Logo Case Study: Carlton Screen Advertising (Flaming Carlton Star)

These days I often find myself remarking that advertising is a dead art. Which is obviously enormously hyperbolic of me, but it is the case that a lot of contemporary advertising just doesn't capture my imagination the way it used to. In part, I would argue that this is because we're living in the age of the touchy-feely ad (for which we can thank the root of all syrup-slathered evil, John Lewis), and I do not, in general, care for touchy-feely ads. But I do also have to acknowledge that, yeah, it's probably not a coincidence that the advertising era that made the greatest impression on me was the mid-90s through to the mid-00s, back when I was in the process of coming of age. Of course the ads of the 2020s aren't going to have quite the same magic as they had back then. I became an old fogey, and the world in general lost a wad of its lustre. I'm sure that, in 1996, some codger was shaking their head and muttering about how advertising was so much more epic when they were using iguanas to sell cigarettes, and not maggots to sell booze. All I know is that, once upon a time, watching the ad reel before a movie used to be an integral part of the cinemagoing experience for me. Remember that shrill woman in the car in those cinema sponsorship bumpers (from Volkswagen?) who used to yell out, "We're gonna miss the ads, that's the best bit!"? Clearly you were intended to sympathise more with her husband (who, IIRC, got out and abandoned her with the vehicle in motion in the final bumper) but I privately felt she spoke a lot of truth. Going to the movies and seeing the ad reel was like getting a grab bag of bonus miniature stories before the main feature, some weird, some terrifying, some absolutely baffling. I'd sometimes emerge chewing more upon that advertising than the film itself. But now, while I remain a staunch proponent of the theatrical experience, I often find my feet dragging in the foyer as the ads are about to start. To me, they're no longer an indispensable part of the package, but these annoying things you have to suffer through before the real fun begins - sentiments that I fear are inevitable around the onset of middle age. I'd be curious to know if kids today still get spooked by theatrical ads. Anything can seem scarier when it's magnified and in the dark, and you're susceptible enough to the sensory overload - how else can I explain being so deeply unsettled by an ad about a Lloyds cashpoint that played before Free Willy? Even some seasonal John Lewis drivel that's bending over backwards to give you the synthetic fuzzies might seem utterly horrifying when viewed through the right pair of eyes. All the same, I'd contend that a major reason why cinema ads seemed so much more spectacular in my favoured period had a lot to do with the company they kept back then, when the promos of the advertising companies themselves were epic little serotonin-inducers in their own right. As long as Pearl & Dean keep using Pete Moore's "Asteroid" as their jingle, a sliver of that grandeur may be preserved for future generations. But we've yet to find a worthy successor to Carlton Screen Advertising and their flaming Carlton star, which was as singularly commanding a cinematic visual as they come. Nothing said "You will fucking pay attention to what we're selling!" quite like having a red hot iron shoved in your face. Those were the days alright!

What made the Carlton Star so special? For a start, I can't claim that any other logo enticed me into to role-playing that I'm a criminal in olden times who's been sentenced to branding. That may sound like a strangely masochistic reaction, but I'm not sure what other narrative I was expected to attach to the sequence in question. We see a star-shaped iron being dunked into burning coals, then before you know it the thing's upon you. I can only speculate what infraction could warrant the barbaric penalty of having a star-shaped scar singed onto my face, but Carlton inflicted it on me with every trip to Cineworld. What exactly was the symbolism there? Were creators Lambie-Nairn seeking to convey some sly commentary on how advertising seeks to imprint on and commandeer our psyches? Was it deliberately likening the process to an act of brutal assault, implying that, by violently searing its mark upon us (or at least, giving the impression of doing so) it was laying claim to us, and to the impulses and desires that could be molded to make perfectly obedient consumers of us? This implicit message, whether conscious or not, is echoed in the logo's stinger, which arrived at the end of the ad reel to give the star the final word. This add-on was less dramatic than the main ident, showing only the star-shaped brand still pointed at the screen in a visibly cooler state, but (thanks in no small way to the eerie background drones), felt no less threatening. This was my final ominous reminder, as a branded medieval criminal, that the pain from my punitive burns might eventually lessen, but the mark wasn't going anywhere. The star insisted on lingering. I belonged to it now.

Needless to say, the Carlton Star left a terrifying impression on the fleets of kids who'd trekked innocently to their local UCI to see Pokémon: The First Movie. By the time it started showing up, in the late 1990s, I personally was already old enough and had spent enough of that time hanging out in cinemas to have acquired a taste for their little terrors, so the star was all catnip to me. It worked so well because it was so purely cinematic, assaulting the senses in the way that only the big screen can. It was bold, intense and awe-inspiring, kick-starting our presentation with a full-on demonstration of all that cinema can do; you'd come because you wanted an experience that can only be fully understood on an enlarged canvas, and you got that in spades with this thing. The mere sight of that brand entering those red hot embers was enough to get sweat trickling down your brow. Those burning coals felt so real and so tangible that they might as well have rolled off and set fire to the cinema curtains that were drawing back right as the logo was starting. You could practically smell them. It touched on a whole cavalcade of nerves (the primal fear of fire, the uncanny uncertainty in not seeing who was controlling the iron brand, which might as well be moving by itself, the visual and sonic severity of that climactic sizzle) but that's what made it such a perfect appetite whetter for the journey ahead. When the lights go down, you want to feel a little unsafe,  already on the edge of your seat in anticipation for where the experience could potentially take you. As a counterpoint to its aggressive intensity, it's also a stunningly beautiful logo. That final blend of showering yellows and swirling oranges never fails to make me gasp.

The Carlton Star enjoyed a healthy run, turning up the heat for UK cinemagoers until well into the 2000s. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the light finally burned out in in 2008, when the UK operation of Carlton Screen Advertising was acquired by Odeon and Cineworld and rebranded as Digital Cinema Media. The Carlton Screen brand (and the star) remained active in Ireland until 2014, when Wide Eye Media (now Pearl & Dean Ireland) took its place. With the Carlton brand now obsolete on both sides of the Irish Sea, it's unlikely that the Carlton brand will be making a comeback any time soon. But like I say, once marked by its searing intensity, there was no way you were getting its imprint off you. Those of us who grew up with the logo will always bear the star-shaped scar somewhere upon our souls.

