SuperTed vs Earth Traffic (aka Not Behind The Bus, Spotty!)

In the mid-1980s, the Central Office of Information were in search of a new trusted figure to educate children on the importance of keeping their wits about them when crossing the road. They settled on SuperTed, eponymous star of a popular Welsh cartoon about a defective teddy bear who became the galaxy's saviour thanks to the interventions of a spotted extra terrestrial and a personified Mother Nature. The upshot was that Ted received his own public information film, "Super Safe With SuperTed", in which he took a break from battling power-hungry Texans and effeminate skeletons to take on something more nefarious - Earth traffic (identified by Ted as being the worst in the galaxy), which he must teach his absent-minded sidekick Spotty how to navigate, following a narrowly-averted disaster on the Planet Spot.

SuperTed started life as a series of books written by Mike Young (inspired by a bedtime story he'd devised to help his son overcome his fear of the dark), before an animated adaptation was commissioned in 1982 by budding Welsh-language public broadcast channel S4C (Warner Brothers were also apparently interested in acquiring the film rights, but Young preferred that his intellectual property remained in Welsh hands). The series was produced by the Cardiff-based Siriol Productions (founded by Young with his wife Liz) and proved such a hit in its native Wales that an English-language dub was created and aired on the BBC in 1983 to similar success. It followed the heroic exploits of a teddy bear (voiced by Geraint Jarman in the Welsh original and Derek Griffiths in the English dub) who was discarded by the human world but found valuable allies elsewhere, being granted life by way of the cosmic dust of an alien named Spotty (Martin Griffiths/John Pertwee) and special superpowers courtesy of Mother Nature (Valmai Jones/Sheila Steafel). Whenever trouble reared its head, SuperTed would activate those powers by whispering his secret magic word (which he never confided with anybody, so it can be as filthy or outlandish as your imagination wants it to be), typically to fend off his recurring nemesis, the conniving cowboy Texas Pete (Gari Williams/Victor Spinetti), and his bungling henchmen Skeleton (Emyr Young/Melvin Hayes) and Bulk (Huw Ceredig/Roy Kinnear). The premise of a crime-fighting teddy bear might have been goofy as hell, but the characters were colourful, the tone was earnest and legions of hearts had warmed to the plucky ursine as the hero the 1980s urgently needed. People so looked up to SuperTed that they manufactured a line of children's vitamin supplements in his image. A turn in a public information film was all but inevitable.

For myself, the secret ingredient to the show's success, and the element that continues to make it such an enduring classic, is the touch of melancholy that was often so palpable throughout. The opening sequence is one of those early television memories that's always haunted me - the coldness of Ted's abandonment (emphasised by the bombast of Peter Hawkins' narration), followed by the vividness of the unlikely solidarity that came with Spotty's appearance. Equally stirring was the closing theme that signed off each adventure, with its awe-struck yearning for a hero with "A scarlet suit, a flowing cape, a magic word, a super change." The music, composed by Chris Stuart and Mike Townend, was totally captivating. The English dub is the version I grew up with, so I can't attest to Jarman's characterisation in the Welsh original, but there was something so endearingly poignant about Griffiths' performance as SuperTed. He sounded honest, stout-hearted and resolute (all of the nice characteristics you would expect from a heroic teddy) but also kind of mournful. His was a voice that conveyed the sadness of the universe, as if he'd never quite gotten over the horror of being thrown away like a piece of rubbish into that old dark storeroom. That same melancholy was successfully captured in the public information film, which rounds out with SuperTed making about the glummest observation possible, particularly in light of the fact that it effectively functioned as the series finale. It wasn't the last we'd be seeing of Ted and Spotty - Hanna Barbera would revive the franchise three years later with a sequel series, The Further Adventures of SuperTed - but this is where the original Made in Wales era wrapped, and what an engagingly solemn note to conclude on.

"Super Safe With SuperTed" was initially presented as a five and a half minute short, though this included the usual opening and closing titles; the PIF itself amounted to three minutes and forty seconds. It was broadcast on BBC One on 26th March 1986, before receiving a home video release on the Children's Video Library VHS The Magic of SuperTed (and later on the 1994 Tempo release The Biggest Ever SuperTed Video). In it, SuperTed discovers that Spotty's comprehension of road safety is not up to snuff, and with help from Spotty's sister Blotch (Wendy Padbury), takes him to Earth (specifically to Cardiff) for a demonstration of the proper crossing procedure. A shorter edit, clocking at a minute and twenty-two seconds, subsequently did the rounds as an ad break filler; this focussed on the later portion of the story, with Ted, Spotty and Blotch safely traversing the roads of Cardiff. Excised was the narrative build-up, in which Spotty first demonstrates his crippling lack of road sense via a computer simulation, and then nearly gets himself mowed down by an alien motorist, prompting SuperTed to activate his powers and pull off a dramatic rescue.

The short opens on the Planet Spot, where Spotty is playing a characteristically 1980s-looking video game that involves guiding a pixilated chicken across a road. Alas, Spotty has no natural flair for chicken protection, and we see him guide the sprite directly into the path of a car and to an instant Game Over. Ted helps Spotty get a better hang of the game by explaining the rules of road crossing - find a safe place to cross where you can see clearly both ways, don't stand too close to the road, look and listen carefully, then cross while it's all clear, while still remaining alert to any incoming traffic. Using these principles, Spotty is able to lead the chicken to safety and earn his first victory screen after 503 occasions of being bested by SuperTed. He is, however, unable to apply those same principles to real life, when he and Ted are out roaming the Planet Spot and notice Blotch waving to them from the other side of a road. Spotty rushes out to greet her without looking and finds a Spotty Rocket hurtling in his direction; thankfully, SuperTed is able to speak his secret magic world and save his friend in the nick of time. In spite of all his prior training with the video chicken, Spotty remains confused about road safety, and gets offended when Ted suggests he look for a zebra crossing, possessing an automatic disdain for things with stripes (is that a by-product of coming from a spot-orientated culture?). Ted hits upon the idea of taking a trip to Earth to give Spotty a full-on demonstration with that infamously awful Earth traffic; Spotty reveals himself to be just as disdainful of Earth's residents (whom he identifies as the worst in the galaxy), but he complies. With prompting from Ted and Blotch, Spotty becomes a proficient road crosser, even while inclined to make every mistake in the book (crossing out from behind a bus, standing right at the edge of the kerb, running across the road instead of walking calmly).

