneur. Burns, by contrast, is unprepared for where his supposed mastery of the community's wallets will take him, discovering that, having reached the top, he now has nowhere to go but into the dark maelstrom of paranoia.

The script even crams in a loose sort of D-story, with Homer landing a job as a blackjack dealer, a thread that's mainly there to set up for Marge's fateful entry into the casino, but also enables him to deal hands to a few familiar faces from popular culture. An encounter with Bond and Blofeld in which Homer might have doomed the entire free world was excised from the final edit, but later surfaced as part of "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular". Rain Man, though, was still fresh enough on people's minds to make a shout-out obligatory (another reason why I might subconsciously have associated this episode with The Critic, which treated Tom Cruise as though he were attached at the hip to Dustin Hoffman). Nowadays, this whole sequence feels maybe a little iffy, given that it involves Homer triggering an autistic meltdown in Hoffman's character, who in turn triggers a similar reaction in Homer. Obviously a parallel is being drawn between Homer and the Rain Man, but the script's intentions are not 100% clear. Is the insinuation that Homer might also be autistic...because he's a socially inept simpleton and, thanks to Rain Man, this is what the public thought autism looked like in 1993? Or are we to assume that Homer is merely mimicking Raymond, because he's taking Raymond's meltdown as a cue for how to respond in this situation? Either way, I can see why this moment might leave a slightly sour taste in some viewers' mouths, since it is difficult to interpret it in a way that doesn't leave the meltdown the butt of the joke. Elsewhere we get a similarly cartoonish depiction of obsessive-compulsive disorder via Burns' intense phobia of microscopic germs (and free masons), although this much is coded to specifically be an allusion to Howard Hughes, the aerospace engineer and Hollywood producer who devoted his later career to the development of Las Vegas and became notoriously reclusive in the process (his life was depicted in Martin Scorsese's 2004 film The Aviator). Hughes' case history, via Burns, is presented as the twisted but logical outcome of an overabundance of success, his wealth and influence having elevated him to such dizzying heights above his fellow man that he has nothing to fill the void but his own febrile delusions. 

A key reason why "$pringfield" succeeds, in spite of its feverishly meandering format, is in how gleefully it commits to the path of total disconcertment. It is nothing if not an unsettling episode, in which you almost feel as dazed as the characters by the brightness of the casino lights, and as overwhelmed by how this garish building comes, for this one installment, to dominate the lives of everyone around it. A number of the jokes have a deliberately unnerving flavour that leaves the viewer slightly confounded over what to make of them. Take the gag where Burns relives a cherished childhood memory of maiming an Irish-accented handyman by ramming him repeatedly with a bumper car, then laughs uproariously about his evil deed across a prolonged montage. The entire sequence drags on long enough to make you feel really uneasy, but also long enough that you practically surrender to the delirium and start snickering yourself, right before Burns rounds it off with a bitter reminder of the source of all this mirth: "What was I laughing at? Oh yes, that crippled Irishman." (They basically replicated this same joke six years down the line in "Take My Wife, Sleaze" of Season 11, with Bart laughing at Homer's professed inability to ride a bicycle, only minus that same discomforting element, so it comes off as a very neutered remake.) Then there's Homer's reaction when Lisa tries to share with him a nightmare she's just had where the bogeyman was on her trail; rather than offering the sensible parental reassurance she craves, he runs around getting the entire household worked up at the possibility that multiple bogeymen might have infiltrated their walls. As Lisa points out, that notion is absurd. Homer immediately understands how silly he's been when Marge returns to the property after a night of protracted gambling, insisting that it wouldn't have happened had she been there to keep him in check. It goes without saying that there were never any bogeymen inside the house. And yet, the frenzy with which Homer awakens Bart and has him shrieking at the prospect is contagious. For a moment, you really do have chills going down your spine. Chills that aren't entirely unwarranted, for while there might not be a bogeyman at Evergreen Terrace, there is clearly something very wrong with what we see within - a shot of Marge's vacated pillow, juxtaposed with Lisa crying out for the mother who isn't there.