The logo had another curious legacy (of sorts), in that it was the seeming inspiration behind a 2002 campaign about how piracy would destroy us all. Was it as petrifying as the real deal? All will be revealed in time.

BT' 92: Get Through To Someone (The Bellows of Indifference)

Let's talk about the single greatest oddity of British Telecom's 1992 "Get Through To Someone" campaign. The edition that conceals it isn't half as unnerving as the one about the woman who frets that her daughter is freezing to death inside a student hall, but it is several times more confounding. On this occasion, we focus on a plucky would-be Lothario who's determined not to get through to someone - or rather, to get through to her by maintaining total radio silence. Our protagonist considers himself a pretty slick fella, and thinks it most beneath him to give his girlfriend a bell to let her know that he loves her, preferring to keep her interested by keeping her hanging. He's so slick, in fact, that he justifies his dubious tactic by misremembering a quote from the 1940 Marx brothers film Go West. "What's that line from the old film? Fanning the flames of desire with the bellows of indifference..." Go West is not explicitly cited, but the quotation in question is markedly similar to one uttered by Groucho Marx therein. Problem is, it's not an exact match; the actual line spoken by Groucho is: "The secret is never let her know you care. Never pursue her. Let her pursue you. Fan the flames of desire with the bellows of indifference!"  You might think this is a case of me being unreasonably pedantic, but where it gets perplexing is that we hear the snippet of dialogue playing in the protagonist's head, spoken in some suave, old timey actor's voice, and presented as though it were an extract of culled directly from the film itself. On top of everything else, that suave, old timey actor is audibly not Groucho Marx. Which begs a number of questions. Can we say for certain that Go West is the old film our protagonist has in mind? If not Groucho Marx, then whose voice is it? Is it a legitimate extract from some other classic picture in which a character makes a near-identical observation, using the exact same metaphors? Or is it just a faux dialogue extract, created to sound like it was taken from an old movie? Was the idea to have the protagonist seem additionally foolish, since his memories don't quite align with what's heard in the film itself, or was the intention here simply to allude to Go West without actually having to secure the rights to use any of it? That last one has the ring of plausibility, although why go to the trouble to create a faux extract when you could have had the protagonist (mis)remember it in his regular voice, creating much the same implications?

It should be noted that most ads in the "Get Through To Someone" campaign involved some element of paranoid or delusional fantasy, with characters fretting over the barrage of unknowns presented by their individual situations, before their fears were finally put to rest with a call and a sound of that soothing harmonica leitmotif. "Bellows" is something of an anomaly, in that the protagonist professes to be entirely at ease with a state of no communication. In lieu of a paranoid dream sequence, he gets an internal monologue, and his misquoting of Groucho Marx, in the wrong vocals, is the closest he gets to retreating into fantasy, with the misremembered details distinguishing his musings as a display of personal indulgence (those mysterious misplaced vocals representing his own attempt, as part of that internal monologue, to role play not as Marx, but as a more generically suave actor from Hollywood's golden age) and not objective memory. There seems to be a broader theme involving classic Hollywood; when Debbie calls, and his facade is totally punctured by the sudden surge of panic that has him lurching for the telephone, Sally the dog appears and creates an awkward, albeit jovially dispelled misunderstanding ("Sally, get off! No, no no, she's a dog. No, a sort of terrier type thing!"). Is it a coincidence that she is, specifically, a Cairn terrier, the breed most familiar to general audiences as that of Toto, the travelling companion of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz? These allusions to old Hollywood are emblematic of the protagonist's desire to immerse himself in a world of airy fantasy, exposed as foolish play pretence the instant reality comes calling and drags him straight back down into Kansas. There, he lives in disarray, surrounded by the contents of an upset fruit bowl, hounded by an over-enthusiastic terrier and suddenly very eager for the reaffirmation of Debbie's affections ("Debbie, listen to me," he implores at the end).

The especially fun part with these GTTS ads is noticing which aspect of the mise en scene works its way into the final arrangement, sharing the BT logo's status as the connective tissue between the featured parties, what function it serves within the characters' narrative and how it might be construed as symbolic of their relationship. In this case, it's the eye-catching knick knack that's foregrounded during the opening frames of the ad, an indoor water fountain comprised of a female figure, and droplets trickling all around the sides of her casing. Her foregrounding is juxtaposed with the protagonist's utterance of "Women...", indicating that she's to be seen as the embodiment of his professed views on the fairer sex. As with "Empty Nest Angst", I suspect that water is once again being used as a metaphor for sex, or at least for sexual desire, with this perfectly contained figurine encapsulated by her own ever-flowing desire serving as a telling reflection of how our protagonist envisions Debbie, treated mean and kept keen. But seems just as appropriate those non-stop trickles to be indicative of his own inner craving to connect with Debbie, barely concealed by his purported inclination to play it cool by emitting those bellows of indifference. In actuality, he's a chaotic geyser of ill-suppressed yearning. In the closing collage, the figure's image is situated so as to appear to be gazing from his direction and onto Debbie, a sly visual allegory for how transfixed by her he really is.

Homer's Barbershop Quartet (aka With A Little Help From My Friends)

 

On September 30th 1993, "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" (episode 9F21) aired, getting The Simpsons' fifth season off to a roaring start. They couldn't have picked a classier, more iconic debut if they'd tried,  and yet it wasn't always intended to lead the pack. The bigwigs at Fox had originally wanted "Homer Goes To College" to be the big season premiere, believing that the premise of Homer Simpson enacting a string of Animal House-style hi-jinks would prove irresistible to viewers, but in the end "Quartet" just had too much of an edge. By which I mean a guest appearance from a Beatle, with Homer's musical odyssey allowing him to cross paths with George Harrison a couple of times. Animal House parodies ain't got nothing on that! But then, as Harrison himself observes during his second appearance, "It's been done." It would be done again too. "Quartet" marked only the second occasion on which a Beatle had graced The Simpsons with their vocals, following Ringo Starr's appearance in "Brush With Greatness" of Season 2. Paul McCartney would later show up in "Lisa The Vegetarian" of Season 7, thus completing the surviving set (if John Lennon had lived to see the series, do you reckon they could have convinced him too?). What better way to cement the show's own status as a phenomenon for the ages than by having your legacy converge with that of another timeless phenomenon? Harrison's cameo is by and far the briefest and most frivolous of all the Beatles' guest appearances - whereas Starr and McCartney each enjoyed a prolonged interaction with one of the family and a meaningful impact on the resolution of their respective story, Harrison's role consists of popping up twice for a quick gag and immediately moving on. It's also more self-effacing than the other Beatles' appearances; Harrison receives none of the in-universe reverence afforded his bandmates, a great part of the joke being that no one even notices he's there (which is the very problem he faced as a Beatle, is is not?). It's a fitting summation of what's going on in the episode as a whole. The legend of The Beatles, those four Liverpool lads who became global sensations and changed the face of popular music forever, looms large over the events of "Quartet" but goes mostly unspoken. Outside of Harrison's appearances, the band is brought up explicitly only once, when Lisa asks if Homer's singing career was sunk because he screwed up like The Beatles and said his titular quartet was bigger than Jesus. (Objection! Only Lennon said that, not The Beatles as a collective, and while it triggered quite the backlash in the US at the time, it hardly brought about an end to the band. They hadn't even done Sgt Pepper's at that point.)

