Flaming Moe's (aka A Moe-st Successful Formula)

Much like the concoction from which its title derives, "Flaming Moe's" (episode 8F08) was something of an overnight sensation. Debuting on November 21st 1991, it immediately cemented its reputation as one of The Simpsons' most electrifying entries. There was a certain panache to the episode, something that caught fire and captured viewers' attentions in a way that exceeded expectations even for a series that had already garnered such glorious notoriety. On the DVD commentary, it's noted by the production crew that "Flaming Moe's" was a really big deal when first it aired, regularly landing spots in contemporary top episode columns. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide declare it to be "Possibly the best Simpsons episode" (of course, in their expanded edition they bestow that exact same honor on Season 9's "The Principal and The Pauper", which is...a minority opinion, to say the least). What was the reason for its breakout success? Was it the wonderfully self-depreciating guest appearance from Aerosmith? A testament to how much audiences loved Cheers (still yet to close its doors and give way to Frasier) and were willing to extend that love to anything that paid homage to it? Those were delicious extras for sure, but certainly not the main ingredient. The main ingredient was Moe. Slimy, despicable, lewd, greasy, backstabbing Moe. He's essentially a counterpart to the children's cough syrup that, as Homer fortuitously discovered, will transform the most low grade, kitchen-sink of cocktails into a luxury beverage, provided the alcohol is first allowed to get a little burned. You know that syrup, like anything bearing the Krusty brand, is dubious, cheap and in no way trustworthy, and yet there is something about it that keeps bar patrons from Springfield and beyond coming back for more. Moe is, on the surface, every bit as repulsive - the plot of this episode has him stealing Homer's recipe and passing it off as his own brainchild without qualms - and yet he makes for such an engaging, and weirdly sympathetic central figure. We shouldn't like Moe, but there is something so achingly, snivellingly human about the guy that whenever he's onscreen, we're totally absorbed.

"Flaming Moe's" feels like an important episode in the evolution of The Simpsons, being one of their earliest experiments in putting a supporting Springfieldian front and centre. It isn't purely a Moe show - Homer plays a pivotal role, and Marge, Bart, Lisa and even Maggie all get their chances to shine. But the dynamics happening within the household are definitely secondary compared to the dynamics happening inside the tavern, and in the strained friendship between Moe and Homer. The only episode before it that felt quite so radical, in terms of side-lining the Simpsons themselves, was "Principal Charming" of Season 2. By its third season, the series was feeling confident enough to try broadening its canvas further, taking advantage of the town's various other colourful denizens and exploring what kinds of stories could be supported beyond the snapshots of modern family life. Not all of their efforts were successful - a counterpoint to "Flaming Moe's" from the back end of the season is "The Otto Show", an episode centred on a character who doesn't prove strong enough to carry his own narrative, and whom the writers have wisely shied away from using too heavily since. Not everybody has the Moe Factor, that pining desperation to be loved and valued by a world he so bitterly resents. But there is a little Moe in all of us, for sure. (As a bonus, the extensive bar focus gives us the opportunity to see other prominent Springfieldians in bizarre after dark personas. Krusty as a pimp? A drunken Edna K attempting to pick up Homer? A well-groomed Barney with trendy wingmen named Armando and Raffi?)

The series was onto a winning formula with "Flaming Moe's", but what's curious is that they did not, for some time, make any serious attempt to repeat it. It was the first episode to use Moe as a main character, and for a number of years it was also the ONLY episode that could be conceivably described as Moe-centric. He had the occasional moment of plot significance here and there - he played a key role in the resolution of "New Kid on The Block" of Season 4, and "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" of Season 5 added the intriguing development of him coveting Homer's life, specifically his union with Marge - but was mostly restricted to asides in his bar room. It wasn't until Season 7, with "Bart Sells His Soul" and "Team Homer", that he started to be brought back into the spotlight. And for another episode in which Homer's friendship with Moe was the emotional nexus, we would have to wait five whole years, until "The Homer They Fall" of Season 8. Writer Robert Cohen, meanwhile, would prove something of a one script wonder, at least where The Simpsons was concerned, with "Flaming Moe's" being his only credited contribution (although he worked elsewhere on the series as a production assistant).

It could be that they were reluctant to go back to the Moe well too quickly after "Flaming Moe's" for risk of repeating itself. And while there would be a great many great Moe moments in the years to come (I am particularly fond of the character study he receives in the "The Love-Matic Grampa" segment of  "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase"), there is no other episode that quite so astutely captures the essence of the Homer-Moe dynamic, a relationship that's not so much symbiotic as it is parasitic. It's nicely summed up by Moe's explanation for why his business has lately been being going through such a rough patch: "Increased job satisfaction and family togetherness are poison for a purveyor of mind-numbing intoxicants like myself." Moe is a miserable being who leeches off the misery of others. Somewhat ironically, given that he's later revealed to envy the life Homer has, Moe's success depends on keeping Homer from realising its full potential. He sells a temporary escapism that Homer is all-too willing to buy, and Homer in turn gives him a steady flow of income. Moe is always there for Homer, albeit not in the most wholesome of ways, and Homer is always there for Moe, even as the rest of the world is too contented to be drinking. What makes Moe's betrayal of Homer in "Flaming Moe's" such a searing gut-punch is not so much that he would take a recipe that Homer came up with and market it without procuring his friend's consent or offering him credit - this frankly is only the logical extension of an alliance that has always been fundamentally exploitative. It's that Moe no longer has any need for Homer the instant his own prospects are looking up. The longstanding threat to Moe would be if Homer were to overcome his habitual drinking and find fulfilment elsewhere, be it in either his family, his career or a more constructive hobby. Homer has, unbeknownst to him, always been the more powerful party in the relationship. But it ends up being Homer who gets left behind, once Moe finds fulfilment in a more desirable class of customer. 

For as beloved as the episode is, it contains a sequence that I consider to be highly underrated, seldom brought up when people talk about the most emotionally painful moments in the show. It occurs as Homer is confronting Moe at the counter of his now-packed bar, protesting that if there were any justice in this world, he would be credited as the drink's creator and his face would be featured on a range of crappy merchandise (ha ha, meta). When Moe does not take his objections too seriously, Homer indignantly exercises the power he's harboured all of this time and tells him that he's lost a customer. This is the kind of announcement that, a short while ago, would have absolutely devastated Moe. Now, he tells Homer that he'll have to speak up, as he accepts a seemingly unending rush of cash coming from all angles of the tavern. Moe isn't knowingly taunting Homer; he genuinely can't hear him above the clatter of the cash register or the clamouring of other patrons thirsting for a Flaming Moe. Once the most valuable asset in Moe's life, Homer now finds himself drowned out amid a sea of indistinct voices, a person of no particular importance to a bartender who is soaring his way up to the big leagues. There's a hilarious moment elsewhere in the episode where Professor Frink, attempting to crack the mysteries of the Flaming Moe, has a computer analyse it and declare the secret ingredient to be love. Really, he's only half-wrong. Homer sharing the recipe came from a place of love, but Moe did not reciprocate. In some respects it is a love story (albeit a toxic one), with Homer slipping into the archetype of the bitter ex who stood by their partner through times of hardship, only to be cast aside once success was in their grasp. I'd like to think it's not a total coincidence that the name of the beverage, no matter whose name is attached to the end, sounds suspiciously like a gay slang term. (Happy Pride Month!)

It is noteworthy that, while Homer is obviously shocked by Moe's bald-faced pilfering of the Flaming Homer recipe, and his move to rename the beverage to accommodate his own legacy, it does not at first create such a dire rift in their friendship. Soon after, Homer is seen back at the bar, casually chatting with Moe about his recent increase in business and if his drink might have had something to do with it. It's only when Moe is approached by Harv Bannister, a representative of Tipsy McStagger, the major food and beverage chain that wants to purchase the recipe to the Flaming Moe, that we see the seeds of real rancour being planted. Moe refuses Bannister's bid, and is assured by Barney that he made the right call, since "Only an idiot would give away a million dollar recipe like that." Words that, unbeknownst to their speaker, cut Homer to the quick. But is it the money that's really gotten him down? What's tragic about the situation is that it had seemingly never occurred to Homer that his home recipe could be marketed and sold for such a lucrative sum. He was simply sharing his tip for a delicious drink as a friend trying to help out another friend who was struggling with low beer stocks, and for the purposes of them sharing an intimate moment as two best mates. It also seemingly doesn't occur to Homer, until the end of the episode, that he wields another certain nefarious power in this equation, in that he's the only person besides Moe who knows the secret ingredient of the coveted beverage. Homer could very easily have sabotaged Moe's trade out of spite, and yet it takes some serious whittling down to get him to the point where he's prepared to do that. Vengeance is not on his mind, and nor is blackmail. At one point he tries exploring his legal options, but is advised that he has no case by Lionel Hutz, who is amazed to discover that books can be a source of useful information, not just fancy decorations to make an office look better. What Homer really wants is acknowledgement from the so-called pal who used him and discarded him so callously. When he returns to the bar, now the hottest joint in Springfield, and has to enter through the bathroom window on account of not being on the exclusive guest list, and pointedly orders a Flaming Homer, it's not so much a demand for belated shares or credit as a plea for validation. It is jealousy, and not envy (and no, the two are not interchangeable) that drives his reaction.

It is not within Homer's interests to lose the established harmony that he has with Moe. We see the vital function the bartender plays in his life within the opening scene, which has Homer retreating to the tavern to get away from the disorder of Lisa's slumber party. The dealings of the slumber party are their own bit of otherwise disconnected weirdness, showcasing an unusually sinister side to Lisa - being host to four of her schoolfriends transforms the ordinarily down to earth middle child into the cackling leader of what's framed as nothing less than a demonic cult, dabbling in freaky rituals involving candle wax and attempting to assimilate Bart into their ranks by way of a forced makeover. They also jinx him, albeit in the schoolyard sense (remember how annoying it was to get jinxed as a child, and bound to silence until somebody released you by saying your name out loud? Why did we ever accept that as canon?). It all gets a bit too self-consciously silly once Bart flees to his bedroom and the girls get through the locked door by removing its hinges, but it serves its purpose in creating a situation that's sufficiently strange and chaotic (Bart leaps out the window, potentially injuring himself, and Maggie is seized by the party as a consolation prize and caked in make-up) that Homer's first instinct would be to remove himself entirely. Moe is his go-to diversion whenever he's unwilling to handle the responsibilities of being a parent (consider that it's unclear if Marge was also in the house, so he potentially left those kids unsupervised, or whenever reality in general gets too overwhelming. The cruellest knock-on effect of Moe's betrayal and meteoric rise to bartending stardom is that it subverts the arrangement, transforming Homer's default method of escapism into an omnipresent symbol of personal oppression. We see this during a dinner table sequence where the subject of the Flaming Moe keeps coming up (the other Simpsons at least are aware that Homer is the true creator of the beverage, but not entirely mindful in how they discuss it around him). Finding his family are not soothing his spirits, Homer excuses himself, reflexively, with the announcement that he's going to Moe's...only for it to hit him like a ton of bricks that Moe is, in this instance, the problem and not the (temporary) solution. His attempt to find a new watering hole at the ironically named The Aristocrat (where the bartender threatens him on entry with a shotgun and gets extremely pissed off when Homer has the gall to request a clean glass) confirms that Moe's services won't be so easily replaced. Homer and Moe were once invaluable allies in their mutual loserdom. The cold reality - that Moe has ascended to luscious new heights while he's been left to wallow in the gutter, becomes a force so inescapable that it has a far more potent effect on Homer's perception than any alcoholic beverage, immersing him in a world where everyone (men, women, children and daisies alike) bears Moe's pug-like face.