The main conflict is able to keep itself fresh by using a tone that none of those prior absent Marge episodes had ever attempted, which it to say full-on eeriness. There is some pathos in the mix, thanks to the plight of Lisa and her Florida costume, but the scenes detailing how Marge succumbs to her gambling addiction, appearing to cast off all free will and awareness, feel more spooky than anything else. The psychology of addiction is not explored; it's just something that happens because Marge gives in to temptation just once, instead of following her higher judgement to turn that dropped quarter into the casino's lost and found, the pseudo-cheerful carnival music that accompanies her early win being the malevolent fanfare that welcomes her to Hell. This emphasis on Twilight Zone uncanniness has the brevity of the story, which might have been a problem in other scripts, actually playing to its advantage. The way in which Marge finally lets Lisa down doesn't come with any visible struggle or moral dilemma. We don't see her grappling with the knowledge that she's made a commitment to her daughter while her compulsion to gamble gradually chips away at her better intentions. She simply promises Lisa that she'll help with the costume, and then when we next see her she's right back at the slot machine as though nothing happened. It feels like a narrative shortcut, but it deftly gets across the corruptive, all-consuming nature of Marge's addiction. Whatever good things she might set out to do, whenever she's stepped away from the slot machine for long enough to regain her clarity, are rendered null and void the instant the casino beckons.

 

It's a formidable cycle that refuses to be broken..until Homer finally gets the resolve to confront Marge and tell her upfront of her addiction, spurred on by the tears of a distraught Lisa resigned to attending the pageant in the misshapen strips of foam rubber he'd duct-taped together at the eleventh hour when Marge failed to deliver. It's an outcome that puts Homer in the rather novel position of having made a correct moral choice where Marge has not, and you can bet he's going to make the most of it. The episode ends with them exiting the casino and Homer reminding a remorseful Marge of a selection of the idiotic stuff he's done over the years and how it all pales beside her gambling problem. Although Marge is initially willing to accept the criticism, she eventually tires of it and reminds Homer that once you've forgiven someone's transgressions, you can't keep rubbing their noses in it. This terrible ordeal in their lives is thus reduced to a quirky routine about the dos and don'ts within a relationship. Which leads us in to quite possibly the most fiendish thing about "$pringfield" - it lacks any kind of firmly redemptive resolution, although it certainly does endeavor to give the impression otherwise. The closing image is nice and uplifting, yet a gambling addiction isn't the kind of problem that's going to be remedied with a kiss and a picturesque stroll into the sunset. The episode itself is fully aware of this, judging by the glib solution proposed by Homer - when Marge suggests that she might do well to get professional help, he rebuts, "No, no, that's too expensive. Just don't do it any more!" Having set up such a complex issue, Oakley and Weinstein are faced with the quandary of how to resolve it in the allotted 22 minutes, and they all but admit that it isn't happening. The best they can do is put a pretty little bow on it, in the form of that kiss, and that sunset, and allow the fade-out to signal that the characters will all have moved on by the following week. For now, there is little in the way of a happy ending for Lisa. She gets a consolation prize at the pageant, for showing up in a costume so glaringly homespun it's presumed she received no help whatsoever from her parents. But if this was intended to take the sting off her humiliation, it doesn't succeed - having to share that honor with Ralph Wiggum, representing the state of Idaho by affixing a piece of paper reading "Idaho" to his chest (what are the odds that Chief Wiggum actually did help him with that?), renders it a patently hollow victory.

Burns' arc resolves with the most explicit promise of a restoration of the status quo, with him choosing to abandon the casino for the plant on the realisation that he prefers his old establishment. He also has Homer restored to his former position, after being perturbed by his erratic display while searching for Marge, and agreeing that such an unpredictable lunatic would be better suited to a nuclear setting. Even then, Burns is last seen holding Smithers at gunpoint for his concerns about the practicalities of flying to the plant inside the Spruce Moose (an allusion to Hughes' Spruce Goose), the titchy model aircraft he'd devised to transport passengers from New York's Idlewild Airport to the Belgian Congo in 17 minutes. Burns' insanity has not subsided, and we are left feeling a little worried there for Smithers, but with sufficient reassurance that the universe is shifting its way back to normalcy, the casino's reign of terror essentially nothing more than a crazy nightmare from which it will awaken shortly. Just like something from a dream, the Burns Casino seems to evaporate instantly, as though it never were a part of the town, and this comes as no surprise. Burns' sudden lost interest in the venue is a tip-off to the viewer that its narrative purpose has expired and that they too should prepare to leave it behind, a temporary fascination to be discarded as Homer (presumably) has Kissinger's glasses. It would eventually come up again in the Season 10 episode "Viva Ned Flanders", where they went to the trouble of having it demolished onscreen, so as to justify Homer and Ned then having to go to the actual Vegas so the latter could master gambling. There, Marge ruminates on the fate of the casino with the kind of ultra on-the-nose self-awareness that was rampant during Scully's era ("Remember how excited we were when this place opened? Then a week later we just forgot about it..."), but given how "$pringfield" ended I find it more baffling that the casino's ongoing existence should retroactively be treated this seriously (besides, if you want to get hung up on continuity, I'm pretty sure the subplot of "My Sister, My Sitter" took place on that same waterfront, and the casino was already gone by then).