"Homer's Barbershop Quartet" opens with the family at a swap meet (or car boot sale, as we'd call it in the UK), where Bart and Lisa are perusing Comic Book Guy's stall and, after learning a little about the Rodent Invasion of the early 1960s, are surprised to dig out a record with Homer's face on the cover. Homer explains to them that, back in 1985, he was part of a barbershop quartet (alongside Skinner, Apu and Chief Wiggum) that used to perform regularly at Moe's. The group had a slow start, but eventually became a local sensation, at which point they were approached by a theatrical agent named Nigel who wanted to represent them, on the condition that they lose Wiggum, whom he considered "too Village People". On discovering Barney's hidden talent for singing, the group brought him in as a replacement and went on to record a hit record, "Baby on Board", under the name The Be Sharps. Alas, the taste of celebrity was sweet, but ultimately fleeting, and by the end of the summer the quartet had become an obscure footnote in music history. This is the story of their dramatic rise and fall.

We can technically count "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" as the fourth in the ongoing branch of "flashback episodes" that originated with "The Way We Was" of Season 2; doing so handily gives the branch a five-year streak that wasn't broken until Oakley and Weinstein took over as showrunners (one assumes that after "And Maggie Makes Three" they ran out of obvious subject matter). But "Quartet" would inevitably be the odd one out, in part because it's the only flashback episode, of that initial streak, that isn't focussed on the family. The other Simpsons are always somewhere at the back of Homer's mind throughout his rise to fame - there's a rather meagre subplot dealing with the mutual dissatisfaction that accompanies his being separated from his young family, but this has no discernible impact on how the episode ultimately resolves. But more glaring still is that is that the events of this particular flashback aren't events that conceivably fit with what we already know about the family. The other flashback episodes play out like the putting together of pieces in a puzzle, combining to give us the bigger story of the Simpsons' formation and how the family in its present state came to be. The questions they tackled were all very logical ones. How did Homer and Marge meet? How did they marry? What were the circumstances behind each of the children's births? How did Homer come to work at the nuclear power plant? When did the family move into Evergreen Terrace? "Quartet", by contrast, tells a story that is, by its own admission, a profoundly illogical thing to be retroactively working into the family's backstory this far into the series. Toward the end of the episode, Bart and Lisa (performing their intermittent duty as viewer substitutes) fire off a barrage of questions that directly attack the preposterousness of the tale their father has just related, the most insurmountable of which is, "How come we never heard about this until today?" Indeed. It would be one thing if a youthful Homer had been part of a music outfit that never went anywhere and left him a bit embarrassed as a thirtysomething. But for him to have been in a band that enjoyed chart success, toured Sweden, performed for the Statue of Liberty's centennial, won a Grammy, inspired a slew of tacky merchandise and still reunites for the occasional Dame Edna special...well, it surely wouldn't have taken this long to come up from an in-universe perspective? It's the kind of thing that should threaten to significantly rewire our perception of Homer as a character. Besides which, Santa's Little Helper is clearly glimpsed one of the flashbacks to 1985. The dog probably wasn't born until later in 80s, and he certainly didn't live with the Simpsons at this point, so CONTINUITY TORPEDOED! (Mind you, the dog in question is a different shade of brown to Santa's Little Helper, so is it possible the Simpsons owned another greyhound we'd also just never heard about? It would certainly be no more of a stretch than the mere existence of The Be Sharps.)

But then, The Be Sharps were not introduced with the intention that they have any serious ramifications for the series' world-building, as evidenced by how seldom they've been referenced in the seasons since. They were introduced purely so that The Simpsons could craft its own personalised love letter to The Beatles, and once we've accepted the distinctly self-contained nature of the story, its charms on that score are manifold. Writer Jeff Martin clearly had a great deal of passion for the Fab Four; that passion is palpable all throughout the script and certainly compensates for whatever conceptual quibbles we might have with the arrangement. If you know your Beatles history, then it's hard not to smile at some of the small ways in which the reality of the series is bent to accommodate the tribute - for example, Moe's Tavern was apparently known as "Moe's Cavern" in the summer of '85 - and the ways in which the quartet members act as embodiments of that history feels almost entirely natural and true to their characterisations. Wiggum is unambiguously the Pete Best of the equation, although none of the Be Sharps themselves serve as analogues for any one specific Beatle. Rather, they just recall bits and pieces of them wherever it fits. Barney starts out as Ringo, the newcomer, but ends up as John, with the Japanese conceptual artist girlfriend (about as on the nose as the allusions get, but at least it's consistent with what we'd later see in "A Star Is Burns", with Barney having an appreciation for the avant garde). Homer starts out as John, the de facto leader and the one who's already taken but encouraged to keep his marriage out of public knowledge, but by the end feels more like Paul (I love Macca, but I can totally hear that song about Mr T coming out of him). Apu being persuaded to adopt the pseudonym De Beaumarchais (on the grounds that Nahasapeemapetilon wouldn't fit on a marque, although De Beaumarchais isn't significantly shorter) likely alludes to "Ringo Starr" being the stage name of Richard Starkey. Skinner is tagged by the press as "the funny one", which was Ringo's designation back in the day (just as John was the smart one, Paul the cute one and George the quiet one). Various poses and fashion choices made by the band throughout directly echo the iconography of The Beatles - notably, a photo from the Let It Be recording sessions, which perfectly captured the divisions between the band members in its final days, here lovingly recreated right as the Be Sharps are nearing their breaking point. Most delectable of all, however, is the origin behind the band name "Be Sharps", chosen because it meets Skinner's requirement for "a name that's witty at first, but seems less funny each time you hear it". That's an accurate assessment of the pun in "Beatles", which is cute when you first notice it, but after a while you just forget is there.

