The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #53: Serta Counting Sheep

Shaun and his brethren weren't the only flock to emerge from the Aardman fold and attain superstardom. At the break of the new millennium, the Bristol-based animation studio found great success on the other side of the pond with a series of ads promoting Serta-brand mattresses. The premise of the campaign, devised by advertising agency Doner, had it that Serta mattresses were so fabulously comfortable that kipping on one might earn you a visit from a very irate band of sheep who objected to your choice of pad. These were no ordinary field-dwelling ovine, but the Counting Sheep, the woolly jumpers whom, in more restless times, you might traditionally have summoned to aid you in accessing the land of nod. These sheep thrived on insomnia, and it was their mission to keep your nights from getting too cushy for their comfort. In Serta, they'd found a formidable adversary, one they feared could potentially make the practice of sheep-counting obsolete, and they weren't shy about barging into the bedrooms of former clientele to make their dissatisfaction known. An aggressive business model that seldom worked out for our flock, although hilarious antics often ensued.

How many Counting Sheep there actually were was anybody's guess - in theory, their numbers could have stretched on indefinitely, depending on the wakefulness of the client they were serving. Each sheep was distinguishable by their identification number, spray-painted onto their fleeces in the style of their barnyard counterparts, and various distinct personalities emerged across the series. 1 was naturally the leader, and the most officiously outspoken of the sheep. 13 was inevitably a magnet for physical misfortune, while 36 was a father whose offspring required orthodontic work, 8 was a ditz and 86 was the black sheep (although not literally) of the group, who in one commercial was caught partaking in an illicit relaxation session upon a Serta, and was defenestrated by 1 for his infidelity. For the campaign's initial run the sheep were brought to life with Aardman's signature stop motion, combined with footage of live action humans, although later installments switched to using computer animation - meaning that the sheep unavoidably picked up something of the uncanny valley that I find lurks in all CG Aardman productions made to replicate Nick Park's style, and which is absolutely all over the movie Flushed Away (not so much Arthur Christmas, which isn't as beholden to Park's look).

The campaign had a bit of an ongoing story for the sheep, detailing the impact the Serta scourge had on their livelihood and the various measures they took to combat it. We followed them as they attempted to find alternative forms of employment, sought legal advice from an unscrupulous lawyer (I'm not sure if this was ever followed up with any ads detailing the court case he assured them they had), traded tales of hardship with a hobo, protested outside a mattress sale and outright sabotaged a couple of others. At their most classic, though, the ads were centred around the core scenario of the sheep hanging out in people's bedrooms and berating them for wanting to cut ties. It's a charmingly absurdist means of getting across the intended message that Serta mattresses are pleasurable to sleep on, but you've got to love how counter-intuitive it is in-universe. Get a Serta and the upshot seems to be that you'll have an indefinite number of talking sheep amassing around your bed and keeping you up by belligerently challenging your consumer choices. You've effectively traded in one form of sleeplessness for another, unless you had the foresight to acquire a guard dog like an unnamed lady in one ad, or to change your locks like the Hendersons. And, even if you were resting upon a Serta, just how well were you going to sleep knowing that these vengeful sheep might be wandering in at any time and glowering all over you? Adding to the awkwardness was that the conflict was often framed as being akin to the breakdown of a sexual relationship as opposed to a professional one, with orgasm innuendo cropping up at least twice. In one commercial, a client breaks the bad news that she's been faking her sleeplessness for months in order to appease the sheep. And in the aforementioned spot where 86 is caught cheating with a Serta mattress, he brings attention to himself with his wildly ecstatic shrieks about its luxuriousness (giving the momentary impression that he's engaged in a threesome with the Kandinskys). In both cases, the Serta is the irresistible temptation that lures you into backstabbing your bedfellows.

Here's the great paradox with the Serta Counting Sheep - their business practices might be obnoxious, but they themselves end up being loveable underdogs. You admire their spunk, and their willingness to fight for their established domain. They are the downtrodden little guys daring to take a stand, and you're rooting for them to prevail against the mattress giant threatening to slap them with irrelevancy. The most satisfying campaign installments were the ones where they managed to scrape a rare victory - for example, when they get Tom banished from the Serta and onto the couch by blowing to his wife that he's been lying to her about being at work all day to cover up his clandestine golfing session. Serta might fix five of the most common sleep problems, but it won't cleanse a shady soul. That was pretty ingenious of the sheep, and I wish them nothing but luck in pursuing this particular recourse, although it introduces further unsettling implications regarding the sheep's ability to spy on us and harvest our dirtiest secrets.

