The Furryfolk on Holiday (1967)

Six years before launching his infamous television campaign on the dangers of patronising ice cream vans without adult supervision, Tufty Fluffytail had appeared on the big screen to give similar food for thought to callow holidaymakers. Created for theatrical distribution in 1967 was The Furryfolk on Holiday, a stop motion short starring the road-wary sciurine and his assortment of leporine, talpine and musteline companions, and detailing the various hazards they encounter while convening for a traditional seaside getaway. The erratic British weather doesn't look poised to spoil their holiday revelry, but could any of the children's injudicious actions? (Note that I've no information on what features this short would have been attached to. What would you have taken the kids to see in 1967? You Only Live Twice?)

The Furryfolk on Holiday was presented by leisure camp entrepreneur William Butlin (are we to assume that Tufty and friends are holidaying in one of his camps?), directed by Norman Hemsley and animated by John Hardwick and Bob Bura, the same team that went on to produce the 1970s television fillers. Hardwick and Bura's trademark folksy animation technique is present in both projects, although their execution in other regards could not have been more different. With its 12-minute running time, The Furryfolk on Holiday had the scope to be more narrative-driven than its television counterparts, and was able to recreate some of the dynamics from the Elsie Mills storybooks that weren't so accurately represented in the fillers - in particular, the impulsive Harry Hare being the real risk-taker of the group, with the impressionable Willy Weasel (the preferred punching bag of the fillers) tending to get into trouble wherever Harry had enlisted him as an accomplice. Whereas storytelling in the TV PIFs was heavily dependent on narration by Bernard Cribbins, the theatrical short forwent a third-person narrator altogether and made more extensive use of character dialogue (the animals' mouths also moved, which did not happen in the fillers). Each approach suited their chosen format aptly; Cribbins' narration was engaging and to the point, exactly what was needed for a 45-second teaching, while the wider array of voices and personalities heard throughout Holiday have a livelier flavour more likely to sustain viewer attention for a longer-form narrative. The child characters were all voiced by radio actress Ann Lancaster, who does a delightful job of giving each a distinct vocal identity - Tufty sounds bright and genial, Harry's voice has an appropriately boisterous edge, Willy's tones are comically squeaky, while Bobbie speaks with a West Country accent. Norman Shelley, renowned for his work on Children's Hour and later The Archers, provides the stern but compassionate vocals of Policeman Badger, the resolute authority figure who is always quick to step in wherever the children's judgement has faltered. (A third voice actor, Denise Bryer, is also credited; I'm assuming she voiced Tufty's mother in the final sequence.)

The short opens with the Furryfolk gathering outside their little row of holiday huts, and Tufty emerging from one to deliver an awkward exposition dump: "Smashing weather for the first day of our holiday! Wouldn't it be fun if Mr Policeman Badger was coming? Why, there he is! And he's on holiday too! Just look at his hat!" Indeed, we can tell that Policeman Badger is supposed to be off duty and getting in on the holidaymaking pleasure because we see him putting his helmet aside and donning a sun hat in its place; for the duration of the short he also assumes the identity of "Uncle Badger". As we know, however, accidents don't take a vacation, and Uncle Badger will have his work cut out in continuing to pull these nippers back from the brink of catastrophe. It is certainly fortunate that he's deigned to join them because, to put it bluntly, none of the kids' parents appear terribly fussed about what their offspring is doing. In fact, the only other adult in the short who's not completely useless is the rabbit driving the ice cream van.

The narrative of Holiday can be divided tidily into three separate acts, each dealing with a different consideration for making sensible use of the shores, with Tufty giving a final summary of all the short's teachings in a nocturnal epilogue. The first and most dramatic of these vignettes, which advises against the risks of swimming in the ocean while the tide is out, follows the classic Tufty scenario of Harry doing something reckless, getting into deep trouble (in this case, deep and watery) before getting his bacon saved by Badger. The second, which comments on the dangers presented by discarded litter, offers the equally classic variation with Harry encouraging Willy to do something foolhardy (with the consequences here being more of inconvenience than anything truly dire, although Badger is firm about what more could have gone wrong). The third, which covers Tufty's favoured subject of road safety and entails an appearance from the beguiling nemesis of all small Furryfolk, the ice cream van, involves no wrongdoing from either Harry and Willy. Instead, we get that other scenario that would intermittently recur within the Tufty tales, with Bobbie Brown Rabbit letting his guard down while tasked with watching over his toddler twin sisters, Bessie and Betsie, only for them to immediately go running off into harm's way. (I mentioned in my previous piece on Tufty that Minnie Mole, Tufty's token female friend, was typically sidelined from the action, and that's absolutely the case here. She gets no notable dialogue and no functional role in the narrative, the peak of her participation being her silently emotional reaction to the Punch & Judy show the characters are watching in the middle segment.)

Meanwhile, there is an additional fourth teaching that is implemented more implicitly, one that's less about safety per se than it is being a good friend and team player, and this is where Tufty himself gets to shine. The first activity that Badger has arranged for the children is a sandcastle-building competition, with boxes of candy promised as prizes for the three best entries, and Tufty proposes that they agree in advance that whoever wins will share their candy with the others. His friends have no trouble in agreeing, but Harry gets so fixated on wanting on win that he allows it to spoil his fun, leading to an act of self-sabotage and ultimately prompting him to seek out the hazards of the waves. Disheartened after losing the miniature flags he'd intended to use to decorate his castle, he destroys his entry in a churlish fit, eliminating himself from the competition and from receiving even the participation prize of a smaller bag of toffees. Tufty appears at his side and offers to help him rebuild, but Harry isn't interested; what he wants is to stand out, and if he can't prove himself the best by constructing a winning on his own, he can do so by demonstrating what a proficient swimmer he is. He enters the sea and discovers, too late, that he isn't proficient enough to keep the tide from dragging him ever further away from the shore. Fortunately, Tufty and Willy are able to alert Uncle Badger to Harry's whereabouts, and he wastes little time in rowing out to rescue the bedraggled hare before the waves have completely engulfed him. Harry's competitiveness and desire to outdo everyone else is subtly contrasted with Tufty's concern for supporting his friends and seeing that they all have an enjoyable time, with the message that cooperation is a better path than self-aggrandising. Having returned to dry land, Harry asks who won the sandcastle competition and Badger responds in a hesitant tone that implies he'd never settled on the winners and is listing off three names at random: "Umm...Tufty, Bobbie and Willy!"  (Of course Tufty won! No shit Tufty won! I'm always glad to see a rare victory for Willy, although I would have liked Minnie's name to have been mentioned, so that she'd at least get some acknowledgement in this short.) Tufty gives Harry the reassuring reminder that they're going to share their prizes, thus affirming that his destructive competitiveness was always unnecessary.

In the same way, sensible behaviour at the beach isn't merely a matter of looking out for your own welfare, but doing your bit to maintain a safe environment for others. Leaving broken glass on the sand is an inconsiderate thing to do because it could result in the injury of another. Your younger siblings can't be expected to recognise danger all of the time, so they need you to watch their backs. The prevention of accidents is intrinsically a team effort.

Tufty might model the behaviour that the short's target audience is intended to emulate, but the real heart of the story is unquestionably Uncle Badger, whose kindly nature is not obscured by his stern demeanour. His use of the word "stupid" to describe some of the children's behaviours might seem a bit harsh to modern sensibilities, but in most regards he's a sterling authority figure - firm in laying down what is wrong and right, and what could happen if the difference is not appreciated, but also patient, generous, and meeting the children's shortcomings with a desire to nurture rather than to simply reprimand. For example, he offers to help Harry become a more proficient swimmer by agreeing to take him and the others for lessons at the swimming pool the next day. Caring, dependable and always knowing what to do in a crisis, he's able to fill the parental void that is sometimes felt throughout the short. There is, however, one thing that Badger does VERY wrong that I am going to call him out for - when Harry and Willy have led him to the location of the bottle they'd broken and initially tried to cover with sand, he disposes of the glass in a sheet of newspaper and has Harry and Willy pass the fragments up to him? What kind of responsible adult gets small children to handle broken glass? I'm suddenly reminded of the less benevolent Policeman Badger we saw in the "Playing Near The Road" filler who manhandled the injured Willy by shoulders and had him walk to the pavement on his wounded leg.

As for the rest of the so-called responsible adults, there is quite a satisfying moment in the third vignette where the ice cream rabbit chews out Mr Brown Rabbit for failing to keep Bessie and Betsie off the road (the two ankle biters are unharmed, thanks to Mr Bunny Whip's lightning reflexes in applying the brakes), even if it's faltering big brother Bobbie who has to answer for the transgression. Look, I understand why the Tufty stories take the stance that they do. They're all about teaching children that they will need to learn how to use their own judgement, as there are inevitably going to be situations in which they can't depend on adults to do the thinking for them. Children are the target audience, and that's why the child characters are the ones held accountable. Even so, there are a number of points in Holiday where it feels like the problems could have been avoided with a little more adult oversight. Where were all the grown-ups while the children were building their sandcastles? If they'd been properly supervised then maybe someone would have seen Harry going up to the waves and been able to stop him then and there. And why did nobody besides Harry notice Willy tripping over with his glass bottle or show any concern about it? (The contribution of a lack of parental oversight to hazardous situations is not something that went totally unacknowledged in Mills' stories, where I seem to recall there was a running theme of Harry's father being fixated on his career and having little time for his son.)