All while Homer's sanity is slowly degrading, Moe is living his dream life. He becomes the toast of Springfield, a community that typically struggles to be the subject of positive conversation, as illuminated in an opening interview with boxing champion Dedrick Tatum ("That town was a dump. If you ever see me back there, you know I really [bleep]ed up bad!" Yeah, I feel the exact same way about the town I grew up in.) He even gets a romantic interest, in the form of an alluring bar maid named Colette, an obvious parody of Diane Chambers, the character played by Shelley Long on the popular NBC sitcom Cheers. Colette was originally intended to be voiced by Catherine O'Hara (best known for her roles in the Beetlejuice and Home Alone films), who had recorded a vocal track, but she was ultimately replaced by regular cast member Jo Ann Harris due to a feeling that there was an insurmountable mismatch between O'Hara's performance and the character's visual presentation. The prospect of female companionship has Moe at his most skin-crawlingly lecherous; the very public job interview he conducts with Colette is comprised of nothing but wall-to-wall sexual harassment, although Colette seems unfazed and capable of holding her own against him. With that in mind, the optics of having her eventually sleep with Moe maybe aren't so great, even as a nod to the Will-They-Won't-They between Diane and Ted Danson's character Sam Malone, but having them enter into a relationship ups the poignancy in terms of what Moe has to lose on an emotional level when his fortunes inevitably crumble. There is payoff at the end. The purpose of Colette's character is, ultimately, to get us to an unsubtle swipe at Long's decision to leave Cheers in 1987. Alone again, Moe informs Homer that Colette "left to pursue a movie career. Frankly, I think she was better off here." This could be perceived as a little mean-spirited, given that Long's cinematic career never reached the same heights as her work on Cheers (although it should be noted that Long also left Cheers because she wanted to spend more time with her family, which she was struggling to do on the show's shooting schedule, so exceeding her success on Cheers was maybe not her top priority). The statement is, however, contextualised as an expression of pathos on Moe's part - Moe might have been happier with Colette around, but of course she wasn't better off with him. Having gained a fleeting taste of intimacy, Moe is restored to his former loneliness, left to ruminate on the likelihood that, in the end, he might have amounted to only a stepping stone on someone else's path to glory.

Colette's arrival turns out to be only the beginning of what later becomes a more intricate homage, complete with a Simpson-ized recreation of the iconic Cheers title sequence and a parody of the theme song, "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" by Gary Portnoy. It has to be said that this portion of the episode is a little peculiar, as it's not altogether clear what this is supposed to represent within the context of the episode. The first time I saw it, I remember thinking it was meant to be a TV promo for the Flaming Moe, but it isn't directly framed as such (despite the song playing like an advertising jingle). Now, I think it plays more like the opening to an alternate reality sitcom in which Moe's bar is the focus (a forerunner to some of the concepts later explored in Season 7's "22 Short Films About Springfield") and the hub of a thriving and welcoming community. We see the beginnings of what looks like a typical Cheers installment, with Barney walking the bar in the manner of the late George Wendt's Norm and being greeted enthusiastically by everyone within, including a bartender who is blatantly meant to recall Woody Harrelson. There is, however, an unsettling subversion to this sense of social kinship, suggesting that while Moe might be drawing in bigger and hipper crowds, they are still fundamentally there for release from life's cruelties, and probably no better of for their reliance on the Flaming Moe. The accompanying stills paint an ugly picture of bar life and the intoxicating effects of alcohol, with bar patrons fighting and making one another bleed (anticipating our trip into the actual Cheers bar in "Fear of Flying" of Season 6, in which Norm got drunk and angry and threatened to kill everyone inside the bar). The seemingly disarming ditty, meanwhile, is replete with troublingly bleak lyrics. Compared to the Cheers theme, which was about finding solace and belonging with like-minded souls who valued your existence, these lyrics are focused on the diversionary powers of the drink itself. Get a load of this: 

 

"When the weight of the world has got you down,

and you want to end your life.

Bills to pay, a dead end job,

And problems with the wife.

But don't throw in the towel,

Cos there's a place right round the block

Where you can drink your misery away." 

 

The closing hook, which insists that "Happiness is just a Flaming Moe away", is juxtaposed (amusingly and harrowingly) with a final still showing Homer peering in from outside the bar, his face pressed up against the glass with all the plaintive longing of that kid outside the McDonald's in Santa Claus: The Movie, the patrons within every bit as indifferent to his suffering. Ultimately, the purpose of this sequence is to further accentuate Homer's loneliness, excluded from the celebratory culture surrounding the drink  he personally devised, its touted release from reality totally inaccessible to him.

Colette ends up serving as the moral centre of the story, when she discovers that Moe owes everything to the friend he wronged and continues to mistreat. She convinces Moe that he could put things right by selling the Flaming Moe recipe to Bannister and splitting the profits evenly with Homer. Moe agrees to do so, but is thwarted by Homer, whose despondency has reached its boiling point. Just as Moe is about to sign a contract with Bannister, he appears from the top of the tavern, his coat draped over one half of his face in the style of the Phantom of the Opera (a neat little visual hint at how severely his status as an outcast has warped him), loudly bellowing that he knows the secret to the Flaming Moe to be "nothing but plain, ordinary, over-the-counter children's cough syrup". Bannister gleefully tears up his contract and scarpers. A week later, the high street is awash with vendors selling their own versions of a Flaming Moe, as Homer sheepishly returns to his old hangout to find it devoid of life or business. The only reason anyone would have set foot in Moe's bar was for the joy of downing that exclusive beverage. The community was all a sham, and nobody was going because they liked the tavern itself. Levelled to Homer's lowly status once more, Moe invites his old friend and former greatest customer back inside with open arms.

I will admit that as a child, although I liked the episode as a whole, I was never totally satisfied with how it ends. It comes down to this one simple point - Moe never explicitly apologises to Homer for stealing his recipe, nor does he admit to any wrongdoing. The closest he came to that was when he'd earlier conceded to Colette, "He may have come up with the recipe, but I came up with the idea of charging $6.95 for it." Homer apologises to Moe for his act of sabotage, which Moe graciously accepts, but it's easy to get the impression that Moe still isn't completely reciprocating Homer's goodwill. In truth, the episode ends the only way it can, not with any overtly tender displays of reconciliation, but with two wounded exes finding their way back to each other's arms on the understanding that they're the only ones who actually will lick one another's sores. The Homer-Moe arrangement is imperfect, and there's not much pretending otherwise (Homer's proclamation of "You're the greatest friend a guy could ever have" seems designed to ring a little hollow), but both men recognise that they need the security of other to fall back on. Moe might have betrayed Homer and dropped him like a rock at the first whiff of prosperity, but when all of that's been stripped away from him, he's happy that Homer's still there, and ready to take advantage of that all over again. For now, he makes one concession, in the form of a complementary beverage, which he identifies as a Flaming Homer, giving his sole patron the belated validation he'd desperately craved. We leave our heroes in their deserted dive, mutual underdogs grateful for a little taste of sour affinity.

I dedicate this review to the late George Wendt, who gave a surprisingly unnerving performance in "Fear of Flying".

Let's solve a Frasier mystery - what is going on at the end of The Placeholder?

 

A long time ago, back when this blog wasn't even a year and a half old, I made a post about a Frasier end credits sequence (from the Season 5 episode "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do") that left me totally flummoxed, and which I declared then and there to be the series' weirdest. Looking back nearly nine years on, the whole piece now seems a little naive - in part, because I was still in the vulgar habit of double spacing between sentences in 2016, but more so because there is another Frasier end credits sequence that I've since decided would be a stronger candidate for the series' most baffling. Eddie barking incessantly at an hors d'oeuvre stand shaped like a moorish idol is an awfully random way to round off an episode focussed on Martin ending a long-term relationship, sure, but it doesn't add anything in the way of mystifying plot detail. It's a weird choice because the stand's presence is so incidental within the story proper that most viewers probably didn't even notice it was there on their initial viewing, but what's going on in the sequence itself is really straightforward enough. Eddie is barking at the fish-shaped stand because it spooks him. Why it would spook him so is unclear, as it's hardly the most outlandish prop ever featured in the series, but then as Groucho Marx so humorously observed, inside a dog it's too dark to read, and that goes double for a neurotic dog like Eddie. We could tack on some added significance, as I attempted in 2016 - if we assume that the stand in question belonged to Sherry, then we could interpret that final showdown as a visual metaphor for the ultimate incompatibility between herself and Martin (since Eddie, Martin's dog, regards it as out of place in his domain). I suspect, though, that this is likely a case of a "filler" ending. The writers wanted that final contemplative moment with Frasier and Martin at the bar to be where we left them for this particular installment, and there weren't any B-stories with Niles, Daphne or Roz they could have exploited. End credits sequences are often where we see glimpses of things happening on the periphery of the story, and I'd speculate that the idea here was to show us something of the party Sherry and Martin were preparing for earlier. In lieu of anything too elaborate, they simply had Eddie barking in its aftermath at the fish, now stripped of its hors d'oeuvres. It's a curious choice, but it succinctly communicates that the party is over, in more ways than one. 

So let's move over to our newly-declared champ of confusing codas, the sequence seen following "The Placeholder" of Season 11, the last season of Frasier, ever. (I am still in deep denial about the 2023 revival, because I will not accept Freddy Crane as either Jack Cutmore-Scott OR Martin 2.0, any more than I will accept him as Luke Tarsitano. Sorry, but we are fiercely for Trevor Einhorn in this house.) Debuting on October 14th 2003, this episode sees Roz attempting to pressure Frasier into dating an acquaintance of hers, an obnoxious insurance claims adjustor named Ann Hodges (Julia Sweeney). Frasier is loathed to date anyone for the sake of it, insisting that he's quite happy biding his time until Ms Right comes along, but Roz opines that he might regard Ann as a placeholder, so to keep flexing his dating muscles for when Ms Right finally does rear her head. Frasier later decides that he is in fact lonely and desperate enough to take Ann up on the offer, but immediately regrets it on realising quite how challenging it will be to keep his teeth gritted through each protracted second of her company. Things are further complicated when Kenny shows up with his visiting cousin (Krista Allen), whose name so happens to be Liz Wright (hardy har har), and who would clearly be a much better match for Frasier. Cue the awkward sitcom hi jinks, with Frasier attempting to blow off Ann and take a place at Liz's table. He inevitably ends up making a dire impression on both women, and while Liz makes an indignant exit, an opportunity forever squandered, Ann insists that he meet with her again tomorrow morning for coffee as compensation for their botched date.