It's perhaps in part because of the sheep's intrinsically sympathetic nature that more recent Serta ads have tended to downplay the antagonistic angle and instead show them cuddling up on their mattresses and tucking human occupants in. It's actually kind of surreal if you've been following the flock's history and know that their in-character inclination really should have been to turf those people out. In the end the sheep became synonymous with the brand (with Serta having established a neat sideline in sheep merchandising), so it doesn't matter how much sense it makes from a narrative standpoint, but I wonder what the explanation would be in-universe for this unlikely truce? Did the sheep and Serta finally figure out how to make their respective trades coexist? Is the implication that the sheep are actually working for Serta now (in other words, helping to feed the beast that killed them)? Or maybe the flock's suppressed love of the mattress's softness finally got the better of them. For that was the single biggest shame in the Serta Sheep's closet - they were latent Serta cheerleaders all along, as evidenced in all instances where they could be enticed into making physical contact with the mattress, and were immediately taken by how fabulous it felt. Fact is that 86 wasn't a lost sheep. He was just slightly ahead of the curve in making his Serta adoration explicit.

There couldn't possibly be anything more awkward and unfortunate in the Serta Sheep's closet, could there? If so, I'm not confident I have the spoons.

Bart The Daredevil (aka Kids Say Such Stupid Things)

When discussing "Bart The Daredevil" (7F06), we might as well start right at the very end. The entire story, delightful as it may be, is all but an excuse to get us to that final twisted set-piece, in which Homer takes not one, but two excruciating tumbles down the wall of a steep gorge, encountering jagged rock after jagged rock and accumulating an increasing number of visible injuries. Debuting on December 6th 1990, this relatively early entry in the show's second season was by and far the most morbid Simpsons outing to date (outside of the original "Treehouse of Horror"). It set out to answer a burning question - what does consequence look like in the Simpsons universe? Creator Matt Groening had a vision of a more grounded cartoon than mainstream audiences were accustomed to, but what did this mean in practice? What differentiated the rules of The Simpsons from the more traditional cartoon physics that governed the realms of Porky Pig, Tom & Jerry and indeed Itchy & Scratchy? When you pricked a Simpson, did they bleed? Absolutely they did, as "Daredevil" demonstrated with wild abandon. When you poisoned them did they die? Probably, but the show was thankfully uninterested in exploring that particular extreme. "Daredevil" was rebellion enough, a gruesome exercise in establishing limitations, but also a gleefully subversive one in pushing boundaries. Homer might have failed at defying gravity, but The Simpsons itself was soaring to ever more giddy heights - with this sequence you can feel the show becoming more confident, more emboldened and more excited about exploring where else it could possibly go. The production crew would continue to regard it as a watershed moment in The Simpsons' development, judging by the large number of callbacks across the series. It naturally found a place in the show's first "Greatest Hits" complication "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show". It was also featured prominently in the faux behind-the-scenes documentary "Behind The Laughter" of Season 11, which largely revolved around a fictitious version of The Simpsons and contained precious few other references to events from the series we knew. In Season 13's "The Blunder Years", Lisa shot down Homer's attempt to revisit the occurrence with the objection, "Everyone's sick of that memory!" And the climax of The Simpsons Movie (2007) included a sequence where Homer and Bart both fell down the gorge, with considerably less gruesome results. There are probably more I'm overlooking. I'm pretty sure that, somewhere out there, there's also a fan theory proposing that Homer was really killed by the fall and everything that's happened since is part of an elaborate Waking Life-esque fantasy from within his dying brain. There's an element of the series that has always stayed in the gorge, haunted by that fateful leap that forever changed its trajectory.