Bobbie asserts that Bessie and Betsie had both been educated on the "Kerb Drill" and should have known better than to have run into the road, but Badger counters that very young children are liable to forget such things, particularly when enticed by something as exciting as the ice cream van. We then get a demonstration of the proper road-crossing procedure, with Badger, Tufty, Bobbie, Bessie and Betsie looking right, left and then right again before making their way across - significantly, they do so standing side by side, reaffirming that safety is a group business. The explicit references to the Kerb Drill would rapidly date the short, being a lingering remnant of World War II Britain. It was devised by the National "Safety First" Association (predecessor to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents) in 1942 and was distinctively militaristic in nature; by the time the television fillers started airing it had been phased out in favour of the Green Cross Code, deemed to be a more relatable teaching tool for youngsters in peacetime.

Holiday concludes with an epilogue where Tufty is being tucked into bed by Mrs Fluffytail while musing on the events gone by. He reflects that it was a lovely day and that nobody really ruined it (spoken as if he'd anticipated in advance that someone would, which shows how genre-savvy he is). "Harry and Willy very nearly did," Mrs Fluffytail retorts, which I consider pretty mean of her, particularly since she makes no mention at all of Bobbie's transgression. Tufty lists off the various teachings dispensed by Uncle Badger throughout the day, and observes how good it was that he was always on hand to keep each nascent disaster from materialising. Indeed. Good old Uncle Badger.

We can only speculate on what might go wrong tomorrow during the swimming lessons at the pool. My money's on Harry running around the pool edges and encouraging Willy to jump in at the shallow end. The ominous siren call of the ice cream van is obviously also going to sound at some point. Well, don't answer it Willy, it's a trap!

An upload of The Furryfolk on Holiday is available for viewing (albeit without sound) on the official website of Carey Blyton (nephew of renowned children's author Enid Blyton), who composed the "The Tufty Club Marching Song" heard during the end-credits. It was also included on the BFI DVD release The COI Collection Volume Six: Worth The Risk?

Inside No. 9 '22: Wise Owl (aka Bird of Prey)

Content warning: child abuse 

Earlier this month we bid farewell to the BBC series Inside No. 9, a show that could be aptly described as the modern-day successor to Tales of The Unexpected, but with plenty of personality and devilish ingenuity all of its own. Like ToTU, it was comprised of half-hour stand-alone comic dramas exploring the meaner side of human nature, typically with some kind of ghoulish twist at the end. Creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who'd previously collaborated on the gleefully grotesque cult comedies The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville, tended to star in each story, although always as different characters; occasionally they took a backseat, and at least one episode, "3 by 3", did not feature them at all. The one major constancy was that every episode took place in a venue that in some way pertained to the number 9. Usually this denoted the house or apartment number, but Shearsmith and Pemberton also liked to think outside of the box in terms of how to work in that titular number (for example, in one episode, "Diddle Diddle Dumpling", it referred to the size of a shoe that formed a pivotal plot detail). The genre of the series was also perpetually shifting - some episodes were flat-out horrors, others were surprisingly tender tales of human vulnerability. One of the thrills of the series was entering into each weekly 9 and never knowing exactly what you would find. Besides the 9, there were really only two guarantees - a) every episode contained a "hidden hare" (literally an ornamental leporine slipped somewhere into the mise en scene) and b) the toilet and its related bodily functions always featured to some capacity, usually as a revolting observation on the side. Actually, I can't claim to have gone through the entire series with a fine enough comb to say for certain that the latter applied to absolutely every episode, but I feel confident in saying that episodes devoid of shit, piss or fart jokes were a whole lot rarer than episodes where nobody dies, and those constituted a slim minority. Shearsmith and Pemberton may be creative geniuses, but their trains of thought never seemed to venture far from out of the toilet bowl. And that's grand - the toilet has long served as a beautiful shorthand for everything ugly and forbidden about the human psyche, the matters we'd sooner flush into oblivion and not give a second's thought. We might recall the specific ground that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho broke in 1960, with its unusually prominent focus on a flushing toilet.

Psycho, most appropriately, was given the tip of the hat quite a few times throughout Inside No. 9. One episode, "Private View", opens with a "Psycho moment", where a popular guest star is introduced and abruptly killed off. In "Merrily, Merrily", a character who mentions having studied psychology is met with the plebeian response, "Yes, I've seen that. Where she gets stabbed in the shower..." And of course, it's hard to not have the Bates in mind through much of "Death Be Not Proud", watching David's morbid relationship play out with his own gruesome mother (itself transplanted from Psychoville); they are gleeful caricatures of the very archetypes the Bates helped cement in popular consciousness. The most substantial of all these Psycho homages, though, occurs in the series 7 episode, "Wise Owl", which was directed by Louise Hooper and first broadcast on 1st June 2022. Its protagonist, Ronnie Oliver (Shearsmith), is an obvious counterpart to Norman Bates, albeit one who lurks in a suburban home in Rochdale (numbered 9, of course), rather than an isolated pocket of the Californian highway. He is yet another socially maladjusted figure who practices taxidermy, has a thing about birds and mentally has never escaped the shadow of the parental figure who dominated him throughout childhood. The particulars of the plot, however, are less evocative of Hitchcock's film than of the Richard Franklin-directed sequel, Psycho II (1983); Ronnie, like the middle-aged Norman, has returned to face his childhood demons following a lengthy period of hospitalisation. There are also echoes of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, with Pemberton playing Derek Blenkin, a client who tasks Ronnie with resurrecting the deceased pet of his five-year-old daughter, an albino rabbit named Ferrari. Like King's protagonist, Blenkin is hoping to delay a conversation about death with his daughter, confident he can pass the stuffed rabbit off as living by telling her it's always tired. His concern for his daughter's feelings is comically undercut by his desire to secure to the cheapest possible option, suggesting to Ronnie that he might leave off the rabbit's legs if it will spare expenses.

Now that the series has formally concluded and I've seen every installment, I have few qualms in declaring "Wise Owl" my personal pick of the bunch. It is, in my eyes, an unmitigated triumph. Given my fondness for all things Psycho, the Bates allusions alone might have been enough to get it into my good graces. But what really elevates this one to such immaculate heights is that it doubles as Shearsmith and Pemberton's affectionate tribute to yet another subject near and dear to my heart - the public information film. Shearsmith and Pemberton were clearly hotly attuned to the impact that such films had on the legions of tender young minds raised on their sombre teachings, tensions that lingered well into adulthood. They wove a beautiful, smartly-observed little horror yarn from that idea, one powered by a rich plethora of creeping disturbances but also an undercurrent of genuine pathos. "Wise Owl" is centred around a fictitious series of public information films that existed in a parallel version of the 1970s, an era that boasts particular infamy for the array of shocking and psychologically scarring educational films that found their way onto UK television screens, a lot of which played like miniature horrors and were specifically intended to be seen by younger viewers. The decade has, in recent times, acquired quite another infamy, as an era in which certain celebrated public figures were able to commit sexual offences with impunity. In a few cases, those infamies have intersected, with some of the most memorable PIFs of their day featuring since-disgraced figures who were then deemed credible as the voice of reason. There was a time when "Teach Them To Swim" was considered such a gentle and wholesome PIF, up against the barbaric likes of "Lonely Water", but now it's every bit as cursed, if not more so. Such apprehensions haunt "Wise Owl" to the core.

"Wise Owl" opens with an animated segment, a faux PIF presented with all the grain and crackle of a 1970s artifact. A brother and a sister (the voices of Dylan Hall and Isabelle Lee Pratt, respectively) are out playing with a kite. The boy, the older of the two, states that he's been asked by his mother to keep guard of the situation, something he immediately blows by demanding a go with the kite, causing it to fly away and get caught against a pylon. The boy thinks it's a perfectly a sensible idea to climb the pylon and retrieve the kite, but is stopped by Wise Owl (voice of Ron Cook), a friendly talking strigine, who advises him of the dangers and why he should not mess with electricity. The sequence beautifully nails down the qualities that made these vintage PIFs so indelible to the children who had to accommodate them amid their regular teatime viewing - in particular, that haunting sense of childhood innocence on the cusp of some awful, irreversible disturbance. The danger the children are in is made all the more stark with the knowledge that it is the little girl's sixth birthday, and the kite that lures them to that dreaded pylon an item of particular excitement for being her present. As a pastiche of a 1970s public information film, it plays itself almost entirely straight, to the point where I could have bought it as a genuine specimen of the era. The only part that doesn't quite ring true is when Wise Owl retrieves the kite himself by blowing in its direction, providing a facile solution to the problem of the girl's lost present, so that the character goes from being authoritative to super-heroic. For now, a pivotal dynamic is established. Wise Owl is the voice of reason; vigilant, trustworthy and benevolent, a parental surrogate who can be counted on in the absence of adult supervision. The boy is foolish and courts disaster. The girl is innocent and helpless.

