The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #52: How To Explain Pixels To A Dead Hedgehog THE PROLOGUE!

Okay people, this is a big one. I recently experienced a "Eureka!" moment that was, on a personal level, utterly tectonic. After much tireless searching, I am finally able to close the book on a television mystery me that's been haunting me for over 30 years. As a young child, I have very distinct and very uneasy memories of being repeatedly exposed to an advertisement that confounded the living daylights out of me - in part because I couldn't make head nor tail of its intended message. By then, I was just about worldly-wise enough to know that the purpose of advertising was to attempt to sell you something, but basically paranoid enough to not put it past the powers that be to throw in random bits of stimuli just to make your sleep at night a lot harder. I had no other means of explaining the existence of this ad, which had no discernible agenda other than to whack you with a weird, confusing and, above all, disturbing scenario entailing the apparent imperilment of a small, fuzzy animal (albeit one obviously played by a puppet). I know I've mentioned it in these pages at least once before, in my review of "Who Shot Mr Burns?: Part One", when trying to explain the personal anxieties I associated with the term "To Be Continued...", so let's just copy and paste the synopsis I gave back then:

"There was a short period, some time in the early 1990s, when the bane of my TV-watching existence was a most peculiar and disturbing TV ad in which stock footage (I presume) of an enormous truck hurtling down a desert highway was interspliced with the cries of a terrified critter, apparently in the path of the truck and in danger of being crushed by it. The creature itself was of no discernable species - the most we ever saw of it was its huge plastic eyes rolling open and shut as it stood there, seemingly powerless to alter its fate. Then, the action came to an abrupt halt, the words "To be continued..." were flashed across the screen in big bold letters, aaaaand I never did figure out what that was all about. As far as I'm aware, the scenario never was continued, and maybe that was the joke in itself, but it was never apparent to me what the advertisement was actually selling, and it's haunted me ever since. If you're wondering why you've never seen this featured as a Horrifying Advertising Animal, it's because I've never been able to find it. Not having a clue what the campaign in question was for has seriously impeded the whole search process. I would love to put the matter to rest once and for all, because as things are, that whole scenario still lies suspended in my head, with no clarity as to the fate of that plastic-eyed critter or what the heck I was even watching."

 

I was never quite able to shake the psychological baggage the experience left with me. A barrage of questions lingered. Did the ad actually make good on its threat of continuation? Did the animal in question escape being crushed beneath the wheels of that hulking great truck? Was the animal a species or character I was intended to recognise? What the hell was that advertisement trying to sell me? As I entered adulthood and the bewilderment persisted, I knew the only way to overcome it was to confront the source head-on and to go in search of my televisual demon. After all, the establishment of YouTube had made it so much simpler to access nostalgic advertising online, if you knew what you were looking for. Problem is, I didn't. After all this time, I couldn't even second-guess what brand the ad had been covertly hawking, which made it very hard for me to narrow down my searches. The best I could do was take a stab at the specific period in which I was likely to have seen it (I knew it was either late 1992 or early 1993 - I could swear I had seen it on CITV around airings of Tiny Toon Adventures, but this was pre-Animaniacs), scout out uploads of adverts from those years and hope for the best. In practice it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. For the longest time, I got zilch. Nada. Bupkis. Which surprised me, because I seem to recall this ad being horribly ubiquitous back in the day. It's a good thing that I'm so enthusiastic about old school advertising in general, so trawling through upload after upload for years on end wasn't a total waste of time. I got to relive plenty of other memories, some fond, some unsettling in their own way. But none quite so prized as the Holy Grail of traumatic advertising, which continued to taunt and elude me, an image too persistent for me to cast it aside, and yet one so elusive it was beginning to feel as though I was the only person on the planet who bore its terrible weight of its memory.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when I happened to find the infernal thing, tucked away in an obscure YouTube upload. Now finally, I have the answers I craved. They weren't necessarily the answers I wanted, mind. I pulled back the lid on this thing and, well, it turns out there's actually a pretty fiendish twist to this story that I was totally unprepared for. At the time, I'd suspected that the whole "To Be Continued" thing was intended as a parody of melodramatic television cliffhangers (this was post-Truckers, which had always ended with Edward Kelsey giving those exact words in his eerie sign-off each week, so I was able to attach some theatrical significance to the term) and that the joke was that the scenario wouldn't be continued. I couldn't logically link that joke to any identifiable product, but I was certain, looking back, that I must have missed a trick - perhaps it was part of a bigger ad and there was another segment I hadn't noticed it had always segued into. But no, the actual answer was far more distressing. I did indicate in the above synopsis that if I were ever to uncover this ad, I would cover it as a Horrifying Advertising Animal, so here we are.

My description of what happened in the ad was fairly accurate, but for a few minor details. The eyes of the fake animal turned out to latex rather than plastic, and they didn't roll open and shut. Instead, they showed the reflection of the approaching vehicle, a detail I clearly didn't absorb at the time. I also couldn't say for certain whether stock footage was used for the visuals of the truck (Maybe? I don't know). I was only majorly wrong about one thing. The onscreen threat that this ominous scenario was "To be continued" was no joke. There WAS a follow-up ad. And this is where it all gets bitterly ironic -  it was one that I'd been well-familiar with for all these years. In fact, I'd already covered it in this very series all the way back in 2020, not realising there was ever a connection. I've termed this the 52nd Horrifying Advertising Animal, but that's something of a cheat. This is really a revisit of the 27th.

Remember this guy?

