Something that really is astounding about The Simpsons' premier season is the sheer variety of stories it was capable of offering straight off the bat. It took its core premise (a modern suburban family who were far from perfect, but capable of standing by one another) in a host of directions, delving into each character's perspective within the equation and seeing what new angles could be applied. Who'd have thought that you could follow up "Moaning Lisa", a moody and melancholic exploration of childhood angst, with "The Call of The Simpsons" (7G09), the closest thing that fledgling year would produce to an all-out farce, and for the two stories not to feel like they came from entirely disparate universes? Of the original 13 installments (and arguably beyond), "Call" is the one that revels the most in the absurdity of its cartoon world, so much so that it might be easy to dismiss it as an overly lightweight affair. Landing midway through the season, on February 18th 1990, it is what producer Mike Reiss describes on the DVD commentary as that archetypal camping episode that most animated series like to do at about seven or eight episodes in, just to switch up the scenery and manufacture a few easy escapades: "Nobody's copying anyone, it's just something you feel...oh gee, that's a natural, let's throw them in the woods and see what happens." I can't say that I've noticed such a distinct pattern myself. South Park took barely any time to throw Stan, Kenny, Kyle and Eric into the wilderness, The Critic waited as long as episode 18 to pack Jay and Marty off to fat camp, and I don't remember the Binfords from Family Dog going camping at all (come to think of it, The PJs had a camping story in their ninth episode, although the joke there was that they never actually left the projects). But The Simpsons certainly makes the most of the alleged cliche, seizing the opportunity to be as feral as it pleases once civilisation is a speck on the horizon. If you think Homer and co are an uncultivated enough bunch within the comfort of their own neighbourhood, then what further indelicacies could Mother Nature possibly tease out of them?
I should preface my review of "The Call of The Simpsons" by noting that this is a significant episode for me personally as it was the first Simpsons episode I ever saw, some time in 1991 when the show was being held captive in the UK as a satellite exclusive (causing the awe Bart feels here for an RV with a satellite dish to hit a particularly bittersweet spot). If you didn't have Sky, then you weren't completely out of luck - Fox Video had come to the rescue with a series of VHS releases containing two episodes apiece. My brother had gotten hold of a tape that had this and "Bart The Genius", so I finally got to see the series that my classmates had been raving about for months. Of the two, "Genius" resonated with me a little better, if only because the school-centred narrative was more relatable as a child (as way off guard as that hamster joke caught me), but "Call" wasn't a bad place to start - it's fun, it's colourful and it gives you a strong impression of who each of the core family are. What I find most remarkable about the experience, with hindsight, is contemplating that there ever was a time when the lack of a couch gag in the opening would not have struck me as at all peculiar - here, the Simpsons rush in and sit down and...nothing happens. When it's your first episode you won't know any better. Watching it now, it practically becomes a joke within itself. Judging by the level of inconsistency the first season had with implementing the opening sequence, it took the producers a while to figure out quite how they wanted it to work; a handful of episodes forewent it altogether, and the seventh installment does seem like a truly random place to insert the "default" version with no additional mayhem (surely it would have made more sense to start with that one and let the couch gags get wilder as we went along?). Of all the episodes they could have stuck it in front of, this one feels like by far the most deceptive.
"The Call of The Simpsons" was writer John Swartzwelder's second contribution to the series, following "Bart The General", an episode that started out with a scenario so small and relatable (having to stand up to a school bully) before kicking it up to an audacious extreme. Already he seemed to be cementing a reputation as the writer who went bigger and broader than everyone else, testing the limits of what could be achieved in this animated reality without breaking the sense that the characters lived in the real world and not some cartoon fantasy realm. Which is not to say that goofy antics were his particular trade - his next script would be "Life on The Fast Lane", the most subtle and adult-skewing of the original season, and yet another outing that pushed the envelope in terms of what the series could do, albeit more in terms of its drama than its humor. Gutsiness was Swartzwelder's trade. He was willing to write episodes that, one way or another, took big swings that made you sit up and notice. "Call" is a markedly stronger entry on the narrative front than "General', which as an episode had an awful lot going for it, but also a conspicuous amount of padding. The plotting still isn't the tightest, particularly in the middle act when the family gets lost in the wilderness and the script does a lot of meandering between their three separate story stands, but it has more going on (so much so that there was apparently talk of expanding it a two-parter at one point), and comes together nicely for a hysterical third act that makes the pint-sized, water balloon-wielding platoon from "General" look like a subdued and sensible solution to that story's problem. It gets so wild and over the top, in fact, that the ending presented a particular challenge in terms of how to finally bring it back down to earth. The philosophy of early Simpsons was that episodes could be hilarious, they could be harrowing and they could be hair-raising, but the one requirement was that they always be human. You needed to be able to identify in some way with what the family was going through. The plot trajectory of "Call" is based around Homer's humanity being slowly stripped from him, first by nature and then by something even more razor-fanged (a media circus), with the extreme outcome that he's mistaken for the cryptid Bigfoot and the scientific community are left debating on whether to class him as a below average man or a brilliant beast. And sure, what could be more relatable? Isn't that what humanity basically is at the end of the day? A brilliant beast? We can all see a little of Homer in ourselves.