The look and the tone of the "Wise Owl" animations was blatantly inspired by the "Charley Says" series, in which a young boy named Tony was prevented from making stupid decisions by a cat named Charley (who, unlike the Owl, couldn't speak English, only a discordant garble of purrs and yowls, which Tony inexplicably understood). Two of the Charley shorts are recalled directly at later junctions in the episode - the one where Charley stopped Tony from playing with a box of matches, and the one where he stopped him from going off with a sinister figure who'd approached him in the playground with the (undoubtedly false) promise of taking him to see some cute puppies. There was, however, never a Charley short devoted to the dangers of scaling pylons - the inspiration for the opening sequence (and the use of an owl in general) looks to have been drawn from the 1978 film Play Safe, where a cartoon robin was lectured by an owl on the dangers of electricity, citing grim examples of children who met horrible fates by playing too close to live wires and substations (including one particularly infamous interlude with Jimmy and his Frisbee).

As Ronnie goes about his business inside the house (which includes a harrowing moment, the story's analogue to the Psycho shower scene, where he contemplates suicide by climbing into a filled bathtub with a mains-powered radio), his routine is interspersed with further animations starring Wise Owl and the children. But unlike the opening sequence, both contain obvious disturbances to the formula, suggesting a breakdown of the security Wise Owl supposedly upholds. In the second PIF, the boy and his sister are enjoying a day at the beach. The sister goes off with their mother to paddle in the waves, while the boy, left alone to dig sandcastles, is approached by a strange man who offers to show him a starfish. He nearly accepts the invitation, but is once again saved by the interventions of Wise Owl, who advises him that the man's intentions might not be as friendly as his appearance (which is really not at all friendly, since he's literally a looming shadow in a trench coat and fedora; he actually looks a lot like the stranger in that illustrated edition of "Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" I covered a couple of years ago). As a pastiche, it doesn't play itself quite as straight as its predecessor, with the added bit of blackly adult humor in the stranger's upfront observation that the boy looks "nice and shiny". It's also a little more on the nose with its nightmarish imagery - unlike its "Charley" equivalent, in which the playground prowler gave up the instant he was called out, we here get the extra sordid detail of the stranger's dark, gangly hand reaching out to seize the boy, prompting a violent response from Wise Owl, who swoops in and bites the hand. With the boy spared, Wise Owl turns and delivers the relevant lesson to the camera: "Don't be a Twit You! Always stay safe with your mummy and daddy! Wise Owl knows best!" The sequence doesn't end there, however. It rounds off with an unsettling epilogue, where Wise Owl flies away, leaving the boy alone once more, shaken and crying out for his mother.

An even more disturbing subversion occurs in the third film, which takes place, once again, on the girl's sixth birthday. Impatient for their mother to arrive home and to light the candles on her cake, the children retrieve the matches themselves from the mantelpiece. But on this occasion, no Wise Owl appears. No cat named Charley either. No voice of authority at all, in fact. The children are simply left to their own devices. The boy, ever the instigator of disaster, strikes one of the matches and holds it close to his face, smiling at the camera while the little flame dances ominously atop the head. We then cut back to Ronnie, who is studying his reflection in the bathroom mirror, stroking back the greasy curtain of hair around his ear to reveal the cluster of burn marks obscured underneath. It now becomes apparent that Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same. The sequences we've seen are conflations; Ronnie has remained so subjugated by the Wise Owl and his teachings into adulthood that he's obliged to filter his own childhood memories through the form and imagery of the character's PIFs. Although Ronnie is now in his 50s, he is still identifiably a child, and lives his life according to the rules laid out by the Wise Owl. Safety consciousness is baked into his psyche, to an obsessive degree; he responds to a buzzing fridge by unplugging most of the house's electrical appliances, removing all the light bulbs and retiring in the darkness. He also makes a point of never talking to strangers. When Blenkin shows up at his door, he accepts the rabbit but avoids engaging with him on any conversational level. The girl who appears alongside him in the animated sequences is identified as his sister, Joanne, and before long we've discovered the terrible reason why it seems to be perpetually her sixth birthday in his memories. It's a date that will forever haunt Ronnie, the day when the kind of catastrophic, worst-case-scenario nightmares outlined in public information films spilled over into his reality. It seems that Ronnie really did attempt to light the candles on Joanne's cake without adult supervision, and it all went horribly wrong. Ronnie was burned and Joanne did not survive. Ronnie has lived with the guilt ever since.

A common theme throughout the animated segments is the absence of the children's mother, and Ronnie's apparent inclination to make bad decisions when left to manage his own welfare and/or his sister's. In the present, Ronnie receives a video call from his mother (Georgie Glenn), who still worries about the possibility of Ronnie doing something stupid on his own. She reminisces about a childhood pet of Ronnie and Joanne's, a cat named Mimsy that was eventually evicted on account of Ronnie's allergies. She then asks Ronnie if he'll be coming to see her on Monday for an important family anniversary. Ronnie responds by referencing that other parental figure whose whereabouts have, up until now, remained unaccounted for. "Will Dad be there?", he asks. Her answer suggests that he is elusive and doesn't involve himself in family matters. "You know what he's like." Ronnie may be without parental oversight, but watchful authority is omnipresent through the eyes of the various stuffed cats, lambs and badgers that adorn the shelves above and are ever peering down on him (in that regard, they fulfil a similar purpose to Norman Bates' stuffed birds). Explicit note is made of the fact that there are no owls in the macabre menagerie, although Ronnie gets a nightmarish visitation from something even more grotesque (and darkly comic), in the form of a monstrous man-owl hybrid that steps into the living room during the night, head rotating and genitalia on full display.

The following morning, Ronnie begins work on stuffing Ferrari the rabbit, and we get a fourth "Wise Owl" PIF, only by now the pastiche has given way into full-blown parody. In this sequence, Ronnie and Joanne are mourning the death of their pet cat, when Wise Owl appears and instructs them on how to preserve their beloved friend forever, guiding them through the taxidermy process in lurid detail. I mentioned that some level of bathroom humor was a requisite for every episode of Inside No. 9, although "Wise Owl" is actually one of the mildest examples on that front. All we really have (besides the toilet's inevitable showing in the backdrop of the bathtub scene) is Ronnie's mother's recollection that Mimsy "had a way of looking at you...like you were muck on its shoe". We do, however, get plenty of uncomfortable gross-out bodily humor in watching this cartoon cat be skinned, its eyes gouged out, its body incinerated and its tanned hide stretched across an artificial skeleton (in Ronnie's words, "Like putting a sausage into its skin"). The cat is, troublingly, identified as Mimsy, although I don't take to mean that the cat was actually killed and stuffed in real life. Rather, an allusion is being drawn between the childhood pet and childhood innocence; once dead, it cannot be restored to what it was. We know that, despite Ronnie's declaration at the end of the PIF that Mimsy is "good as new", that a stuffed animal is in no way the same as a living pet. Blenkin's plan to pass the stuffed Ferrari off as a live but perpetually tired rabbit is obviously doomed to failure, a facile attempt to mask over a painful reality. How doomed, however, comes as a bit of a shock. As the PIF ends, we see the end-results of Ronnie's real-life taxidermy session, revealing a pronounced difference between himself and his Hitchcockian counterpart. Norman Bates was, among other things, a skilled taxidermist. Ronnie is anything but. The body of poor Ferrari the rabbit gets absolutely desecrated in his hands. In death, the creature is afforded no dignity.

Unfortunate, because it's right at this point that Blenkin reappears at the door, wanting to get Ferrari back in the same condition in which he left him. He seems much more agitated than on their previous encounter, having learned from speaking to a neighbour that resident taxidermist Mr Oliver is a man in his 70s, and he might have entrusted his daughter's pet rabbit to an imposter. Naturally, he's horrified on seeing what's become of Ferrari. While he's absolutely right in asserting that any child presented with Ronnie's "Franken-Rabbit" would have nightmares, it's hard to imagine how his tactic of giving his daughter a preserved rabbit hide would have worked out any better in the long run. Ronnie, then, is only an amateur taxidermist, and he is not the regular occupant of this particular no. 9. That is one of the story's twists. It is not made explicitly clear why he accepted Blenkin's job and attempted to stuff the rabbit himself, although it seems that he does, at heart, only ever want to do the right thing and please people. His disinclination against interacting with strangers was potentially overridden by the knowledge that the innocence of a small girl, not much younger than Joanne, was hanging in the balance. But he isn't able to protect her from the bleakness of the world, any more than he was Joanne.

Later that evening, the regular seventysomething Mr Oliver returns home, having been away on business for the weekend. He is of course Ronnie's father, Wilf, and he's played by Ron Cook, who is also the voice of Wise Owl. That is yet another of the story's twists. Just as Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same, so too are his father and Wise Owl the exact same entity. Wilf really was the voice of Wise Owl in the series of public information films that existed in-universe, and Ronnie has never been able to separate them in this mind. Wilf was not expecting to see Ronnie. "You'll have to give me money for that window", he states, indicating that Ronnie has forced his way into the property. He speaks with a distinct lack of affection for his son, dropping the first casual reference to Ronnie's having been institutionalised for much of his adulthood ("Did they have a telly in...where you were, or were you not allowed?") and unrepentantly acknowledging that he maintained no contact with him within that time. He never visited Ronnie; when asked if he received any of Ronnie's letters, he takes the opportunity to berate him: "I couldn't read half of them. Your handwriting's shocking!"