The secret of the sequence is that it crafts such a deft balance between discomfort and hilarity. Homer's agonising pain is emphasised with each and every thud, yet his fall is played intrinsically for humor. The particulars are harrowing and grotesque - we'll likely be unsettled by that thick layer of blood accumulating around his mouth - but are accomplished with an incongruously farcical tone that offers one hell of a safety net. And when we're blessed with that absurdly gratuitous sight of the ambulance crashing and Homer going down the gorge a second time on a gurney, we know for certain that we couldn't be in more loving hands. In practice, there maybe isn't such a pronounced difference between the rules that govern the adventures of Itchy & Scratchy (wherein Itchy can brutally cut up Scratchy, but the cat is always back to normal by the next installment) and Homer's mishap here. In both cases, our reaction is coloured by an understanding that it is only a twisted joke and that any consequences will expire with the end of the story. When Homer ends up in traction, in a hospital bed adjacent to that of world-renowned daredevil Lance Murdock, and delivers to him the punchline of the episode ("You think you've got guts? Try raising my kids!"), we know that it is only a punchline, and not the beginning of a whole new chapter in Homer's life, the wheelchair years.

All the same, when we wind back the clock and consider how Homer got here, the path to the gorge is a grisly one all over, strewn with physical calamities, maimed children, and the threat that something even more horrific might transpire. Not only is Homer just one of several casualties, he doesn't even suffer the most gloriously over the top injury of that tally (that honor goes to Murdock, who's hospitalised after a mauling from an aquatic lion). The plot involves Bart witnessing one of Murdock's stunts and getting it into his head that he could be a world-renowned daredevil too. His first ill-calculated attempt to leap over the family car on his skateboard ends in disaster, resulting in a trip to the emergency room and stitches in his forehead, but this doesn't dissuade Bart. Instead, he finds the adrenalin rushes he gets from making these perilous leaps addictive, along with the rapturous applause he receives from his peers, prompting him to seek bigger and all the more stomach-churning thrills. Finally, he discovers the gorge and decides that this will be the challenge to end all challenges. Superficially, he acknowledges that it could also end his life then and there -  he announces to his peers his intention to jump the gorge with the concession that "there is a good possibility I will plunge to my bloody death" - but he hasn't absorbed the implications of this. To him, the prospect of things going horribly wrong is just something to be flaunted as part of the daredevil performance, a further attempt emulate the showmanship of Murdock, who kept his audience on the edge of their seats by similarly advertising that the spectacle they they were about to witness "may well be my grisly death." The one thing Bart does not understand is consequence. The problem Homer faces is in figuring out how to get across to his son that his reckless behaviour could reap truly regrettable results. How do you explain consequence to a child who's already convinced himself that if he leaps off a cliff it's no big deal?

On the one level, "Bart The Daredevil" is a tale of callow hero worship and how it impacts a person's values, for better or for worse. But at its core it's mainly about the trials and tribulations of child-rearing. It feels appropriate that it aired directly ahead of "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" in the series' running order, as the two episodes play like deliberate sister stories. Both revolve around scenarios that are parental nightmares, in which children have started to answer to external authorities that conflict with the parent's own and maybe don't have the child's best interests at heart, raising the question of where and how the parent should draw the line. "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" dealt with the ultra-topical concern of media violence, and as such was a more bitingly satirical installment, whereas "Daredevil" is a far goofier, more tender look at the relationship between Homer and Bart and how the former struggles to maintain control of his son. An allusion that hadn't occurred to me until I heard the DVD commentary was that this was as close as the series would get to doing a story in which substance addiction was the particular wedge being driven between them, with Bart seeking increasingly dangerous highs and Homer and Marge finding that they can't let him out of their sight without his compulsions tearing him away. In both cases, we have examples of children being led astray by a failure to understand consequence - or, more specifically, a failure to distinguish consequence in the real world from the kinds of consequences shown to them through popular entertainment. After Bart's first try at leaping over the car causes him minor injury, Dr Julius Hibbert, in his debut appearance (fun fact: Hibbert was originally written as a woman named Julia Hibbert, but was gender-flipped in subsequent drafts), attempts to set him straight by taking him on a tour of Ward C, a children's ward specially reserved for patients who've been more seriously injured attempting to imitate the happenings in  television, movies and the legitimate stage (among them, the cliche of the kid who broke his leg trying to fly like Superman raises its head). For now, most of these entertainment-addled children are dangers only to themselves. The flip-side to this parental nightmare - the possibility that media exposure might transform children into raging sociopaths who think that violence to others is glamorous or funny - would have to wait until "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" to be examined in depth, but it gets a small nod here. At least one kid in the ward was injured through no fault of his own, but by his brother hitting him in the head with a wrench, mimicking the deciding blow in a televised wrestling match we saw at the start of the episode.