What makes "Quartet" an interesting episode beyond the Beatles allusions is that it also represents a bit of bold experimentation in terms of broadening Homer's social connections. With the exception of Barney, with whom he was well-accustomed to palling around, the line-up of characters in The Be Sharps was a reasonably novel one. If a more contemporary Simpsons episode were to feature the premise of Homer forming a barbershop quartet, the remaining members would almost certainly be Moe, Lenny and Carl. All three of those characters work their way into "Quartet", but at this point in the series there seemed to be a general reluctance to use them much outside of their designated habitats of bar and power plant. Instead, the episode digs a little deeper into the supporting cast, pooling Springfieldians from various all of life in an attempt to settle on some new mates for Homer, some of which stuck while others didn't. "Quartet" seems to mark the turning point where Apu was depicted as one of Homer's close friends, and not simply the guy he'd interact with when he was out shopping for groceries, a move cemented later on in the season with "Homer and Apu". It seems far stranger to contemplate the possibility that the writers were toying with the idea of making Skinner a fixture of Homer's friendship circle, but there does appear to have been a genuine shift toward bringing those characters together during Season 5 - consider that he was included in Homer's vigilante group in "Homer The Vigilante", and they shared a hotel room while serving as jurors in "The Boy Who Knew Too Much". Skinner doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd be in his element with Homer socially, but perhaps that was what made their combination so appealing. Skinner is the uptight straight guy who provides invaluable contrasts. When asked by a reporter if his aforementioned reputation as "the funny one" is justified, his deadpan, "Yes, yes it is," demonstrates why that's seriously no lie (it's also a bit strange how the reporter addresses him as "Principal Skinner", suggesting that his strict schoolmasterly persona has permeated his identity within the band too). The writers were onto something with the pairing, but I guess they just didn't know how to keep it going. As for Wiggum, while I don't feel there was such a conscious effort to make him one of Homer's friends in Season 5, it's worth noting that they would enjoy a more prolonged team-up in "Marge on The Lam".

Part of the underlying joke behind the Be Sharps is of course that barbershop is (as Bart points out) an old-fashioned music style associated predominantly with the turn of the century, and would have seemed really out of place within the popular music climate of the 1980s, despite Homer's insistence to the contrary ("Rock and roll had become stagnant. "Achy Breaky Heart" was seven years away. Something had to fill the void. And that something was Barbershop.") Still, our friend Bobby McFerrin had his own one-off chart success in 1988, so it wasn't as though there was no room for a cappella in the era of synthpop and New Romantics. And here's the secret ingredient that gives the episode that extra layer of conviction, for all its unlikelihoods - as a musical act, The Be Sharps are played more-or-less straight. Singing vocals were provided by then-current members of the Dapper Dans, the barbershop quartet that performs daily as part of Disneyland's Main Street Parade, and interlaced with those of Castellaneta, Azaria and Shearer, so they certainly have the mettle. "Baby on Board", the song Homer is inspired to pen after seeing Marge's latest purchase, a yellow warning sign designed to deter drivers from "intentionally ramming our car", has the benefit of sounding like an authentic a cappella standard and lampooning a contemporary obsession (much like Dexy's Midnight Runners, those "Baby on Board" signs stuck around for longer in the UK, but in the US I understand that their moment came and went in the mid-80s). Although maybe Homer was too quick to abandon that one about Geraldo and Al Capone's vault (somewhat anachronistically, given that the whole Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults fiasco wouldn't happen until April 1986).

"Quartet" is a delightful ride, although it has to be said that there's not a great deal to the story. You can tell, from the beginning, that the writers had difficulty stretching it to the full 22 minutes, because of what's going on with the couch gag; they mash three of them together, giving us something to the tune of a couch gag clip show. ("Cape Feare", its neighbouring episode, had the same problem, but used the more conventional solution of running the extra-long circus-themed variation). Conversely, it also feels like there are pieces missing from it; being one of the last episodes to emerge from Al Jean and Mike Reiss's turn as showrunners, it's got their trademark meandering structure, with not all of the narrative threads neatly combining. Did you notice, for example, that after a while the character of Nigel just disappears from the story altogether? He sets The Be Sharps up on the road to stardom and then apparently takes no interest while the group is disintegrating. It has crossed my mind that his absence might have been a deliberate choice, as an allusion to the death of Brian Epstein, but if we're meant to draw that conclusion it surely would have been helpful to have at least acknowledged him. There's also the matter of the Simpsons struggling while divided; a classic theme, but it doesn't really build to anything narrative-wise. The scene where Marge attempts to compensate for Homer's absence by constructing a dummy father for the young Bart and Lisa is a little unsettling and adds nothing (except for that timeline-muddling Santa's Little Helper appearance), but we do get a nice moment with Homer in his Hollywood hotel room, having a telephone conversation with baby Lisa about his Grammy success (Lisa, who at this stage can't be older than one, is already exhibiting precocious behaviours), before contemplating how much he's missing his family and how unfulfilling he's finding stardom. He's so disillusioned by that realisation that he attempts to give away the Grammy to a bellhop as a tip, only for the bellhop to reject it as not worth having. That joke at the Grammy's expense is as far as this particular thread goes - Homer's longing for his family doesn't come up at all in the third act, as much sense as it would have made to imply that his abilities as a songwriter waned because his heart wasn't in it - but I do like the moody, almost Hopper-esque tones that accompany his hotel-bound solitude. Meanwhile, there's an obvious parallel to be drawn between the raw deal Marge gets in the past and how direly underappreciated she still is in the present. In 1985, she's left alone with the kids and is purposely erased from Homer's public profile so that his teenybopper fans can retain their delusions of having a shot with him. In 1993, pay attention to what Marge is doing in the background of the framing narrative, and you'll see she's having yet another punishing time of it, forced to walk 12 miles when the family's car breaks down in the desert, and later receiving no help in changing the tire. Combine that with the sight gag in which Homer's parenting of toddler Bart consists of leaving him under a laundry basket in the basement, and the implicit message is that while Homer recognises that his real place is among the Simpsons clan, he can't help but take them for granted whenever he's with them.