Even before Wilf shows up in the flesh, his animated counterpart has undergone a significant degeneration, transmuting from the benevolent voice of reason to an increasingly sinister being with each new appearance. Take that moment in the second PIF where he bites the stranger's outstretched hand. Within context, it's ostensibly framed as a heroic action, but it calls attention to the owl's potentially vicious nature, underscoring that central irony that Ronnie is receiving advice about avoiding predators from an animal that is itself a predator. True, you could lay the exact same charge against Charley the cat (in his own "Strangers" PIF, he reduces a fish to a skeleton in the blink of an eye), but a cat's domesticated, and not a critter it seems particularly unusual to depict hanging around with small children. An owl's a creature of the wilderness, which is suggestive of a whole myriad of unknown and hidden dangers. His instruction on not talking to strangers seems like sound advice to give to a child, but has a darker echo in a later sequence, when Ronnie recalls being asked by his distraught mother why he lit those matches, and is again visited by Wise Owl, who simply tells him, "You mustn't say anything." The message Ronnie is being fed is that silence is his only recourse. Even Wise Owl's catchphrase, "Don't be a Twit You!", while sounding amusingly plausible as the kind of trademark saying a character from a public information film would have, takes on harsher tones, in mirroring Wilf's evident tendency toward bullying and rebuking Ronnie. Cook's dual performance is terrific - as the owl, he's hauntingly convincing as an authoritative voice from yesteryear. As Wilf he's spookily mean, but not to a point that precludes the character's discernible wretchedness. When they merge together, the results are both unhappy and uncanny.

Since the "Wise Owl" series ended, Wilf (whose name is, incidentally, only a letter away from that of another predatory wild animal) has gotten intermittent gigs playing to the nostalgia crowd (most recently an event at a toy museum, which had him in the stellar company of "Ray Brooks, Nigel from Pipkins [and] one of the Bungles - not the scary one") but taxidermy is now his bread and butter. He tells Ronnie, "You'd be surprised how many people want to preserve something of the past, keep a memory alive. Freeze-frame of a happy moment." The taxidermy motif serves a string of purposes throughout the narrative. It is, most obviously, an allusion to Psycho, that classic tale of an abusive parent and their damaged offspring, but on that score it is also something of a misdirect. On our first viewing, knowing the series' predilection for gruesome and disturbing endings, we might suspect that this is building towards the shocking revelation that one of our two taxidermists, be it the professional or the amateur, has applied that same process to a human subject (as Norman infamously did with his mother), most likely the body of the long-deceased Joanne. But that revelation does not come. Instead, the taxidermy is used fundamentally as a metaphor for what Wilf has done to Ronnie, in keeping him perfectly preserved, forever a child under the Wise Owl's rule, only a shell of what he might once have been. With hindsight, the macabre instructional film on stuffing Mimsy the cat becomes a grisly allegory for the violations Ronnie has endured at his father's hands; in the aftermath, it would be a flagrant pretence for either Mimsy or Ronnie to be described as "good as new", with Ronnie's botched job on Ferrari the rabbit signifying a more honest representation of the ugly realities. And intensely ugly they are too. Ronnie reminds Wilf that Monday will be the 44th anniversary of Joanne's death; if she'd lived, she would have been turning 50. He's come to Wilf because he has questions regarding what really happened on that fateful day. There follows a replay of the earlier "Matches" PIF, only this time the live action Ronnie is intermixed with the animated Joanne, suggesting a puncturing through of the illusion. Ronnie recalls that she'd received a doll, a tea set and a kite (there's another predatory bird). "Wise Owl" is revealed to have been present after all, only now he is depicted as the abusive and negligent figure that Wilf was in real life. Joanne wants to light the candles herself. Ronnie tells her that she shouldn't, but is shouted down by Wise Owl, who mocks Ronnie for needing to ask permission for everything and tells him to grow some balls. Joanne is left without supervision while Ronnie is ominously ordered to follow the predatory bird upstairs into the bedroom, with the reminder that "Wise Owl knows best". Ronnie was conditioned to always follow his father's instructions, much as he was conditioned to always follow the teachings of the Wise Owl. Wilf abused both of those authorities at once, creating a climate in which the innocence of both of his children was prematurely snuffed out.

With that in mind, we can see how the scenario in the earlier "Strangers" PIF was really being turned completely on its head. The danger lay with the supposedly safe authority figure all along. The message never to talk to strangers becomes an admonishment against ever reaching out to the outside world for help, against Ronnie being able to vocalise what he was going through. This is a chilling inversion of the alleged purpose of a public information film, in which the authority's words are clearly designed to protect its own interests and not the subject's.

The story climaxes with a reversal of this dynamic, as Ronnie holds his father at knife point and forces him to accompany him upstairs. As he goes, he has one more flashback to Joanne, now a flesh and blood child (the girl who plays her is not credited), cheerfully lighting the candles on her cake, the last time he ever saw her alive. He takes Wilf to his childhood bedroom, and confronts him on why he allowed him to take the blame for the fire. Wilf responds that he had his career to think about, morbidly observing that for a renowned PIF voice-over's daughter to die in a fire of his causing was "not very on brand". Ronnie insinuates that Wilf betrayed his trust in him, and the Wise Owl, to which Wilf responds, "That was only a game. You enjoyed it." He then attempts to subdue Ronnie by evoking the lexicon of the Wise Owl: "Don't be a Twit You. Give your old man a hug." Ronnie looks as though he might comply, but instead raises the knife and slashes through an adjacent pillow, causing feathers to violently spill. Wilf hits back with the threatening reminder that such behaviour could potentially get Ronnie reinstitutionalised, assuring him that if he stops now then he won't say anything. Ronnie responds, "But I will", and goes his own way, clear in his mind over what he needs to do next. He's going to go to his mother and tell her everything. Wilf makes a further effort to dissuade him, by slipping back into the persona of Wise Owl ("Wise Owl won't let you...and we must always do what the Wise Owl says, mustn't we?"); in a deliberately on the nose detail that straddles the border between the unsettling and the just plain absurd, he does so with several feathers still hanging off of his body. The spell is broken, however. Ronnie no longer answers to the Wise Owl, having seen him for the wretched fool that he is.

It's tempting to conclude that "Wise Owl" was conceived as a measured response to criticisms of how the series had previously depicted trauma victims and characters with mental illness, which is to say, as ready to kill their abusers and liable to hurt others; for examples, see "Tom and Gerri" (which is a really good, really tense little character piece, although the ending might not please everyone) and "Thinking Out Loud" (for myself, the low point of the series, for a myriad of reasons). In that regard, Shearsmith and Pemberton aren't necessarily offering up anything more egregious than any number of horror-based media, which has an ingrained tendency towards treating the psychologically troubled as outcasts and objects of fear and suspicion (for all of its merits, Psycho is absolutely included; the film's title alone is a dead giveaway) ^[1] - although, correct, by the 2020s we really should be doing a whole lot more to challenge those preconceptions, and "Wise Owl" feels like a refreshing step in the right direction. To an extent, it is another exercise in rug-pulling from a series smart enough to use its own perceived formula to its advantage. In establishing Ronnie as an obviously mentally ill protagonist and coding him according to such a familiar archetype, it engenders a deliberate set of expectations, only to subvert them - in addition to the aforementioned misdirect with the taxidermy, there's also a fake-out moment where it looks as though Ronnie intends to stab his father, when in the actuality he's going for the pillow. But more than merely surprising, it reaches a genuinely affecting and cathartic resolution, one that eschews brutality and shocks in favour of conveying a sincere sense of Ronnie finding a way forward from his traumas. The cycle of horror and despair does not ultimately claim him. As he walks away at the end, we have every reason to believe that a more hopeful future lies ahead.

"Wise Owl" concludes with one final animated sequence, in which Ronnie the boy leaves the house and, freed from his father's toxic influence, takes his first real steps toward adulthood; in doing so, he visibly transforms from a boy into a man. The traumas that have dogged him for most of his life have not entirely receded; Wise Owl continues to follow him, and to berate him with the usual cry of, "Twit You! Twit You!" But he's merely an irritating speck at the back of Ronnie's head, not the dominating figure of the past, and Ronnie is fully capable of dismissing him. "Get stuffed!" Ronnie retorts, and keeps on walking.

 [1] For an example of how persistently accepted such ideas still are in the modern horror landscape, you might look to film critic Mark Kermode's rather tone-deaf response to a listener's charge that the 2022 film Smile perpetuated those very stigmas. I'm only bringing this up because I was somewhat taken back at how he brought Psycho into the conversation, to make the case that Smile shouldn't be singled out, without acknowledging that Psycho was made a whopping 62 years before Smile. You might very reasonably have expected attitudes to have moved on since then.