The episode's title is an obvious nod to Jack London's 1903 novel The Call of The Wild, concerning a collie-St Bernard hybrid who goes feral and learns to live among wolves against the backdrop of the Klondike Gold Rush. As such, it contains the implicit joke that for the Simpsons, trading civilisation for the wilderness represents a kind of homecoming. As a premise, it recalls one of the early Tracey Ullman shorts, "Zoo Story", in which Homer takes the family to a zoo and encourages them to laugh at the "stupid antics" of a troop of monkeys who bear an uncanny resemblance to themselves. The gag there was in the Simpsons evoking the most primitive, crude and grotesque qualities of human nature, to the extent that they barely seem any more evolved than their simian counterparts (and that one of the monkeys is able to trade places with Bart and make it all the way to the backseat of the family's car without them noticing). Most of all, "Call" stands out to me as the less sentimental, summer-themed cousin of "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", in that it puts Homer through a series of humiliating trials designed to squeeze out his every remaining drop of dignity, and on this occasion denies him the triumph of a sweetly redemptive ending (while allowing him to salvage a tiny scrap of pride, thanks to Marge). As with the Christmas show, a recurring bugbear of Homer's existence is the need to keep up with the Joneses, or rather the Flanders, with the entire conflict being kicked into motion by Ned's acquisition of a swanky new RV. This was only Ned's second appearance, and while he would become a more rounded character with the following season's "Dead Putting Society", for now his raison d'etre is still to lure out Homer's green-eyed monster with his splashy consumerism. He is, nevertheless, presented in a more favourable light than in "Roasting", where he came off as kind of insensitive to the Simpsons' financial struggles. Here, he gives Homer friendly advice on how to acquire an RV of his own through credit. And when Homer later shows up with the only RV his own spotty credit history would allow, a dented hunk of used junk with no satellite dish, Ned's very polite about it, wishing Homer well and betraying not even the faintest inkling of derision or snobbery. Homer's begrudging of Ned, while nowhere near as bitterly expressed as in "Roasting", is also a whole lot pettier. There's no reason why he shouldn't want his own RV, especially after learning how it could be within his means, but he seeks out the biggest and most extravagant model on the market, with the explicit intention of rubbing it in Ned's face. Unlike "Roasting", where his motivations were rooted in giving his family the best possible Christmas, here pretty much he sets himself up for a fall from the outset.
The RV shopping excursion is the most unassuming segment of the story, but arguably also the most momentous, marking the first occasion on which Albert Brooks would lend his vocal talents and ad libbing prowess to the series, kicking off one of its longest and richest of guest shot legacies (one that only Kelsey Grammer, Joe Mantegna and Phil Hartman could feasibly rival), although in the beginning he was somewhat coy about getting on board the Simpsons train. At this point the show still had everything to prove as a lowly cartoon attempting to cut it in an adult domain. Animation in the 1980s was widely regarded as an inferior diversion for undemanding kiddies, and Brooks wasn't certain if he wanted to risk bringing that kind of stigma upon his name, so he chose to be credited as A. Brooks instead. It's a movie that has always amused me. He wasn't the only early guest to have those misgivings - Dustin Hoffman also declined an overt credit for his contribution to "Lisa's Substitute", but Hoffman went with a more thorough disguise, using an entirely fabricated moniker with a hidden pun that hinted playfully at the artifice. In Brooks' case, I kinda feel that this is the equivalent of that Pokémon episode where Team Rocket attempt to hoodwink Ash and co by slipping on green jackets over their regular attire. James L. Brooks and Albert Brooks (no relation) were known best buds who frequently appeared in one another's projects (James was in Albert's Real Life and Modern Romance, and Albert in James' Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News), so I doubt that anybody who paid attention to the credits would have been doing a whole lot of head scratching as to who this mysterious A. Brooks might have been. Whatever trepidation Brooks might once have felt for his Simpsons association has naturally long since dissipated, although A. Brooks has remained his traditional credit, a throwback to the days when this was all radically new territory and the show's breakout success had seemed like the longest of long shots.