Finally, I couldn't close this review without drawing attention to one of the episode's greatest background gags. Toward the start, as Abe and Jasper are walking past the porno theatre, if you look closely you'll see that the two titles playing are both parodies of James L. Brooks films - Sperms of Endearment (Terms of Endearment) and I'll Do Anyone (I'll Do Anything). Speaking of I'll Do Anything, it has been a long time since I last talked about that film, and since then there have been some really exciting developments. No, we still don't have the uncut version with the musical numbers intact, and I'm not optimistic that it's ever coming. But someone was nice enough to put up a bunch of the excised musical sequences on YouTube, including the one where A. Brooks tap dances. So I technically did find my grail. Huzzah!

SuperTed vs Earth Traffic (aka Not Behind The Bus, Spotty!)

In the mid-1980s, the Central Office of Information were in search of a new trusted figure to educate children on the importance of keeping their wits about them when crossing the road. They settled on SuperTed, eponymous star of a popular Welsh cartoon about a defective teddy bear who became the galaxy's saviour thanks to the interventions of a spotted extra terrestrial and a personified Mother Nature. The upshot was that Ted received his own public information film, "Super Safe With SuperTed", in which he took a break from battling power-hungry Texans and effeminate skeletons to take on something more nefarious - Earth traffic (identified by Ted as being the worst in the galaxy), which he must teach his absent-minded sidekick Spotty how to navigate, following a narrowly-averted disaster on the Planet Spot.

SuperTed started life as a series of books written by Mike Young (inspired by a bedtime story he'd devised to help his son overcome his fear of the dark), before an animated adaptation was commissioned in 1982 by budding Welsh-language public broadcast channel S4C (Warner Brothers were also apparently interested in acquiring the film rights, but Young preferred that his intellectual property remained in Welsh hands). The series was produced by the Cardiff-based Siriol Productions (founded by Young with his wife Liz) and proved such a hit in its native Wales that an English-language dub was created and aired on the BBC in 1983 to similar success. It followed the heroic exploits of a teddy bear (voiced by Geraint Jarman in the Welsh original and Derek Griffiths in the English dub) who was discarded by the human world but found valuable allies elsewhere, being granted life by way of the cosmic dust of an alien named Spotty (Martin Griffiths/John Pertwee) and special superpowers courtesy of Mother Nature (Valmai Jones/Sheila Steafel). Whenever trouble reared its head, SuperTed would activate those powers by whispering his secret magic word (which he never confided with anybody, so it can be as filthy or outlandish as your imagination wants it to be), typically to fend off his recurring nemesis, the conniving cowboy Texas Pete (Gari Williams/Victor Spinetti), and his bungling henchmen Skeleton (Emyr Young/Melvin Hayes) and Bulk (Huw Ceredig/Roy Kinnear). The premise of a crime-fighting teddy bear might have been goofy as hell, but the characters were colourful, the tone was earnest and legions of hearts had warmed to the plucky ursine as the hero the 1980s urgently needed. People so looked up to SuperTed that they manufactured a line of children's vitamin supplements in his image. A turn in a public information film was all but inevitable.