In Bart's case, the toxic influence doesn't come from television, although television plays its part in getting him to the arena where Murdock is performing. Bart and Homer are mutually drawn to a monster truck rally being held that Saturday at the Springfield Speedway by a commercial hyping the appearance of one Truckasaurus, a car-crushing robotic T-Rex modelled on the real-life Robosaurus. As the entire opening sequence is at pains to emphasise, Bart and Homer are governed by the same crudely exhilarating impulses, and neither one can resist something quite as ridiculously ostentatious as a giant robotic dinosaur that devours puny vehicles. Truckasaurus transpires to be something of a narrative fake-out. He's the carrot that lures the family to the speedway, but the female mud-pullers and of course the Lance Murdocks are what they stay for. His role in the story peaks early on, when the Simpsons accidentally drive out into the arena and are nearly destroyed by the hulking metal monster, in a sequence that doubles as a subtle PSA - even sharper than the one Murdock later explicitly delivers - about the importance of wearing a seatbelt (Maggie, the only family member to be buckled up, avoids being thrown around with the others).

This being a Season 2 installment, there's an emphasis on the slice of life elements of the story and on further mapping out the internal dynamics of the family. Before we get to the real narrative hooks, we have a preliminary conflict involving the family already having plans that Saturday to attend a school recital where Lisa is performing, ie: the very antithesis of the evening the boys have in mind. Sensing that her father might be tempted to skip her big night in favour of a date with Truckasaurus, Lisa presents him with a consequence of another variety: "I'll be playing my first solo; if you miss it on Saturday I advise you to start looking for a child therapist on Sunday." This might be a Bart and Homer episode, but it's still Lisa who gets all the best lines (there's also "I'm afraid the forces of history have changed wrestling - perhaps forever"^[1],  and "I'm sorry Bart, but if you got hurt or died, despite the extra attention I'd receive, I'd miss you."). Marge suggests that the timing might work out for them to attend both events, provided the recital doesn't overrun. And so they must go first to the recital, with Homer spending most of it glancing anxiously at his watch. The recital doesn't add anything in terms of Bart's impending daredevil arc, but feels like such an indispensable part of the overall picture, offering a brilliant window into the family's disparate priorities and adding in generous extra helpings of relatability, heart and energy. This is meant to be the boring portion of the evening, but it's really as much an exercise in glorious excess as the monster truck rally, culminating in a rousing rendition of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" that manages to incorporate everything from a bourdon to the traditional cannon fire. The entire interlude also contains a lovely miniature arc for Lisa. While Homer is off bonding with Bart over their shared love of high-octane mayhem, all she wants is for him to see the value in what she does. And ultimately he does, if mostly on a subconscious level. As they're driving away from the recital and making haste toward the Speedway, Homer is unwittingly humming the aforementioned overture. "I reached him," Lisa observes, with a quiet elation that suggests this is a greater achievement than she'd dared to hope for. With that all-important box ticked, her attentions soon shift from her father to the worrying direction her brother's mind is leaning. Enter the man of the hour, Captain Lance Murdock.

Murdock, an Evel Knievel-type stunt rider with a penchant for dangerous leaps (and animal cruelty), has arrived in Springfield to perform what's billed as his most daring endeavor to date. He will jump over a water tank populated by all manner of unfriendly aquatic fauna (sharks, piranhas and electric eels), a drastically misplaced lion and, just to make the feat that extra bit more precarious, one drop of human blood. Bart, enraptured by the proposition, is the lone audience member who can bear to watch it play out. Murdock pulls off the stunt itself, but his showmanship ends up being his undoing, when he drives back up the ramp to take a bow and topples over into the tank. After that, he manages to swim to the side in one piece, only for the lion, of all things, to catch up with him and drag him back under. He's subsequently retrieved by paramedics, and summons enough strength to give the thumbs up sign to his audience before being carried away. This traumatic spectacle isn't enough to put a damper on the occasion - Marge comes away commenting what a fun-filled evening it was. And Bart's takeaway from Murdock's misfortune is that getting yourself brutally lacerated is a deeply noble business if you're able to make an entertaining display of it. Thus, his daredevil career is kicked into motion.