A Disney Christmas Gift (The Clock Watcher Cut)

 

If you're a younger Gen-Xer or an older Millennial, then you might have memories of a Disney compilation film that used to make the rounds during the festive season, under the title of A Disney Christmas Gift. First airing on CBS on December 4th 1982 as part of their regular Walt Disney slot, it contained a selection of shorts and clips from classic Disney films, linked by chintzy live action segments showcasing wind-up toys of Disney characters and the decorating touches at Disneyland. Only a limited number of the featured clips had any legitimate connection to the Christmas season, so artful snippets of voice-over narration (much of it in song) were applied to create the brittle illusion of a running festive theme - we're told, for example, that the winter sequence in Bambi happens on Bambi's first Christmas morning, even though there's nothing in the film itself to indicate this, nor any logical reason for these forest creatures to have any concept or knowledge of what Christmas is. The "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" sequence from Cinderella was dubbed to have the Fairy Godmother shout out "Merry Christmas, Cinderella!" right before the fade-out (if you look closely you'll notice that her lips don't move), despite everything preceding it having absolutely sod-all to do with the festive season. The "You Can Fly" sequence from Peter Pan similarly doesn't happen at Christmas, but the characters explicitly reference the holiday in the lyrics, so I'll give it a pass. The most tangential thing on the menu is a clip from The Sword in The Stone (worked in as a vague allusion to the Nativity story - "another young king was born" - which is as overtly religious as the special gets) that doesn't exactly show off the best side of any of the principal characters, except maybe Archimedes the owl. Merlin throws a hissy fit and ditches Wart, for reasons that might not be obvious to anyone who hasn't seen the movie proper, and Wart proves to be a royally incompetent squire by forgetting to bring Kay's sword to the big sword-fighting tournament (we're not meant to side with Kay, but do you really blame him for being cheesed off with Wart about this?). The clip also ends abruptly, with a voice-over assuring us that "And so began the legend of King Arthur!" just as the development of Wart pulling the titular sword from the titular stone is barely getting started.

A Disney Christmas Gift was covered by the guy who does the annual Island of Misfit Christmas Specials feature (as “A Walt Disney Christmas”, which might be a legitimate alternate title). I enjoy his work and have a lot of respect for him, so I do mean it with the utmost most courtesy when I say that parts of his coverage are sort of misleading. The bit that I think is true is that Disney created the special because Mickey's Christmas Carol, which was at one point intended to air in its timeslot, was delayed due to an animators' strike, and A Disney Christmas Gift was an easy placeholder project to assemble cheaply and on the fly (note that Mickey's Christmas Carol wound up debuting not as a TV special, but as a theatrical short attached to the 1983 re-release of The Rescuers). But it simply isn't the case that Disney only aired this once and then canned it, nor is this special anywhere near as rare as he suggests...to the contrary, Disney proliferated the shit out of it on home video. In the 1980s it was available on every format you'd care to name, including CED, and it continued to see the light of day on the formats still standing (ie: VHS and LaserDisc) into the 1990s. I'd also point out that the special was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award For Outstanding Animated Program in 1984, so it was presumably well-received enough at the time (it lost to Garfield, who was king of that award until the Simpsons showed up).

The reason why A Disney Christmas Gift might be considered a misfit now is because this kind of cut and paste job inevitably looks redundant in an age where the original content is so readily accessible. I'd take a wild stab that that's why Disney never released it on DVD or Blu-Ray - by the time we'd reached the versatile disc era, A Disney Christmas Gift was long past boasting any especially rare or must-have material, unless you were nostalgic for the interstitials themselves. And its total absence on Disney+ absolutely doesn't knock me out. If you want to watch the scene with Bambi and Thumper ice skating then you can do it easily enough just by fiddling with a few buttons. It wasn't such an egregious practice in the 1980s, however - in fact, in the UK we had a regular feature called Disney Time which ran all the way from 1961 to 1998. For just shy of four decades, the BBC could whip up a bit of easy crowd-pleasing filler for their Bank Holiday programming by tossing together a few scenes from Disney movies and having a celebrity provide commentary in between (I am deeply sorry to have misplaced my recording of a 1989 edition with Frank Bruno introducing a featurette on the making of Oliver & Company...and I sure wish I'd had the foresight to tape the 1993 show with Mike Smith being stalked by some guy in a Jafar costume). For a while these cheesy-ass clip shows were the closest that an entire generation of us were going to get to seeing a lot of the features themselves. You have to remember that, at the time A Disney Christmas Gift debuted, only a scant number of Disney's animated titles were available on home video. It was a market they were initially approaching with extreme caution, since they were still set on re-releasing their animated features theatrically in a regular rotation, and feared that having them out there simultaneously on Betamax and VHS might undercut all of that (the Disney Vault system, whereby titles were only available for a strictly limited period before being locked away for the better part of a decade, was eventually adopted as a cunning means of perpetuating their catalog's mystique). In 1982, getting to watch Bambi flunk at skating from the comfort of your own living room would have been a rare enough treat in itself, and it remained the case for most of the decade.

Far more obscure than the original special, and what I really want to focus on here, is the truncated variant that aired during the latter end of the 1980s. When this variant first dropped is still a mystery to me; Wikipedia claims it debuted in 1987, while the Disney Wiki says 1986...one of them must be wrong, but I wouldn't like to say which. This was the version of A Disney Christmas Gift that I watched as a child (my family had it on an old VHS recording, I suspect from 1988, maybe 1989), and for a while, the only one that I ever knew existed. I'd be curious to know the story behind its being. It surely couldn't just be a case of them needing to trim down the original to fit a shorter timeslot, which could have been accomplished straightforwardly enough by shaving off a few excess clips. No, this was a complete top to bottom revamp. It feels like a case of somebody looking at the original and deciding that there was a far snappier version longing to get out of it. A few of the clips and shorts used in the original were retained, but some were dropped altogether and new ones added in. The most striking alteration, though, was in the interstitials. Gone were the live action segues, the renditions of "On Christmas Morning", the syrupy verses leading into each segment. Instead, footage from The Clock Watcher (1945), a Donald Duck short featured in the original special in its near-entirety, was here chopped up and redubbed to create a crude framing narrative, in which Donald was allegedly wrapping presents for the Disney characters seen in the clips. As Lisa Simpson would say, it seems new to the trusting eyes of impressionable youth.

Stumbling across the ORIGINAL version of A Disney Christmas Gift many years down the line was a disconcerting experience; the title certainly rang a bell, and I went into it fully expecting to get the version I'd known in my childhood. At the time, my memories of The Clock Watcher Cut (as I'm now fond of calling it) were vague and distant, and the 1982 original had that air of seeming familiar but also not quite right. It was like getting reacquainted with a program I had once viewed, but an off-kilter version from a parallel universe; so much of the content appeared to match, but the tone, pacing and presentation was all wrong. My most vivid memory was of Donald persistently arguing with an animate speaker pipe, so when we got to The Clock Watcher segment, I wondered if I had perhaps misremembered this as something that happened all throughout the special, as opposed to this one chunk. The tip-off that I hadn't came in how the segment ended. I'd remembered all too strongly how things between Donald and that speaker pipe ultimately went down. The 1982 special excises the short's final punchline entirely, making the ending appear to land at Donald's expense, whereas The Clock Watcher Cut incorporates the original closing gag with Donald getting his long-awaiting reckoning with the unseen individual at the other end of the pipe. I'd remembered that specific visual so clearly because it frankly baffled me as a child.

It might be helpful to establish what's really going on in The Clock Watcher, a short that's based around Donald working in the gift wrapping section of a department store, but didn't originally take place at Christmastime. Donald's boss (voiced by John Dehner in the original short) feeds him false cheer and passive aggressive chides through the speaker all day, while Donald does a deliberately half-assed job, eager for the clock to run out so that he can get out of there and go home. Quitting time eventually arrives, but Donald is ordered to work overtime and wrap an onslaught of last minute packages, whereupon he snaps and runs upstairs to pound the living snot out of his boss (and presumably hand in his letter of resignation right after), a development represented by a visual of the speaker disintegrating beneath the stress of all the bad vibrations. The Clock Watcher seen in A Disney Christmas Gift '82 was itself a heavily modified version of the 1945 release; for one, the original incorporated some uncomfortable racial humor, wherein Donald manipulates the "mouth" of the speaker to have it talk like a stereotypical African American, so that understandably had to go (note the abrupt transition between Donald's fiddling with the speaker and the subsequent moment where he's wrapping a chair). Also excised was the original's opening sequence, with Donald arriving at the Royal Bros department store, clocking in, leering at a mannequin in lingerie, and being subjected to the Royal Bros workforce song (I suspect this was done to make the scenario more concise by jumping directly to the gift wrapping, although they were probably quite glad to be rid of that mannequin too). And, of course, the final catharsis where Donald clobbers his boss is gone - I'm not sure why, but I would hazard a guess that they wanted to sand off the short's violent coda, mild though it was, to keep things good and genial for the holiday season.