Still, in the end the family becomes something of a red herring, to the point that they're given no payoff. The sequence where the quartet members, post-disbandment, are seen settling back into their regular lives is all padding, despite that hilarious bar order from our Yoko Ono parody, but does it strike you as strange that Homer's return to normality is all about him going back to the power plant (where he's implied to have killed Queenie the nuclear chicken...goddammit, Homer) and not reconnecting with the family for which he's been pining? The other Simpsons might be the gravitational pull that keeps Homer from feeling too at home in the world of celebrity, but they are not where the episode's real emotional grounding lies. Rather, the heart of the story lies with the friendships forged with his fellow Be Sharps during their moment of glory, and the feeling of nostalgic regret that ultimately emerges from Homer's recounting, as he looks back on those youthful ambitions that were never fully realised, and the good times that simply couldn't last. Whatever the underlying factor, The Be Sharps came to an end because their creative well ran dry, in spite of Barney's valiant attempts to take the barbershop genre to strange new places. The fateful moment that doomed them to obscurity came when Us Weekly declared them "Not" instead of "Hot". Here, it's possible to detect just a smidgen of the anxiety the series would explore in greater depth with "Bart Gets Famous", and which permeated much of Oakley and Weinstein's era - the idea that the Simpsons' own bubble might pop at any moment. Homer underscores the fickle nature of celebrity when he specifies that The Be Sharps' reign lasted for only five and a half weeks (which, mind you, seems a long time by today's standards). When Homer states that "what goes up must come down", only for Bart and Lisa to retort that Dean Martin, Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra were still going strong, it's hard to say if they're meant to represent the doggedly expectant fans or the defiant staff insisting that they'll keep going regardless. I don't believe such anxieties to be the real point of the episode, however. "Quartet" seems to me to be about something far less cynical than the idea that anything that reaches the top is destined for a sharp and brutal decline. As noted, it is an achingly sincere ode to the Beatles and the numerous lives their music touched. And it's just as sincere about the "what if" question that becomes particularly poignent as it nears its conclusion, when Homer feels compelled to get in touch with his fellow Be Sharps. What if it didn't have to end when it did? What if we could have made this last longer? What else could we have accomplished together? If we tried again, would anybody still care?

The thing I quibbled over earlier on this review, about how this isn't a backstory that logically fits with the the series, actually ends up working to its advantage. Hearing the story of The Be Sharps is akin to brushing up against an alternate reality, in which Homer gets to contemplate another road he might have pursued in life. It's a road he knows was never really for him, but he remains haunted by the suggestion that there was always something there of value, even if he couldn't get close to it for long. He's able to revisit that road, if only for a moment, by reigniting his connection with the friends with whom he once shared that common ambition. The episode ends with Homer meeting with the other Be Sharps on the rooftop of Moe's, where they give an impromptu performance of "Baby on Board" to the streets below, an obvious homage to The Beatles' rooftop concert of 30th January 1969, aka the band's final public performance. Crowds gather to watch, enraptured by what they're seeing. It's also hinted that Wiggum, who had to contend with being a media punching bag during The Be Sharps' success, might get his belated revenge, as he orders Lou to "Get the tear gas" (a nod to how the police intervened in The Beatles' own rooftop concert). Homer signs off by quoting Lennon: "I'd like to thank you on behalf of the group, and I hope we passed the audition." Barney laughs uproariously, then admits he doesn't get it - speaking, I suppose, for every audience member who was either too young or simply too unhip to know just what this episode was getting at.

The ending of "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" is a touching one on multiple levels. There is something immensely magical about the prospect of getting to go back and re-experience some bygone excitement from a time in our lives when things seemed so alive with possibilities. About giving something that seemed long-lost one final, unexpected breath of life. There's the faintest hint of knowing absurdity blended in with the wistful melancholy that accompanies The Be Sharps' reunion - within the show's internal universe, their turn in the spotlight didn't happen so long ago, and it's not as though Homer doesn't interact with two of the other members on a regular basis anyway. But then they're standing in for something far greater outside of the show's reality, that being our continuing cultural connection with The Beatles, a phenomenon that seems at once so tied up in a distant age and yet still so prevalent and perceptible in the present. In 1993, the possibility of The Beatles reuniting in this manner was long off the cards, for obvious reasons; we weren't then even 20 years removed from the band's official break-up, and already they represented something lost and irrecoverable. But their legacy refused to fade, both among the people who'd witnessed their rise to the top as it happened, and among the generations that had come along since, the Simpsons tribute being yet another step in that ongoing proliferation. "Quartet" is a heartfelt attempt, however quixotic, to recreate just a smidgeon of that Beatles magic by having Homer and co follow in their footsteps. The Simpsons might be the masters of deconstructing popular culture from all across the board, but I'm not sure how many other examples send out so sincere a statement of "We heard you. You mattered to us. Here's our little part in keeping your flame alive."

We'll end this review with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "I say in speech that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'." True, and I'd like to think that Matt Groening and his crew achieved a bit of that too.

 

(PS: Looking at the episode's Wikipedia article, I can't help but notice that the current summary seems to grossly exaggerate the role that Barney's Japanese conceptual artist girlfriend plays in The Be Sharps' dissolution. Funny that.)

Intersections (Wheel of Misfortune)

As we've established, New Zealand's intersections were dangerous places to hang in the 2000s, and this campaign - quite possibly the most inspired of all NZ intersection campaigns - offered a really creative means of illustrating that point. "Wheel of Misfortune" was created in 2008 by agency Clemenger BBDO Wellington for Land Transport New Zealand (who'd inherited LTSA's mantle in 2004), and arguably represents the absolute peak of LTNZ's output. I'd go a step further and say that it represents peak road campaigning, period. When it comes to public information films (or whatever the equivalent international term would be), "Wheel of Misfortune" is one of the all-time greats. Top 10 material, definitely. Maybe even a contender for the Top 5. All of the right ingredients are there - an ingeniously novel set-up, spine-chilling atmosphere, beautifully crafted tension, flickers of grim humor and the kind of indelibly grisly climax that makes any PIF buff weak at the knees. What's more, it has a villain who could give the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water a run for its money. Here, the face of crossroads carnage is actor David Austin, playing a wordless, other-wordly carny who occupies the focal intersection and beckons drivers with the ultimate challenge - the opportunity to Risk It All, Risk It Here. Getting across without giving way is envisioned as a twisted carnival game, straight out of your darkest, most nutmeg-addled nightmares.