For myself, the secret ingredient to the show's success, and the element that continues to make it such an enduring classic, is the touch of melancholy that was often so palpable throughout. The opening sequence is one of those early television memories that's always haunted me - the coldness of Ted's abandonment (emphasised by the bombast of Peter Hawkins' narration), followed by the vividness of the unlikely solidarity that came with Spotty's appearance. Equally stirring was the closing theme that signed off each adventure, with its awe-struck yearning for a hero with "A scarlet suit, a flowing cape, a magic word, a super change." The music, composed by Chris Stuart and Mike Townend, was totally captivating. The English dub is the version I grew up with, so I can't attest to Jarman's characterisation in the Welsh original, but there was something so endearingly poignant about Griffiths' performance as SuperTed. He sounded honest, stout-hearted and resolute (all of the nice characteristics you would expect from a heroic teddy) but also kind of mournful. His was a voice that conveyed the sadness of the universe, as if he'd never quite gotten over the horror of being thrown away like a piece of rubbish into that old dark storeroom. That same melancholy was successfully captured in the public information film, which rounds out with SuperTed making about the glummest observation possible, particularly in light of the fact that it effectively functioned as the series finale. It wasn't the last we'd be seeing of Ted and Spotty - Hanna Barbera would revive the franchise three years later with a sequel series, The Further Adventures of SuperTed - but this is where the original Made in Wales era wrapped, and what an engagingly solemn note to conclude on.

"Super Safe With SuperTed" was initially presented as a five and a half minute short, though this included the usual opening and closing titles; the PIF itself amounted to three minutes and forty seconds. It was broadcast on BBC One on 26th March 1986, before receiving a home video release on the Children's Video Library VHS The Magic of SuperTed (and later on the 1994 Tempo release The Biggest Ever SuperTed Video). In it, SuperTed discovers that Spotty's comprehension of road safety is not up to snuff, and with help from Spotty's sister Blotch (Wendy Padbury), takes him to Earth (specifically to Cardiff) for a demonstration of the proper crossing procedure. A shorter edit, clocking at a minute and twenty-two seconds, subsequently did the rounds as an ad break filler; this focussed on the later portion of the story, with Ted, Spotty and Blotch safely traversing the roads of Cardiff. Excised was the narrative build-up, in which Spotty first demonstrates his crippling lack of road sense via a computer simulation, and then nearly gets himself mowed down by an alien motorist, prompting SuperTed to activate his powers and pull off a dramatic rescue.

The short opens on the Planet Spot, where Spotty is playing a characteristically 1980s-looking video game that involves guiding a pixilated chicken across a road. Alas, Spotty has no natural flair for chicken protection, and we see him guide the sprite directly into the path of a car and to an instant Game Over. Ted helps Spotty get a better hang of the game by explaining the rules of road crossing - find a safe place to cross where you can see clearly both ways, don't stand too close to the road, look and listen carefully, then cross while it's all clear, while still remaining alert to any incoming traffic. Using these principles, Spotty is able to lead the chicken to safety and earn his first victory screen after 503 occasions of being bested by SuperTed. He is, however, unable to apply those same principles to real life, when he and Ted are out roaming the Planet Spot and notice Blotch waving to them from the other side of a road. Spotty rushes out to greet her without looking and finds a Spotty Rocket hurtling in his direction; thankfully, SuperTed is able to speak his secret magic world and save his friend in the nick of time. In spite of all his prior training with the video chicken, Spotty remains confused about road safety, and gets offended when Ted suggests he look for a zebra crossing, possessing an automatic disdain for things with stripes (is that a by-product of coming from a spot-orientated culture?). Ted hits upon the idea of taking a trip to Earth to give Spotty a full-on demonstration with that infamously awful Earth traffic; Spotty reveals himself to be just as disdainful of Earth's residents (whom he identifies as the worst in the galaxy), but he complies. With prompting from Ted and Blotch, Spotty becomes a proficient road crosser, even while inclined to make every mistake in the book (crossing out from behind a bus, standing right at the edge of the kerb, running across the road instead of walking calmly).

Although the sequence in Cardiff seems gentle and non-threatening (compared to the drama of that prior sequence on Planet Spot where Spotty nearly becomes road pizza), hawk-eyed viewers might notice that two of Ted's enemies, Texas Pete and Bulk, make stealthy cameos as motorists. There's nothing to indicate that either is up to anything malevolent, but it adds a suggestion of hidden danger, as though the potential for calamity is always there, lurking below the seemingly untroubled surface, even if it can't be immediately perceived. The real kicker, though, comes at the end, when SuperTed's kindly reassurance that, "If you remember these rules, you will be safe crossing the road anywhere in the universe", is immediately followed up with the sombre reminder that, "I can't be there to save you...especially on the planet Earth." As noted, these were Ted's parting words to his fans, as he finished up his original run, and they took the form of a haunting allusion to his own unreality. A world in which an animate teddy bear could become a superhero and save you from all potential harm made for a delightful fantasy, but a fantasy was all that it was. The viewer now had to wake up and acknowledge that they lived on Earth, where such things did not happen, but where danger and terrible outcomes were very real possibilities. Ultimately, the viewer was on their own, their survival dependent on the honing of their own wits and judgement. It adds an extra sting to Spotty's prior remark about Earth having the worst people in the galaxy, if this innately hostile world is the one we have to figure out how to live in.