The end credits sequence depicts the aftermath of Frasier's disastrous dinner; left alone at the restaurant, Frasier is approached by a man who takes a seat at his table and immediately starts sharing some photographs he has on hand. Frasier, who is perturbed by this development, gets out of the situation by faking a telephone call informing him of urgent business elsewhere, and leaves the man alone with his photos. Who was this man? What did the photographs he shares with Frasier have to do with anything we'd just seen? And what about the combination was so repellent to Frasier that he had to immediately high tail it out of there? There is nothing in the preceding twenty minutes to make it overtly obvious what is going on.

I'll admit that the credits sequence for "The Placeholder" was never one that stuck with me (not in the enigmatic way that the image of Eddie barking at that fish did), until I became aware of how many threads there were inquiring about it on the Frasier subreddit, and with no particularly conclusive answers being offered. The KACL 780 episode transcript was just as hazy, identifying the intruder as a man in a sports jacket who's attempting to push his photos on Frasier, but not linking it directly to anything else from the script other than Frasier's use of "the cell phone trick". We had seen Frasier pretend to receive a phone call with urgent news at two prior points during his date with Ann, so this part of the sequence is at least decipherable. The mystery lies with the man and the significance of his photos. I was intrigued enough to rewatch "The Placeholder" several times over, treating the whole arrangement as a puzzle that could be solved if I scrutinised the pieces long and hard enough.

I don't think it's unfair to say that "The Placeholder" is a fairly by-the-numbers installment of Frasier. Aside from introducing Ann, who would return in a more openly antagonistic role a few months down the line in "The Ann Who Came To Dinner" (I noted in my previous piece that Sherry is a divisive character among Frasier viewers, but oh boy does Ann make Sherry at her worst seem truly innocuous), the most notable thing about it is a sequence in which Frasier interacts extensively with a cat named Mr Bottomsley, whom Frasier is pet-sitting while his owner is out of town. The feline actor playing Bottomsley is such a delight - his reaction on being teased by Frasier about the prospect of a hot bath is simply priceless - and he and Frasier have such delectable chemistry that you really wish it hadn't taken this long for his latent cat person to come out (but then Frasier apparently had allergies back in 1996 when he met Kate Costa's cat). The rest of the episode is devoted to hitting largely familiar notes. For now, Ann herself plays like a cruder version of Poppy, an aggressively garrulous character we'd spent a couple of episodes with in Season 7, Frasier screwing up a date is certainly nothing we've never seen before, and the first act incorporates a sequence that heavily recalls the Season 4 finale "Odd Man Out", with Frasier once again having to contend with the stigma of being the only unattached adult in a restaurant. There's also a subplot with Martin agreeing to interrogate Niles and Daphne's Czech housekeeper Mrs. Gablyczyck (Lauri Johnson), whom they suspect of stealing; it's an agreeable enough diversion from the Frasier A-story, but is introduced fairly late into the runtime, what with Martin, Niles and Daphne also playing principal parts in that preliminary restaurant scene.

Even Frasier's tactic of staging a telephone call, purportedly from Niles after suffering a back injury, comes with built-in deja vu. We've seen variations on it in other episodes. In "Merry Christmas, Mrs Moskowitz" of Season 6, Frasier and Faye had each arranged for third parties to call them during their introductory meeting, to give them a quick out if their prospects weren't looking so rosy. "Cranes Unplugged" of Season 8 has a subplot with Niles and Daphne attempting to set Roz up with a man who is strongly implied to have resorted to this very trick after a single glance at Roz. This is a classic Frasier standby. So what does our mystery man do to warrant it on this most peculiar of occasions?

The first thing to note is that the man doesn't emerge from completely nowhere. If you pay attention to the extras in the backdrop during the date with Ann, you'll see that he's seated at the table behind Frasier. He isn't seen doing a whole lot other than toying with a wine glass and interacting with a waiter, but there is a shot where Frasier moves past his table that establishes that he's there by himself. He doesn't appear to take any interest in what's going on over at Frasier's end until Ann starts making a scene. And then when the credits are rolling he makes his own move. It would be helpful if we'd gotten a closer glimpse of what's actually in the pictures he shares with Frasier, but in my opinion they look like ordinary family photos (if you squint, I swear I see a child standing beside someone in a rabbit costume). This isn't a case of an overly zealous KACL fan wanting Frasier to sign his glossies, nor does it look like he's trying to set Frasier up with someone he knows. Whatever he's attempting to talk about with Frasier, he comes across as being somewhat down in the mouth about it (notice the dejected head shake as he takes his seat). A couple of possibilities spring to mind - the man might be trying to locate a missing person (in which case Frasier is acting like a bit of an arse in fervently not wanting to help him) or he's a lonely guy reaching out to another solitary restaurant patron by trying to strike up a conversation about his kids (in which case we're potentially meant to fill in the blanks that he's divorced and the kids are likely living with their mother). Frasier isn't in the mood for this; he was enjoying his consolation prize, in the form the souffle Kenny had ordered, and which Ann had previously declared was to die for, and this stranger is little more than an unwelcome intrusion in this moment of peace. Overwhelmed by the neediness of this man, he pulls out his phone and pretends that something's just come up, even if means having to abandon his souffle.

If that all still seems rather random, I do have a theory about how it might be more closely linked to the happenings in the episode, more specifically the sequence where Frasier is alone with Mr Bottomsley. During the initial restaurant scene, we learn that Frasier is very excited about his recent antiques purchase, a late Regency fruitwood mirror - a thread that transpires to have been implemented in service of a sight gag where Frasier, feeling the chill, has wrapped himself up in an afghan and, cradling the cat in his arms, goes to inspect his new mirror, only to recoil in horror at what he finds staring back at him. The realisation that he might be transforming into a crazy cat lady (ie: his aunt Shirley) is what spooks him into accepting the date with Ann. No literal mirrors figure in the final uncomfortable restaurant interaction, but we see Frasier being spooked by yet another frightful reflection of his own desperation. This time, the caricature it assumes is not that of a crazy cat lady, but another stereotyped figure of social impoverishment, the downtrodden divorced father. It's enough to scare him away, not simply to escape a dull conversation with an overbearing stranger, but because he fears that this is the kind of culture into which he'll be assimilated if he gets too accustomed to dining alone. (Not that dining by one's lonesome is any near as stigmatic as either this episode or "Odd Man Out" would suggest.)

If only Frasier had had the willpower to stick to his guns when he told Roz in the episode's opening that he was quite happy living the single life. The saddest thing about this whole situation is really not that Frasier missed out on an auspicious relationship with Ms Wright, but that he ultimately wasn't willing to settle for a quiet evening in his apartment with the company of Mr B and his hearty bowl of nine-vegetable winter soup. I don't know about you, but it all sounds positively idyllic to me. The only intrusion he had to put up with was a fleeting appearance from Eddie, who was easily sent scurrying. There's a reason why the scene with Mr B stands out to me as the highlight of "The Placeholder" - sandwiched in between the cavalcade of human awkwardness and the non-stop pressure to conform to the standard of doing everything in duos, the tranquility of cat-sitting is a long, cool drink of water, a respite in which Frasier is able to enjoy night of privacy on entirely his own terms. What it absolutely is NOT is a sign of Frasier hitting rock bottom on the personal well-being scale. He was doing perfectly fine until the judgements of the outside world crept in, via the memories of how he had once (presumably) judged his aunt Shirley. Because we all know that there's nothing wrong with favouring the companionship of an animal friend over a dubious avalanche of social stresses. Later in the episode, Martin mentions how he'd confided in Eddie his concerns that Frasier needed to get a life, and while this is clearly intended as a hypocritical echo of Frasier's prior interactions with the cat (with the laugh track responding accordingly), all that Martin does here is confirm that talking to a pet is no big deal. At this stage Martin was also involved with Ronee, so surely the implication isn't that he's also lonely and desperate?

Odds are that Aunt Shirley didn't have to deal with the kind of grotesque social blow-ups that Frasier endured at the hands of Ann, any more than she did bizarre interludes where strangers approached her and attempted inexplicably to talk her through their family snapshots, and I suspect she was all the merrier for it. 

A Fairy Tale (aka A Curious Case)

At first glance the title of Tony Ross's 1991 picture book A Fairy Tale might seem deceptive. It takes place not in a lush mythical kingdom, but in a grimy industrial city in the early 20th century and the narrative that unfolds is, on the surface, a predominantly down to earth one. The opening page has our protagonist, a young girl named Bessie, angrily rejecting a book about fairies because she can no longer relate to such concepts. Her yearning for books that are about "real things" lays out Ross's own ambitions to tell a story that says something authentic to children on the brink of the same disillusionment. Young readers who may be too old and jaded to believe in things like the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, but are also feeling the bleakness of that void and wondering what else in life could possibly come along to fill it.

Like Ross's Oscar Got The Blame, A Fairy Tale is about the conflict between fantasy and reality, more specifically a child's inclination to use imagination as a means of reckoning with their world versus the pressure to live in the real world. In this case the conflict is largely internal. Bessie is quite a bit older than Oscar and at the stage in life where she is questioning the value of escapist fantasy, yet she is clearly reluctant to abandon that lingering sense of childhood curiosity altogether. Her insistence that fairy tales are about made up things is challenged when she gets to know her elderly neighbour, Mrs Leaf (full name later revealed to be Daisy Leaf), who suggests that she herself might really be a fairy. Bessie is initially incredulous, since Mrs Leaf does not meet her preconceived notions of how a fairy should be, but Mrs Leaf explains that fairies only look dainty and beautiful when they are happy; an unhappy fairy would look absolutely wretched. Bessie observes that if Mrs Leaf were a fairy, she would have to be very deeply unhappy, a comment she immediately regrets but that Mrs Leaf does not appear to take too personally. Mrs Leaf, it seems, is indeed a deeply unhappy woman - the source of her unhappiness is never explicitly cited, but can be readily deciphered by anybody reading between the lines. Over the course of the story, she and Bessie forge a close friendship that endures as the latter comes of age, experiences love and loss, and enters into her twilight years. By the ending, which takes us up to the present day, Daisy is still by her side, and it becomes apparent that the ageing process has worked rather differently for her.