 

Anyone else reminded of that old NSPCC campaign?

It's hardly surprising that Murdock would leave such a strong impression on Bart. He appeals to the kid's  wayward, mayhem-thirsting nature. He's an intrepid rebel who goes about defying countless authorities - among them, nature, gravity and common sense - winning applause and admiration for his efforts. He lives life on the edge, repeatedly pushing himself to do what anyone else would consider courting disaster on a grotesque scale. He's exactly the kind of person whom Bart would idolise and aspire to be just like. When Bart has his first setback and is confronted by Dr Hibbert, he doesn't take the lecture as seriously as he should, because to him Hibbert's is just another authority to be defied (it's also a transparently two-faced one - see below). He returns to his skateboard, and before he knows it has seemingly perfected the art of the foolhardy jump. Having gotten this far, why would he be inclined to listen to anybody who tells him that he cannot leap over the gorge? Aren't they just imposing false limitations on his path to greatness?

Still, the notion that Bart's compulsion to tempt fate is all down to the toxic influence of the entertainment industry doesn't exactly ring true. There is another, more pressing problem facing Bart throughout the story, and that is the woeful lack of adult oversight or interest in what he's doing, until he's seemingly at the point of no return. When Bart first announces his desire to be a daredevil to Homer, Homer's immediate reaction is to laugh about how "kids say such stupid things", not taking into account that they also do stupid things. Marge likewise seems curiously relaxed over Bart's aspirations, based on how she shrugs off the circumstances behind his injury as a case of "Monkey see, Monkey do." One of Bart's stunts involves leaping over a sleeping Homer, who is entirely oblivious to what is going on. The most disturbing aspect of Dr Hibbert's tour is not what we see in Ward C, or even the horrors hinted to be lurking in the unseen Three Stooges ward, but Hibbert's jarringly callous conclusion that, "as tragic as all this is, it's a small price to pay for countless hours of top-notch entertainment," (to which Homer enthusiastically responds, "Amen!"). Bart would surely be shrewd enough to detect the hypocrisy in Hibbert's words - despite his seeming interest in Bart's well-being, he openly admits that good entertainment is a bigger priority. On learning of Bart's intention to jump the gorge, Otto initially sounds as though he's going to take an unusually serious tone ("As the only adult here I feel I should say something...") before lapsing right into character ("Cool!"). And of course the man who inspired his morbid fascinations turns out to be as mind-bogglingly irresponsible as everyone else. In an act of desperation Lisa takes Bart to see the hospitalised Murdock, hoping that he'll hear straight from the horse's mouth that daredevil stunts are to be performed strictly by the professionals. Alas, it backfires horribly when Murdock expressly encourages Bart to pursue his death-or-glory ambitions: "A lot of people are gonna be telling you you're crazy, and maybe they're right, but the fact of the matter is, bones heal, chicks dig scars, and the United States of America has the best doctor to daredevil ratio in the world!"

In an act of greater desperation, Lisa squeals to Homer and Marge, who get up to speed, too late, on how badly Bart's daredevil aspirations have escalated. Suddenly Homer must rise to the occasion and become the kind of authority figure who can out-impress Murdock in Bart's psyche. What tricks does he have at his disposal? He first tries taking the punitive approach and sending Bart to his room, but Bart, now totally impervious to his father's jurisdiction, openly flaunts that Homer can't keep tabs on him 24/7, and as soon as his back is turned, he'll be sneaking out to the gorge. Homer's next tactic, on the urging of Marge, is to reach out to Bart on a more emotive level, imploring him to promise to not head out to the gorge and to adhere to this as a matter of trust. He alludes to his history of perfunctory parenting when he tells him that this isn't "one of those phoney-baloney promises I don't expect you to keep." He wants Bart to know that there is something more at stake than the possibility of him plunging to his death. He could successfully make the jump across the gorge and become the toast of school-aged Springfield, and yet things would never be the same between himself and his father again. If he were to break this particular promise, he will have lost all credibility in Homer's eyes. Bart seems genuinely taken back by his father's ultimatum and ostensibly complies with wishes. But inevitably the call of the gorge proves too strong and he sneaks out anyway, to find his adoring fans (including Otto) waiting. Homer cottons on and follows Bart to the gorge, just in time to intercept his attempted leap. As it turns out, there is one further tactic that's occurred to Homer. He will take the skateboard and attempt to jump the gorge himself, so that Bart may experience the situation from his perspective.