Even so, there's the lingering prospect that SuperTed hasn't left us for good, and might one day return to share his wisdom with the 21st century. What with the current cultural obsession with superheroes and nostalgic reboots, there has been intermittent talk of bringing the series back for a new generation. This is something Young has been endeavouring toward since the 2010s, and every now and then we get word that progress has been made, although the end-product has yet to materialise. Young has indicated that we shouldn't expect it to return in quite the same form, and that the villains in particular would have to undergo an extensive retooling; he noted in a Radio Times interview given in 2014 that, “In SuperTed, we had a gun-slinging cowboy, a flamboyantly gay skeleton and a fat guy who had jokes made about his weight and all these things you just wouldn’t do today,” Okay, I get why the guns and fat jokes wouldn't be on the table nowadays, but what was wrong with the flamboyantly gay skeleton? Don't you think that Skeleton was an icon? Kudos to Young for giving us official confirmation of his sexuality, though.

The Furryfolk on Holiday (1967)

Six years before launching his infamous television campaign on the dangers of patronising ice cream vans without adult supervision, Tufty Fluffytail had appeared on the big screen to give similar food for thought to callow holidaymakers. Created for theatrical distribution in 1967 was The Furryfolk on Holiday, a stop motion short starring the road-wary sciurine and his assortment of leporine, talpine and musteline companions, and detailing the various hazards they encounter while convening for a traditional seaside getaway. The erratic British weather doesn't look poised to spoil their holiday revelry, but could any of the children's injudicious actions? (Note that I've no information on what features this short would have been attached to. What would you have taken the kids to see in 1967? You Only Live Twice?)

The Furryfolk on Holiday was presented by leisure camp entrepreneur William Butlin (are we to assume that Tufty and friends are holidaying in one of his camps?), directed by Norman Hemsley and animated by John Hardwick and Bob Bura, the same team that went on to produce the 1970s television fillers. Hardwick and Bura's trademark folksy animation technique is present in both projects, although their execution in other regards could not have been more different. With its 12-minute running time, The Furryfolk on Holiday had the scope to be more narrative-driven than its television counterparts, and was able to recreate some of the dynamics from the Elsie Mills storybooks that weren't so accurately represented in the fillers - in particular, the impulsive Harry Hare being the real risk-taker of the group, with the impressionable Willy Weasel (the preferred punching bag of the fillers) tending to get into trouble wherever Harry had enlisted him as an accomplice. Whereas storytelling in the TV PIFs was heavily dependent on narration by Bernard Cribbins, the theatrical short forwent a third-person narrator altogether and made more extensive use of character dialogue (the animals' mouths also moved, which did not happen in the fillers). Each approach suited their chosen format aptly; Cribbins' narration was engaging and to the point, exactly what was needed for a 45-second teaching, while the wider array of voices and personalities heard throughout Holiday have a livelier flavour more likely to sustain viewer attention for a longer-form narrative. The child characters were all voiced by radio actress Ann Lancaster, who does a delightful job of giving each a distinct vocal identity - Tufty sounds bright and genial, Harry's voice has an appropriately boisterous edge, Willy's tones are comically squeaky, while Bobbie speaks with a West Country accent. Norman Shelley, renowned for his work on Children's Hour and later The Archers, provides the stern but compassionate vocals of Policeman Badger, the resolute authority figure who is always quick to step in wherever the children's judgement has faltered. (A third voice actor, Denise Bryer, is also credited; I'm assuming she voiced Tufty's mother in the final sequence.)