The premise of "Wheel of Misfortune" has it that whenever a driver navigating the intersection fails to give way, the other-worldly carny spins the titular big six wheel, determining their fate from five possible outcomes - Near Miss, Minor Crash, Major Crash, Death and an ultra-slim chance of Miracle. The original campaign installment followed a "rule of three" structure, teasing us with the evil possibilities while reserving the most brutal developments for last. The ad was broken up into three different segments, opening with a driver who, laughing with her passenger and presumably not paying adequate attention to the road, pulls out in front of a red van and gets a Near Miss on the wheel. A collision is averted, although the driver of the red van angrily sounds their horn, indicating their mistake. The second segment shows a driver making more sensible choices and crossing the intersection without prompting the carnie to spin the wheel (just as well, as I think he had a kid in the back). The final segment opens with a driver (who I've always thought looks a bit like Peter Gabriel) giving way and making it across the intersection safely, but has a second driver in a grey sedan attempt to cut across right after, throwing themselves directly into the path of a black sedan, and into the wheel's climactic wrath. And here's where the fun part begins - there are multiple versions of the ad, revealing the various possible repercussions for the hapless drivers based on what comes up on the wheel. It is, notably, always the same two vehicles involved in all instances (with a third unhappy vehicle getting dragged into the action in one variation), indicating that we are exploring the alternate consequences of the grey sedan driver's single rash decision, and not different outcomes for other drivers who prompt a wheel-spinning on different days. This is the Sliding Doors of road campaigns. Or Run Lola Run, since there are three possibilities shown.

The first of these variations, the "Death" ending, might be considered our default version, as it contains the most obvious narrative from a cautionary standpoint. We already got our tantalising glimpse of potential catastrophe with the opening segment; surely now it's time for them to hold nothing back and to reveal what absolute disasters we could potentially bring on ourselves. Here, the black sedan duly slams into the grey sedan (and its occupant) with full force, causing the vehicle to crunch and leaving an ominous trail of shattered glass in its wake. The action is intercut with the spinning wheel, and the eyes of the carny as he keenly awaits the results. For a moment, the final outcome seems uncertain, with the pointer resting on the final spoke between Major Crash and Death, but it gets that last little burst of momentum to flip over into the latter, sealing the grey sedan driver's terrible fate. Naturally, this is the very worst thing we see happen to the grey sedan, but it's not the only thing.

Another variation, the "Near Miss" ending, was a real unicorn. I'd seen someone describe it on an internet forum soon after the campaign started airing in New Zealand, stating that there was one version in which the grey vehicle narrowly cleared the black vehicle, only to get a police car on their tail. But I could never find this one on YouTube, and my hunt proved so fruitless that I started to doubt that it even existed. After all, they'd already demonstrated the "Near Miss" outcome with the first segment (albeit without the police getting involved), so wouldn't it be redundant to show it again at the end? Would it not reinforce the very misconception the campaign seemed designed to downplay, that it wasn't a big deal if you failed to give way, since your odds of being involved in a collision were low compared to your chances of getting across safely? I wondered if perhaps the author had misremembered the "Near Miss" variation, by conflating details from the opening segment with a legitimate ending. But no, I can confirm that it does exist, having eventually been signposted to an upload on Vimeo. Seeing the grey vehicle miss the black by the skin of its teeth, having scoured the net for it for so long, and knowing the other versions inside out, was frankly surreal. I can also confirm that it makes more sense in context as a variation, as the Near Miss in this case is a hell of a lot nearer than that in the opening segment, as signified by the pointer once again getting caught between two possible outcomes, Near Miss and Death. In this version, the pointer doesn't quite have the momentum to flip over, staying in Near Miss and averting the collision. It's nevertheless hair-raising to complete just how razor thin a line had divided the more desirable outcome from complete disaster. The "Near Miss" ending makes a point that was implicit in the opening segment (the first time the wheel is spun, you might notice that Death fell immediately after Near Miss, and that's certainly sobering) but not given quite so brutal an emphasis (since the first driver still lands safely in Near Miss). When you fail to give way on an intersection, not only are you playing a foolish game of chance, but the factors that separate one extreme from the other (whether you get out unscathed or get completely pulverised) could be totally miniscule. On top of that, the police indeed show up, indicating that the grey sedan driver will face consequences in the form of a fine. He's not getting to wherever he was headed any sooner.

The third and final variation is "Miracle", and this one basically feels like it's there for a bit of comic levity. This time around, the grey sedan's gambit causes the black sedan and a third vehicle approaching from the opposite direction to swerve in a desperate attempt to avoid collision, and somehow or other, it works. All three vehicles come to a safe standstill without making contact. Gentle choir music plays in order to hammer home the point that this is nothing short of miraculous. Clearly "Miracle" is intended to the jackpot outcome. It only occurs once on the wheel and takes up less space than the others, so the odds of landing on it are significantly smaller than the others. In practice, though, I'm not sure what makes "Miracle" any more of a jackpot than "Near Miss". Nobody gets hurt in either result, no damage is dealt to the vehicles, and both presumably entail heapings of stress for the people involved. Muting the cute music and looking at what actually happens in the "Miracle" ending, if I had been in one of those vehicles, I think I'd have found the experience considerably more traumatic than if I'd been in one of the vehicles in the opening segment. It may just be that "Miracle" falls between "Death" and "Major Crash", the two worst outcomes, so it represents your slim chance to get out of an extremely fucked situation. But there are evidently no winners in this game, just needless risks and varying extremes of punishment. (Some of which spilled over into the behind-the-scenes arena, with a stunt driver requiring hospital treatment during the filming of one of the endings, presumably the Death one.)

The outcomes of Minor Crash and Major Crash were not represented in the television ads, but did receive their own print ads.