The Clock Watcher Cut had no such qualms; it concludes in much the same manner as the original short, with Donald being ordered to work overtime and losing his temper, except that in this version the boss can be heard conceding and agreeing to leave the rest of the wrapping to Santa (seguing into the final short, The Night Before Christmas - see below). The visual of the speaker disintegrating is present and correct, and one that I really didn't know how to make sense of as a small child. I should emphasise that, back then, my callow brain couldn't quite grasp that the speaker was merely a device being used by an off-screen presence to communicate with Donald, and had instead accepted it as a character unto itself. And so when the speaker started falling apart at the end (I didn't then comprehend that Donald had anything to do with it, and assumed he'd just vacated the building in protest), it made me sad because I thought the speaker was randomly dying. Given his final assurances that Santa was on his way, my best interpretation was that Santa was currently trying to squeeze his way down the pipe, having mistaken him for a chimney, and the poor speaker couldn't withstand the pressure. Also noteworthy is that the voice coming through the speaker is nowhere near as obnoxious as in the original short - he certainly never misses the opportunity to rub it in that Donald's having to work on Christmas Eve (possibly for the benefit of anyone who'd tuned in during the last commercial break), but he doesn't pile on the smarm as heavily as his 1945 counterpart - making him less deserving of the brutal beating he takes at the end.

I don't know if this is a particularly contentious opinion, but I'd argue that The Clock Watcher Cut was the superior version of A Disney Christmas Gift. If somebody did indeed decide to revamp the special on the assumption that they could get a snappier show out of it...then congratulations, they succeeded. Both editions are fundamentally tacky collages, but Donald's ongoing contention with the speaker gives the arrangement a lot more bite than the twee interludes of the original, and who wouldn't empathise with Donald's frustration at being stuck in the workplace on Christmas Eve? A shame, then, that it's been regulated to the status of a mere footnote. The 1982 original might now be only a distant memory for a certain generation, but it had its turn at being touted as a holiday classic, whereas I'm not sure that its shorter equivalent received so much as one measly home video release. Alas, my family's copy from the late 80s appears to have fallen down the same black hole as Frank Bruno's plugging of Oliver & Company, but with a little digging, I was able to locate another recording, enabling me to revisit Disney's seasonal clip extravaganza more-or-less as I'd remembered it. For the benefit of anyone who's only familiar with A Disney Christmas Gift '82, here's an overview of what was featured in the Clock Watcher Cut (outside of the Clock Watcher interstitials themselves). Italicised are the clips and shorts that were NOT in the 1982 original.

• On Ice (1935): One of Donald's earliest shorts, and one he appears to be reliving as a traumatic flashback when the special begins. It ends with Goofy bonking him on the head, and we dissolve to find Donald throwing a fit in the present (which, in the original Clock Watcher short, was in response to hearing the morning rendition of the Royal Bros workforce song).
  
• Pluto's Christmas Tree (1952): Although Chip and Dale were initially introduced as nemeses for Pluto, their career with him was fairly brief, this being the last of only four shorts in which they got to go head to head with the yellow mutt. It's why I couldn't buy into those erroneous rumors from early last year that Pluto would be the villain of the 2022 Rescue Rangers movie (!), desiring revenge for all of the humiliation the chipmunks had caused him back in the day - his list of grievances would have been pretty minor compared to Donald's (and no, I couldn't fathom Donald being the villain either, although what they actually came up with was far more conceptually appalling). As it turns out, the real reason why Rescue Rangers '22 would never have cast Pluto as the villain is because that movie was dead set against acknowledging that there was Chip and Dale life before Rescue Rangers. Why, I've no idea, as Chip and Dale starred in some splendid shorts within their time, and Pluto's Christmas Tree is among the highlights. Classic ending where it looks as though a seasonal truce has been called between mouse, dog and chipmunk, only for Chip to get sick of Pluto's howling and to slap a "Do Not Open Til Xmas" sticker upon his snout. To this day the image of the silenced Pluto still puts me in the holiday spirit.
  
• Bambi (ice skating): Bambi is my favourite Disney movie, and I'm delighted to report that this year I finally accomplished my long-standing goal of seeing it on the big screen, when Disney re-released a few of their classics as part of their centennial celebration. Oh, but as a small child, before I'd had a chance to see it in its entirety, period, I used to positively HATE whenever any of these Disney clip affairs dropped a sequence with the wide-eyed fawn. For a while, all I knew about the flick was that one traumatic plot point everybody talked about, and I was always terrified that it was going to happen right then and there in the featured footage. Of course, it never did, nor do I believe that the people responsible for assembling these programs would have been callous enough to allow it. The creators of this special certainly had no intention of ruining everybody's Christmases and went with the safer option of Bambi and Thumper having fun in the snow (which is, incidentally, Bambi's last gasp of childhood innocence). Bambi sucks at ice skating, and I never tire of seeing it. As with the original Gift, we're told that it takes place on Bambi's first Christmas morning, and that Donald here had the snow delivered to Bambi by express delivery. My question there is how on earth would that have survived the transit?
  
• Peter Pan ("You Can Fly"): The character who was vilified (bizarrely, and somewhat skin-crawlingly) in the aforementioned Rescue Rangers '22 is featured here at a more innocent time in his career. This is the one area where I think A Disney Christmas Gift '82 actually outdoes the Clock Watcher Cut, since the latter doesn't show the full sequence, just the build-up with Peter telling Wendy, Michael and John to think happy thoughts and peppering them with Tinkerbell's sparkly dandruff. We fade-out right before the part where they fly above London and begin their journey to Neverland, ie: the big culminating pay-off of the sequence. The result doesn't feel quite as anticlimactic as the Sword in The Stone clip from the original, but it comes close. As this special would have it, the shadow Peter is attempting to affix to his shoes at the start is a spare one sent to him by Donald (and in such a tiny package too).
  
• The Three Caballeros (Las Posadas): Panchito tells Donald about the Mexican festival of Las Posadas, in which a procession recreates the journey of Mary and Joseph before celebrating by breaking out the piñata. If you've seen The Three Caballeros, you'll know that this is Disney's trippiest feature bar none (seriously, I don't know what Donald was on for most of it, but I want some), yet this particular clip isn't really representative of that - it is the most uncharacteristically restrained and solemn sequence in the original film. The subsequent moment, where Donald has a go at hitting a piñata, causing an array of mind-bending colour to rain down upon him, is our only inkling as to its real madcap nature. Its inclusion here no doubt enabled the special to claim a little extra educational merit, in providing a brief window into the different customs used to observe Christmas around the world.
  
• Toy Tinkers (1949): I'm surprised they kept Pluto's Christmas Tree and added in Toy Tinkers, because the two shorts have virtually the same premise - a character chops down a tree and contends with a Yulteide home invasion from Chip and Dale. Still, having the two shorts pretty much side by side allows for a fun contrast between Donald and Pluto's respective warfare styles, and it's clear why the former was more frequently favoured as an antagonist for the pesky sciurines. Pluto is, well, an animal about it, whereas Donald gets to be a much more knowing bastard in his tactics, particularly when playing the chipmunks off against each other. I doubt that trick with the disparately sized walnuts would have occurred to Pluto.
  
• Cinderella ("Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo"): The clip is the same as in the original Gift, right down to the unconvincing redub with the Fairy Godmother calling out, "Merry Christmas, Cinderella!" Here, Donald is tasked with sending out a package that reportedly contains "a wish come true for Cinderella", so we're perhaps to assume that the Fairy Godmother was smooshed up inside it.
  
• The Night Before Christmas (1933): Confession - I think my family's recording might have cut out just as this short was beginning, since I have no memory of it ever featuring in any of my childhood viewings. Anyway, you know the drill. 

 

Snoot and Muttly (Birds of A CGI Feather)

My recent piece on "Homer³" got me thinking about just how strange and downright disorientating a lot of those early experiments in computer generated animation were. A new horizon of boundless potential was opening up before our eyes, bringing with it a positively futuristic means of representing our hopes, dreams and passions, and the results often felt as though they had been plucked straight out of a surrealist nightmare - which could, of course, be an entirely beautiful thing in its own right. Take Adam Powers, The Juggler (1981), a nascent demonstration in motion capture techniques from Richard Taylor and Gary Demos. Motion capture has come a long way since Taylor and Demos' pioneering efforts, but it still holds up splendidly as a short animation by virtue of how mind-bogglingly weird it is. It's practically exercise in taking something recognisably human and having reality bend all around it. The future was exciting, but also alien and uncanny.