The short opens with the Furryfolk gathering outside their little row of holiday huts, and Tufty emerging from one to deliver an awkward exposition dump: "Smashing weather for the first day of our holiday! Wouldn't it be fun if Mr Policeman Badger was coming? Why, there he is! And he's on holiday too! Just look at his hat!" Indeed, we can tell that Policeman Badger is supposed to be off duty and getting in on the holidaymaking pleasure because we see him putting his helmet aside and donning a sun hat in its place; for the duration of the short he also assumes the identity of "Uncle Badger". As we know, however, accidents don't take a vacation, and Uncle Badger will have his work cut out in continuing to pull these nippers back from the brink of catastrophe. It is certainly fortunate that he's deigned to join them because, to put it bluntly, none of the kids' parents appear terribly fussed about what their offspring is doing. In fact, the only other adult in the short who's not completely useless is the rabbit driving the ice cream van.

The narrative of Holiday can be divided tidily into three separate acts, each dealing with a different consideration for making sensible use of the shores, with Tufty giving a final summary of all the short's teachings in a nocturnal epilogue. The first and most dramatic of these vignettes, which advises against the risks of swimming in the ocean while the tide is out, follows the classic Tufty scenario of Harry doing something reckless, getting into deep trouble (in this case, deep and watery) before getting his bacon saved by Badger. The second, which comments on the dangers presented by discarded litter, offers the equally classic variation with Harry encouraging Willy to do something foolhardy (with the consequences here being more of inconvenience than anything truly dire, although Badger is firm about what more could have gone wrong). The third, which covers Tufty's favoured subject of road safety and entails an appearance from the beguiling nemesis of all small Furryfolk, the ice cream van, involves no wrongdoing from either Harry and Willy. Instead, we get that other scenario that would intermittently recur within the Tufty tales, with Bobbie Brown Rabbit letting his guard down while tasked with watching over his toddler twin sisters, Bessie and Betsie, only for them to immediately go running off into harm's way. (I mentioned in my previous piece on Tufty that Minnie Mole, Tufty's token female friend, was typically sidelined from the action, and that's absolutely the case here. She gets no notable dialogue and no functional role in the narrative, the peak of her participation being her silently emotional reaction to the Punch & Judy show the characters are watching in the middle segment.)

Meanwhile, there is an additional fourth teaching that is implemented more implicitly, one that's less about safety per se than it is being a good friend and team player, and this is where Tufty himself gets to shine. The first activity that Badger has arranged for the children is a sandcastle-building competition, with boxes of candy promised as prizes for the three best entries, and Tufty proposes that they agree in advance that whoever wins will share their candy with the others. His friends have no trouble in agreeing, but Harry gets so fixated on wanting on win that he allows it to spoil his fun, leading to an act of self-sabotage and ultimately prompting him to seek out the hazards of the waves. Disheartened after losing the miniature flags he'd intended to use to decorate his castle, he destroys his entry in a churlish fit, eliminating himself from the competition and from receiving even the participation prize of a smaller bag of toffees. Tufty appears at his side and offers to help him rebuild, but Harry isn't interested; what he wants is to stand out, and if he can't prove himself the best by constructing a winning on his own, he can do so by demonstrating what a proficient swimmer he is. He enters the sea and discovers, too late, that he isn't proficient enough to keep the tide from dragging him ever further away from the shore. Fortunately, Tufty and Willy are able to alert Uncle Badger to Harry's whereabouts, and he wastes little time in rowing out to rescue the bedraggled hare before the waves have completely engulfed him. Harry's competitiveness and desire to outdo everyone else is subtly contrasted with Tufty's concern for supporting his friends and seeing that they all have an enjoyable time, with the message that cooperation is a better path than self-aggrandising. Having returned to dry land, Harry asks who won the sandcastle competition and Badger responds in a hesitant tone that implies he'd never settled on the winners and is listing off three names at random: "Umm...Tufty, Bobbie and Willy!"  (Of course Tufty won! No shit Tufty won! I'm always glad to see a rare victory for Willy, although I would have like Minnie's name to have been mentioned, so that she'd at least get some acknowledgement in this short.) Tufty gives Harry the reassuring reminder that they're going to share their prizes, thus affirming that his destructive competitiveness was always unnecessary.

In the same way, sensible behaviour at the beach isn't merely a matter of looking out for your own welfare, but doing your bit to maintain a safe environment for others. Leaving broken glass on the sand is an inconsiderate thing to do because it could result in the injury of another. Your younger siblings can't be expected to recognise danger all of the time, so they need you to watch their backs. The prevention of accidents is intrinsically a team effort.