Although the sequence in Cardiff seems gentle and non-threatening (compared to the drama of that prior sequence on Planet Spot where Spotty nearly becomes road pizza), hawk-eyed viewers might notice that two of Ted's enemies, Texas Pete and Bulk, make stealthy cameos as motorists. There's nothing to indicate that either is up to anything malevolent, but it adds a suggestion of hidden danger, as though the potential for calamity is always there, lurking below the seemingly untroubled surface, even if it can't be immediately perceived. The real kicker, though, comes at the end, when SuperTed's kindly reassurance that, "If you remember these rules, you will be safe crossing the road anywhere in the universe", is immediately followed up with the sombre reminder that, "I can't be there to save you...especially on the planet Earth." As noted, these were Ted's parting words to his fans, as he finished up his original run, and they took the form of a haunting allusion to his own unreality. A world in which an animate teddy bear could become a superhero and save you from all potential harm made for a delightful fantasy, but a fantasy was all that it was. The viewer now had to wake up and acknowledge that they lived on Earth, where such things did not happen, but where danger and terrible outcomes were very real possibilities. Ultimately, the viewer was on their own, their survival dependent on the honing of their own wits and judgement. It adds an extra sting to Spotty's prior remark about Earth having the worst people in the galaxy, if this innately hostile world is the one we have to figure out how to live in.

Even so, there's the lingering prospect that SuperTed hasn't left us for good, and might one day return to share his wisdom with the 21st century. What with the current cultural obsession with superheroes and nostalgic reboots, there has been intermittent talk of bringing the series back for a new generation. This is something Young has been endeavouring toward since the 2010s, and every now and then we get word that progress has been made, although the end-product has yet to materialise. Young has indicated that we shouldn't expect it to return in quite the same form, and that the villains in particular would have to undergo an extensive retooling; he noted in a Radio Times interview given in 2014 that, “In SuperTed, we had a gun-slinging cowboy, a flamboyantly gay skeleton and a fat guy who had jokes made about his weight and all these things you just wouldn’t do today,” Okay, I get why the guns and fat jokes wouldn't be on the table nowadays, but what was wrong with the flamboyantly gay skeleton? Don't you think that Skeleton was an icon? Kudos to Young for giving us official confirmation of his sexuality, though.

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 like 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?

Bob's Birthday (aka In Ourselves Are Triumph and Defeat)

Even at a relatively brief 12 minutes, Bob's Birthday, the 1993 animation from British-Canadian husband and wife team Alison Snowden and David Fine, is a slow burn. The short, a co-production from Channel 4 and the National Film Board of Canada, centres on Bob Fish (Andy Hamilton), a neurotic dentist turning 40, and the efforts of his forbearing wife Margaret (Snowden) to throw him a surprise party, under the pretence that they'll be dining out at an Indian restaurant come the evening. Bob, though, isn't feeling the occasion and is in the midst of a mid-life crisis. The narrative highlight is when, having arrived at the house with no inkling of Margaret's actual intentions, he proceeds to strut into the living room with his genitalia on full display, and to fire off a string of damning remarks about the friends and associates who, unbeknownst to him, are hiding behind the furniture. But that doesn't occur until seven minutes in. Before then, we get an extensive build-up in which Margaret's innocent party preparations are contrasted, uneasily, with Bob's drab day at the dental surgery, and his wandering eye for his young and oblivious secretary, Penny. Bob is not a particularly sympathetic character. Much of his malaise about the onset of middle age seems to revolve around his cold dissatisfaction with his life with Margaret, all while we're seeing the evidence of Margaret's sweetness and devotion to Bob in plain sight. There is, though, something achingly human about his prosaic predicament. Snowden and Fine's short was to resonate with audiences, winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1995, and later inspiring a spin-off series, Bob and Margaret,  which rain from 1998 to 2001.

Bob's Birthday is a poignant, particularly sour-toned trouble in paradise tale with a sprinkling of strange and grotesque touches - right from the very first scene, in which a severed foot visible upon the kitchen floor is quickly revealed to be a squeaky dog toy. Bob, who has dedicated his career to the preservation of oral hygiene, lives in a world that is markedly unhygienic, with all kinds of uncomfortable realities simmering below its proverbial gum-line. The aphid infestation that is slowly devouring the plants in the dental surgery is a visual indicator of the emotional ugliness of which Bob, until his climactic blow-up, prefers not to talk, as is the ornamental doll gifted to him by a patient, revealed to be a kitschy toilet roll holder, and the criminal activity happening both on the street outside Bob and Margaret's abode (Margaret doesn't seem to notice the thief who casually breaks a car window and makes off with its radio) and within their living room (one of their guests pockets the spare change she fishes out from behind the sofa cushion). The surgery's aphid problem also juxtaposes comically with the script's various allusions to gardens as symbols of vitality. Bob listens to a radio announcer (voiced by Harry Enfield, and sounding distinctly like a more sedate Dave Nice), who introduces a discussion on middle age with a clunky metaphor about seasons in the gardening calendar. The greenery with which Bob has surrounded himself (the reflections of his own metaphorical garden), is ailing, potted and confined to a coldly clinical environment in which they have little hope of thriving. In his longing for Penny, Bob recites Thomas Campion's Renaissance love song, "There is a Garden In Her Face", while Penny is shown tending to one of the infested plants; the plant's continued degradation in her care (by the final shot in the dental surgery, we see that it only has one leaf remaining) a sure sign that his yearning is unlikely to heal his inner turmoil. His work offers him no solace. One patient merely feeds his existential fears, by citing an American study claiming that dentists have a particularly high rate of suicide. Another, despite her tasteless choice of birthday present, seems more benevolent in her musings. Her suggestion that 40 should be seen as a new beginning, with one having had ample opportunity to learn from the foolishness of their youth, is swiftly undermined by Bob's immediate instinct, on arriving home, to engage in a whole new bout of foolishness, behind what he naively believes to be closed doors.