That's right. This flat-out nightmare of an ad, which at the time I had registered as a baffling one-off, transpires to have been a prelude to the equally nightmarish (but marginally more comprehensible, at least from the standpoint of it existing to sell me a product) ad for Sonic the Hedgehog 2, in which Steven O'Donnell fiddles with an unresponsive hedgehog in a fruitless attempt to revive it. It was all a teaser, to account for how the hedgehog got so unresponsive in the first place. The animal seen cowering in terror at the approaching truck was none other than the same hedgehog puppet we later saw with a coroner's tag on its toe and in the questionable care of O'Donnell. The answer was right under my nose all along. I'd just never put it together. Seriously now, was I supposed to? Aside from the fact that they feature the same spaghetti western leitmotif, there's not a lot to overtly connect the two ads. The hedgehog puppet doesn't look amazingly recognisable in its stationary form, and the follow-up doesn't incorporate any flashback material, at least not in any airing that I saw. I surely can't have been the only person confused by this?

Here's a far pettier nitpick of the ad's execution. The vehicle in question looks like an American-style truck (with the elongated snoot) and the landscape it's hurtling down very much like an American desert. It even sounds, to my ears, like the hedgehog is saying "Uh-oh!" with a discernible American accent. Which is flawed, because hedgehogs aren't found in the wilds of America (judging by its colouration, this is meant to be a European hedgehog and not an African pygmy hedgehog, which is the kind you can keep as a pet). If you'd asked me to guess what type of animal it was intended to be from the teaser alone, I'd have ventured armadillo. (I'd also remembered the puppet as having more cat-like features, another factor that evidently kept me from connecting the necessary dots.) The hedgehog is also implied, in the follow-up ad, to have ended up in some twisted parallel universe version of St Tiggywinkle Hospital in Aylesbury, UK, so something strange is definitely going on with the campaign's sense of geography. Actually, I'd wager that the truck and the desert highway in the teaser were intended as a homage to the movie Duel - which does have the added effect of making it seem as though the truck is assaulting the hedgehog on purpose, the honk of its horn resonating as a murderous battle cry. The spaghetti western music likewise reinforces the sense of a deliberate showdown between these two blatantly mismatched forces. The poor hedgehog didn't stand a chance.

The upload I have to thank for getting me reacquainted with this childhood nightmare was not one of the random advertising blocks I've been trawling through for years, but an obscure educational VHS titled Sega Invades Your Schoolwork, which was apparently intended to be shown to school kids as a teaching tool on the value of marketing. They included both hedgehog ads, as examples of how Sega's advertising proved that they were better than the competition, and I've now got the answers I've been seeking all these years. As I say, though, they weren't exactly the answers I was hoping for. I refer you back to what I said in my "Who Shot Mr Burns?" review about how "that whole scenario still lies suspended in my head, with no clarity as to the fate of that plastic-eyed critter or what the heck I was even watching." It is undeniably a weight off my mind having closure on the latter (since the question was only going to chew away at my sanity the longer it went unaddressed). With regard to the former, I think I actually preferred living in blissful ignorance. Knowing the scenario didn't end well for the imperilled critter really is a massive bummer. I had always assumed that if the cliffhanger had been picked up again, it would have found some way to escape the incoming vehicle. The heinous truth could only sour my elation in having untangled this longstanding mystery. Do you understand how deflating this is? I located my white whale and it took a big salivary bite out of me.

I'd already considered the chief installment ,with O'Donnell prodding the inert hedgehog, to be disturbing enough on its own merits, but now that I've put the whole narrative together this is easily one of the most singularly, purely horrifying ad campaigns I've personally come across. If I were tasked with picking out the advertising animal I'd rate as the most purely horrifying, I would, without question, go for Kevin the Levi jeans hamster (with the irony that I did not technically cover Kevin as part of the Horrifying Advertising Animal retrospective, since I wrote about him before it occurred to me that I could spin a whole series from the notion - although you can consider him a proto Horrifying Advertising Animal, along with the Coca-Cola swimming elephant and the bizarre menagerie in that Roysters crisp ad). The only detail that makes the Sega campaign slightly more palatable is that, unlike the Levi's ad, which used a live hamster and a stuffed one according to the needs of the story, they never used a real animal at any point. The doomed hedgehog is clearly always a latex imposter (its little lifeless eyes are still enough to rupture your heart, however). But it's still an amazingly grim and mean-spirited premise through which to sell a video game that was, at the end of the day, supposed to be a bit of innocent diversion. For context, it was part of a wider "Sega TV" campaign, which was renowned for taking a weird and edgy approach to hawking the Sega Mega Drive to UK audiences. The release of Ecco The Dolphin, for example, was teased with a faux commercial for "Ecco" washing powder (what, they didn't want to keep the theme going and do a teaser with a dolphin puppet struggling in a tuna net?). On those terms, the sheer WTF-ness of the Sonic campaign at least fits in perfectly with the broader brand. But I do find it a bit astounding that nobody influential enough within Sega's UK arm apparently remarked, "The dead hedgehog? Bloody hell, don't you think that's a bit much?" (as opposed having a giant image of said dead hedgehog plastered across their headquarters at the time of the game's release - I mean, seriously? And they had a miniature Sonic making the peace sign in the corner as if he wouldn't be deeply mortified by this mockery of his species). Sonic The Hedgehog is supposed to be a kid-friendly franchise, after all. Did kids really want to have it sold to them by having a dead hedgehog shoved in their faces? Did adults, for that matter?

I've reflected on it, and I've come to the bleak conclusion that Britain must have gone through a cultural fascination with dead hedgehogs in the 1980s that trickled over into the early 90s. After all, BBC sketch show Not The Nine O'Clock News very notoriously incorporated a sketch where a hedgehog was gruesomely crushed by the wheels of a truck, followed by a faux apology in which they clarified that the hedgehog was stuffed, and then suggested that responsibility for promoting hedgehog abuse ultimately lay with the hedgehog taxidermists, whoever they were. This was such a defining example of NTNON humor that they adopted a dead hedgehog as their go-to mascot and had it brazenly centred on the covers of their LP releases, most memorably between slices of bread and cheese as a hedgehog sandwich (I should emphasise that this was a real hedgehog, in their case, not a puppet). Pictures of dead hedgehogs sold records in the 1980s, apparently. So perhaps it wasn't such a huge leap to suppose they might sell video games too. We can trace this campaign to the release of Sonic The Hedgehog 2 in November 1992; thus, it represented the tail-end of the UK's sordid love affair with hedgehog misfortune. What was coming in 1993, however, was to change zeitgeist forever. The Animals of Farthing Wood was set to take the UK by storm, and it too featured a critical scene in which a couple of hedgehogs were crushed beneath the wheels of a hulking great lorry. On this occasion, the occurrence was presented as a tragedy, a harrowing consequence of humankind's encroachment upon and indifference toward the natural world, and the nation was left collectively traumatised by what they saw. After that, we couldn't go back. To quote Farthing Wood's own Fox, there was nothing to go back for.