From the text alone, there might be some ambiguity regarding Daisy's claims to fairyhood. Ross never flat-out confirms that she is a fairy, much as he never flat-out confirmed what was really going on in the text for Oscar Got The Blame, although in both cases the illustrations appear to favour a particular conclusion. For the first half of the story it seems entirely possible that Daisy is simply humoring Bessie, by giving this frustrated child one last peculiarity to chew on before this kind of fanciful imagining becomes totally inaccessible to her. Bessie notices things about Daisy that make her different to others but do not, in themselves, prove that she is a fairy - for example, her vegetarian diet and her tendency to forage for wild berries (berries that she warns Bessie would be poisonous to anyone not of elfin origin). Then, as Bessie grows into an adult, Ross insinuates more heavily that there might indeed be something genuinely uncanny about Daisy. She does not show up as anything more than a ghostly smudge in Bessie's wedding photographs, although we are offered the glimmer of a rational explanation, with her husband Robert thinking nothing of it and insisting that no picture he's been involved with has ever turned out quite right. Bessie also observes that as she has come of age, Daisy only appears to have gotten progressively younger, although we could still chalk that up to Bessie's friendship bringing out a new lease of life in Daisy. But is there any way to make sense of Daisy's remarkable longevity, and the fact that she's still with Bessie at the end of the book, other than to concede that she is exactly what she says she is?

Bessie's initial distaste for fairy tales stems from her assessment that they do not reflect reality, but at the same time it is clear that she is not exactly satisfied with what reality has to offer. We sense that she turns on childhood fantasy as angrily as she does because she sees it as having betrayed her in not reflecting the world as it really is. And when she attempts to discuss her unanswered questions with the other children at school and gets predictably ridiculed for it, she becomes frustrated with the intolerance of the non-elfin world in not allowing room for such thought. Bessie cannot relate to fairy tale fiction, but nor does she feel at home in the world in which she's required to take her place; in many respects, Daisy's quest is less about convincing Bessie that fairy tales are real than it is steering her toward the qualities worth celebrating in a world that does not align with childhood expectation. The things she encourages Bessie to see as remarkable are, on the surface, very small and ordinary ("Have you ever had a magic moment...a summer afternoon when the sky's so warm the world stops, or the night before Christmas when you can feel the happiness in the air?"). The real world harbours ample magic, but it manifests in subtler, more unassuming means than one might find in an archetypal children's storybook. It is notable that when we first meet Bessie and Daisy, their respective living spaces are marked by dominant colours that point to the state of their internal worlds. Bessie's bedroom is blue and shady, reflecting her general gloom and dissatisfaction. Daisy's living room, by contrast, is green and vibrant, evoking both her connection to nature and, by extension, the fairy domain she describes to Bessie as being covered in grassland. It also hints at Daisy's latent vitality, and at the other hidden depths she possesses, something underscored in having her house's exterior seem as gloomy and disconnected from the natural world as everything else in Balaclava Street.

Daisy tells Bessie that the human world and the fairy world exist simultaneously, and together, but are like two sides of the same coin. Ordinarily they can't see each other, although cracks will occasionally appear between the two, allowing fairies to wander through into human dwellings, only for them to retreat in an instant. The implicit message here is of the duality of life, as Daisy teaches Bessie to consolidate the harshness of reality with the ephemeral blessings it also brings, which Bessie must be alert to in order to seize and appreciate. The cruelty of the human world takes many forms, ranging from the teasing Bessie receives from her schoolmates when she lets her fairy agnosticism slip to the onset of the world war that will eventually claim the life of her beloved Robert. Ross's story centres on the transformative power of the friendship that persists between Bessie and Daisy and how both parties are mutually lifted from their respective solitude and despair. The friendship proves physically transformative for Daisy, but it also visibly changes Bessie's world. As the two grow closer, the illustrations depicting the happenings in that grimy industrial burg already seem brighter and more colourful. The street outside Leach's shop, in which Bessie and Daisy have their second encounter, looks warm and lively, even beneath the clouds of factory smog, and populated by other individuals who are likewise seizing the moment (two men engaged in intimate conversation, a boy hoop rolling). Sharp-eyed readers might notice that littered through the book's illustrations are various hidden fairies and gnomes, lurking somewhere within the corners or, in the case of the illustration depicting the military cross issued posthumously to Robert, right within plain sight. It is a charming touch that seems to bear out Daisy's words about the fairy world always being connected to the human world and the magic intermittently seeping its way in, but the real revelations are in the broader sense of atmosphere and how alive Bessie's ostensibly humdrum existence becomes when she is sharing these experiences with Daisy. Ross's description of the Whit Monday they spend together seems hauntingly reminiscent of Daisy's earlier words on the magic of a summer day in which the sky is so warm that the world seems to stop. Nothing especially out of the ordinary happens. Daisy watches Bessie participate in a parade, they have a celebratory meal in the church hall and then walk home together. But each individual moment is fused with an elation that Bessie wishes could go on forever. It proves a day more magical than any fairy tale.

Bessie cannot actually stop time, of course. The blissful Whit Monday she would have gladly inhabited for all eternity is followed immediately a time leap, in which Bessie becomes a young woman and her perspective on life somewhat changes. She begins to identify as Bess, and her unanswered questions about the existence of fairies are largely put to one side. She and Daisy still talk about it, but have contextualised it as a fond memory of a bygone time in which Daisy had playfully tried to make her believe in fairies. Now Bess's interests lie with more adult pursuits, such as her job in one of the local factories and her romance with her colleague Robert. The idyllic future she might have built with Robert is savagely ruptured by the coming of war; Robert goes away to fight and is killed in action. Bess is naturally distraught, but Daisy is able to support her through the grief until, some years later, "the sadness about Robert turned into happy memories, just as Daisy said it would." Implicit in this line is, I think, the most salient hint regarding the source of Daisy's own implied sadness when first encountered by Bessie. Daisy does not reveal much about her background, other than to suggest that she became stranded in the human world after being unable to find her way back to the fairy world, although we might well have read some significance into her identifying as Mrs Leaf. With that in mind, Daisy's assurances of light at the end of the tunnel following the loss of Robert could be taken as stemming from personal experience. Perhaps when she described being unable to get back to the fairy domain she was speaking at least somewhat metaphorically, referring covertly to the loss of the life she had previously known when her husband was with her. Eventually, it seems that her sorrow transmuted into happy memories, but it took the renewed joy from her friendship with Bessie to get her to that point. Daisy is now able to return the favour by being there for her friend during her own voyage through grief. But even before then, before Daisy's companionship had clearly always helped in filling a hole in Bessie's life. From what we know of Bessie's school life, she was teased and something of a misfit among her peers. There is a passing reference to her mother and we get to meet her uncle Harold, who is a pigeon fancier and points to the birds' homing instincts as an example of the inherent mysteriousness of life. But by all indications Bessie felt more of a connection with Daisy than she did her own flesh and blood family, who stay largely out of the picture. Daisy helped the lonely Bessie find a sense of belonging the real world once before, a function she is able to keep on fulfilling for the adult Bess.

Ross's story ends more or less where it began, with Bess and Daisy in the present day, as close knit a pair as they've always been, although the two of them have now switched places. As we can see from the closing illustrations, Bess has grown old while Daisy now looks young and dainty. By now, Bess feels that she's finally attained clarity for those unresolved questions she had many years ago regarding the existence of fairies. "Maybe old friends never notice the changes in each other. Now and again though, a faint memory comes to old Bess. Something about fairies looking young and beautiful when they're happy...stuff and nonsense, she knew there were no such things...she'd always known." Ironically, Bess's sense of closure on the matter arrives right as Ross gives the reader what looks to be irrefutable proof of Daisy's fairyhood. Is Bess's ageing intended to be symbolic of her relinquishing of childhood fantasy? I would argue not. While the story closes on an unmistakably poignant note, it still reads to me like a positive ending. The implication is that Bess no longer feels the need for fairies, because she has found assuredly the fulfilment she'd long deemed to be lacking in the real world, and is contented with the friend she has, who also just so happens to actually be a fairy. Her friend too could not be happier. Significantly, the final illustration, which has the two friends walking along 1991-era Balaclava Street, appears to show them heading out of the urban environment that has dominated the narrative and in the direction of a distant stretch of greenery. The feeling is one of transcendence, as if the fairy world is their ultimate destination. Their hands linked, we see them bridging the gap between the young and adult worlds, with youthful innocence and graceful maturity co-existing side by side. The pair compliment one another perfectly. Far from a mournful story about the inevitable abandonment of childhood awe, A Fairy Tale is an optimistic yarn about its endurance, and its ability to grow and develop along with us. Life is filled hardship - in that regard it's not so different to a fairy tale - but we've a valuable ally in the magic that floats up through the cracks.

 

Two Dozen and One Greyhounds (aka Are Those Naughty Dogs Back Again?)

The third canine-centred episode of The Simpsons' classic era stands out as the anomaly for a number of reasons. "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" (2F18), which aired April 9th 1995 toward the tail end of the sixth season, is the only entry of the four that isn't focused on the relationship between Bart and Santa's Little Helper. You get the impression that the Simpsons kids are much more protective of the dog (and his progeny) than their parents, which tracks with what we saw in those previous episodes, but there's no sense here that Bart relates particularly strongly to Santa's Little Helper because he sees in him so much of his own incorrigible self. Truth be told, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" isn't really a Santa's Little Helper episode at all, with the dog's most significant participation confined largely to the first act. He serves as a catalyst to the main conflict and then takes a backseat, making this not much of a step-up from his turn in the previous season's "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song". And yet his presence is felt all throughout this story. The plot involves him courting a female racing dog and siring an improbably large litter of twenty-five puppies, all of which have his face, and his appetite for destruction. We might not spend a lot of time with the leading pooch himself, but we have twenty-five bags of his troubled genes crawling around in his stead - which turns out to be way more Santa's Little Helper than anyone (not least the Simpsons themselves) can handle.

An advantage that "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" should have over the other "classic" Santa's Little Helper episodes is that, out of the four, it is the least prone to sentimentality. A shortcoming shared by "Bart's Dog Gets an F", "Dog of Death" and "The Canine Mutiny" is that their resolutions all hinge upon "boy and his dog" cliches played mawkishly straight, but this is something that "Two Dozen" sidesteps altogether. It isn't interested in tugging on the heartstrings, but in revelling in the inevitable chaos that comes with attempting to live under the same roof as twenty-five puppies, sire dog, dam dog and an ostracised cat. For the first two acts, this is as free-wheeling a farce as The Simpsons had ever tried its hand at by Season 6. Eventually, it settles into becoming one of those "Bart and Lisa Investigate" stories that have been a staple of the series since "Krusty Gets Busted" of Season 1, but even with some belated menace thrown into the plot (in the form of Mr Burns, and his nefarious plans for the puppies), it never takes itself overly seriously. There are action sequences that anticipate the high-adrenalin climax of "Brother From Another Series" (with Bart and Lisa being held at gunpoint and escaping by sliding down a chute), but here it's mostly in quotation marks.