The first of Brooks' Simpsons incarnations is an RV salesman named Bob who hides his grasping intentions behind the glad handing persona of a cowboy whose pearly whites are on constant display. He might actually be the least iconic of Brooks' roles (of the classic era anyhow), which I'm inclined to put down to his being upstaged by not just one but two characters within the space of a few episodes - an infinitely more memorable character voiced by A. Brooks and an infinitely more memorable character named Bob. Granted, I've a strong bias in favour of both of those guys in general, but I doubt that I'm saying anything particularly out of line here. Comparing them seems almost unfair - Jacques and Sideshow Bob are major presences in their respective outings, being the actual driving forces behind their pivotal conflicts, whereas Cowboy Bob has a far more modest part, appearing only for a few minutes near the start and bowing out before the first act is even through. That puts him at another disadvantage, since by the time the episode's over, so much else has happened that an RV salesman who talks and dresses like a cowboy no longer feels like the strangest thing about it and he isn't so fresh on your mind. Even so, Brooks' performance is an absolute blast, and you can tell he's having a great deal of fun in that recording booth, replicating every oily dealer who tried to fling a dubious deal his way. Bob certainly knows how to work Homer like a sucker, smothering him with praise and affability while intermittently hinting at his fishier agenda ("I don't own this place, even though my name's up there....long story, but that doesn't matter"). Occasionally, Bob is even taken back by the extent of Homer's naivety; "Ever known a siren to be good?" he murmurs in disbelief, when Homer asks if the wailing signals emitted by the computer reviewing his credit history mean that he's been approved. Having exposed Homer's underlying sheepishness, he goes in mercilessly for the kill ("You're never going to own a better RV...This is it for you, you know? It's this or a wagon.") Significantly, when he shows Homer the beat-up RV and goads him into committing to buy without consulting his family (having detected that Marge isn't keen on making an impulse purchase, and certainly not on that RV), he tells him that "If you have to talk with those humans out there, there's something wrong with all of us." Within context, he's alluding to his earlier attempt to butter Homer up by comparing him to the Greek god Zeus, but he also foreshadows how the story will eventually unfold, with Homer being cast out of the human race (and not because he's mistaken for anything more elevated). Having dared to dream that he might be destined for a more esteemed standard of living, he's about to take one heck of a sharp plummet downward. Being forced to settle for something much less than the Behemoth was only the beginning.
Still, he's invested in his scrappy little clunker (to the chagrin of his family) and is determined to make the most of it, proudly displaying it to Ned and indulging in the play pretence that he's made his perpetually sunny neighbour squirm with jealousy. Taking his reluctant family on a camping trip in the woods is an extension of that same posturing - having acquired an RV, he needs to be seen to use it, and to throw its weight around. It becomes swiftly apparent that he's no idea what he's doing, however. First he endangers his family by making the rash decision to drive off road and into a river, insisting that the RV is equipped for any terrain (all while whistling the tune to "The Happy Wanderer"). Then, in a wonderfully executed sequence (one that genuinely made me gasp on my first viewing), he comes to a random standstill, only for it to be revealed that he's driven right up to the edge of a cliff, and the RV is now teetering dangerously into the drop. The family are able to vacate in the nick of time (in an emphatic rejection of Homer's authority, they don't even wait for him to give the signal to clamber out), but alas, there's no saving the vehicle itself. The poor RV doesn't even make it to the second act, and through no fault of whatever deficiencies it had before ending up in Homer's hands.
Needless to say, we don't hold quite the same degree of sympathy for Homer as we did in "Roasting". Both episodes are littered with examples of the universe being seemingly out to get him, but he gets into this predicament as a result of his own recklessness and disregard for his family's wishes. We can see that he's ripe for a royal humbling. He is nevertheless the character with whom we most closely identify without the adventure, and the script does a nice job of treading that middle ground with him, exposing him as fundamentally foolish at every turning, but also painfully aware of his failings and desperately wanting to do better. It's not just his pride that's under constant attack, but also his attempts to put on a brave face for the rest of his family to disguise the perilousness of their situation, now that they're stranded out in the wilderness with no idea how far they are from the nearest port of call. They are repeatedly reassured that Homer is "an experienced woodsman", but we're given no context for that statement. What experience does he have exactly? Possibly none at all. There's a particularly neat sequence where he wanders away to lament in private how he's doomed them all, only to be done in by his own echo, which not only makes his despair entirely audible to his family, but becomes the taunting voice of self-admonishment. Unfortunately for Homer, "Call" is no redemptive story where he can go off into the woods and discover himself. Or rather, he does discover himself, and what is fundamentally in his nature, but not through his mastery of the wilderness; instead, the wilderness beats him down and claims him as its own.