Bob's Birthday offers a humorous look at the existential despairs associated with ageing (Snowden and Fine were themselves closer to 30 when they made the film, and apparently already feeling the pinch of their impending middle age), but its sharpest insights are in the moments which create a broader portrait of loneliness, accentuating the mutual solitude of both Bob and Margaret, and the obvious disconnect that has crept into their marriage. The futility of Margaret's party preparations is echoed in the adjacent tussle between the couple's two dogs (whom, it later appears to occur to Bob, were taken in as substitutes for having children) for a football, which leaves both parties locked in a stalemate for the duration of the short. Bob's professed desire to have children with Margaret seems at odds with his interest in an extra-marital affair, reading less like an attempt to reaffirm their union than a further, desperate expression of his fear of ending up alone. Bob is so overwhelmed by the prospect of oblivion in his future that he's unable to recognise the care he is evidently receiving from Margaret in the present, and his own failure to return it. His disparagement of his wife, and his unwitting sabotage of the party she'd planned, amount to a cruel rejection of that care, pushing Margaret into a more subdued existential crisis, in which she contemplates her own ageing, vulnerable form and the lack of love in her life (can she count on Bob to take care of her?). Her predisposition to always nurture the pathetic Bob nevertheless seems to transcend the emotional bruising she endures; she eventually returns downstairs and tenderly hands him a pair of trousers, which Bob obligingly receives.

Bob's journey can be seen as following the familiar trajectory of the five stages of grief. The earlier scenes in the dental surgery are all about denial. His silent desiring of Penny, who's never hinted to reciprocate his interests, amounts to a hollow attempt at escapism from his middle-aged discontent, while his sterile interactions with his patients offer him little recourse for an emotional outlet. When Bob gets home, his anger suddenly becomes manifest in the gruesome outburst in which, in an act of overcompensation for his own roving fancies, he coldly advises Margaret to find herself a new partner. He denounces all of their friends as boring, before sinking into a mournful rumination about how the only people they ever cared for, Ted and Elaine, have since deserted them for Australia (his evident attraction to Elaine indicates that Penny wasn't the first occasion in which he's contemplated infidelity to Margaret). He reaches his bargaining stage when he searches for an answer to his problem. Should he and Margaret have children? Would he be more attractive if he exercised more or went on a diet? Finally, he embraces Margaret and appears to have achieved acceptance. Suddenly he seems very upbeat and optimistic about the restaurant dinner he believes is awaiting them, insisting that he's been looking forward to it all day, despite his earlier reservations that curry was too spicy for his palate.

This takes us into the short's ambivalent ending, in which Bob goes out to start the car, and Margaret takes the birthday cake she'd prepared earlier and follows him, abandoning the thwarted party and leaving her friends in the darkness. Meanwhile, Bob proclaims his newfound acceptance of middle age by reciting the final lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Poets" ("Not in the clamor of the crowded street, Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, But in ourselves are triumph and defeat"), and is seen to unlock the car door for Margaret, freeing the way for her to join him in wherever life will take him next. We might question why Margaret chooses to ignore the party guests at the end. Is she too embarrassed to face them? Is this some futile attempt to sweep those pervasive uncomfortable realities back under the rug, by pretending they were never there? Or does it represent her own rejection of the social connections that, as per Bob's accusations, Margaret despises as much as he does? (The rather emphatic slamming of the door might imply the latter). Either way, it is obviously a bit fanciful to suppose that they won't have to face the music sooner or later. They're going to have to come back home eventually (for one thing, their dogs are there) and, whether or not the guests will be waiting or will have found their own way out, this is the world they'll still have to live in. Perhaps we feel a mite bad for the guests, with whom we don't really spend enough time to assess if they are as bad as Bob claims. For the most part their transgressions seem to be quite low-key. We've got the penny-pincher who pockets coins from behind the sofa, and another who spills a drink on the carpet despite Margaret's request that they leave it unstained. Bob repeats some rumor he's heard about one guest, Barbara, who is a "wild card" behind the back of her husband Brian. Otherwise, their biggest sin, according to Bob, is simply being dull. He could be right - as we first enter the party, some of the guests are having a rather vapid conversation about basil and mozzarella. All the same, we're not given enough information to see their friends as the real problem. Bob is plainly his own worst enemy (something his citation of Wadsworth Longfellow appears to acknowledge), but by embracing Margaret (physically and emotionally) he seems to find his way toward redemption. Margaret, meanwhile, throws her lot in with Bob, concession that, in the end, all they fundamentally have is one another.

There is, though, another problem. Bob remarks how prudent it was that they booked their restaurant table in advance, as being a Friday night, they can expect it to be busy. But of course Margaret hasn't. She never intended to go to the restaurant, which was just a decoy to disguise her actual intentions. They're going to have to take their chances. Maybe they'll get lucky and get a table anyway, maybe they'll have to drive around all night looking for a place that can take them (in which case Margaret is going to have to admit to Bob that she lied about making the booking). What lies behind them is a lot of awkwardness and angst that's bound to rear its head again somewhere down the line. What lies ahead of them, tonight and on every night to follow, is uncertain. By the end, Bob and Margaret have each resigned themselves to that particular fate.