At the time, I recall seeing a handful of online voices who claimed that the concept was flawed, since it implied that whether or not you get into an accident is all a matter of chance and had nothing to do with the driver's diligence. I can only assume that those viewers weren't paying close attention, because the ad makes it clear that the carny does not spin the wheel for drivers who don't make bad decisions. That is the whole purpose of the middle segment, where nothing happens, and that's a good thing. That the carny readies the wheel suggests that the second driver was at least tempted to cut across, but managed to resist, and is rewarded by getting to sit out the game. And he doesn't even ready the wheel for Peter Gabriel. We can think of his philosophy as being somewhat akin to that of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, and how it was not his custom to go where he was not invited. By the same token, the carny does not subject anybody to the game who did not take him up on his offer in the first place, however unwittingly. He lets people make their own decisions, and if they choose wrong lets fate make the decisions from there. What makes Austin's performance especially chilling is the air of total impassiveness with which he imbues the character. Compared to the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, there's nothing to suggest that he derives any kind of sadistic relish from being a force of reckoning for these foolish and unwary drivers, but he goes about it with a steely, unflinching sense of duty that's every bit as ghoulish. 

In a campaign brimming with disturbing touches, it might be difficult to isolate the most disturbing, but here's a bit of gratuitous horror that always stands out to me - at the end of the ad, no matter what the variation, we'll get a final shot of the carny and his wheel in motion, signifying the interminable nature of the game, accompanied by a discernible, disembodied whispering. What the whispering is saying isn't fully intelligible, but you can definitely pick out a "Yeah, that wasn't worth it..." at the start. What's more, we hear that same disembodied whispering at the beginning of the third segment, as the ill-fated grey sedan pulls into view and the carny waits for Peter Gabriel to pass. Spooky, no question. But whose disembodied whispering is it? Arguably, it's the carny's internal monologue, which would align with it being juxtaposed with him, but that would imply a degree of emotional investment in the lives of these passing motorists that I don't think he makes. Presumably it's not the ghost of the grey sedan driver because a) we hear it in all versions of the ad, not just the one where he gets Death and b) we hear it prior to him making his stupid decision. It might be that it has no deeper narrative significance, and was incorporated as an extra bit of atmosphere to accentuate the viewers' goosebumps. I've got another theory, though, and it alludes to yet another layer of implicit horror that you might pick up on if you study the details closely. At the start of the ad, the pointer is already positioned on Death. Once the carny has had his first opportunity to spin the wheel and it's landed on Near Miss, we can see that it remains in that position at the start of both succeeding segments, until he has the chance to spin it again. If we read between the lines, then the implication is that the last unlucky sod to play the game before the events depicted in the ad had landed on Death. So I'd suggest it might be their ghost we're hearing, urging the other motorists not to make the same mistake. Maybe even multiple ghosts, all resigned to the same locale to collectively rue the one reckless blunder that cost them everything. I think the implication is definitely that the intersection is haunted, in one sense or another, a monument to the accumulated mistakes made by various individuals in the heat of the moment, the grim consequences of which are now echoing across eternity.

Despite the brilliance of the campaign, coupled with the morbid elegance of Austin's performance, the carny would not go on to have a long-running presence on New Zealand television (I don't know if the disestablishment of LTNZ in mid-2008 had anything to do with that). He appeared in just one further ad, in which he was shown to be stalking the same individual across various different intersections on different days, the omnipresent spectre of what could potentially go wrong, waiting for this patently conscientious driver to make the single slip-up for which he could be punished dearly. This ad did not have multiple endings, although there were different edits, the longer of which resulted in another driver who did not follow the protagonist's shining example, necessitating a spin of the wheel, although the ad cut away without showing us how they fared. That was the final curtain for the Kiwi intersection carny, yet he's never quite gone away. His face, his wheel, his eerie fairground leitmotif...it all still haunts me. There are days when I think I can just make out his silhouette from the corner of my eye, lingering on the roadside and anticipating every possible opening for calamity. Public information legends never retire, they merely enjoy an extended encore in the psyches of their viewers.

Bob's Birthday (aka In Ourselves Are Triumph and Defeat)

Even at a relatively brief 12 minutes, Bob's Birthday, the 1993 animation from British-Canadian husband and wife team Alison Snowden and David Fine, is a slow burn. The short, a co-production from Channel 4 and the National Film Board of Canada, centres on Bob Fish (Andy Hamilton), a neurotic dentist turning 40, and the efforts of his forbearing wife Margaret (Snowden) to throw him a surprise party, under the pretence that they'll be dining out at an Indian restaurant come the evening. Bob, though, isn't feeling the occasion and is in the midst of a mid-life crisis. The narrative highlight is when, having arrived at the house with no inkling of Margaret's actual intentions, he proceeds to strut into the living room with his genitalia on full display, and to fire off a string of damning remarks about the friends and associates who, unbeknownst to him, are hiding behind the furniture. But that doesn't occur until seven minutes in. Before then, we get an extensive build-up in which Margaret's innocent party preparations are contrasted, uneasily, with Bob's drab day at the dental surgery, and his wandering eye for his young and oblivious secretary, Penny. Bob is not a particularly sympathetic character. Much of his malaise about the onset of middle age seems to revolve around his cold dissatisfaction with his life with Margaret, all while we're seeing the evidence of Margaret's sweetness and devotion to Bob in plain sight. There is, though, something achingly human about his prosaic predicament. Snowden and Fine's short was to resonate with audiences, winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1995, and later inspiring a spin-off series, Bob and Margaret,  which rain from 1998 to 2001.