The middle act sees the family dividing off in various splinter groups, with Homer and Bart venturing out to find help while Marge and Lisa stay put and await rescue. Nobody makes the horrifying realisation that Maggie is on her own in the woods since they all assume she's with the other party (with Lisa being the only one who expresses any doubt about the situation). But not to worry. In the most bizarre narrative development of not only the episode but also the entire season, she falls in with a family of grizzlies and gets to spend a day or two living the life of a feral child.
Of the three narrative strands, my favourite is the one that receives the least amount of screentime, that being the subplot about Marge and Lisa, and the blissfully untroubled time they have of it compared to the Simpson men. It was actually the subject of a little bit of a mystery, when the first edition of The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family was published in 1997 and included a snippet of dialogue between Marge and Lisa that was nowhere in the finished episode (and which was removed from subsequent editions). Somehow or other they've gotten onto the subject of where babies come from, with Lisa admitting that she doesn't know, but that she once heard a disturbing story about it in the school yard, and Marge responding, "Well, it's true, I'm afraid." For the longest time, I'd wondered if something had been cut from the version we'd had on tape, and was relieved when I learned that the entire fandom was as baffled by its inclusion in A Complete Guide. On the DVD commentary it is mentioned that there was originally more to the Marge-Lisa story, but that it was largely trimmed to accommodate for as much of A. Brooks' ad libbing as possible. Among the excised material were homages to Swiss Family Robinson and an extended version of the nocturnal sequence where Marge and Lisa are bedding down beside their fire, in which they had an entire discussion about boys and, one would presume, the facts of life. As brilliant as Brooks' contribution was, I can't help but feel a little mournful for that additional Marge-Lisa rapport we were denied. Even that tiny tidbit that somehow wormed its way into the official reference guide drips with irresistible emotional honesty. Arguably, it is a stretch that a girl as precocious as Lisa wouldn't already have some understanding of how reproduction works, but Marge's response is pure gold, and I'd have loved to have seen it within its proper context. Between this, the central conflict in "Moaning Lisa" and the small scene they had together in "Some Enchanted Evening", the connection between Marge and Lisa felt like the most wholesome and earnest of the family relationships in the show's early days, making it a shame that it wouldn't get so much exploration going forward.
The subplot with Maggie and her ursine foster family is also a highlight, peppering the episode with a few quirky intervals of non-verbal storytelling. Groening's aversion to the use of anthropomorphism within The Simpsons is well-documented, and there are certainly instances of that in here (one of the bears makes the "stop" gesture by holding up its paw), but overall this thread is intrinsically too weird to feel excessively Disneyesque - not least because it's suggested that Maggie is able to subdue the voracious predators through the power of her pacifier. Again, this is in stark contrast to the reception Homer gets from the animal kingdom; his attempts to hunt for rabbits leave him not only with an empty belly, but in possible need of a rabies shot, when he ventures into the bushes and gets attacked by a rabbit, a raccoon, a snake and a chipmunk in unison. (It's interesting how much more cartoony the designs for Simpsons animals were in the beginning; the bears here don't look significantly different to the one we'd later see in "Much Apu About Nothing" of Season 7, but the rabbits more closely resemble the characters from Groening's Life In Hell than the more naturalistic bunny Lisa pursues at the start of "Lisa's Wedding"). A repeated theme is Homer's posturing being cut down whenever he advocates conquering the wilderness through traditionally masculine methods (hunting, showing no fear, etc), all while the Simpson women have more luck using approaches that are more genteel (Marge and Lisa are effectively able to transform the woodland floor into their personal living room, while Maggie finds kinship with a grizzly by introducing it to her personal mechanism for relieving her oral fixation). As Marge, Lisa and Maggie are able to make the wilds around them a little more civil, Homer becomes progressively less civilised, first losing his clothing after falling into a river, then his power of intelligible communication after impulsively stuffing the contents of a beehive into his mouth, and finally becoming so drenched in sludge that a nearby camper with a videocam no longer recognises him as human, but as the legendary ape-man Bigfoot. In no time, the footage he filmed is all over the media, and people are flocking to the woods in the hopes of bagging the creature for a substantial reward.