Never Say Pink Furry Die (aka Save It Till The Morning After)

Some Aardman productions are so obscure that they didn't even see the light of day in celebrations of the studio's obscurities.

The 2000 home media release Aardman Classics gave a comprehensive overview of the Bristol-based animation house's output pre-Chicken Run, but by no means a complete one. The DVD edition came with a booklet, Insideaard, offering a handy breakdown of the studio's filmography, and if you studied it extensively, you were going to pick up on a few glaring gaps here and there. The lack of Morph or Wallace and Gromit was self-explanatory, since this was intended as a showcase for the studio's assorted one-offs and oddities, with the Creature Comforts pieces as its obvious selling point. Other notable omissions included the preliminary Rex The Runt shorts (assuming you weren't counting Ident), the preliminary Angry Kid shorts, and any of the studio's advertising work outside of Creature Comforts. Also predominantly overlooked was the studio's music video credits, the only featured example being the quirky visual accompaniment created for Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me" in 1987. From a representational standpoint, the absence of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" (easily the most esteemed of Aardman's music video collaborations) seems hard to justify, but maybe there was an issue with licencing. The most mysterious of the snubbed items was a 1989 piece entitled Liftin' The Blues, credited to David Sproxton; to this day, the film continues to elude me, but I have gathered that it was an aviation documentary, which sounds intriguingly out of Aardman's wheelhouse. I fear that its hefty 52 minutes running time might have immediately precluded it from making this compilation, however. A more head-scratching omission would be the 1992 short, Never Say Pink Furry Die, which running at just shy of 11 minutes you'd think they might have squeezed into the mix. I wonder what the story was there? Was the implied sex scene considered a notch too ribald for the family audiences? It's not as though Aardman Classics was an overwhelmingly kid-friendly release anyway, what with the psychological horrors of Stage Fright and the apocalyptic visions of Babylon.

Never Say Pink Furry Die came about during the era when Aardman was regularly allowing its younger talent to create their own projects for Channel 4 - it's how Nick Park, Barry Purves and Richard Starzak were able to get their names into the limelight. This film's creator, Louise Spraggon, doesn't seem to have stuck with Aardman in the aftermath, which is a shame - partly because it is nice to see an Aardman project fronted by a female talent, but also because, while bedevilled with all the roughness of a first effort, it has promise, and I would have been interested to have seen how Spraggon's craft might have developed from here. The claymation visuals look considerably less refined than much of its contemporaries, but I quite like the homespun qualities, particularly the crudely-sketched, predominantly plain environments, which seem warmly nostalgic for the stop motion Paddington series from 1976.

The first thing to be said about the set-up of Never Say Pink Furry Die is how reminiscent the central dynamic is of Wallace and Gromit. Once again we have a master/pet relationship in which the pet is visibly the brains of the operation, although in this scenario both characters are equally non-verbal. The plot follows a young woman who wakes up with the mother of all hangovers, on a Friday the 13th that, most inconveniently, happens to be the day she's scheduled to get married. She's supported through her morning preparations by her far more organised feline companion, who clearly has a greater determination to get her to that alter on time...I don't know about you, but I don't think that exactly bodes well for her future union with her unseen groom. The matter gets thornier still - nestled within the woman's cleavage is a most peculiar item, the titular pink furry die, stoking hazy memories about possible misspent passions that unfolded the night before. We get flashbacks depicting her on what I presume to be her hen night, only there doesn't seem to be anybody out celebrating with her; either her friends have all ditched her at the bar, or she's henning it up by her lonesome. There is, in fact, only one other character in the full short besides the central duo, and they don't show up until the climax. Such is the paradox of Never Say Pink Furry Die; at times it seems so very busy and stuffed with details (the array of food packages, shrivelling Venus fly traps and half-eaten fry-ups on the kitchen unit, the records and magazines strewn across the bedroom floor), whilst being pervaded by so much dead and strangely empty space. Which takes us into its obvious shortcoming - the pacing of the short is listless to a baffling degree. There doesn't seem to be much urgency in how the narrative progresses, which isn't exactly ideal given that our antagonist is a ticking clock. What plot there is could have been told in less than half the run time, but there are long stretches focussed on giving a slice of life glimpse into the daily living routine of this woman and her cat, with the ostensibly pressing matter of the wedding rising to the surface only intermittently, whenever the cat glances at his wristwatch and a ceremonial leitmotif obligingly sounds. Otherwise, it's almost comical just how lightly the wedding seems to weigh on the narrative, never developing into anything other than a vague motivation for the characters to (just about) keep moving. We don't get much indication that this woman's heart is really in it - to the extent that she might just as well be going to a friend's birthday party, not the supposed happiest day of her life. Or is her terminal indifference all part of the joke?