Now that I've got my closure on this matter, I can't tell you how eager I am to move on from it. I do need a new advertising white whale, however. How about the cat food ad where the guy eats his cat's food (and loves it), mistaking it for leftover stew his girlfriend prepared? I only remember seeing it once, but you're not going to convince me that I dreamed it.

Farthing Wood Deaths Revisited (Horrific Injuries Bonus Round): Reservoir Vixens

Remember that infamous ear-slicing scene from Reservoir Dogs and how much hand-wringing it generated back in the day?  Right from the start, Quentin Tarantino drew criticism as a film-maker who reveled in graphic depictions of onscreen violence, but he himself was always at pains to point out that the camera actually pans away during the exact moment in which the ear is severed from the body, meaning that no such incident is ever depicted onscreen, and that the viewer is essentially manipulated into thinking that they saw something which in reality they didn't.

I bring this up because it should be noted that in 1994, two years after Reservoir Dogs premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992, The Animals of Farthing Wood ventured into territory that even Tarantino was much too restrained to tackle at the time - which is to say, they featured a scene in which an animal's ear is bitten off onscreen.  Naturally, the aftermath features considerably less blood than that of Tarantino's film, but the brutality is downright startling, and all the more so for being inflicted by a character who up until now has been noted largely for her compassion and benevolence.

The long-awaited showdown between Fox and Scarface is preceded by a briefer, more impromptu confrontation between their respective right-hand vixens.  What the battle lacks in duration, it makes up for in the sheer degree of viciousness with which the two vixens go at one another.  Each vixen gets only one hit in this battle, but they certainly know how make it count.

Vixen is patrolling Farthing Land when she happens across Lady Blue and demands to know what she is doing there.  Lady Blue is deliberately evasive in her response, and it isn't long before the two vixens lose all patience with one another and decide to settle things with their teeth.  As the two of them sidle up to one another, we hear both of them getting up to some seriously disconcerting growling.  This level of violent aggression is something that we've never seen from Vixen before and she certainly doesn't pull any punches - for her first move, she lunges straight at Lady Blue, latches onto her right ear and bites a huge chunk of it off.  Lady Blue retaliates by biting Vixen in the chest in a very painful-looking manner, which causes Vixen to retreat immediately, suggesting that she has all the spunk and killer instinct for battle but not much stamina, I guess.  In the end, Lady Blue wins this round, despite having been on the receiving end of the visually nastier injury.

All in all, this may just rate as the single most cringe-inducing sequence in the entire series.  Even today, the brutality of it leaves me speechless.

Farthing Wood Deaths Revisited (Horrific Injuries Bonus Round): Tails You Lose

As I stated back in May, I wasn't yet done with my retrospective upon the many gruesome and disturbing deaths from the first two series of The Animals of Farthing Wood.  Revisiting the series, it struck me that a couple of the most shocking instances of onscreen violence from Series 2 resulted merely in non-fatal injuries, and I thought it a shame that, owing to the nature of the retrospective, I wouldn't also be able to cover those.  So in the end I decided to stick them on as a special bonus round.  I will not be rating these, but I thought each of them worthy of their own miniature review.

The first of these occurs after the Farthing animals' bungled assassination attempt on Scarface, which  instead resulted in the death of Bounder and left Scarface eager to hit back against the culprit before they have another chance to strike.  Ranger has tipped Scarface off as to Adder's whereabouts, falsely believing that Adder had acted independently of the Farthing Fox and hoping to divert his father's attentions away from their ongoing feud.  Scarface isn't quite so naïve, but recognises that it is imperative that he get Adder out of the way while her venom levels are still replenishing.  Finding Adder basking in the sun by the pond, Scarface carefully sneaks up on her, but Adder spies him in time and makes a sharp bolt to a small hole in the bank of the pond.  Unfortunately, she isn't quite quick enough, with Scarface managing to grab the end of her tail and clamping down hard on it with his jaws.  Adder is able to latch on to a large root from inside the hole and the two of them engage in a vicious game tug of war for a while, before finally something has to give - this being the end of Adder's tail, which is literally torn in half onscreen.

I can still recall the initial shock I felt when I first saw this sequence back in 1994; the moment of severance happens in a blink of an eye, but it manages to be stark and unsettling, in no small part due to the small streaks of red which momentarily burst from Adder's broken body.  This is otherwise an entirely bloodless affair, but no less gruesome for it; we see from the subsequent shots that Scarface has bitten off quite a sizeable chunk of Adder's tail, which makes the sight of him standing beside the discarded remains (along with the images of Adder's mutilated body from inside the hole) utterly skin-crawling.

The Animals of Farthing Wood Do America: Part 5

Happy 4th of July to all of my readers in the US!  I can think of no better way to mark the occasion than by posting the concluding chapter to my five-part analysis of Journey Home, the American direct-to-video feature edit of Europe's much-loved series The Animals of Farthing Wood.