Unfortunately, none of those anomalies work in the episode's favour, and I'm inclined to rate "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" as both the worst of Season 6 and the weakest of the show's runty litter of Santa's Little Helper outings. It is, if nothing else, more watchable than the mean-spirited "Dog of Death", but it is a far junkier experience. I feel a slight trepidation in saying that, as I get the impression that this is the best-regarded Santa's Little Helper episode among Simpsons fans, and I'm sure that is 100% down to the musical number that Burns performs toward the end about his sociopathic love of animal hides. No dispute that it's an extremely energetic and unforgettable set-piece, and I suspect that having it land so very late on in the game convinces viewers that the episode as a whole was a lot stronger then it was, since that is the last major spectacle it leaves us with. This is a case of The Simpsons cheekily exercising the writer's escape clause outlined by Robert McKee (Brian Cox) in the 2002 film Adaptation. :"The last act makes a [story]...You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end and you've got a hit." My question is, if the "See My Vest" sequence didn't show up to give us a much-need serotonin-boost at the eleventh hour, is there anything at all about this episode that would stick out to you as memorable or inspired? Aside from maybe the Rory Calhoun reference that works precisely because it's so unintelligible?

The thing is, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" is a cute episode, but it's also kind of dumb. What's startling is that it's dumb in a way that I don't think there had been any real precedent for until now, at least in terms of A-stories. It makes a bit more sense when we take into account who wrote it. This was a Mike Scully script, and while Scully was still entirely capable of writing episodes with strong narrative backbones and sincere character observations (see "Lisa's Rival" from earlier that season), his worst indulgences were already starting to creep through, notably in his approach to writing Homer (again, see "Lisa's Rival" from earlier that season, or for a particularly foreboding example, "Lisa on Ice"), and "Two Dozen" feels like the first occasion on which he really let those eccentricities run rampant. I don't much care for the direction the show went when Scully eventually took over as showrunner, and I can somewhat see the blueprints for that direction in this episode. The story is half-baked and excessively cartoony, the humor is crude and physical, the Simpsons themselves are written fairly unsympathetically (although that's par for the course with these dog episodes) and the mindfulness for tying up loose ends is lacking (see next paragraph). The small mercy is that Homer is nowhere near as horribly written as he was in "Lisa on Ice" (in part because this plot doesn't give him as many opportunities to be an all-out dick), although Snowball II gets the worst of what we have - in "GET THAT CAT OUT OF THE WAY!" you can pick out the aggressively entitled tone he'd be assuming a lot under Scully.

For once, however, I am not inclined to name the eternally maligned Snowball II as the critter done dirtiest by this particular doggone script. That honor goes to Santa's girlfriend, She's The Fastest. "Two Dozen" kicks of with Santa's Little Helper in an unusually hyperactive mode and the family failing to realise that his behaviour problems stem from sexual frustration, until he breaks free and chases down and mounts a female dog on the tracks. Rather than doing the sensible thing and getting their dog fucking neutered, the Simpsons decide to take the female dog into their abode (her owner, the Rich Texan, seems only too happy to relinquish her, laughing uproariously when Marge asks if he'll miss her loyalty and companionship). It's a move that makes the Simpsons look stupid as hell, if they don't foresee where this scenario is headed, although maybe that's part of the joke. Needless to say, She's The Fastest didn't become a long-term fixture of the Simpson household - after the events of this episode, she's never seen again, and "Two Dozen" never attempts to give her character closure or account for her subsequent absence. I can't say I'd gotten terribly attached to this dog or had been anticipating many great adventures with She's The Fastest to come, but I do find it cheap and lazy that the script would go to such lengths to incorporate this additional pet into the Simpson fold, only to forget about her the instant she's served her narrative purpose. Could they not have worked in at least a throwaway line indicating that she'd fallen out with Santa's Little Helper and gone off with some other family? I'd like to give Scully the benefit of the doubt and assume there was something along those lines in an earlier draft that was cut for time, but the fact of the matter is that She's The Fastest is only a plot device, brought in solely to proliferate Santa's seed, and the episode has no qualms with treating her as such. In fairness, she's not the only animal to be acquired by the family and then completely memory holed - after Season 4's "Duffless", we'd heard nary a peep from that hamster who was adopted by Lisa and abused in the name of science/vengeance. The difference being, I suppose, that Lisa was chiefly interested in that hamster as a test subject, and there was no indication that she'd intended to keep it once her experiment was concluded (as terribly out of character as it seems for Lisa to treat an animal as a resource and then discard it). In "Two Dozen" we have Bart and Lisa begging for ownership of this dog and her original owner walking out on her, so it doesn't sit half as well with me for her to fade from the picture without thought or comment. There was an alternative - rather than saddling the Simpsons with a second dog and getting all that extra story baggage, they might have had the dam's owner dump the unwanted puppies with them (as happened with Eddie's litter in the Frasier episode "The Unkindest Cut of All"). As a side-note, the character design for Santa's girlfriend also bugs the living snot out of me - they gave her human eyelashes, for Pete's sake!^[1]

Returning to the dog track allows the series to get reacquainted with its beginnings in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire", and while the explicit references to the events of that episode are a little jarring, given how drastically far removed "Two Dozen" feels from it tonally, I do like the subtler callbacks that don't advertise themselves so openly. She's The Fastest's racing number is 8, just like Santa's Little Helper before her, and Homer is once again swayed into placing a bet based on the perceived significance of the dog's name - which on this occasion actually works out for him, or at least it would have done if Santa's Little Helper hadn't disrupted the race. She's The Fastest's career is tanked, and for better or for worse, she takes up residence with the Simpsons. We get to see how the family's attitude toward responsible pet ownership has further degraded since the days of "Bart's Dog Gets an F", where it was recognised as a major transgression for Santa's Little Helper to be left to roam the neighbourhood unattended. In this episode, Marge, of all characters, willingly opens the door for the dogs so that they can wander all over town as they please, in a fanciful sequence that ends with the dogs seated at their own personal table outside Luigi's restaurant and coming to blows over what must be the toughest spaghetti strand in the world.

This might be a good point to acknowledge that "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" is, specifically, The Simpsons' tribute to the Disney animated canon (long before they themselves fell under the ownership of the Mouse), and there's an extent to which we need to view it through that lens. The title alone is a dead giveaway that the plot aspires to pilfer a few details from the 1961 classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians (it also evokes Fox's 1950 film Cheaper By The Dozen, then yet to be remade with Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt), but the Disney references are scattered and varied enough to suggest a broader running theme. The romantic interlude with Santa's Little Helper and She's The Fastest is plucked straight out of  Lady and The Tramp (1955), while the climactic "See My Vest" number is a flagrant rip-off of the "Be Our Guest" song from Beauty & The Beast (1991). (It's probably not an intentional reference, but that especially corny gag where Snowball II bats away the catnip also puts me strongly in mind of that random Parisian in The Aristo-Cats (1970) who decides to lay off the Merlot.) The entire story is a love letter to Disney, and as such it might be given leeway for being a little more cutesy and anthropomorphic than your average Simpsons outing. On the episode commentary, Groening talks with pride about how they always strove to have the animals in the series behave like real animals, with the rare anthropomorphisms being reserved for situations where they'd ring a deliberately disturbing note (the example he cites is in "Bart Gets An Elephant" of Season 5, where Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II attempt to walk upright and say "We love you" in a manner that suggests the effort is causing them excruciating pain). Ironic, then, that "Two Dozen" itself proves to be something of a deviant in that regard, with quite a few jokes that have the animals behaving in distinctly un-animal ways that, while self-consciously silly, feel as though they're intended to be charming rather than weird, eg: Santa's and She's snickering at the Shar Pei in the park (the Shar Pei's reaction is great, though) and Snowball II rubbing her eyes in disbelief. Still, such touches are handled with a sharp enough Simpsons edge. The sequence that's the most conspicuously Disney-ish is Santa's and She's aforementioned date around the town, and while this section is a little too long and frothy for my tastes, it's kept afloat by a playfully subversive undercurrent. There's a moment where the dogs have their picture taken after poking their heads through a photo stand-in, which is a self-evidently ridiculous scenario (who's taking the picture? Who is the photo even for?), except it's revealed that the image on the other side is a recreation of one of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's paintings of dogs playing poker. To the untrained eye, this might read as a harmless, perfectly kitschy cultural reference, but a more seasoned Simpsons viewer might interpret its appearance as ominous, having been trained by "Treehouse of Horror IV" to see those pictures as inherently cursed. The spaghetti kiss moment from Lady & The Tramp likewise goes humorously wrong, with the apparent lovebirds turning into snarling beasts the instant their resource guarding urges are activated. And when we finally get to "See My Vest", a great part of that joke is that what Burns is singing about is so horrifically far-removed from the intentions expressed by Lumiere and chums to that same cheerful tune (although it might have appealed to Gaston, who used antlers in all of his decorating).

There was, of course, always more to Disney than cute creatures batting their unnaturally elongated eyelashes. There was an element of danger, typically involving the separation of the young and innocent from protective paternal figures and/or a deliciously flamboyant villain, and while "Two Dozen" eventually yields both of those things by bringing Burns into the mix, we first have to sit through a very laggy and staccato middle section that's little more than a string of skits about puppy-inflicted mayhem. The birth of the twenty-five pups brings what I personally consider to be the most unforgivable aspect of this episode, this being that it contains what has to be by and far the worst, most cringe-inducing line of dialogue ever spoken by a Simpsons character, at least in the 90s. I refer to Bart's "Hey look, a really small dog just fell out of Santa's girlfriend!" Forget that "Springfield swings like a pendulum do!" line my brother used to rag on hard in "All Singing, All Dancing", this is just heinous. Among other sins, it makes it sound as if Bart doesn't understand where babies come from, which of course he does. He had that video he showed his class about how kittens are born (the ugly truth) in "Lisa's Substitute", and he'd surely have put it together that puppy births are going to be much the same process. Then again, the whelping of She's The Fastest is a surprisingly clean business, devoid of afterbirth, umbilical cords and meconium, and the puppies are born with their eyes already open. Disney's depiction of the process in One Hundred and One Dalmatians honestly felt a touch more realistic.

I'm not going to go after "Two Dozen" for its far-fetched set up because at this point in the series it just seems futile. The premise of the Simpsons seriously thinking that they can live with twenty-seven dogs (plus a cat, a fish tank and - possibly - a hamster somewhere in the backdrop) is perhaps no more fanciful than the premise of them attempting to co-exist with a full-grown African Elephant chained up in their yard. It does mean, however, that when the threat of removing the puppies is finally introduced, it seems like common sense prevailing and not something you can really feel too mad at the adult Simpsons for imposing. Lisa's response - "Is that what we do in this family? When someone becomes an inconvenience we just get rid of them?" - would be a patently spurious rebuttal even without the cutaway gag showing Abe in miserable solitude at the Retirement Home. Sorry Lisa, but you clearly don't have room for all these dogs, and it's evident enough by now that your family are shitty pet owners anyway. This is, I think, what makes "Two Dozen" a weaker installment than either "Bart's Dog Gets an F" and "Dog of Death" - for all of those episode's deficiencies, they dealt with the trials of pet-keeping in a grounded fashion in which there were genuine stakes. When Bart (twice) found himself in the position of having to speak up for the beloved dog his callous parents were prepared to sacrifice to make their own lives a little easier, his distress and indignation felt real and searing. Here, we have a ludicrous scenario that plainly isn't sustainable, and which the family look obtuse for ever allowing to get this far. You just can't feel the same sympathy for the children's position this time round because, yeah, the line does have to be drawn somewhere. Their unreasonable pleading nevertheless manages to buy the puppies a short reprieve, with their parents agreeing to keep them so long as they don't cause any more trouble (um, right, because that's really going to happen). At this point we suddenly leave the milieu of a whimsical Disney film and find ourselves plonked right in the middle of the hellish sitcom banalities The Simpsons is so fond of sending up. Marge and Homer are hosting a dinner party for Reverend Lovejoy, Homer's old army drill sergeant (the remnant of some prior unseen adventure where Homer joined the army and was mistakenly discharged a month early) and the regional director of the IRS. Exactly the kind of trio whom you wouldn't want present to witness the stomach-churning spectacle of your roasted turkey ripping open to reveal two flea-ridden gremlins inside. The puppies are evicted!