Tufty might model the behaviour that the short's target audience is intended to emulate, but the real heart of the story is unquestionably Uncle Badger, whose kindly nature is not obscured by his stern demeanour. His use of the word "stupid" to describe some of the children's behaviours might seem a bit harsh to modern sensibilities, but in most regards he's a sterling authority figure - firm in laying down what is wrong and right, and what could happen if the difference is not appreciated, but also patient, generous, and meeting the children's shortcomings with a desire to nurture rather than to simply reprimand. For example, he offers to help Harry become a more proficient swimmer by agreeing to take him and the others for lessons at the swimming pool the next day. Caring, dependable and always knowing what to do in a crisis, he's able to fill the parental void that is sometimes felt throughout the short. There is, however, one thing that Badger does VERY wrong that I am going to call him out for - when Harry and Willy have led him to the location of the bottle they'd broken and initially tried to cover with sand, he disposes of the glass in a sheet of newspaper and has Harry and Willy pass the fragments up to him? What kind of responsible adult gets small children to handle broken glass? I'm suddenly reminded of the less benevolent Policeman Badger we saw in the "Playing Near The Road" filler who manhandled the injured Willy by shoulders and had him walk to the pavement on his wounded leg.

As for the rest of the so-called responsible adults, there is quite a satisfying moment in the third vignette where the ice cream rabbit chews out Mr Brown Rabbit for failing to keep Bessie and Betsie off the road (the two ankle biters are unharmed, thanks to Mr Bunny Whip's lightning reflexes in applying the brakes), even if it's faltering big brother Bobbie who has to answer for the transgression. Look, I understand why the Tufty stories take the stance that they do. They're all about teaching children that they will need to learn how to use their own judgement, as there are inevitably going to be situations in which they can't depend on adults to do the thinking for them. Children are the target audience, and that's why the child characters are the ones held accountable. Even so, there are a number of points in Holiday where it feels like the problems could have been avoided with a little more adult oversight. Where were all the grown-ups while the children were building their sandcastles? If they'd been properly supervised then maybe someone would have seen Harry going up to the waves and been able to stop him then and there. And why did nobody besides Harry notice Willy tripping over with his glass bottle or show any concern about it? (The contribution of a lack of parental oversight to hazardous situations is not something that went totally unacknowledged in Mills' stories, where I seem to recall there was a running theme of Harry's father being fixated on his career and having little time for his son.)

Bobbie asserts that Bessie and Betsie had both been educated on the "Kerb Drill" and should have known better than to have run into the road, but Badger counters that very young children are liable to forget such things, particularly when enticed by something as exciting as the ice cream van. We then get a demonstration of the proper road-crossing procedure, with Badger, Tufty, Bobbie, Bessie and Betsie looking right, left and then right again before making their way across - significantly, they do so standing side by side, reaffirming that safety is a group business. The explicit references to the Kerb Drill would rapidly date the short, being a lingering remnant of World War II Britain. It was devised by the National "Safety First" Association (predecessor to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents) in 1942 and was distinctively militaristic in nature; by the time the television fillers started airing it had been phased out in favour of the Green Cross Code, deemed to be a more relatable teaching tool for youngsters in peacetime.

Holiday concludes with an epilogue where Tufty is being tucked into bed by Mrs Fluffytail while musing on the events gone by. He reflects that it was a lovely day and that nobody really ruined it (spoken as if he'd anticipated in advance that someone would, which shows how genre-savvy he is). "Harry and Willy very nearly did," Mrs Fluffytail retorts, which I consider pretty mean of her, particularly since she makes no mention at all of Bobbie's transgression. Tufty lists off the various teachings dispensed by Uncle Badger throughout the day, and observes how good it was that he was always on hand to keep each nascent disaster from materialising. Indeed. Good old Uncle Badger.

We can only speculate on what might go wrong tomorrow during the swimming lessons at the pool. My money's on Harry running around the pool edges and encouraging Willy to jump in at the shallow end. The ominous siren call of the ice cream van is obviously also going to sound at some point. Well, don't answer it Willy, it's a trap!

An upload of The Furryfolk on Holiday is available for viewing (albeit without sound) on the official website of Carey Blyton (nephew of renowned children's author Enid Blyton), who composed the "The Tufty Club Marching Song" heard during the end-credits. It was also included on the BFI DVD release The COI Collection Volume Six: Worth The Risk?