For as long as it takes for the narrative to get to the point, the ending comes oddly abruptly, and this is where the tone of the pieces shifts into something flagrantly more sinister. We never get to the wedding, and by the credits it's honestly hard to say if the characters are even headed there at all. Given the groom's total lack of corporeality, the betrayal that's ultimately felt comes not so much at the closing revelation that it was the vicar with whom our protagonist knocked boots the night before (presumably the same vicar who's going to oversee her wedding ceremony, though it's not made explicitly clear) than at the fade-out, for abandoning us at this point in the story, and in the company of such a skin-crawling individual. When the vicar enters the picture, to assist the main duo with their broken-down vehicle, he is an immediately unsettling figure, with his eyes obscured behind his glasses, although deceptively, his initial function is to dispense quirky sight gags, with his car boot-ready alter, cross that doubles as a spanner, and unintentional substitution of petrol with holy water. Once the woman and cat have joined him in his van, and the furry die has been slotted back into its proper place, along with the last remaining fragments of clarity as to what went on that fateful night, it comes together less like a wacky comedy reveal than a moment of genuine squeamish horror. The general emptiness that's pervaded the film up until now - the seeming lack of anyone in this world besides the protagonist, her cat and this mysterious third party - suddenly feels treacherous, as though the predatory vicar has been closing in on this woman the entire time and she has unwittingly been all alone in his presence. The final arrangement, which finds the duo stranded in the vicar's ever-accelerating van, suggests a situation hurtling ever more critically out of control. The closing image codes them as having entered into a twisted symbolic marriage, bound by their mutually scandalous secret, with the license plate of the towed vehicle trailing behind in the style of "Just married" signage, while Peter Brandt's hazy background score feels evocative of a nightmare unravelling. I don't know if I'd go so far as to conclude that the vicar has literally kidnapped this young bride and her cat, but it does seem evident that their tribulation is just beginning - that, despite the increased speed, they aren't getting anywhere fast, except ever deeper into the whirlwind of chaos.

Humdrum (aka Fear of A Midday Shadow)

If you owned a copy of the 2000 home media release Aardman Classics, you might recall just how flat-out unsettling the compilation got the deeper you delved into its centre. For those who only knew the Bristol-based animation studio for the Morph skits and the creations of Nick Park, I'd imagine this would have been one heck of a bucket of ice water. Things got off to a deceptively genial start, with the original Creature Comforts short and the first of the spin-off ads for electric heaters featuring Frank the tortoise. Then Pib and Pog appeared, in all of their mean-minded, psuedo-educational glory, and things were thrown just a little off of balance. The Creature Comforts gang resurfaced, and for a fleeting moment we felt like we were safe again...right before were slap-dab in the middle of an incredibly fucked-up computer animated bit about a minotaur murdering a duck with the help of a severed hand. Sandwiching Minotaur and Little Nerkin in between the two ads about the dishwasher-loving pandas had the effect of making the pandas seem utterly false; going back to their smiling faces immediately after witnessing the horrors inflicted on that duck was like to having to resume your place at a dinner party after being privy to some enormously disturbing gossip about your host. There was some agreeable content ahead - War Story, Wat's Pig, a music video where a claymation cat with the vocals of Nina Simone performs "My Baby Just Cares For Me" - but "Heat Electric - Penguins 3 and Pablo" would be the last stop before a very disconcerting stretch throughout the middle, where we were basically leaping from one bite-sized nightmare to the next. Stage Fright, Pop, Ident, Loves Me, Loves Me Not - it was a non-stop parade of sleep-robbing freakiness. Obviously nothing else among them was as dark and sobering as the apocalyptic drama Babylon, but twisted psyches with full creative freedom clearly were endemic to the studio. The end of the compilation took us back into calmer territory, with the grimy realism of the Conversation Pieces and Animated Conversations, but even then they had to stick on one final scare to send us home with, in the form of Boris Kossmehl's Not Without My Handbag. In 2006 Aardman released another compilation, Aardman's Darkside, touted as a glimpse into the studio's nastier, more adult-orientated underbelly, but I personally saw very little difference between the films therein and at least half the line-up of Aardman Classics. Family-friendly was definitely not their default setting in the days before Chicken Run.

Lurking amid that sinister middle stretch was the 1998 film Humdrum - a short that, based on the opening credits, I had seriously expected to be a lot darker than it was. Everything about the title sequence - the deeply ominous musical notes, the black backdrop, the abrasive, jagged lettering -  suggests something truly terrifying is in store. Which may well be part of the joke; we enter into Humdrum prepped for a more dramatic affair than actually transpires. Instead, the key characters, two shadowy entities voiced by Scottish comedians Jack Docherty and Moray Hunter, are navigating a nightmare of a whole other nature, one that has less in common with the overt horrors of Stage Fright and Not Without My Handbag than the plight expressed by the verbose zoo animals in Creature Comforts. Stuck indoors and fed up of staring at the same four walls all day, the shadows spend the entirety of the six and a half minute runtime in search of alleviation from the stifling monotony. Their names are never disclosed, but I've taken the liberty of applying my own for the purposes of this review - Pawn, the thoroughly morose one (Docherty), and Rook, the intermittently exuberant one (Hunter), based on the chess pieces their heads resemble. This design choice strikes me as entirely deliberate, since the game of chess comes up explicitly in the dialogue, with Pawn recounting what happened on a previous and (we presume) equally boring occasion, when Rook made him eat all of the white pieces after losing a bet. He indicates that most of the pieces have yet to work their way through his digestive system (though he thought he saw a couple of pawns yesterday), a gleefully scatological gag that takes on added resonance if we view it as a mirror to the characters' own predicament, engulfed by a smothering monotony and desperately looking for an exit that never appears. The idea that the characters themselves are chess pieces also calls attention to their positioning for most of the film, perched at opposite ends of a table, suggesting that they are, whether knowingly or not, opponents and not allies in their ongoing entrapment. In the absence of any other distractions, they have nothing to gaze into except the dark abyss of one another, their every move a bid to keep not only the monotony from gnawing away them, but their companion's eccentricities too. Pawn is, unsurprisingly, the underdog in this equation, with Rook appearing to outmanoeuvre him at virtually every turn, and we sympathise with Pawn all the better for it.