Rehoming the puppies presents its own challenge, thanks to the pups' harrowing tendency to vocally object whenever any prospective new owner tries to separate them. "We've got to be realistic..." Marge insists (a little late to say that now), before Burns shows up and offers to give all twenty-five of them a loving home. We know right off the bat that Burns' intentions for those dogs can be none too savoury. The family themselves are savvy enough to recognise this, and to deny Burns ownership of the puppies, but not so savvy that they don't also turn their backs on the puppies for long enough for Burns to stuff them into a sack and take them anyway. "Two Dozen" took its sweet time, but now we finally have something resembling a decent conflict. Actually, when Burns shows up the tone of the episode changes drastically, going from Happy, Dopey and a bit Sleepy to something much more energetically demented. It stands to reason - it is so often the Disney villains who are the MVPs of their stories, with their extravagance and their dark eccentricities, so it should not surprise us that this rule would apply to Disney pastiches too. The third act kicks off with a sly moment of self-awareness, by pretending to go through the motions of having the Simpsons treat the puppies' disappearance as a genuine mystery, before cutting abruptly to the chase, with Bart and Lisa infiltrating Burns' mansion to investigate. They observe Burns taking curiously doting care of the puppies, prompting the Simpsons kids to ponder if they've perhaps misjudged the decrepit billionaire. But no. Burns lays out his sinister agenda with nauseating starkness, adhering to the traditional Disney model of belting out your heart's deepest desire with a lavish song and dance number, in this case an upbeat showstopper detailing the gruesome array of animal skins that went into the attire in his personal wardrobe. His latest fashion hankering is for a tuxedo made from greyhound fur - a narrative development that's honestly no stranger or more fucked-up than the Disney film it's spoofing, where ninety-nine Dalmatian pups were similarly threatened with the prospect of becoming a garish fur coat, although Burns' evil motives are expressed with a shameless theatricality that would put even Cruella herself in the shade. "See My Vest" stands out among Simpsons musical sequences because it is such a delirious exercise in bad taste - a head-spinning voyage through one man's hedonistic vision of every living creature under the sun as the raw materials to be cut up and modified into whatever hideous garment takes his fancy. Every taboo regarding animal mistreatment is violated; Burns has both slippers made from an endangered rhino and a beret made out of a decapitated poodle (less an outrageous fashion statement than a serial killer deviancy). The show was at least able to forgo its usual hard-on for hamster abuse on this occasion, though I suppose those loafers, former gophers aren't so far-removed from a hamster.

To be honest, this is all a bit much even for Burns, which goes back to what I said about his actions in this episode being in quotation marks. He's playing the cartoonishly flamboyant villain in a Disney parody; his shameless theatricality might be jaw-dropping, but it also ensures that it stays just unreal enough for comfort. He also gets to show the inkling of a sensitive side, having earmarked twenty-four of the puppies for death, but intending to spare the one that's endeared itself to him with its ability to stand up on its hind legs (just like Rory Calhoun - you know, the man who's always standing and walking), and whom he's christened Little Monty (even at his most doting, there is something faintly perturbing in his desire to transform this loveable pup into a reflection of his own ego). Bart and Lisa are able to exploit Burns' affection for Little Monty to their advantage, but not without first making a daring escape with the other puppies down a laundry chute. I'll concede that there are some underrated gags in the attempted rescue sequence - I like Bart's "Hush, puppies", and in particular that strange, ominous shot of the door handle slowly turning, as Burns and Smithers take an inexplicably long time getting back into the room that holds the puppies (Smithers, incidentally, doesn't get to be much more here than a quietly disapproving bystander to Burns' scheme). All that I can say is that it is mighty fortunate that the puppies were all able to vacate the laundry basket before Bart and Lisa landed, or else they would have risked squashing a few of them in the effort.

The group does not get far before being cornered by Burns and Smithers, at which point Bart gets a hold of Little Monty and mixes him up with the others, hoping that if Burns can't pick out his favourite dog then he'll have to treat them all with the same mercy. Unfortunately, Burns has no trouble distinguishing Little Monty, because he's the only puppy of the twenty-five who'll stand on his hind legs at his command. Thinking quickly, Bart is able to coax the remaining twenty-four to stand upright by dangling a line of socks above them (the culmination of a running gag in which the dogs were shown to have a perpetual hunger for socks), so that Burns can no longer tell which one is Little Monty. The whole scenario is a little hokey, but it plays neatly on the reason for Burns' contradictory outlook on the dogs, in that he sees Little Monty as different to the others and worthy of attachment because he's able to assert himself as an individual. It nearly backfires, for in practice all that Bart has done is nullify Little Monty's individuality, so that none of the dogs now stand out to Burns, and he initially resolves to kill them all. But even a heart as frosty as Burns' cannot help but melt on being confronted with a barrage of plaintive puppy-dogs eyes, and he decides that the creatures are simply too cute to kill. It's an undeniably sentimental turn from a character who, just a few minutes ago, seemed totally unabashed about wearing a decapitated poodle noggin, but Scully's script is clever enough to temper it by having Burns' evil not immediately subside, but suddenly swing in a startling new direction. The only crime more shocking than killing puppies would be killing children (unless it's Sideshow Bob attempting to kill Bart, in which case it's only business as usual in the woods), and Burns declares himself prepared to do just that, turning his gun on Bart and Lisa, with no apparent motive other than than that he can. But of course, he can't, for even those pesky meddling Simpsons kids are too disarming when you have them at their most vulnerable. Has he learned his lesson that fur is murder? Kind of. Burns insists that he'll never wear another item of clothing made from an animal...provided that animal can do an amusing trick.

As it turns out, Burns has a more ambitious trick in mind than simply standing on two legs. The epilogue reveals that he went on to successfully train the rowdy rabble into champion race dogs (Santa's Little Helper, as we'll recall, was a lousy racer, so the puppies obviously took after their mother in that regard), adding a further ten million dollars to his already bountiful funds. Meanwhile, Homer isn't exactly taking the realisation that he let these world champion dogs slip through his fingers. To its credit, the episode bows out in a uniquely ballsy fashion, with one of the strangest, most hair-raising endings of all of Season 6 (worthy of Season 5, in fact), which sees a horrified Marge wandering down to the basement to find Homer's silhouette swinging in an ominous manner designed to suggest that he's hung himself. What's going on is naturally a whole lot sillier - Homer is gripping onto a ceiling beam whilst batting an old lightbulb, which is apparently the most constructive outlet he has for his chagrin at losing the dogs. The episode then fades out right as the burning bulb smacks directly into his forehead, with obvious results. Homer suffering some form of physical mishap and screaming in agony is yet another Scully indulgence that would overstay its welcome once he took over, but here the execution is sharp and well-judged. If it's any consolation to Homer, I doubt that the puppies would have become world champions if they'd stayed with the Simpsons. It's not as though they had the resources or the know-how to train those dogs, who'd have instead spent their days lounging around, devouring socks and watching Baywatch. Besides, from an animal welfare perspective the greyhound racing industry isn't a whole lot less contentious than the fur industry, so you could argue that the puppies didn't actually win either.

 

Sky 1 edit alert!: Back in the day Sky 1 would always trim the dog track sequence to remove the frames where you see Santa's Little Helper mounting She's The Fastest, although we still got Bart and Lisa's confused commentary right after, making it plain enough what those naughty dogs were up to.

Also, gone was this entire exchange:

 

Bart: Oh, me and Santa's Little Helper used to be a team. But he never wants to play any more since his bitch moved in.

Marge: Bart, don't ever say that word again!

Bart: Well that's what she is! I looked it up!

Marge: I'm going to write to the dictionary people and have that checked. It feels like a mistake to me.

 

I am in two minds about this. Bart is referring to a literal dog as a "bitch", not a woman, but the way that statement is framed, it is still clearly intended to have misogynistic connotations, so I get why Sky might have felt uneasy about it. What puzzles me is that they always retained that moment in "Marge In Chains" where Apu calls Marge a bitch - I don't remember seeing that episode and ever not hearing it - and the context there is so much meaner-spirited. Regardless, it's not a huge loss, this being a limper variation on a joke that was much better done in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?". Bart doesn't get nearly the same relish out of calling She's The Fastest a bitch as he did Herb a bastard.

Finally, I noted in my review of "Dog of Death" that there was unequivocally some anti-cat sentiment among The Simpsons' writing staff. To set the record straight, this observation does not apply to showrunner David Mirkin, who is evidently a cat person and devotes a chunk of the "Two Dozen" commentary to speaking with affection for all of the cats he's owned. Scully, by comparison, seems to have had mostly bad luck with the animals - growing up, his childhood pets were a cat he was severely allergic to (but which was beloved by his mother), and a canine vagabond that ditched him after only two days.

 

[1] I get that it's a reference to the antiquated practice of creating female counterparts by taking the male's character design and giving it long eyelashes and maybe a ribbon (see Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, etc). I don't have to like it, however.

Bundles of Joyce: Epic (aka Blue and Green Should Never Be Seen?)

I find it fascinating how in vogue the works of American children's author William Joyce were among animation bigwigs as the 2000s were going into the 2010s. In a period of roughly six years, we received no less than three feature adaptations of Joyce's books, each from a different Hollywood animation studio. Disney got in first on this trend, with the 2007 offering Meet The Robinsons, a loose re-working of Joyce's picture book A Day with Wilbur Robinson. In late 2012, DreamWorks' animation released Rise of The Guardians, taken from Joyce's book series The Guardians of Childhood, only for Blue Sky to round out this unofficial trilogy a few months later with Epic, their take on The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs. Joyce, who was also a prominent figure within the animation industry, having worked as a designer for Pixar's early features and a producer for Blue Sky's Robots (2005), had a finger in all three pies, serving as an executive producer for the Disney and DreamWorks entries and a screenwriter and production designer for Epic. A little project I've decided to set myself for 2025 is to provide a full retrospective of all three films, considering not only how they handle the themes and spirit of Joyce's works, but also the personal stamp that each studio managed to bring to the production. I'll admit to having a soft spot for this unsung triad; they basically all came and went, leaving nary a dent in zeitgeist, but stand out to me now as underrated examples of their respective studio's output, each very worthy of a revisit.