We're now into the final twenty minutes of Journey Home, and the film still has five episodes' worth of story to cram in, so...expect an awful lot to have been excised.  As it turns out, very little of Episode 9 makes it into Journey Home, beyond the very necessary task of introducing Whistler to the main cast (although so little of what he does in those remaining few episodes has been preserved in Journey Home that viewers possibly questioned why he was added at all), the events of Episode 11 (in which the animals travel through pesticide-heavy farmland) get skipped over entirely, and hardly any of Episode 13 survives beyond the concluding scene.  As for Episodes 10 and 12, they've been rearranged in order, so that the hi-jinks at the church precede the tragedy on the motorway.

As we rejoin the animals we find them making their way toward the quarry, where they will shortly encounter Whistler the heron.

1.00.58 - Toad remarks that, "My instinct's pulling me to White Deer Park now, instead of home to Farthing Wood.  I'm over the hump, I am. [Laughs] I'll not have any trouble getting us to White Deer Park now."

This is another statement which isn't given any context in Journey Home, where Toad's issues with temporarily forgetting the way to White Deer Park (which took place during the portion of the journey in which Badger had stepped up as the animals' leader) were entirely omitted.  In Journey Home, Toad triumphantly indicates that he's overcome a crisis of self-doubt which, as far as the viewer is concerned, he'd never experienced in the first place.

1.01.05 - In the original series, the larger animals had some difficulty getting through the fence surrounding the quarry and had to tunnel under, but Journey Home bypasses this and immediately fades into scenes of the animals unwinding at the quarry.

1.01.18 - We meet Whistler, who introduces himself to the Farthing animals, and explains the origin of his peculiar moniker - namely, the gunshot-inflicted hole in his wing that "whistles" whenever he flies.  We then cut straight to Badger introducing "Live and let live" as the motto of the Farthing animals, which Whistler admits "makes a change", before adding that he finds them rather intriguing.  Journey Home has just skipped over a number of key scenes from this episode, so naturally the proper context of this particular exchange is no longer there.  In the original series, it was in reference to Toad's unexpected display of compassion toward a carp which mere moments ago had been attempting to devour him.  To me, this was one of the defining moments of the series, as it demonstrated just how deeply the animals had been affected by the Oath, so I'm sorry to see it skipped altogether, but obviously they were really determined to keep this cut down to around 80 minutes.

As Whistler begins to muse over joining the Farthing animals, Adder insists that "it'sss nice here", in reference his present home at the quarry.  In Journey Home this comes across as an entirely sincere statement, but in the original series was part of a running gag based upon the implication that Adder is somewhat afraid of Whistler (who, in fairness, has a tendency to crash-land on her) and isn't overly keen on having him along.

Whistler indicates that he's interested in going to White Deer Park in the hope that he might meet a female heron there.  Toad confirms that there are herons at White Deer Park but admits that he can't tell the difference between a male and a female, prompting laughter from the Farthing animals, at which point in Journey Home the scene fades out.  In the original series, the actual punchline to that scene comes from an exasperated Adder, who remarks, "And he's guiding ussss?  Ridiculoussss."  Also missing from Journey Home is a scene with Whistler and Vixen being formally initiated into the Farthing band by taking the Oath, and Fox and Vixen stressing to Toad how important it is that he not put himself at further risk (in reference to the carp attack).

1.02.46 - We fade back in and find the animals on the move once again.  Adder announces that she is exhausted and wants to stop, but Fox insists that they are safer moving.  Journey Home removes Adder's churlish response - that the sounds of Whistler flying will inevitably attract unwanted attention.

Baby Rabbit's death has been excised from Journey Home (as we established with the Field-Mice, this edit blatantly isn't keen on having the infants die) and after leaving the quarry, the animals head directly to the town, where they end up spending the night in a church and get locked in.  One of the odder editing decisions made by Journey Home was to rearrange the order of events toward the end of the animals' journey, so that the motorway crossing occurs AFTER the incident in which the animals inadvertently crash a wedding.   My guess would be that this was so as to have more of a dramatic final obstacle immediately before the animals reach White Deer Park.  Also, as noted, Episode 11 has been skipped over entirely.  In fairness, Episode 11 was easily the most "fillerish" of the first series - nothing much happens that directly impacts on events in subsequent episodes, other than the animals expressly deciding to go through the town in order to avoid the poisoned fields.  It's quite easy to accept the town as just another obstacle that stands in their way, however, so its absence doesn't hurt the overall story too much.

1.03.04 - Cut to the opening scene of Episode 12, with the animals arriving outside the town at nightfall.  Their trek through the town is disrupted by heavy rainfall, prompting the animals to seek shelter at a nearby church.  Journey Home removes a number of scenes of the animals struggling to traverse the streets in the rain, along with Fox's reason for thinking that the church would be a good bet (he assumed there would be a porch, but it transpires that this church is in rather a derelict state and has had its porch taken out).  We instead cut directly to Mole finding a hole in the wall, which enables the animals access.

1.06.09 - After the animals awake to find themselves trapped inside the church, Journey Home cuts directly to the humans entering, whereas the original series includes additional scenes with Owl and Kestrel looking for another exit and Toad keeping the other animals occupied by telling them more about White Deer Park.

1.07.51 - As some of the animals begin to panic and blow their cover, Owl remarks that humans have a proverb: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."  Fox takes her point and orders all of the animals to make a bolt for it.  And with that we move into Journey Home's third song, "Animal Power", a very jaunty, hoedown-y number which really hams up the sequence's comedic elements for all they're worth.  Some of the lyrics:

We can do it, yes we can, we will never cower!
We can do most anything, we've got animal power!

All for one and one for all, now's our finest hour!
We're the team that can't be beat, we've got animal power!

Animals squeeze, animals slide, humans better step aside!
In the air, on patrol, ready get set, here we go!