On the flipside of the equation was Snoot and Muttly (1984), one of the first films to really push the envelope in exploring the technology's potential to tell stories, with characters capable of conveying emotion to which viewers could relate. The story being told was, appropriately enough, about finding familiarity within the unfamiliar, by illustrating a moment in which connection is forged between two characters operating on ostensibly disparate dispositional wavelengths. Snoot and Muttly was created by Susan Van Baerle and Douglas Kingsbury of Ohio State University, with music by John Berton. It's a deceptively simple piece - two flightless birds, each the other's polar opposite, cross paths, and genial antics ensue - but incredibly busy in its ambitions. Characters who interacted with their environment and one another, who were equipped with their own individual characteristics and mannerisms, and were expressive enough to carry a visual narrative for three and a quarter minutes (in a way that clearly illustrated how said characters had grown and developed by the end) were weighty undertakings for CG animation at the time. There is no dialogue in Snoot and Muttly, but it seems obvious enough that "Snoot" refers to the red and orange bird - ie: the snooty one who walks with their head held high - while Muttly (as the name implies, the more humble of the two) is the blue and yellow one in search of a companion. The characters' silence also has them remain androgynous; I'd always assumed Snoot to be female because of that very feminine-looking hat the character dons at the end - but really, who knows? I notice that in this contemporary article from The Lantern, Van Bearle avoids assigning either bird a gender, so I will do the same here.

Snoot and Muttly was clearly conceived with an eye toward demonstrating how two computer-generated characters, similar in design, could exhibit distinct differences in personality, and for as basic as the animation might seem now, it gives you a strong impression of who each bird is. Muttly's initial reaction, on noticing Snoot, is to imitate their very uppity mode of walking, but even as Muttly copies Snoot, there is a definite jauntiness to their movements that makes plain their more jovial intentions. The world the birds inhabit likewise feels fresh and alive, combining the vibrancy of its tropical greenery with touches of idiosyncratic whimsy, such as the multi-coloured array of propeller-operated spheres that hover around like swarms of insects. The row of buildings (suggestive of a somewhat wider community of unseen characters), are simple in design, looking like a collection of boxes stacked atop one another, but have a whimsy of their own, with their rainbow colouration and doors and windows of assorted shapes - they look like like a surreal cross between a themed children's play area and a disco light box (as a bonus, there's a nice detail in which Snoot's house is seen to tilt shortly before they emerge at the front). It's a world that seems perfectly self-contained for the purposes of the story, while giving the sense that there might be a whole lot more that could still be explored. Playful, innocent discovery is the theme bolstered by Berton's twinkly synth score, which strikes me as notably similar to the soundtracks that would later accompany the earlier Rugrats adventures. Berton does a nice job of giving each of the characters their own musical identity; the notes echoing Snoot's prim movements feel harsher and more blaring, conveying their grandioseness and initial hostility, while Muttly's have more of a peppy energy, with just the right hint of solitary yearning, as they attempt to endear themselves to the distant Snoot.

The range of emotions the characters exhibit are beautifully realised, lucid enough to support the narrative progression, but subtle enough that it doesn't feel forced or overbearing. Snoot is at first surprised to find Muttly trailing behind them, before making it clear that they want nothing to do with them. The swarm of spheres then flutters overhead, and Snoot's expression softens; already you can see the flickers of curiosity in their eyes, cluing us in that there's a well of untapped larkiness within that starchy avian form that has yet to be embraced. Muttly, meanwhile, might be predominantly a free spirit, but they get to display their share of confusion and an inkling of hurt at Snoot's reluctance to join them in the chase. Van Bearle and Kingsbury manage to work in a bit of viewer misdirection at the end - Snoot retreats back into their funky abode and for a moment we think they've ditched Muttly, when in actuality they've gone in to get dressed for the occasion. The flowery pink hat they emerge wearing provides one of the film's quirkiest visual touches, allowing Snoot to undergo a visible change of heart while retaining their characteristically dapper disposition. The film ends with the two birds running after the spheres together, as the camera pans to an overhead view showing two spheres, one red, one yellow, appearing to bounce off one another's energy, a further symbol of the connection forged between our heroes. Actually, I'm surprised that they didn't make the second sphere blue, just to make the visual echo all the more obvious, but I suppose yellow works as Muttly's secondary colour (beside, none of the spheres in the swarm are blue; that particular variation is apparently non-existent around here).

Again, not a lot happens in terms of narrative, but Snoot and Muttly moves along with such an earnestly impassioned charm. There's something about these birds, and the guilelessness of their primitive yet sprightly world, that draws me in every time.

Treehouse of Horror '95: Homer³ (aka Only Solutions)

"Homer³" is a tremendously novel installment of "Treehouse of Horror". Forget, for just a moment, that it made extensive use of 3D animation at a time when the technique had nowhere near the ubiquity it has now - when it debuted on October 29th 1995, as part of The Simpsons' sixth Halloween outing, it was the first ToH segment in a seeming eternity that had managed to avoid descending into a violent bloodbath by the out. There are no character deaths at all in fact, which at this point in the series made it an absolute rarity. I was trying to remember the last ToH segment before it in which nobody actually got killed, and I think it may have been "The Devil and Homer Simpson" of "Treehouse of Horror IV" (I nearly said "Terror at 5 1⁄2 Feet" from the same episode, since I was in two minds as to whether Moleman's car combusting counted when the guy's survived worse in the series proper, but then I remembered that Ned got his head ripped off by the gremlin at the end). That's an awful lot of carnage sandwiched into the seven segments in between. The Halloween spirit and freedom from the shackles of continuity give the ToH episodes leeway to go to freakier, nastier places than most regular Simpsons episodes could accommodate, and it's always fun to see what kind of gruesome creativity the staff can inject into the series' DNA, but kudos to "Homer³" for mixing things up and demonstrating that freakiness can come from sources besides the bloody and macabre. (If you wanted to stretch it for casualties, you could argue that we technically don't know what becomes of the 3D goldfish that get sucked into the black hole, but since Homer survives I see no reason to assume they didn't either.)  What makes "Homer³" particularly unique, however, is that it evokes a feeling I don't think had been attempted by any ToH segment before it, and that is melancholy. "Homer³" is an unusually sombre Halloween story; whenever it gets strange, it gets hauntingly moody in tandem. A huge wad of the credit for that goes to its soundtrack, evocative of Robyn Miller's score for popular contemporary video game Myst.

I find "Homer³" such a bittersweet segment, in part, because with hindsight it's hard for me not to read it as an analogy for the dawn of CG animation and the changing landscape of the industry. 1995 marked a significant year for the technique, with two breakthrough pictures that boldly announced how CG animation was going to radically re-shape Hollywood's approach to its visual effects and to storytelling possibilities going forward - Amblin Entertainment's Casper, the first live action film to incorporate a computer generated main character (courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic), and Toy Story, the first fully 3D animated feature film, and the flick responsible for putting incoming powerhouse Pixar on the map for mainstream viewers. Getting in just slightly ahead of Buzz and Woody was the Simpsons' own stab at the emerging craft; "Homer³" was a timely piece that served to herald this exciting new age, with animation from Pacific Data Images, one of the pioneering houses of computer animation. They would later join forces with Pixar's first major rival, DreamWorks Animation, helping to create Antz, Shrek and many other pictures, before closing their doors in 2015. They did a really exemplary job with their Simpsons assignment - the novelty of "Homer³" has inevitability faded since 1995, with these kinds of visual techniques now being so commonplace, but I don't think that the animation itself has aged anywhere near as badly as you might imagine. Certain gags seem somewhat lost to time - specifically, the gags that were designed to comment on the flashiness of the techniques, such as when Homer comments that he's "wasting a fortune just standing here", and and the knowing contrast between that particularly ambitious underwater shot of the 3D fish pond and the equally showy (but jarringly vulgar) shot of Homer drooling over the unprocessed fish sticks - and visually, it all looks fairly rudimentary compared to what was to follow. But PDI got things right exactly where it mattered for "Homer³". The CG Homer and Bart are recognisably Homer and Bart, the expressiveness is there (occasionally the CG Homer will slip into looking a trifle dead-eyed, but he's able to convey confusion, fear and annoyance wherever it's needed), and getting to see these familiar characters from a fresh new perspective is still such an exciting prospect - so much so that it's kind of a shame that time and budget don't allow for the entire family to enter in and get the three dimensional treatment (apparently Ned Flanders was slated to go in at one time, but the CG capabilities of the day weren't ready for his moustache). PDI's work was deemed impressive and important enough for inclusion in the animated anthology film Cyberworld 3D, which played in IMAX theatres in 2000, giving the Simpsons their first big screen outing (I've no doubt that snagging a big brand like The Simpsons enabled Cyberworld to gain more recognition). I didn't see it, and I'm kind of narked that I missed the opportunity to see Homer and Bart rubbing shoulders with the music video to the Pet Shop Boys' "Liberation" (it's from the Very era, so you know it's a gaudy delight).