Humdrum was directed by Peter Peake, the particular twisted psyche behind the aforementioned Pib and Pog, with a script doctoring credit for Rex the Runt creator Richard Starzak (then known as Richard Goleszowski). The film takes a unique visual approach - like your archetypal Aardman production, it uses stop motion figures, with the twist that the camera in this case is interested not in the figures themselves but in the shadows they cast. Seemingly detached from any corporeal bodies, Pawn and Rook exist only as murky, one-dimensional entities who nevertheless manage to be entirely fluid and expressive with the limited features they have. They seem at once alive and stranded in a ghostly state of only half-existence, distorted imitations of a full-bodied world that seems eerily unrealised. Meanwhile, the blistered backdrops onto which the shadows are projected take on a low-key life of their own, reflections of the protagonists' barren mental states that intermittently shift to signify the nascent traces of evanescent preoccupations. When the game of chess is mentioned, the wall assumes the checkered pattern of a chess board. When a cow is cited, the blotchy markings of a bovine's hide can be seen. The uncanniness of the visuals is buffered by the distinctly human warmth of the characters' banter, the dialogue between Pawn and Rook being both hilarious and natural. If you were watching it on the Aardman Classics compilation, then that warmth, coupled with the relative simplicity of the piece, came as a great relief following after the busyness and mean-spiritedness of the preceding Stage Fright. Starzak's playful touch seems particularly evident in the film's bluntly self-aware script, incorporating multiple barbs at its own nicheness. The possibility of turning to the television for escapism is dismissed early on, when we're told all that's on is "some weird animation thing". The major development that dominates the latter stages of the film - Rook's proposal that they entertain themselves by creating shadow puppets with their own hands - is met with weary disdain from Pawn: "I can't think of anything more boring that staring at some stupid shadows, for god's sake! Is this what happens when you don't have any friends?!" Elsewhere, Humdrum looks to be making some broader comment on our relationship with popular entertainment and the extent to which it alleviates or reinforces our monotony. The radio proves as futile a means of diversion as the television, bearing out Pawn's gloomy assessment that music "is all the same rubbish these days", with every station the characters tune into broadcasting some variation on "La Cucaracha".

The real purpose of the shadow world is to allow for a series of clever twists regarding the nature of perception. In the first half of the short, a momentary distraction arises in the form of a dog (or, more accurately, the shadow of a dog) barking at the protagonists' doorstep, which Pawn indignantly attempts to send packing. We think we understand what's going on, until Rook shows up and identifies the dog as a double-glazing salesman, who has apparently pestered the shadows on previous occasions. Our natural assumption would be that Rook is simply in cloud cuckoo land, until the door is closed and the dog, suddenly speaking in plain English, confirms his perception. It becomes even funnier when you rewatch the sequence with the knowledge that Pawn is always addressing the caller as a double-glazing salesman and not a dog; it makes me wonder, likewise, if the dog is actually barking from the protagonists' perspective, or if it's all just a comical means of conveying a particularly incessant sales pitch?

The interlude with the dog seems initially to be nothing more than a random sprinkling of absurdity, but later transpires to have laid the ground for the punchline of the short, once the game of shadow puppets has unfolded and become increasingly heated. As noted, the viewer's sympathies are invariably with Pawn, since he is the character with whom our perspectives are more firmly aligned. Odds are that we too would not recognise Rook's ridiculous attempt at contorting his digits into the shape of a cow, before he supplies the giveaway mooing (Pawn quite accurately observes that it looks more like he has his hands caught in a sandwich toaster). By contrast, Pawn's wizardry in creating an astonishingly fluid rabbit shadow is always painfully conspicuous to us, even when Rook insists that it looks more like an otter with two sausages tied to its head. It all climaxes with a deliciously cathartic moment where Pawn finally loses it with the hopelessly obtuse Rook: "I'm stuck indoors playing Guess The Misshapen Beast with someone who clearly wouldn't recognise a rabbit if it came to his house for tea, said "What's up, Doc?" and started burrowing into his head! There are blind people with no fingers who are better at shadow puppets than you! No wonder I'm a tad miffed!" All thoroughly just criticisms...except it's all tipped on its head in the closing moments, when a second caller appears at the door, a mooing shadow that perfectly matches Rook's prior attempt at creating a cow. Something even more shockingly unexpected then occurs - for the first time, we see a smile form across Pawn's face. "Not today, thank you," he says politely, before closing the door, seemingly unfazed by the irony of the situation. While it's certainly gratifying to see things end on a more buoyant note for the beleaguered Pawn, it's here that we also part ways with the character, seeing how our perspective no longer lines up with his. Suddenly, he seems at totally peace with the absurdity of his surroundings, and what's obviously normal to him has us scratching our heads with regard to what we're actually looking at. Is this hideously misshapen beast an accurate representation after all of how bovines look in this world? Is it another door to door salesperson flogging their unwanted wares? A grand cosmic joke at the expense of Pawn? A meta joke at the expense of the animators? All of those things at once? Has Pawn potentially been the daffy one all along, while Rook has a firmer grasp on the realities of the shadow world? After all, we never get any objective insight into how a rabbit even looks in this universe, outside of Pawn's projection - for all we know, his efforts really do look more like an otter with sausages protruding from its head. Or is Pawn simply calmly rejecting the film's final efforts to make a fool of him? All that matters is that Pawn is now in on something that we aren't, and it seems significant that he closes the door while facing the viewer, effectively ejecting them from the premises and leaving them out in the cold. The music heard during the end credits, yet another variation on "La Cucaracha", offers a striking contrast to the music featured during the title sequence and seems almost mocking of the viewer's confusion.

Humdrum was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short, but lost to Aleksandr Petrov's take on The Old Man and The Sea - a film to which there was seriously no shame in losing. I'm just happy that it got some recognition, since like a lot of the studio's projects that weren't helmed by Nick Park, it remains something of a hidden oddity. It's disconcerting as hell, yet basically genial enough that it helped the psychological scarring from elsewhere on the Aardman Classics release to go down more easily, which speaks volumes to Aardman's character at the time.