We'll be starting this retrospective with Epic - which was, chronologically, the last of the three to see the light of day, but this is a case where I'm allowing the seasons to dictate my ordering. Epic feels the most appropriate to be exploring during the transitional period between spring and summer, when the greenery is lush and the outside world is fully in bloom (the film is, specifically, set at the summer solstice, but I'm sure I can be forgiven for getting in a few weeks ahead). Meet The Robinsons, with its emphasis on overcoming regret and anticipating what the future will hold, seems better suited for the wistful days of a waning summer. The Rise of The Guardians technically takes place at Easter, but it so wants to be a Christmas movie and, as far as popular perception is concerned, it is a Christmas movie, so it can wait until the year is nearly through.

Besides, I have been wanting to get it off my chest for some time just how much I miss Blue Sky, now that they've been consigned to the Hollywood history books. They were not my favourite animation studio. I suspect they were the favourite of very few people, possessing neither the prestige of Pixar, the subversiveness of DreamWorks or Illumination's canniness in conceiving the most prolifically, nefariously merchandisable of characters. They were there, and they were relatively consistent, churning out Ice Age films on a regular basis, and projects that were generally pleasant, if unremarkable. It was easy to take them for granted. And yet when their closure was announced in April 2021, I and a lot of other animation fans felt very melancholic about the news. Just knowing that we'd lost a major voice in Hollywood animation felt like such a massive blow. I wouldn't say that I went as far as mourning the (ostensible) extinction of the Ice Age franchise, which I had whittled down whatever patience I had remaining by its fourth installment, but I couldn't help but wonder about all of the other stories the studio might have told, and what new talent and direction could eventually have emerged that we would now never get to see in this timeline. In truth, the writing had already been on the wall for Blue Sky, as soon as their overlords at 20th Century Fox where acquired by Disney. The official explanation for the closure was that COVID-19 had made the studio's operations unsustainable, but even in late 2017, when the acquisition process was in its early stages, I remember there being a lot of speculation as to whether Disney would have sufficient interest in keeping Blue Sky going. They weren't exactly starving for animated output, and Blue Sky had spent much of the late 2010s struggling to find a money maker as reliable as the Ice Age franchise (which itself was beginning to show signs of diminishing financial returns with the fifth installment). Some might look on the development as the Circle of Life at its most unrelentingly brutal, as according to one of the testimonies in Dan Lund's 2005 documentary Dream On, Silly Dreamer, it was the overnight success of Blue Sky and the first Ice Age in 2002 that convinced the heads of Walt Disney Feature Animation to pull the plug on traditional animation. Blue Sky were, at one time, considered a threat by Disney. They played their part in redefining the course of Hollywood animation, only for Disney to ultimately claw its way back to the top, get itself into a position of authority over their former adversaries and to neutralise them without mercy.  As things stand, Annapurna Animation, which was founded by Blue Sky executives Robert L. Baird and Andrew Millstein in 2022, looks set to become their successor, their first release being Nimona (2023), a production previously scrapped under Disney's rule. Perhaps not surprisingly, the demise of Blue Sky wasn't enough to keep those pesky Ice Age critters from coming back - a spin-off film, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, dropped on Disney+ in 2022 (sans most of the original voice cast) and Ice Age 6 has since been confirmed, but that's all Disney's bugbear now.

Let's go back to May of 2013, when all that drama was still a number of years away, and Epic was the freshest entry into Blue Sky's canon. The film had been in gestation since as far back as 2006 and at one point had apparently come very close to moving over to Pixar (now that would have been an interesting turn of events, especially given Pixar's otherwise total avoidance of doing adaptations, unless you want to count A Bug's Life as an adaptation of the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant). It pulled in decent enough numbers at the box office, but nothing that was likely to convince the studio to abandon Ice Age in favour of a Leaf Man franchise, and reviews fell largely within the lukewarm range. I confess that I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it at the time. But there is something about it that intrigues me, and over the years it has slowly grown on me. In fact, I might even go so far as to call it the best of Blue Sky's output. That might be a contentious opinion, since I reckon a lot of people would argue that The Peanuts Movie (2015) is where they peaked. And yes, The Peanuts Movie is a very sweet and warm and loving tribute to the characters of Charles M. Schulz, but here's the thing - if I want to spend time with Charlie Brown and friends, I'm still far more likely to watch the TV specials. Whereas Epic is one of those films with a peculiar hold on my fascinations. It's no masterpiece, but its imperfections just make me all the more obsessed with trying to narrow down what works for me about it.

Children's picture books don't always make the most auspicious starting point for feature storytelling. Consider Hollywood's chequered history of bringing the works of Dr Seuss to the big screen (Blue Sky's own attempt, Horton Hears A Who, is broadly considered one of the better examples, if not exactly a classic). The recurring challenge tends to be that picture books don't have sufficient plot to fill up feature length, so you have to add a lot of extra detail and narrative fussiness to stories that were originally designed to be told with brevity. On the other hand, picture books are enchanting examples of visual storytelling, and it stands to reason that a filmmaking creative might be inspired to want to recreate a bit of that visual verve on a cinematic canvas. The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs is also a much more plot-driven picture book than A Day With Wilbur Robinson, so in theory Blue Sky should have had the advantage over Disney here. Let's dig in and see how they did.

 

What is the book about?

Published in 1996, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs tells the story of an elderly woman who loves her garden and recalls it being a place where magical things occurred in her childhood, although her memories are hazy as to the finer details. One day the woman falls ill, and her favourite item within the garden, a rosebush, begins to decline along with her. The grief of the woman's grandchildren is paralleled with that of the bugs who live in the garden and fear for the bush's future. A small metal toy that has lain lost in the garden for many years advises them to summon a legendary band of creatures known as the Leaf Men; to do so, they must ascend to the top of the tallest tree just as the full moon touches its topmost branch. A guild of doodlebugs (woodlice) makes the daring climb, and is opposed en route by the malicious Spider Queen and her ant minions, but manage to summon the Leaf Men, who defeat the Spider Queen. They then restore the rosebush to health and carry the Long-Lost Toy to the bedridden woman, along with one of the flowers from the bush. The woman is suddenly hit with a flood of memories, recalling that the toy and the rosebush were gifts from each of her parents as tokens of how they would always love and protect her. The woman recovers from her illness, and shares with her grandchildren the stories her parents told her in her childhood about the Leaf Men who lived in the garden and watched over it. Her grandson asks if the stories are true; the woman responds: "Things may come and things may go. But never forget - the garden is a miraculous place, and anything can happen on a beautiful moonlit night." The final illustration shows the bugs standing around a framed photograph of the woman as a small child, planting the rosebush with her parents. The book is dedicated to the memory of Joyce's friend John, described as his "brave, best pal".

 

How much of this is in the feature adaptation?

Not a lot. At this point I should highlight that the source story is specifically credited in Epic as the inspiration for the Leafmen characters ("Leafmen" being the stylisation the film prefers), which in itself is very telling. They are the only participants from Joyce's pages to have recognisably survived the transition to Hollywood blockbuster. Gone are the woman and her grandchildren, the doodlebugs, the Spider Queen, the ant goblins and the Long-Lost Toy.

Instead, the plot of Blue Sky's film focusses on the teenaged MK (voice of Amanda Seyfried), who following the death of her mother has returned to the home of her estranged father, Professor Radcliffe Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), an eccentric scientist attempting to prove the existence of a race of tiny humanoids in the local forest. MK takes one look at his research, decides that he's a lunatic and she should scarper, only to get shrunken down and caught up in the ongoing conflict between the very real Leafmen, promoters of life and growth within the forest, led by the hard-headed Ronin (Colin Farrell), and the sinister forces of decomposition, the Boggans, led by the smarmy Mandrake (Christop Waltz). The forest's ruler, floral being Queen Tara (Beyoncé Knowles), has just selected the pod set to bloom into her equally benevolent successor - but should the pod fall into Mandrake's hands, it will become corrupted, and the seed of the forest's inevitable destruction.

Director Chris Wedge called Joyce's original story "wonderful" but also "quaint", and cited Star Wars as the narrative the film more closely resembled. Between this film and Pixar's Lightyear, I am starting to think that it's maybe not such a great sign when an animated feature (or any type of feature) claims that it's specifically out to replicate the scale and feeling of Star Wars. Star Wars was one of those real lightning-in-a-bottle successes that Hollywood has been trying to emulate since the film's release in 1977, and learned many times over that it can't be done on demand. Still, in Epic's case, there is a certain poetic charm in the comparison. Star Wars was all about looking out to the galaxies beyond and wondering what kinds of vast, sweeping stories they could accommodate. Epic is about looking inward, at our own world, and wondering what kinds of similarly vast, sweeping stories might be happening on a microscopic level beneath our feet. There is plenty of magic, it argues, in the blades of grass growing beside our own doorstep, a view that is not out of step with the final assertion of Joyce's book. The Star Wars influence broadly manifests in the re-envisioning of the premise as a larger-scale struggle between forces of good and evil, but is at its most salient during a bird-racing sequence that seems consciously designed as a homage to the infamous pod race in The Phantom Menace (1999). Otherwise, comparisons feel more apt with Bill Kroyer's traditionally animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), another tale of a shrunken human accommodated by a race of tiny magical beings within a threatened forest.

Of the three Joyce feature adaptations, Epic is also notable for having the title that's furthest removed from its source material. The film's working title had been Leaf Men, and the decision to change it to Epic was apparently forced on the production by Fox's marketing department, to Wedge's chagrin (I do not blame him; Epic is a silly title). I can only assume that this was done in response to Disney's early-2010s love affair with vague, one-word titles designed to be snappy and to conceal any whiff of fairy tale quaintness (see Tangled, Brave, Frozen and the cancelled Gigantic).

 

 Where does Epic falter?

The translation from book to feature was an evidently uneasy one - there are five credited writers (including Joyce himself), a sign that it underwent multiple rewrites - with a finished production that feels like it's pulling in a myriad of directions. I can feel Blue Sky really wanting to grow and mature as a studio through this project. Wacky buddy comedies with talking animals were their bread and butter for most of their lifespan, so I did appreciate the attempt to craft a story with a noticeably more serious sense of adventure and mythology. Old habits die hard, however, and Epic isn't the radical break from the studio's formula it might have been. The anthropomorphic minibeasts, though a part of Joyce's original story, muddle the world-building and mostly lower the tone (the non-anthropomorphic creatures, by contrast, are brought to life with flair and majesty, particularly a mouse that's able to be both adorable and wickedly threatening in the same sequence). The comic relief molluscs, Mub and Grub (Aziz Ansari, Chris O'Dowd), are very typical Blue Sky characters, heavily reminiscent of the possum duo from the Ice Age series, and so functionally useless as to suggest that they were worked in very late into the drafting process. The worst offender by far is an amphibian bookie voiced by Pitbull, whose screen presence proves mercifully minor. Every last detail about this character - his dialogue, his demeanor, his design, his wardrobe - marks him out as egregiously out of place within this world, and better suited to one of those "hip" and "modern" Beatrix Potter "adaptations" that weren't so far on the horizon.