True, one never senses that the animals are in that much danger with this particular bunch of humans, who presumably want to get them out of the church as much as the animals themselves want to leave.  This sequence also contains some of the silliest sight gags in all the series (namely, Weasel catching the bride's bouquet, which with hindsight neatly foreshadows her impending union with Measly).  All the same, sticking that frothy, ultra-lighthearted song on top does make the entire incident seem like one big exhilarating lark for the animals, when the fall-out in the original series was quite disastrous, at least in the short-term.

Side-note, but I never really got why Owl steals the bride's veil, other than to be a total arse.

1.10.32 - Adder's line, "I don't know what all the fusssss is about", becomes the final punchline of the sequence in Journey Home, which fades things out with her slithering off down the churchyard path.  In the original series, Adder actually lingers around the churchyard for long enough to observe the humans resuming the wedding, making the Shakespearean quip that "Allssss well that endsss well, I sssuppossse."

Despite the confusion, the animals appear to have had no difficulty staying together in Journey Home.  In the original series, the animals wound up getting separated into various splinter groups upon fleeing the church, and Episode 13 dealt with the task of getting everyone back together before they completed the last leg of their journey to White Deer Park.  Overall, it was quite a subdued, reflective episode, short on any really major drama, and as noted, I suspect that Journey Home favoured using the motorway crossing from Episode 10 as the final obstacle in order to provide a dramatic climax that would better suit the needs of a feature film.

1.10.41 - Fade in with Kestrel announcing that a big road lies ahead, whereupon the animals come face to face with the motorway.  In the original series this sparked an outpouring of anger among the party, as Toad had not warned them that such a gargantuan obstacle lay ahead (the road was still under construction when he had crossed it previously), and many of them wanted now to abandon the journey and turn back the way they'd come.  Upon hearing the ominous sound of the hunters' horn in the distance, Fox insisted that the only way was forward.  Some of the other animals accused him of being selfish, but Badger fiercely defended Fox, pointing out how fantastically loyal he had always been to the other Farthing animals.  Realising that the hunt was on their scent, the animals then all fled together in the direction of the motorway.  All of this is skipped in Journey Home.

1.11.15 - Vixen notes that the cars on one side of the motorway have come to a total standstill, and so the animals begin to cross while they have the chance.  Journey Home trims down this sequence so that the emphasis is very much on The Hedgehogs, along with Mr. Field-Mouse getting his tail caught under one of the wheels.  Omitted are bits with the Squirrels jumping across the car bonnets and Weasel tricking Mole into thinking that she's been crushed by one of the moving vehicles.

1.11.57 - Sharp-eyed Journey Home viewers might have noticed that Mr Rabbit has a visibly red paw all of a sudden, and perhaps wondered why.  This is originated in an earlier scene from Episode 10, not featured in Journey Home, in which Mr. Rabbit sprained his paw while fleeing from the hunt.

  
1.13.49 - Once the Hedgehogs have made it across the first side of the motorway, we cut directly to them crossing the other side, and then that whole terrible tragedy plays out.  Journey Home does not focus upon any of the other animals' efforts to make it across.  Here, Whistler is not called upon to carry the smaller creatures (as stated, his character is rendered a bit pointless in Journey Home's version of events), and all of the other animals apparently make it across without difficulty or incident.

The Hedgehogs' onscreen death under the wheels of a lorry occurs exactly as it did in the original series, as is every bit as shocking and nasty in Journey Home as it was there.  Bravo.  Journey Home retains the scene with the surviving animals mourning the Hedgehogs, along with Toad remarking that, "Instinct can be very strong.  I should know."  This is another reference to Toad's homing instinct causing him to forget the route to White Deer Park, which in Journey Home is orphaned of its context.

Also, something quite peculiar happens here:

Mr. Hare: What happened?

Mrs. Hare: Why didn't they run?

In Journey Home we get an audio error, in that both hares are heard speaking with the exact same voice (Rupert Farley, who ordinarily would only voice Mr. Hare).  No such error occurs in the original series, making me wonder if this was spotted and fixed before the UK broadcast, but the Journey Home team were sent an older copy of the episode.  Hmm.

1.14.43 - Cut to Fox stating that the Hedgehogs didn't stand a chance, and feeling that he let them down as a leader.  Vixen points out that the Hedgehogs would certainly not have survived if they had remained in Farthing Wood and that it was far better that they tried.  Badger's remark, "I'll second that," is a deliberate echo of Mr. Hedgehog's long-running catchphrase, although Journey Home had edited out every single instance in which the recently deceased critter had actually used it, so it doesn't have quite the same impact here.

1.15.09 - Badger points out how remarkable it was that the other animals all made it across the motorway safely, which he states was all thanks to Fox's leadership, and the other animals agree that they are all behind him.  At this, we get a reprise of the song "Follow Your Heart", with most of the clips from the accompanying montage being from scenes previously featured in Journey Home.

In the original series, Badger's assurance that the other animals were all behind Fox served as a reaffirmation of their trust in him following the near-mutiny that occurred earlier on the episode.  That scene didn't make it into Journey Home, of course, but I think that it still serves an important purpose here, acting both as a culmination of Fox's character arc in having to prove himself a worthy leader, and also as a small reflective moment before we move on to the final scene.  In a sense it has to substitute for the penultimate scene of Episode 13, in which the animals reflect upon how much the Oath has changed them and we get a particularly - and surprisingly - eloquent speech on the matter from Mrs. Vole.  Badger's words here don't have quite the same effect (for one, Journey Home never addresses the matter of whether or not the animals will continue to live by the Oath once they reach their destination), but it is nevertheless a poignant observation upon how far the animals were able to come by sticking together.

1.15.51 - The scene with Toad triumphantly crying, "Not far now!" was taken from the end of Episode 12 when, unbeknownst to him, a huge number of the party were no longer following.  As Fox and Vixen race along beside him, Kestrel can be heard saying, "Slow down!", which, originally, was alerting Fox to the fact that so many of the animals had become separated.