What Homer's proposing is, objectively speaking, profoundly messed up, but there is a kind of twisted narrative logic to it. Bart's recklessness stems from his assumption that it doesn't matter what happens to him because he has (or so he thinks) made peace with the idea that putting himself at extreme risk is what being a daredevil entails. If he dies, he'll at least go out in a blaze of valorous glory. Homer forces him to see his actions from a wider perspective. It's one thing to conquer your fear of bad things happening to yourself, but try conquering your fear of bad things happening to those you love. Bart comes to understand something of the distress he's been causing his family, and the pain they would suffer if he were to be hurt or killed. Now that's consequence. Homer's gambit works, and the prospect of jumping the gorge loses its lustre for Bart. He pleads with his father not to jump, promising to give up his daredevil ways in return, and the two of them tenderly embrace. But of course no Simpsons ending is quite as straightforward as that. Homer is so relieved at having regained Bart's fidelity that he neglects to maintain control of the skateboard on which he's still standing. A momentary lapse of attention sends him hurtling down the slope and flying out over the gorge, getting us to our infamous climactic set-piece.

It's a bitter twist of fate that, having set out to force Bart into his own position of hand-wringing helplessness, Homer becomes immersed in Bart's delusions, although hardly a surprising one. We had already seen in that opening sequence just how fundamentally alike the Simpson boys are. Naturally, Homer would succumb to the same exhilaration as Bart while he's flying as deceptively high. When, for a glorious moment, it looks as though he might just make the jump, his terror dissipates and, like his son before him, he gets intoxicated from his own adrenalin. Very soon he's whopping about this bring the greatest thrill of his life and declaring himself king of the world, seven years before Leonardo DiCaprio did the same in Titanic. Whatever nobleness he might once have exuded in wanting to make the leap to save his son is all gone. What this means, in practice, is that Homer must learn the very brutal lesson that was formerly earmarked for Bart. His elation proves short-lived, for as he nears the other side he runs out of momentum and fails to close the gap. Had this happened to Bart, then it's unlikely that it would have been in any way funny. But since Homer was supposed to be the rational adult in this equation, there is far greater glee to be had in undercutting his hubris. What we get is a reversal on the story of Daedalus and Icarus, in which the parental figure who should have known better demonstrates that his own judgement can be as clouded by the stupefying lure of the sun, only for the gods to cut him down with even less mercy. He plummets painfully to earth, and the show enforces its reality by fully embracing the fact that it's a cartoon, giving us perhaps the grisliest twist of all. The possible outcome that was a mere moment ago being treated with grave serious - that Homer would attempt to jump in Bart's place and fall horribly - becomes a reality, and it's played not as a grievous development but as a great (albeit unsettling) joke, so that Homer, unlike Icarus, doesn't even have the dignity of going down tragically. The harshest consequence to all his suffering is that there is no real consequence, beyond the intense physical punishment he endures in the moment. He is not king of the world, but a cartoon doofus, and he exists purely to provide entertainment to the legions of spectators on the other side of the fourth wall.

In the final scene, Homer ends up even with Murdock, the character with whom he's been indirectly competing all this time to be viewed as the example that Bart should follow. Both are now in the exact same position, laid out in traction and exposed as injudicious adults who got to where they were not through acts of glory but through stark demonstrations of their vincibility. Kids say such stupid things, and they do such stupid things, but the adults clearly aren't above those same imprudent impulses and have failed to steer the kids right in so many ways. Homer still insists that the kids are the problem, when he delivers the punchline to Murdock, proposing that child-rearing is a prospect more daunting and hazardous than any stunt a daredevil could envision. "You think you've got guts? Try raising my kids!" We might think that assessment is a mite unfair on Maggie, who didn't do anything to hurt or inconvenience Homer throughout the episode (Lisa, I suppose, did have him sit through her recital). But just give her time. By the very next episode, Homer will be back to normal, and she'll be poised to hit him with a mallet and put him out of commission all over again. So Homer has a point. As the centre of this madcap universe, his life is a cycle of unending punishment that a character of the day like Murdock could never know. In other words, more Sisyphus than Icarus. Icarus only had to endure his cosmic pummelling once.