The Case For Sidney's Family Tree (aka Knighty Knight Bugs Is A Stupid Cartoon)

There have been many, many contentious Oscar rivalries across the decades, but few quite so endearingly offbeat as that between Looney Tunes mega star Bugs Bunny and Terrytoons newcomer Silly Sidney the elephant, who in 1959 went against each other for the Academy Award For Best Animated Short Film (or Best Short Subjects, Cartoons, as it was then known). Actually, when Bugs' entry, Knighty Knight Bugs, triumphed and Sidney's Family Tree was sent away empty-handed, I doubt it was considered a terribly earth-shattering outcome from anyone within the industry. After years of languishing in the shadows of Disney and MGM, Warner Bros were increasingly becoming the studio to beat for Short Subjects; Knighty Knight Bugs represented their fifth overall win, four of which had occurred within the past decade (Knighty Knight Bugs would prove to be the last of their victories, as the 1960s were a spectacularly unkind time to the Looney Tunes, and to theatrical animation in general). Terrytoons, meanwhile, seldom had their shot at Oscar glory, with Sidney's Family Tree being only their fourth nomination in the history of the award, and the taste of victory was consistently denied them. In the years that followed, it seems unlikely that many people lost sleep over the match-up, or even gave it a second thought. And then, 31 years after the fact, it suddenly gained retroactive notoriety, when it became the basis of the Tiny Toon Adventures episode, "Who Bopped Bugs Bunny?" It was 1990, and Sidney was back from the abyss of obscurity...in a manner of speaking. The elephant in question went by the name of "Sappy Stanley" and his character design was given a grotesque modification, courtesy of John Kricfalusi, so that his mouth was located inside his trunk. It was patently obvious that this was meant to be Sidney, however. He was still bitter about losing to Bugs after all these years, and apparently vindictive enough to kidnap the rabbit and steal his Oscar (or Shloscar, as it was called in-universe), setting Daffy Duck up to take the fall along the way - a startling turn of events for an elephant who, in his original series of shorts, was never depicted as having a mean bone in his body. ^[1] That's what the sting of losing to Knighty Knight Bugs had done to him!  This portrayal of Sidney (sorry, "Stanley") was voiced by Jonathan Winters, and for an entire generation of children (yours truly among them) he would have been their introduction to the character. And what a first impression! Casting him as a villain with such a vicious axe to grind might seem like a terribly mean-spirited move (this was, after all, a written-by-the-victors scenario, with Warner Bros mocking a character they'd already defeated once), but they made a singularly cool antagonist out of the neurotic elephant. Far from defiling Sidney's legacy, they gifted it with a fun and affectionate new twist.

When confronted by Babs and Buster, Stanley's justification for his crimes was that he deserved the award by right for good taste, since "Knighty Knight Bugs is a stupid cartoon". That's a sentiment to which I am honestly very sympathetic. While I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to call Knighty Knight Bugs "stupid", I do find it astonishing to think that the ONLY Oscar of Bugs' entire rich career was for this cartoon. They couldn't have picked a more pedestrian, more middle of the road example of his work if they'd tried. There is nothing outstanding about it other than that it happens to be Bugs Bunny's sole Oscar win. That it won the award while the phenomenal What's Opera, Doc? (1957) wasn't even nominated a year prior feels like a sick cosmic joke in itself. But then nominations for Bugs shorts were surprisingly sparse in general - only two shorts, A Wild Hare (1940) and Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt (1941) had previously attained the honor. The success of Knighty Knight Bugs is a blatant example of the Academy handing out a win not on the merits of the nomination itself, but in compensation for their having overlooked a body of much stronger works to an artist's name. On that basis, I think Sidney/Stanley has every right to feel aggrieved.

Could Sidney's Family Tree actually have beaten Knighty Knight Bugs in a battle based solely on the respective merits of each cartoon? Here's where Sidney's Family Tree would still be at a hot disadvantage - there is little getting around the fact that the animation in Knighty Knight Bugs is of a considerably higher quality than that of Sidney's Family Tree. Terrytoons was, after all, renowned for doing things on the cheap. Studio founder Paul Terry infamously cared more about the quantity of his output than the quality and never had any pretensions to making serious art. Sidney himself came about as part of a new wave of Terrytoons characters created after Terry retired in the mid-1950s, leaving his studio in the hands of Gene Deitch (remembered chiefly for his infamous run of Tom & Jerry shorts in the early 1960s). Deitch's strategy had been to move away from the studio's existing store of characters (Mighty Mouse, Heckle & Jeckle, Little Roquefort & Percy) in favour of implementing new blood, and with only a fraction of the budgets of his already notoriously frugal predecessor. A former apprentice of United Productions of America, Deitch applied that studio's approach of limited animation against basic, undetailed backgrounds (techniques that would prove instrumental with animation's impending shift to being a medium of television) ^[2]. And lo, the look of Terrytoons got even cheaper. A second's glance at Sidney's Family Tree would clue you in that this was a considerably less prestigious production than Knighty Knight Bugs.

Likewise, it is important to acknowledge that the competition for Best Animated Short of 1958 was hardly a two-horse race, three contenders being the category's bare minimum. Sidney had not just the heavy-hitters at Warner Bros to worry about, but Disney too. The also-ran who's largely been squeezed out of this discussion is Paul Bunyan, the House of Mouse's take on the overgrown lumberjack of American folklore. But then again Disney, the undisputed kings of this award in the 1930s, had fallen quite vastly out of favour by the 1950s. Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Bloom (1953) was their only win for Best Animated Short that whole decade. At a hefty 17 minutes, Paul Bunyan was certainly the most epic short in contention that year, although that might even have worked against it. It goes on a long time and offers rather a wishy washy pay-off. I can see why Academy voters might have felt underwhelmed by it. Whatever their shortcomings, Knighty Knight Bugs and Sidney's Family Tree do have the virtue of being short.