Bob's Birthday is a poignant, particularly sour-toned trouble in paradise tale with a sprinkling of strange and grotesque touches - right from the very first scene, in which a severed foot visible upon the kitchen floor is quickly revealed to be a squeaky dog toy. Bob, who has dedicated his career to the preservation of oral hygiene, lives in a world that feels distinctly unhygienic, with all kinds of uncomfortable realities simmering below its proverbial gum-line. The aphid infestation that is slowly devouring the plants in the dental surgery is a visual indicator of the emotional ugliness of which Bob, until his climactic blow-up, prefers not to talk, as is the ornamental doll gifted to him by a patient, revealed to be a kitschy toilet roll holder, and the criminal activity happening both on the street outside Bob and Margaret's abode (Margaret doesn't seem to notice the thief who casually breaks a car window and makes off with its radio) and within their living room (one of their guests pockets the spare change she fishes out from behind the sofa cushion). The surgery's aphid problem also juxtaposes comically with the script's various allusions to gardens as symbols of vitality. Bob listens to a radio announcer (voiced by Harry Enfield, and sounding distinctly like a more sedate Dave Nice), who introduces a discussion on middle age with a clunky metaphor about seasons in the gardening calendar. The greenery with which Bob has surrounded himself (the reflections of his own metaphorical garden), is ailing, potted and confined to a coldly clinical environment in which they have little hope of thriving. In his longing for Penny, Bob recites Thomas Campion's Renaissance love song, "There is a Garden In Her Face", while Penny is shown tending to one of the infested plants; the plant's continued degradation in her care (by the final shot in the dental surgery, we see that it only has one leaf remaining) a sure sign that his yearning is unlikely to heal his inner turmoil. His work offers him no solace. One patient merely feeds his existential fears, by citing an American study claiming that dentists have a particularly high rate of suicide. Another, despite her tasteless choice of birthday present, seems more benevolent in her musings. Her suggestion that 40 should be seen as a new beginning, with one having had ample opportunity to learn from the foolishness of their youth, is swiftly undermined by Bob's immediate instinct, on arriving home, to engage in a whole new bout of foolishness, behind what he naively believes to be closed doors.

Bob's Birthday offers a humorous look at the existential despairs associated with ageing (Snowden and Fine were themselves closer to 30 when they made the film, and apparently already feeling the pinch of their impending middle age), but its sharpest insights are in the moments which create a broader portrait of loneliness, accentuating the mutual solitude of both Bob and Margaret, and the obvious disconnect that has crept into their marriage. The futility of Margaret's party preparations is echoed in the adjacent tussle between the couple's two dogs (whom, it later appears to occur to Bob, were taken in as substitutes for having children) for a football, which leaves both parties locked in a stalemate for the duration of the short. Bob's professed desire to have children with Margaret seems at odds with his interest in an extra-marital affair, reading less like an attempt to reaffirm their union than a further, desperate expression of his fear of ending up alone. Bob is so overwhelmed by the prospect of oblivion in his future that he's unable to recognise the care he is evidently receiving from Margaret in the present, and his own failure to return it. His disparagement of his wife, and his unwitting sabotage of the party she'd planned, amount to a cruel rejection of that care, pushing Margaret into a more subdued existential crisis, in which she contemplates her own ageing, vulnerable form and the lack of love in her life (can she count on Bob to take care of her?). Her predisposition to always nurture the pathetic Bob nevertheless seems to transcend the emotional bruising she endures; she eventually returns downstairs and tenderly hands him a pair of trousers, which Bob obligingly receives.

Bob's journey can be seen as following the familiar trajectory of the five stages of grief. The earlier scenes in the dental surgery are all about denial. His silent desiring of Penny, who's never hinted to reciprocate his interests, amounts to a hollow attempt at escapism from his middle-aged discontent, while his sterile interactions with his patients offer him little recourse for an emotional outlet. When Bob gets home, his anger suddenly becomes manifest in the gruesome outburst in which, in an act of overcompensation for his own roving fancies, he coldly advises Margaret to find herself a new partner. He denounces all of their friends as boring, before sinking into a mournful rumination about how the only people they ever cared for, Ted and Elaine, have since deserted them for Australia (his evident attraction to Elaine indicates that Penny wasn't the first occasion in which he's contemplated infidelity to Margaret). He reaches his bargaining stage when he searches for an answer to his problem. Should he and Margaret have children? Would he be more attractive if he exercised more or went on a diet? Finally, he embraces Margaret and appears to have achieved acceptance. Suddenly he seems very upbeat and optimistic about the restaurant dinner he believes is awaiting them, insisting that he's been looking forward to it all day, despite his earlier reservations that curry was too spicy for his palate.

This takes us into the short's ambivalent ending, in which Bob goes out to start the car, and Margaret takes the birthday cake she'd prepared earlier and follows him, abandoning the thwarted party and leaving her friends in the darkness. Meanwhile, Bob proclaims his newfound acceptance of middle age by reciting the final lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Poets" ("Not in the clamor of the crowded street, Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, But in ourselves are triumph and defeat"), and is seen to unlock the car door for Margaret, freeing the way for her to join him in wherever life will take him next. We might question why Margaret chooses to ignore the party guests at the end. Is she too embarrassed to face them? Is this some futile attempt to sweep those pervasive uncomfortable realities back under the rug, by pretending they were never there? Or does it represent her own rejection of the social connections that, as per Bob's accusations, Margaret despises as much as he does? (The rather emphatic slamming of the door might imply the latter). Either way, it is obviously a bit fanciful to suppose that they won't have to face the music sooner or later. They're going to have to come back home eventually (for one thing, their dogs are there) and, whether or not the guests will be waiting or will have found their own way out, this is the world they'll still have to live in. Perhaps we feel a mite bad for the guests, with whom we don't really spend enough time to assess if they are as bad as Bob claims. For the most part their transgressions seem to be quite low-key. We've got the penny-pincher who pockets coins from behind the sofa, and another who spills a drink on the carpet despite Margaret's request that they leave it unstained. Bob repeats some rumor he's heard about one guest, Barbara, who is a "wild card" behind the back of her husband Brian. Otherwise, their biggest sin, according to Bob, is simply being dull. He could be right - as we first enter the party, some of the guests are having a rather vapid conversation about basil and mozzarella. All the same, we're not given enough information to see their friends as the real problem. Bob is plainly his own worst enemy (something his citation of Wadsworth Longfellow appears to acknowledge), but by embracing Margaret (physically and emotionally) he seems to find his way toward redemption. Margaret, meanwhile, throws her lot in with Bob, concession that, in the end, all they fundamentally have is one another.

There is, though, another problem. Bob remarks how prudent it was that they booked their restaurant table in advance, as being a Friday night, they can expect it to be busy. But of course Margaret hasn't. She never intended to go to the restaurant, which was just a decoy to disguise her actual intentions. They're going to have to take their chances. Maybe they'll get lucky and get a table anyway, maybe they'll have to drive around all night looking for a place that can take them (in which case Margaret is going to have to admit to Bob that she lied about making the booking). What lies behind them is a lot of awkwardness and angst that's bound to rear its head again somewhere down the line. What lies ahead of them, tonight and on every night to follow, is uncertain. By the end, Bob and Margaret have each resigned themselves to that particular fate.

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?