1.16.03 - We're at the final scene!  Toad jumps through the fence and into White Deer Park, to be greeted by the silhouette of the Great White Stag emerging from the distance. Overall, this scene isn't radically different to how it plays out in the original series, but when the animals all wander over to the edge of the hilltop to gaze upon the splendor of White Deer Park, the subsequent shot of them all standing upon a hill together comes not from this sequence, but from Episode 10, when the animals were looking upon the motorway, of all things (notice that the Hedgehogs are suddenly back from the dead).

There's also this final piece of voice-over narration from Fox: "So at last our journey was over, and our new adventure was about to begin.  At last, we were home."

By "new adventure", Fox is, presumably, referring to the events of Series 2, in which the animals had Scarface, winter and the poachers to contend with, although none of this received the Journey Home treatment.  For US viewers in the late 1990s, the Farthing Wood adventure would indeed have ended here, although you could always have checked out the books if you were really eager to know what happened next.

The Animals of Farthing Wood Do America: Part 4

Let's pick up where we left off with Journey Home, with Fox having been separated from the rest of the Farthing crew, and the animals having resolved to continue the journey in his absence.

44.14 - Fox gets a rude awakening when he discovers that the boat he's taken refuge in has been heading toward a town and that he's now surrounded by a mass of gawking humans.  We see the frightened Fox escape and race through the streets, crossing paths with various startled townspeople and narrowly avoiding getting hit by vehicles.  In the original series, Fox eventually found shelter from the humans in an alley behind a supermarket, where he encountered Tom, the tough but diplomatic cat in charge of the building's pest control, who allowed him to stay the night in exchange for doing his duties for him.  Tom does not appear in Journey Home - instead, we go into another montage and get the film's second insert song, "Follow Your Heart".  The lyrics are cheesy and generic as hell (see below), but it gets points merely for being tolerable, which is more than I can say for the film's two other insert songs.  A sample:

Things can go from bad to worse, you've begun to learn,
It's hard to know what to believe, or which way to turn,
There's a voice that's deep inside, it's saying to hang on,
You may be on you're own but you're not alone.

Follow your heart, follow your dreams,
The road may not be as long as it seems,
Home's where the heart is, wherever you roam,
Follow your heart, follow your heart and love will lead you home.

The reference to "love" seems a bit out of place in this particular context, but whatever.

The montage alternates between scenes showing Fox traveling on his own and the other animals without him, which come from all across the series.  Notably, the dead baby field-mice put in an appearance during this sequence - at 45.18, we see Fox wandering into the Butcher Bird's territory and gazing up uneasily at their rotting carcasses.  It's a pretty horrific sight, although given the total lack of context I do have to wonder if viewers only familiar with the story via Journey Home would have quite appreciated what they were seeing there.

45.36 - We see a sequence in which Fox is chased by a couple of bulldogs after raiding a dustbin, and is forced to flee across the path of a train.  This was actually taken from much later on in the series, in Episode 11, long after Fox had successfully rejoined the other animals (and is one of the very few scenes from Episode 11 which makes it into Journey Home at all).  Vixen was also involved in the bulldog chase, but has been edited out here.

46.22 - The montage closes with Fox sleeping in a box in the supermarket alley, and being accidentally loaded into the back of a delivery truck.  Again, the original context is removed, including Tom looking on slyly as he is taken away.

46.45 - Journey Home now has to deal with the matter of the Mice and Voles voting to opt out of the journey, and I feel that this is one of the occurrences from the original series which it really struggles to incorporate fluently and coherently.  The inclusion of this particular incident was somewhat necessitated by it later impacting upon Fox and Vixen's search for the other animals (they deduce that the animals might have split into two groups and are forced to search separately), but it's evident that Journey Home doesn't want to include any implications of infanticide in the story, so all references to the baby field-mice have been cut (the out-of-context glimpse we got of their bodies during the "Follow Your Heart" montage notwithstanding).  This does make the Mice and Voles' insistence upon staying behind a bit confusing, as there seems to be no really obvious motivation for it whatsoever.  In the original series, this followed on from an incident in which Toad had temporarily forgotten the route to White Deer Park and started leading the animals back in the opposite direction, so some of the party were beginning to lose faith in him, but that additional factor is gone too.  In Journey Home the smaller animals insist on dropping out because...well, why not?

We cut to Vole and Mr. Field-Mouse confronting Badger with their decision.  The resulting debate has been trimmed, partly to cut down on the amount of stalling that Mr. Field-Mouse does in this scene, but mainly to remove any references to those ill-fated babies that Journey Home does not care to include in the story.  The most confusing line of dialogue comes from Owl, who's had a pretty crucial aspect of her opinion on the matter removed.  Bolding indicates what was cut:

Owl:  Whether Fox is here or not is of little consequence.  WE must decide what is best. Clearly the Field-Mice, as good parents, must do the best they can for their children, and if that means staying here, that is what they must do.

Confusing, because Journey Home never establishes why staying behind is so good for the Mice and Voles and for nobody else.  It really isn't clear what Owl's supposed to be arguing for here.

47.57 - Cut back to Fox, who is seen escaping from the back of the truck.  Included is his encounter with the grazing horse, who allows him to rest in his field before revealing, much to Fox's distaste, that he is an ex-hunter.  Their conversation has been trimmed somewhat - excluded are the snippets of dialogue in which the horse admits that it was never anything personal on his part and that he finds human behaviour a bit baffling.

49.06 - As with the original series, we cut directly from Fox wondering how his friends are getting on to a shot of the Butcher Bird flying overhead with a dead mouse in his beak.  As the babies have not been mentioned, I assume that Journey Home wants us to believe that this is one of the adult mice (or possibly not even one of the Farthing mice at all).  This is our only glimpse of the Butcher Bird in Journey Home - gone is that particularly gruesome shot of him standing beside his bloody collection of impaled mouse corpses.  Fox's later encounter with him is also cut.

The second half of Fox's meeting with the horse, in which the horse recalls having heard a story about the Farthing animals from a crow, does not feature.