 

[1]  I'm still not 100% sure if that's a reference to the Cold War ending or a more specific comment on the historical reputation of Grigori Rasputin. For years, I presumed the latter but then it dawned on me it was more likely the former. But either interpretation works!

FACT: The Pirates Are Out To Get You

It's funny how campaigns on the issue of piracy had this erstwhile tendency to be leagues more apocalyptic than campaigns on issues that might strike you as being immediately more threatening. A few years back, we touched on the classic 1990s cautionary fable regarding Rebecca's pirated VHS experience - I'm still not 100% sure what was going on in that film, but I really did get the impression that the world was ending in that closing shot. In 2002, the Federation Against Copyright Theft got even more on the nose with a little piece called "The Pirates Are Out To Get You", the mere title of which says it all. The imperilled suburban innocence denoted by Rebecca's guileless giggling was now but a distant memory; this film might as well have taken place after the collapse of civilisation brought about by the foolish choices of Rebecca's unscrupulous parents, of which Rebecca herself appeared to have a chilling premonition at the end of her chapter. We find ourselves plunged into a burning hellscape, in the company of a pirate who might as well be the Devil himself. They didn't go so far as to give him pointy horns (although that wouldn't have been any less unsubtle), but he's got red-tinged skin and the glow of annihilation in his eyes. In place of his traditional pitchfork, he wields a brand in the shape of an X (for Forbidden!), which is first submerged in flame and then pointed at the camera, aaand it's not my imagination, is it? This anti-piracy film was intended as a parody of the Flaming Carlton Star? I mentioned in my coverage of that logo that the red-hot star-shaped brand was made all the more unnerving for the fact that we never saw the hand that moved it, enabling it to take on an uncanny life all of its own. Thanks to FACT, we get to discover if the alternative - seeing the sadistic thug with a penchant for scorching - is any more reassuring.

In lieu of turning the brute force of his weapon upon the audience, our demonic brand-wielder instead gets his kicks out of torching stacks of VHS tapes, film reels and CDs. A mere touch of the X is enough to engulf them in a flaming explosion that would make Michael Bay proud. The use of VHS makes the film feel curiously behind the times, as by 2002 the public were well along the process of tossing them out for DVDs, and countless VHS collections were meeting similarly miserable fates at landfill sites the world over. Being a VHS aficionado myself, I'll admit that the sight of all those tapes going up in flames makes my heart a little fluttery. (CDs? Torch as many of the snotty fuckers as you like. In this house it's vinyl or nothing.) By 2002, the Carlton Star had also been operation for long enough for audiences to be well-accustomed to kick-starting their watching experiences by having a burning iron shoved in their faces, so the idea was presumably to offer a startling subversion, with the (sorta) familiar imagery directing us to somewhere altogether more unimaginable. This is the Star's corrupted counterpart, signalling a dystopian world in which those pesky pirates, and not the advertisers, call the shots on what we see and hear - that being a slew of explosions and all the tell-tales noises of a society sinking deep into an apocalyptic chasm (sirens wailing, mobs chanting, gunfire rattling), indicating that our video-killer's actions have further-reaching consequences than a few melted copies of Bend It Like Beckham. I like the concept in theory, although it has to be said that the red hot X, in spite of its ability to make everything it comes into contact with to messily combust, lacks the awe-inspiring potency of its inspiration. We're issued a grim warning on the perils of letting the pirates brand us with their mark, yet "Pirates" doesn't make good on the implications of that threat - unlike the logo it's recalling, it never forces the viewer to endure the simulated experience of having the searing brand thrust directly upon them. It certainly puts a lot more emphasis on the fire visuals, making it a full-on nightmare for any pyrophobe unfortunate enough to find this lurking on the copy of Cheaper By The Dozen they rented, but compared to its counterpart, I never feel the creeping paranoia that the X-shaped brand is coming for me. The C-shaped brand (for Copyright!) that ultimately takes its place, once a bucket of cold water has put a stop to the mindless media-burning, is a slightly different story. Despite having just emerged from the same bucket of water that vanquished the X, it too ignites, with enough fury that it apparently causes the screen to burn out. It glows white rather than red, which I guess is intended to signify its purity, but the use of violent imagery to represent copyright is still jarring, meaning that it's not presented as a healing force that will put the world to rights, but an angry and vengeful one that's out to get you every bit as much as those pirates.