One of the quirks of being set mostly outside of Springfield is that "Call' features very little world-building among the show's supporting cast, with Ned, Todd Flanders and Dr Marvin Monroe being the only recurring regulars to appear, and all of them in minimal roles. Of note is a news anchor who could be described as a proto Kent Brockman, although he wouldn't be formally introduced until "Krusty Gets Busted". There's also an entire scene with an anonymous couple voiced by Hank Azaria and Maggie Roswell, who unlike the Simpsons are disappointed with just how tedious their camp-out in the wilderness is proving (unaware that the bears are looting their supplies to provide for Maggie). The generic designs chosen suggest to me that they were never intended to be anything other than one-scene wonders, but the performances and chemistry from Azaria and Roswell are so sparkling that I wouldn't have been averse to seeing more from these characters. If the episode were made in one of the later seasons, their roles would no doubt have been fulfilled by more established Springfieldians, although it's hard to envision who exactly would have taken their place. Kirk and Luann Van Houten could have worked, in terms of the couple's tetchy dynamic, although they'd needed to have had a baby with them (Milhouse's demeanour can be on the infantile side at times, but surely he doesn't require a bottle?).
In its third act, "Call" becomes particularly uproarious, for it's here that The Simpsons takes its first big shot at skewering that most evergreen of topics, media sensationalism and the subsequent mass hysteria. Already it's something that the series handles with so much sharpness and panache (the Bigfoot newsflash upstaging a presidential address, followed by the array of side-splitting tabloid headlines when Marge, having been located by the park rangers, attempts to explain that "Bigfoot" is really her husband Homer, only for her pleas to be misconstrued by reporters as indicators of a scandalous interspecies relationship). The eventual outcome, which sees Homer and Bart trekking their way into the Bigfoot hunters' base (having bumped into Maggie along the way, necessitating a surprisingly poignant farewell scene between the babe and her adopted family), where Homer is still mistaken for the cryptid and taken out with a tranquilliser dart, is naturally very silly (he doesn't even get to go down with dignity, urging Bart to avenge his death before snoring up a storm). After being beaten into submission by the wilderness, he finds that reintegrating back into civilisation won't be as easy as all that. Civilisation now lives in fear of him, regarding him as the "missing link" that stands halfway between both worlds, a grotesque reminder of the bestial side of human nature that has always been at home in the woods. His wild exterior no doubt provides a perfect mirror to their own mindless frenzy on being confronted with the purportedly inexplicable. It is ironic that he should inspire so much awe and terror, since Homer is obviously low on the evolutionary ladder within both settings - he couldn't outdo Ned as a suburban consumer, and outdoors he got his butt kicked by an assortment of fluffy woodland critters.
Even after a week under observation in a laboratory, he hasn't completely dispelled the comical misunderstanding. The authorities have evidently decided that to keep him any longer would amount to false imprisonment, but the scientific community is still on the fence, with Dr Marvin Monroe (who before the introduction of Professor Frink was the show's go-to scientific representative, whether it made sense or not) and a panel of supposed experts (one German, one French and one British) continuing to butt heads over the question of Homer's humanity. They can agree that he is, at best, a below average man or, at worst, a brilliant beast, or should that be the other way around? The closing sequence establishes that life is returning to normal for Homer, in spite of his absurdest of ordeals - no matter what these scientists have to say on the matter, the only real consequence to him, in practice, is the prospect of having to go back to work and face a ribbing from his colleagues. Marge consoles him by suggesting that he take pride in being a "brilliant beast", a statement that, in this bedroom-bound context, carries possible sexual undertones (the fade-out with Marge switching out the light puts me warily in mind of the ending to "Lisa's Substitute"), but mostly highlights the value in not necessarily conforming to society's expectations, but being a survivor nevertheless.
Nowadays, the thing that most sticks out about "The Call of The Simpsons" is how it takes the cake for having probably the highest proportion of truly morbid jokes of any Season 1 entry (the nocturnal rock walk in "Homer's Odyssey" would be its chief competition). Bart's reaction to Homer's efforts to create a makeshift snare from a contorted tree branch - "What are we gonna do? Hang ourselves?" - is hilariously bleak. There's also the gruesome thud made by the hapless rabbit that gets flung halfway across the forest by the aforementioned trap (it's too over the top to be anywhere near as traumatic as the allotted fate of the control hamster in "Bart The Genius", but still somewhat troubling in the moment), the buzzards circling around the family on their entry into the wilds, and this low-key exchange between Bart and Homer: "Are we ever gonna be there?" "How would I know?!" It's rough out there, so come prepared.
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