Vole apologises to Badger for his poor decision, whereupon Badger reassures him that it was brave of him to have wanted to stay with the others - a statement which no doubt perplexed the film's viewers in the absence of any particularly pressing need for "the others" to have stayed behind at all.

50.14 - Fox encounters Vixen who, like most of the characters in Journey Home, keeps her original British voice.  Also included is Fox's bizarre fourth wall-breaking moment, in which he comments that "things are looking up" while winking at the camera, here seen fading into the opening shot of Episode 8.

Included in Journey Home is Fox and Vixen's encounter with a male owl who reports having spoken to the Farthing Owl.  Vixen's encounter with the mother thrush, who advises her on her dilemma as to whether or not to return to Fox, is cut however.

52.50 - We then cut to a shot of the main party of animals climbing up a hill, only to cut, bizarrely, to another shot of them in an open field and visibly turning in a circle.  This, of course, came from Episode 6, during Toad's aforementioned memory loss arc.  No idea why it was mixed in here.

53.54 - Badger is seen reaching the top of the hill, whereupon he addresses Mole.  Sharp-eyed viewers might have noticed, however, that Mole is visibly absent from his back at this point.  In the original series, Mole had fallen from Badger's back without his noticing, leading to a small subplot in which Mole was required to climb the hill by himself.  This is all cut from Journey Home.

54.03 - Cut to a shot of the lead huntsman sounding his horn, as a hunt gets underway.  As Vixen panics and begins to flee, missing from Journey Home is a scene in which she runs past the Butcher Bird (in his final appearance in the series), who advises her, somewhat mockingly, to run for her life.

In the original series, Fox's attempt to draw the hounds off Vixen's scent by crossing her trail was not entirely successful, as it merely caused the hounds to separate into two groups, but this is not brought up in Journey Home.

57.03 - Journey Home adds an additional line of dialogue for Weasel ("I'm outta here!") as she takes cover in the bushes.

Although Journey Home retains a shot in which Kestrel is seen attacking a hound and inflicting an obvious head wound upon it, a later shot showing the same hound with a large red gash on its head is removed.

58.12 - Fox finally rejoins the other animals and frets when he realises that the hunt is now back on Vixen's trail.  Journey Home leaves out the portion of the scene in which Badger realises that Fox had been trying to save Vixen's life because he was in love with her, and regrets his interference.  A side-note, but I never really liked how ridiculously obtuse Badger was on that point - he'd recognised prior that the strange fox was a female and that Fox was risking his life to keep the hounds off her trail, and yet it never occurred to him that there might be a very obvious motivating factor for that?  Jeez, Badger.

59.07 - As Vixen flees up the hill and Fox encourages her on, we're missing the exact moment in which Vixen is seen to collapse with exhaustion.

After Adder attacks the hunter's horse, causing it to rear and the hunter to fall, gone is the scene in which the hounds are seen sniffing around his motionless body.  Personally, I never got the impression that he was killed or anything, but I'm guessing that Journey Home didn't want to so much as risk putting the idea into anyone's heads.

Journey Home excludes the scene in which an embarrassed Adder tries to avoid being credited for having saved Vixen's life, and faces a teasing from Weasel.

1.00.01 - Vixen finally accepts Fox as her mate and Fox declares that, "I'm so happy!"  Again, I prefer Farley's delivery of that line over Macchio's because of the utterly giddy joy with which the former manages to infuse it.

Farthing Wood Deaths Revisited: An Overview

Now that I've completed the main body of work for my "Farthing Wood Deaths Revisited" retrospective, I thought that it might be interesting to survey the results and produce a list of the ten deaths which, as per the (admittedly quite chaotic) ratings system I've applied, rank as the most memorable and powerful of the series.  They are as follows:

1) Bold - Series 2 (30)
2) The Hedgehogs - Series 1 (29)
3) Badger - Series 2 (25)
4) Mole  - Series 2 (25)
5) Baby Rabbit - Series 1 (21)
6) Mrs. Pheasant - Series 1 (21)
7) Scarface - Series 2 (21)
8) Baby Field-Mice x3 - Series 1 (20)
9) Dreamer - Series 2 (19)
10) Mrs. Hare - Series 2 (18)

As brutal as so much of The Animals of Farthing Wood might have been, it had plenty to teach its viewers about the vulnerability of life, the harshness of nature, the impact of human activity upon the animal kingdom and the continuous cycle of birth, death and renewal.  Once Series 2 had come and gone, there was certainly never a children’s show quite like it ever again, at least not for as long as I continued to keep tabs on children’s TV schedules.  Series 3 wasn't far behind, but as I’ve clearly established by now, I didn't care for it at all.  A few years later, there was Noah’s Island, a sort of spiritual successor to The Animals of Farthing Wood, also commissioned by the European Broadcasting Union and also focusing upon an unlikely brand of inter-species unity, but with a much more exotic cast of animals this time around.  Unfortunately, the tone felt more akin to Series 3 of Farthing Wood than to the two series prior, and I was never quite able to get into it.  Later, there was the 1999 TV adaptation of Watership Down on CITV, which I had high hopes for at the time, but which disappointed many.  Among other problems, and unlike Farthing Wood, Water[ed]-ship Down: The TV Series was extremely cautious when it came to subject of death, to the point where it ultimately couldn’t commit to the killing off of a major character - Campion died at the end of Series 2, only to be brought back to life via bullshit means in the subsequent series.  In Farthing Wood, whenever a character was killed off, they actually stayed dead (the occasional animation error notwithstanding).  Like it or lump it, it seems that every so many years we're destined to get a new adaptation of Watership Down, and only time will tell what kind of stance the upcoming BBC/Netflix will take on the issue.

For now, I’ll wrap up things up with a quote from Speedy, which contains probably the wisest possible lesson to be taken from all of this: "Makes you think, doesn't it?  One minute you're here, the next you're not.  Far better enjoy life while you can.  That's what I say."