The film's most memorable component was its infamously foreboding monologue, which wasn't actually claiming anything that Rebecca's ordeal before it didn't. There, terrorism and organised crime were also said to be the beneficiaries of our dodgy video investments, although their invisibility made them more effective foes; the mere mention of the man at the market was ominous enough in context, but the suggestion that this only scratched the surface of a far more sinister agenda unfolding beyond the eyeline of Rebecca's ignorant parents was genuinely spine-chilling. The tactic was to prompt questions about the hidden costs of piracy and, through the highly emotive figure of Rebecca, what kind of world we were building for our children as a result. In attempting to provide more concrete answers to those questions, "Pirates" ends up feeling a lot more hyperbolic, in no small way because of its exceptionally bombastic choice of visual accompaniment (in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the specific charge that "piracy funds terrorism" had also become an especially loaded one). It was an even more drastic leap from "Daylight Robbery", the anti-piracy film we all got sick of seeing at the start of our tapes in the late 1990s, in which the pirates were represented by a cartoonishly belligerent market vendor who played like a nastier version of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses. Obnoxious to the core, and not the kind of bloke you'd feel comfortable doing business with, but at least he was only a bloke and not the Devil incarnate, claiming your hard-earned fiver for a barely-functional copy of Trainspotting but sparing your soul. "Daylight Robbery" was a notably lighter kind of anti-piracy ad, its tactic being to present piracy as a particularly loathsome inconvenience as opposed to an all-destroying force, and it found room for humor in its featured scenario (the vendor claims that his trade was "advertised on Crimestoppers"). "Pirates", by comparison, takes the path of excess. The pirates are depicted not as unscrupulous criminals, but as unearthly demons on a mission to set the whole world ablaze, who get one step closer to succeeding every time someone fails to source their copy of Minority Report from a reputable retailer. Its message is conveyed with thoroughgoing seriousness, and yet its hyperbole is so hilariously bald-faced that it ends up getting the comedic edge on "Daylight".

For as much notoriety as its doom-laden monologue amassed, it has to be acknowledged that it is rather clunkily-constructed. There are snippets that work well enough, like the eerie ambiguity in the statement that piracy "will destroy our development and your future enjoyment." Obviously, they're talking about the jeopardy facing the entertainment industry, but after that mention of terrorism it's hard not to get the sense that they're alluding to the possible destruction of society as a whole. But the equation of those two concerns - the repeated criss-crossing between the proclamation that the very worst, most malignant kinds of people stand to overwhelmingly benefit from piracy and the affirmation that the film and music industries have everything to lose - is overall unwieldy (the use of explosive imagery to imply that these two concerns go hand in hand feels especially ham-fisted). It's further weighed down by the surplus of inelegant fire analogies - in addition to the aforementioned "Don't let them brand you with their mark!", there's "Don't let the pirates burn a hole in your pocket!" and "Don't touch the hot stuff. Cool is copyright!" (which immediately contradicted by the image of that C catching alight). You get the distinct impression that several different marketing slogans were proposed and, after a backstage deadlock on which was the punchiest, all of them were tossed into the final script, with the effect that they cancel one another out.

As easy as it is to poke fun at "Pirates" for its intensely over the top tone and production, its crudely nightmarish charm always makes it delightful for a nostalgic revisit. It also looks positively sophisticated when up against FACT's upcoming specimen for 2004, "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" (aka the worst anti-piracy film ever made). All I'll say is that it's impossible for me to watch that one and not hear Tweety Pie's voice echoing at the back of my head. "You wouldn't steal a car..." "Her don't know me vewy well, do her?!"

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

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

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

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

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

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