The computer generated world cannot itself help but seem an entirely basic creation, particularly next to the colourful, fully realised child's playroom in which we'd shortly be immersed when Toy Story hit theatres, but in a way that feeds into the merits of the segment. It offers an assortment of tributes to the iconic 3D images of the time, such as the Utah teapot (also glimpsed during the Mrs Nesbitt scene in Toy Story) and the library from the aforementioned Myst, atop a grid that tips the hat to one or two old-school Disney sci-fis (we'll get to that shortly) and a whole bunch of math jokes geared toward tickling the eggheads in the audience. That the 3D universe should consist of such a vacant, open space adds to the strangeness of the place, in being nothing like the world that Homer has jumped in from, and to its haunting sombreness. There is nothing about the 3D plane that seems dangerous or overtly threatening, outside of the fact that it is so unfamiliar. Mostly, it is what it is - an adjacent universe, existing benignly and waiting passively for someone to stumble across it. Its relatively emptiness is suggestive of the barrage of ways in which this germinal universe could expand and develop, but also a loneliness and fragility; it is a universe that does not seem as though it could withstand the corruptions of a less benevolent world, as is borne out when the intrusions of the 2D world prove fatal to its entire being. Even before the 3D plane gets round to collapsing on itself, some of those eggheads might have already picked up on the warning signs; hidden among the background gags is the equation ρ_m0 > 3H₀² /8πG, the inclusion of which writer David X. Cohen attributes to his astronomer friend David Schiminovich. It's apparently very ominous and indicates that this universe is ultimately too dense to remain standing. It doesn't stand a chance with Homer added into the mix.

That the 3D universe should collapse (taking the accident-prone Homer with it) while the 2D world endures seems contrary to how things actually panned out for the respective animation techniques. Back in 1995, the arrival of Toy Story was a magical moment, and the success and acclaim the film received was well-deserved. Pixar, PDI, Industrial Light & Magic and their ilk were all doing tremendously exciting things, and the possibilities of where they might take us next were exhilarating. All the same, I find it deeply distressing, as a fan of traditional animation, to contemplate how little time it took for 2D animation to all but die out in Hollywood, with 3D replacing it as the standard - not even a full decade separates Toy Story from Home on The Range (2004), which was then tagged as Disney's last traditionally animated feature (an attempt at a 2D revival followed in the late 2000s/early 2011s, but the damage was already done and it proved painfully short-lived). 2D animation still has a home on television, and The Simpsons has gotten to keep its familiar style, but even they were eventually forced to bend to the computer's domination and switch to digital colouring (bringing with it a more plastic-looking aesthetic). What "Homer³" gets across entirely accurately is the sense that the world as we knew it was changing and that things were never going to be the same again. Like Homer himself, once we'd stepped out over the line and immersed ourselves in this mind-bending new technology, we couldn't get back to where we were. I don't think that it had to be thus - in a fairer universe, 2D and 3D animation should have been able to co-exist just fine. But mistakes were made. Metaphorical cones were thrown, puncturing the very fabric of our fragile reality. I find it poetic that the preceding segment, "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace", should have opened with a tribute to the cartoons of Tex Avery; the Simpsons crew took a loving look back to the golden age of animation, before looking ahead and tangling with the CG beast lurking right around the corner, all poised to turn the industry inside out and devitalise the form that had been its cornerstone for so many decades.

 "Homer³" was inspired by the classic Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost", something that Homer explicitly calls attention to when he observes that the portal to the 3rd dimension is like "something out of that Twilight-y show about that Zone". It seems significant to me that the segment should open with a deceptively ordinary set-up, one that could have figured in any number of regular Simpsons installments. Patty and Selma are on their way over with a pillowcase of seashells harvested from their trip to Sulfar Bay, wanting the family to join them for round of deceased hermit crab extraction, and no one in the household besides Marge is particularly eager to greet them. Homer is having to compete with with Bart and Lisa (and Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II) for the house's best hiding spots, and it's his fear of being uncovered by his sister-in-laws that prompts him to take his chances in the 3D world. Like "Little Girl Lost", "Homer³" is rooted in the troubling idea of the the most ordinary and domestic of spaces suddenly and inexplicably becoming the entry point to the strange and unknowable, and the even more troubling possibility of that strangeness coming between ourselves and our loved ones. It's only appropriate that Homer's cutting-edge adventures should initially be happening on the fringes of a more grounded Simpsons story, as opposed to one that immediately submerges itself in its Halloween trappings. There's the sense of disturbance in a world that's basically oblivious to the magnitude of the incoming change. It takes Marge and co a comically long time to grasp what Homer (who, like the little girl lost, is still able to verbally communicate with those in the adjacent dimension) means when he tells them that he doesn't know where he is ("We better call Ned, he has a ladder"), in part because Homer himself can scarcely comprehend it, let alone put it into words. He eventually settles for comparing the 3D world to the futuristic cyberspace of Disney's 1982 film Tron, and we then get a very emphatic gag based around the fact that nobody gathered within the Simpsons' living room has apparently seen the danged thing (except, possibly, Wiggum). This is the one gag in the segment that I kind of take issue with, because while the execution is certainly very funny, Tron isn't that obscure a picture, surely? I also refuse to believe that Frink, of all people, wasn't first in line to see it. I'll admit that it probably wouldn't sting so much if I weren't such an ardent fan of the movie they're ribbing. Look, I wasn't born when Tron came out, so I can't comment first-hand on how people felt about it during its theatrical run. My understanding is that it did moderately well at the box office, but it didn't meet Disney's Star Wars-sized expectations and was written off as a disappointment at the time. Still, it built up a cult following over the years, enough for Disney to finally capitalise on its sequel potential 28 years later. I just hope the Simpsons gag didn't give anybody the impression that Tron is a lousy movie, not worth checking out, when actually the film is cool as fuck (I mean, it's got David Warner playing all three of its main villains, what more do you want?). Part of me would like to believe that Cohen (or whoever was responsible for that specific joke) got Tron mixed up with another Disney attempt at chasing the Star Wars model, The Black Hole of 1979. It honestly seems to me that the grid in Homer's 3D world could have been inspired by either picture (the green colour scheme puts me more strongly in mind of the latter), and when the entire terrain gives way into a mighty vortex, with Bart and Homer lingering at the edges - yep, that one visual at least was unquestionably taken from The Black Hole. Which really is a movie that nobody saw. Don't get me wrong, I like The Black Hole a lot too. Anthony Perkins is in it. Ernest Borgnine is in it. But nobody saw it. More's the pity. (Every now and then, talk surfaces about the possibility of a remake, but I would be very surprised if that's a priority for Disney any time soon. Not now that they have the actual Star Wars.)

If you did see The Black Hole, then odds are that the thing you most remember about it is that mindscrew of an ending, where the black hole is revealed to be a portal to Hell (whether literal or figurative) or something along those lines. The black hole of "Homer³" goes to screwier places still, by having Homer transplanted into the "real" world, more specifically Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles (that he lands in a dumpster is reminiscent of the opening to Howard The Duck (1986), making me think that this could be the set-up to a crazier adventure still to come). This was a visual novelty in its own right, being the first occasion in which original live action footage was incorporated into the series, and yet as a child I remember feeling disappointed with it, if only because for a second there I thought that Homer was going to transform into live action and be represented by a flesh and blood actor to match his new surroundings. It still seems like a cheat to me that he doesn't, given that this was how things worked in the 3D animated world, and because seriously, the prospect of getting an official interpretation of what Homer would look like as a real person would be even more mind-blowing than seeing him in 3D animation. It's probably for the best that they didn't go that route, however. For one, I'd imagine it would be an arduous task casting an actor who could satisfy everybody's preconceptions for a "real" Homer, possibly more arduous than rendering him in CGI for a few scant minutes. The final arrangement would also have had to play out somewhat differently, as there'd be no reason for all those extras to gawk at Homer as they do if he could pass for one of them. A great part of the sequence's power comes from its depiction of two worlds colliding, with each as disturbing and inexplicable to the other. Then Homer discovers that they have erotic cakes in this world, and immediately feels a sense of belonging.

On the DVD commentary showrunner Bill Oakley insists that from his perspective this was a happy ending, since the implication is that Homer will be perfectly at home in our universe, although he admits that it was "controversial" and that the closing credits music, a Myst-ified take on the Simpsons theme, suggests another mood entirely. Arguably, it isn't radically different to the ending of "Time and Punishment" of "Treehouse of Horror V", in which Homer also never found his way back to his original reality and learned to make do with the one he had. But at least there he remained in presence of Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, none of whom seemed to care that he was out of step with them in lacking an extendable lizard tongue. "Homer³" ends with him stranded among the unfamiliar which, unlike the passive 3D world, is very actively contemplating him back, and how little sense he makes in their reality. The closing music honestly gives me the chills; it feels like something very profound is being communicated here, even if, as per Oakley's words, it's entirely by accident. The mood it conveys is one of dreaminess and unreality, playing into the idea that we're all at the mercy of our own perception, and we never know when our world is going to expand and force us to reevaluate what we think we know. At the end, 3D Homer has apparently made his peace with us. But will we make our peace with 3D Homer?

It's an optimistic ending perhaps, positing that the strange may not seem quite so if you look at it in a certain way, but also a profoundly poignant one. To me, it says something about the nature of change, as represented by the 3D Homer and the need for him to accommodate himself in our world, and be accommodated in return. The change that happens, for better or for worse, the sadness of what gets left behind and the anticipation of what might lie ahead. You can cope with change by finding the parts you like in it and making the most of that, even if it is something as dumb as erotic cakes. Ultimately, that's what consider most impressive about "Homer³". Not only did it take us to some bold new territory on the aesthetic front, it hit a few unexpected emotional buttons along the way. It's great that after so many Halloweens, the "Treehouse of Horror" installments still knew how to be surprising.