Farthing Wood Deaths Revisited: Series 2 - Bold

We're here!  We've reached the final death of Series 2, which brings us to the end of this retrospective after ten long, woodland carnage-filled months.  It's been a difficult but also really fascinating dip into some of the darker recesses of my personal childhood nostalgia.  A real bang we're going out with too - Bold's death, which comes at the very end of Series 2, is another candidate that's commonly cited as being the saddest of all the series.  Does it measure up to that reputation?  Well, let's take a look.

Much like Scarface's death, Bold's demise was a foregone conclusion by this stage, and the end- result of a character arc that had spanned the entire second half of the series, which means that it requires a bit of context.  Unhappy with how his father was handling the conflict between the red and blue foxes (Bold's view was that the matter was purely between Fox and Scarface, and that Fox therefore had a responsibility to confront Scarface directly) and frustrated by his father's heavy-handed efforts at disciplining him for some trouble he'd caused after crossing into enemy territory, Bold decided to leave White Deer Park for good.  To put it bluntly, he despised living in the shadow of his father and vowed to have nothing more to do with him.

Shortly after leaving the park, Bold encountered a carrion crow who, noting that Bold seemed to have no qualms about wandering around in broad daylight, advised him to start being fearful of humans.  Bold dismissed the advice and arrived at a game reserve, where he killed pheasants recklessly.  He befriended a young female badger named Shadow who gave him similar advice to the crow, warning him that the gamekeeper would not tolerate the presence of a predator who killed so rampantly.  By twist of fate, however, it was Shadow herself who wound up getting caught in a trap which had been lain by the gamekeeper to catch the creature that had been taking his birds - Bold managed to free her, but suffered an eye injury in the process.  His vision severely impaired, Bold later wandered right into the middle of a pheasant shoot, where he was shot in the back leg and badly wounded.  He ran into the same carrion crow from before and convinced him to fly to Shadow to let her know that he was now the one in need of help.  Shadow was more than willing to return the favour and, with help from Crow, regularly brought Bold food and enabled him to regain some of his lost strength.

Although grateful to Crow and Shadow for their care, Bold disliked being so dependent upon other animals for his survival and tried to return to his old life as a hunter.  After an unsuccessful attempt at raiding a chicken coop (ironically, Bold only survived because the farmer, noting his crippled state, showed him mercy) he followed Crow's suggestion that he live as a scavenger, raiding the dustbins of a nearby town.  There, Bold met Whisper, a young vixen, and was immediately smitten with her, but Whisper herself was not so impressed with Bold - that is, until she learned that he was the son of the Farthing Wood Fox, who had already become a legend among animals outside of the park.  Later, once she'd allowed Bold to get close enough to get her pregnant, Whisper shamelessly admitted that she took him as her mate purely so that her cubs could have some of that famous Farthing Wood blood.  Bold was crushed, but nevertheless remained loyal to Whisper, even when she dropped her ultimate bombshell - now that he'd planted his much-coveted seed into her, she wanted him to take her back to White Deer Park so that she and her cubs could experience that Farthing Wood kinship first-hand.

Bold reluctantly made the long trek back to White Deer Park with Whisper, although his health was by now severely declining and he was in no fit state to travel.  Whisper eventually realised this, but nevertheless forced Bold to keep going.  In the end, rather than break his vow never to return to his father's territory, Bold gave Whisper the slip once they'd reached the park and went off to find a quiet spot outside in which to die.  Which takes us into the beginnings of Episode 13.

Whisper never sees Bold again.  The only creature who knows of his whereabouts is Crow, who honours Bold's request that he not let on to Whisper but, out of his deep long-standing respect for the Farthing Fox, later shows Fox and Vixen where to find him.  By now, Whisper has met with the Farthing clan and informed them that Bold is nearby.  Bold's last moments are spent listening to his parents as they tell him that his cubs will be in good hands.  Then, Fox offers him an olive branch: "I'm sorry I was hard on you.  Forgive me.  You're the bravest fox I've ever met.  I'm proud of you."  Upon hearing this, Bold heaves one last breath and is finally at peace.

Charmer and Ranger then arrive, and are informed by Fox that they have come too late.  But not for nothing - realising that the residents of White Deer Park are weary from all the conflict and in desperate need of a new beginning, Fox finally gives them his blessing as a couple.  Here, the series ends, with Charmer and Ranger walking off together, finally freed from the feuds of their fathers and hopeful for what the future might bring.

HORROR FACTOR: 10. This might seem like a bit of a cheat, but I am counting the fact that Bold's injury was drawn out over the course of several episodes, and his physical decline within this time was genuinely painful to watch.  When Bold finally dies, it honestly comes as a relief, although the imagery showing his last gasp of breath as it leaves his body is nevertheless extremely stark.

NOBILITY FACTOR: 10. Bold did the honorable thing and led Whisper back to White Deer Park so that his cubs could have the best possible start in life (although note that, as per Series 3, only one of them, a male named Plucky, actually appears to have survived into adolescence).  It was an act of pure altruism - Bold probably wouldn't have lived to a ripe old age even if he had remained in his relatively comfortable existence at the town, but there's little doubt that the stresses and strains of the journey (not to mention that he was nearly ripped apart by a couple of greyhounds along the way) took a heavy toll upon him.

TEAR-JERKER FACTOR: 10.  I'm going to play much the same card here as I did with the Hedgehogs in Series 1.  If you don't cry at this death, then nothing in this series can possibly move you.  You heartless bastard.

RATING: 30

Anyway, I lied.  Truth is, I'm not quite done with this retrospective just yet.  Time to bring on the special bonus round - ie: gruesome injuries which didn't actually result in death.  In Series 2 in particular, some of the most shocking instances of onscreen violence were surprisingly non-fatal.