Something else that I suspect was compromised between drafts are the environmental themes that go hand-in-hand with this kind of setting, and feel frequently as though they're on the tip of the movie's tongue, only for it to pull back and play things entirely safe. The environmental themes in FernGully: The Last Rainforest are often criticised for being too broad and on the nose, but at the very least that film was entirely confident in what it intended to say through those themes. It's a cautionary story about humankind's sense of disconnect from the natural world, something that's challenged through the absorption of a man into a hidden world and his coming to see the consequences of his actions from a new perspective. As an eco-narrative, Epic seems hesitant to say anything much bolder than that the forest is good, and maybe mysterious. It's not that its environmental themes are more subtle than that those of FernGully - more that they've been watered down to the point where they're barely present and, at times, barely coherent. We're told early on that, at its purest, the conflict between the Leafman and the Boggans constitutes a "balance", implying that both sides are playing a vital role in maintaining the forest, and that they might do well to look past their enmity and see their interactions as a form of as cooperation. This makes sense when we consider that decay is part of the process through which life is perpetuated. But it's belied through the depiction of one side as inherently good (identified as such in the opening narration) and the other as innately evil. The Star Wars model of a light side and a dark side seems curiously misapplied to the natural order.

But, enough carping. I've already established that Epic is no masterpiece, but I do think that it also has a lot going for it. The reason why it's has grown on me, particularly in the years since Blue Sky's closure, is that it is the picture that best exemplifies why I was so saddened to see them go. They were a studio that had the potential to grow into something much greater. They never quite got there, but you can see the glimmers of ambition and adroitness in this production. It's an incredibly good-looking film (there is a slight stiffness to some of the humanoid characters, but my god is that foliage to die for) and it takes itself and its world seriously whenever those molluscs and the (Pit)bullfrog aren't the focus. And for as little DNA from Joyce's book appears to survive in the final product, the hearts of the respective stories really aren't in such disparate places. There are themes from The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs that Epic carries over and recontextualises very ably into its revised setting.

 

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs REALLY about?

Nestled in Joyce's quaint story of brave bugs and arboreal soldiers is an implicit message about death, loss and renewal. The woman's parents are presumably long-departed, but we see how they have continued to be an active part of her life through her relationship with her garden, the items that were tokens of her parents' devotion and the memories they created together. The Long-Lost Toy (aka the Metal Man), a gift from her father, represents a connection to childhood innocence that was not gone for good but lying dormant all this time, waiting to be rediscovered. The rosebush that was planted by her mother gives life and comfort but requires nurturing in return (much like Mother Nature) - when the woman falls ill and is unable to care for it, the bush shrivels, threatening the creatures that depend on it. The triumph of the doodlebugs and the Leaf Men over the Spider Queen is the triumph of hope and resilience against the forces of despair. The fate of the garden is linked to the fate of the woman, but at the end of the story we see her pass the baton to the incoming generation by telling her grandchildren of her parents' legacy, through the gifts they left behind and their stories of the Leaf Men who continue to watch over the garden. The inevitability of death is evoked in the woman's reflection that "Things may come and things may go," but the garden is upheld as a constant in which wonderful things may continue to happen. This ongoing cycle of parental (and grandparental) reassurance is intertwined with the broader cycle of life, with the natural world becoming a site in which youthful imagination and wonder may remain forever active. It is a connection to the past that sustains the present while holding the seeds for the future, and much like the memories of our departed loved ones, requires that we cherish and tend to it for it to remain fresh and thriving.

 

And how much of this is in Epic?

At heart, Epic is not fundamentally a story about tiny people who live in the forest and battle pint-sized decay-spreading demons. All of that action adventure stuff is really window dressing to a story about a father and daughter re-establishing communication after years of silence and coming to terms with their mutual grief for the absent mother. It's the scenes in Bomba's abode, focusing on the interactions between the our two human participants, that I specifically find the most earnestly intriguing. Bomba is, incidentally, the film's strongest character, not least because his character design is the most distinctively Joyce-esque.

The initial interplay between MK and Bomba establishes that communication between both parties is totally defunct. MK does not take Bomba up on his offer of discussing her bereavement, insisting that she is working through it on her own terms. And Bomba in turn does not pay due attention to MK when she attempts to raise the possibility that she might do better to live independently. When the shrunken MK later returns to the house and attempts, in vain, to gain her father's attention, very little has effectively changed, with Bomba still failing to grasp what is right under his nose because his sights are focussed in the wrong direction. Bomba has dedicated years to a fruitless hunt for the legendary Leafmen, peering at the world by way of the assorted surveillance cameras and monitors he has installed around the area, revealing to him only leaves and hummingbirds (we discover that the Leafmen are well aware of this "stomper" on their trail, and have been purposely misdirecting him this whole time). There transpires to have been a hidden agenda to this seemingly psychotic preoccupation - Bomba later admits to MK that he became increasingly subsumed in his study of the Leafmen because he'd hoped that if he proved their existence it would bring her mother back to him (an end goal that was ultimately more delusional than his belief in the Leafmen). This obsession with a past that's already slipped him by has merely impeded his ability to take advantage of what is there for him in the present, allowing his relationship with his daughter to grow distant and stagnant in a way that's contrary to his desire to salvage the family he's thoroughly alienated. At one point, MK calls him out for being so fixated on taking advantage of every given opportunity to scout out the Leafmen that he misses an opportunity to be there for her as a father.

A prevalent theme of loss runs all throughout Epic, with most of the main characters grappling with some form of personal bereavement (this theme becomes all the more palpable with the knowledge that MK, or Mary Katherine, was named after Joyce's own daughter, who sadly passed away in 2010). Nod (Josh Hutcherson), the brash young leafman with eyes for MK, was taken under the wing of Ronin after the death of his biological father. Ronin suffers his own loss when Queen Tara, his long-running love interest, is fatally wounded protecting the pod (like MK, however, he chooses to keep his emotions bottled). Even the evil Boggans are not immune to feelings of grief. Adding a little dimension to Mandrake's villainy is that he is himself in mourning for his son and general Dagda (Blake Anderson), who is killed in an early confrontation with the Leafmen. Part of his motivation for seizing control of the pod is that he sees it as a way of regaining the heir that was taken from him. A very paternal figure, his quest becomes a darker echo of Bomba's objective of obtaining proof of the Leafmen in order to regain his lost life; both are scenarios in which destruction will invariably follow.

What MK and Bomba have in common is that both are alone in the world. Bomba has spent the last decade or so being shunned professionally and familially for devoting all of his time and energy to his crackpot research project, while MK has just lost her caregiver and emotional bedrock and been consigned to a man who is effectively a stranger to her. They spend the narrative in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a beautiful but remote wilderness that emphasises their sense of separation from anything beyond themselves, not least one another. There is, notably, only one other human character seen in the entire 102 minute runtime, that being the taxi driver (Judah Friedlander) who drops MK off at her new abode and promptly high tails it out of there. Bomba is absorbed in the Leafmen's domain in a figurative sense, lost in his aspirations of finding vindication and recovery within. MK's literal absorption, meanwhile, becomes a metaphor for her having to navigate through a big and overwhelming world in which she is seemingly all on her own, unable to make herself heard and at constant risk of being devoured whole. She finds solidarity in the Leafmen, who introduce her to their philosophy of "Many leaves, one tree", by which all things are connected and each individual becomes valuable in relation to a bigger picture. This is challenged by Mandrake, who proposes that the tree is ultimately indifferent to the fate of the individual leaf, pointing out that, "In the end, every leaf falls and dies alone". Mandrake gives a menacing voice to MK's feelings of parental abandonment, while the Leafmen, whose final display of unity is enough to decisively thwart the king of decay, become proxies for familial devotion, reaffirming the same sense of enduring parental security as they did in Joyce's book. The symbolism of nature as a force that nurtures and sustains us all is also discernible.

The rosebush and the Metal Man do not feature in the film, but there is a character who serves as a kind of equivalent to both, in the form of Ozzy, the three-legged, one-eyed pug who was the Bomba family's pet during their time of unity, and was left with the professor when MK and her mother moved out. Quite how long MK has spent apart from her father is not established, but it's clearly longer than the average pug's lifespan - on arriving at her father's home, MK is vocally surprised to be greeted by Ozzy and to discover that her childhood pet is still alive. The dog is a connection to a more innocent past, and an indication that her bond with her father is not as dead in the water as she assumes; Ozzy's battered physique reflects the damage inflicted on their relationship by their time apart, but his amazing vitality offers reassurance that their underlying love has ultimately endured. A photograph showing the young MK with her parents and Ozzy as a puppy features a couple of times in the story, echoing the photograph illustration seen at the end of Joyce's book. Ozzy's movements and actions often anticipate Bomba's, indicating that he functions as an extension of her father; he becomes an inadvertent threat to the shrunken MK right before Bomba unwittingly creates trouble for her, and he later saves MK from a Boggan, prefacing Bomba's coming to her aid at a crucial moment in the climax.

By the end of the film, MK and Bomba have succeeded in overcoming the hurdles that have prevented them from efficiently communicating. MK finds a way to let her father in on her location, by repositioning a thumb tack on his map of the forest, while Bomba is able to use the technology he's honed during his pursuit of the Leafmen to make MK intelligible to his ears. By the time MK has been restored to her proper size, she and her father are now firmly on the same page. The wilderness that once reflected their mutual isolation becomes a source of open affinity, with MK able to freely resume her dialogue with Nod via the surveillance monitors, mirroring the open communication she now enjoys with her father. Whether Bomba can get the wider scientific community on board with his latest findings now that he has his daughter to back him up is irrelevant - what matters is that the study of the Leafmen, a once contentious topic that kept them at odds, is now a means for them to grow and learn together. We leave with them racing out enthusiastically into the woods, eager to bond more with their diminutive friends.

One criticism I do have of how Epic handles the theme of loss, compared to its source material, is that the deceased mother is never fleshed out in a way that causes her to feel like anything other than a plot device. We don't learn anything about her other than the most obvious details needed to kick the conflict into gear - ie: that she was close to MK and disapproved of her husband's research. The parents in The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs were never seen in the flesh, but had a distinct presence via the components of the garden and the memories the woman had created therein; you felt as though you knew so much about their relationship and they ways in which they were still being felt just by glancing at that poignant illustration of the Metal Man and the rose in her hand. Epic would have benefited from giving us at least a little more flavour of who MK's mother was, perhaps through an item of her own that she'd left behind at the house. But as a story about mending broken bridges and finding your way back into a kinship thought long-lost, it really is quite lovely. That we may perceive in it an expression of Joyce's own desire to reconnect with the real Mary Katherine makes it all the more poignant, and genuine.

In addition, I really do love that entire sequence with the predatory mouse. It so neatly exploits the fact that, when you view a mouse or rat's head from the underside, it does kind of resemble a shark.