Basil Brush vs Inflatables

Over the years the Central Office of Information (COI) enlisted numerous celebrities to dispense enlightenment to the calamity-baiting masses. Michael Palin warning us about the dangers of driving too close to other vehicles in a downpour. Ernie Wise guiding Glenda Jackson through the process of donating blood. Alvin Stardust, Joe Bugner and others delivering reproving lectures to children reckless enough to disregard the Green Cross Code. Few, though, were hotter than Basil Brush, a felt fox whose distinguishing characteristics included his Terry-Thomas-like vocals, his uproarious laughter (typically at his own jokes) and his signature cry of "Boom! Boom!" At the time Basil landed his own public information film in 1976, he was riding high as one of the elites of UK television, with his variety program, The Basil Brush Show, showing no signs of stopping after eight years. If the public was going to listen to any public figure sound off on the all-important subject of seaside safety, it was the buck-toothed vulpine with the penchant for cheesy puns. He was certainly cooler than Tufty, at any rate.

Basil Brush got his start in 1962, in a television series detailing the struggles of a down-and-out circus troupe, The Three Scampies (I approve of the title), before graduating to being a supporting act for magician David Nixon. The wisecracking fox proved so popular that in 1968 he received his own spin-off. The actor and puppeteer behind the magic was Ivan Owen, a man so committed to preserving the illusion of Basil's reality that he fervently avoided doing any publicity work as himself. The Basil Brush Show had a prosperous run that spanned all of the 1970s, but as the 1980s set in Basil's empire started to crumble and by the end of the decade his relevance had all but receded, giving way to fresher puppet creations like Roland Rat and Gordon the Gopher. I'll confess that he played no part in my own early childhood, with my personal introduction to the character coming via an advert for Angel Delight dessert mix that he'd appeared in in 1995. He would, however, enjoy a major comeback in the 2000s with a retooled version of The Basil Brush Show, which followed the format of a family sitcom and saw Michael Windsor taking over from Owen, who'd passed away in 2000. Throughout his career, Basil worked alongside a lengthy line-up of human second bananas, including Rodney Bewes, Billy Boyle and, in the 2000s series, Christopher Pizzey, with actor Roy North (or Mr Roy, as Basil called him) serving as his sidekick at the time of his foray into PIF territory. 

The two minute short, "Basil Brush and The Airbed", sees Basil and Roy savouring a day of sun and sand when Roy proposes going for a ride out to sea in his inflatable dinghy, followed by a dip in the waters once he's gotten beyond the waves. This causes their jovial banter to shift to the serious topic of inflatables - objects of buoyant holiday fun, or treacherous deathtraps threatening to lure swimmers into a salty blue abyss? Basil gives us the lowdown, and despite a comical misunderstanding over Roy's intentions when he speaks of "blowing up" an inflatable canoe, emerges as the voice of reason. Basil might be a joker, but he's no fool when it comes to respecting the briny.

As public information films go, "Basil Brush and The Airbed" is firmly at the non-traumatising end of the scale. Basil and Roy don't get into any hazardous situations, they simply talk about the various ways in which things could go wrong, and Basil is ultimately at pains to stress that the inflatables themselves are not actually the problem, just people's usage of them and lack of consideration for the precarious nature of the waters. The terrifying scenarios related - being swept away from an inflatable dinghy you have foolishly vacated, or drifting out to sea atop an airbed because you weren't paying attention to where it was headed - are softened by the characters' arsenal of wisecracks (with Basil fiercely jousting to retain sole joking rights), and the agreeable chemistry between Basil and Roy, which has the effect of framing the discussion less as a lecture than as a spot of good-natured sparring between friends. Indeed, the most startling moment might be when Roy abruptly breaks the fourth wall, a minute and forty seconds in, to deliver one warning directly to the viewer, prompting Basil to glance at the camera more reservedly, as if reluctant to outright implicate the lesson's intended recipients. 

The PIF rounds out with a suitably light-hearted moment, with Basil opting to stick to the shallower regions of a nearby paddling pool, but having trouble summoning his rubber duck Horace, who is averse to getting wet under any circumstances. We're a long way from the nightmares of "Lonely Water", even if the threat in question is much the same.