Somehow, it's my impression that 1958 wasn't the strongest of years for short animation, and Academy voters weren't exactly left with an embarrassment of riches at the end of it. They had their choice of the mediocre Bugs Bunny cartoon, the interminable shaggy dog story from Disney, or the unassuming, frugally-animated short about the unknown elephant. "Oh jeez. Well, everyone loves Bug Bunny, and this is his first nomination in 17 years. Let's just give it to him now while we have the chance, and take a load off our consciences." It's not fair, but it's where we are.

Am I really poised to argue that Sidney's Family Tree was the worthiest of the three nominees after all? I'm sure that part of the joke, in Tiny Toon Adventures, was in Sidney/Stanley ever seeing himself as a serious contender to begin with. And yet where Sidney's Family Tree is at an advantage, at least in my eyes, is that, unlike Knighty Knight Bugs, it actually feels like it's about something. That something being neediness. The characters have a loneliness and a vulnerability that makes them endearing, even if it exists largely within the subtext. It may not be the most technically accomplished of the three entrants, but is the one to which I am the most warmly-disposed.

Sidney's Family Tree was only the second of Sidney's adventures (he'd made his debut earlier that same year with Sick, Sick Sidney).  Directed by Art Bartsch, it follows Sidney (voice of Lionel Wilson, better known to modern viewers as Eustace from the early seasons of Courage The Cowardly Dog) in his efforts to find himself an adoptive family. The whereabouts of his biological parents are accounted for in a verse recited by Sidney during the opening credits; they joined a circus and left him alone in the jungle. Initially, his plight is met with little sympathy by the other animals, who remind Sidney that he's 44 years old. Which is one of Sidney's main running gags - his crippling anxieties about having to live in the adult world whilst being a perpetual kid at heart. And really, who couldn't relate to that? The guy's cast off and alone in the world, being in his 40s doesn't preclude him from still not having a clue what he's doing, and all he yearns for is a whisker of emotional security and validation. He tries taking his case to a passing hippo and giraffe, but gets brushed aside in both cases. They've already got offspring of their own, and don't have time to be indulging a neurotic elephant on the side. (The giraffe, incidentally, is named Cleo, and she would become a recurring character in Sidney's subsequent cartoons. For now, Sidney addresses her only as "Mrs So-and-So", which probably isn't going to score him many points in the courtesy leagues. She seems to know exactly who he is, however.) 

Sidney's luck changes when he runs into an animal also looking to fill an emotional void, a female chimpanzee who's desperate for a baby of her own, but doesn't have one. She eagerly agrees to be Sidney's adoptive mother, but her mate isn't so thrilled when she breaks the news that this two-ton elephant manchild is moving in with them. It's through what's implicit in the chimpanzees' interactions that the short adds a dash of hidden substance to its subtext. The male chimpanzee is every bit as keen to start a family as she is, and when she indicates that they've made good on that aspiration, his immediate assumption is clearly that she's pregnant. This is even reinforced with a cheeky subliminal visual gag, wherein he joyously squirts an obviously phallic banana out of its skin on thinking that he's finally managed to sire offspring of his own. It's not a point that the script particularly lingers on, but it's easy enough to read in between the lines and interpret the chimps as a couple who want to procreate, but haven't had much luck with the conception process. The female chimp sees Sidney as the answer to their problems, but the male isn't so willing to accept him as a baby substitute. The interplay between Sidney and his grudging adoptive Pop is where most of the narrative focus lies, as he first attempts to cope with the arrangement and then aspires to get rid of Sidney, but it also takes the time to establish a bond between Sidney and his mother, incorporating a tender moment where she knits him a trunk cozy and bids him a good night. The connection between the two seems heartfelt enough that you genuinely feel a sense of her pain at the end, when her mate announces that Sidney is out of their lives for good.

Sidney's Family Tree is an extraordinarily gentle cartoon. Possessing neither the loftiness of Paul Bunyan nor the anarchic aggression of Knighty Knight Bugs, it coasts along considerably on basic geniality. The very darkest thing that happens is when Sidney's adoptive father attempts to ditch him by trapping him inside a cave, which he obviously doesn't get far with. Even the frugal production values, and the all-round lack of technical sophistication, come together in ways that play to the film's merits. The plain, predominantly yellow backgrounds dusted with crude floral outlines are barebones as can be, yet they radiate a warmth and vibrancy. Phil Scheib's flute and percussion score is repetitive, but adds to the soothing ambience of the piece.

Sidney remains too naive and trusting to ever cotton onto the fact that his adoptive father doesn't want him around, interpreting his hostility as tokens of affection. His priorities seem to change, however, when a female elephant happens to wander past and catch his eye, and Sidney is compelled to follow after her, seemingly forgetting about his simian kin. The male chimp is giddy with delight, attempting to sell the outcome to his heartbroken mate as a case of nature running its course, an empty nest an inevitability she signed up to when she chose to take on a baby. His relief proves to be short-lived; as it turns out, Sidney still has no intention of taking his place within the adult world, reaffirming his commitment to his protracted childhood by inducting his new mate Hortense into the fold. The elephants show up at the chimps' tree and announce that they'll be moving in with them until they find their feet (as if that's ever going to happen). Sidney believes that they make the nicest family in the jungle, and while the closing visual gag, in which the branch collapses under their combined weight, would ostensibly undermine that, what's important is that they all go down together - a chaotic and unconventional unit, but ultimately as valid as any other, connected firmly by the basic need to be needed on both sides. I'm sure the male chimp will come round eventually (or maybe not - later Sidney shorts appear to indicate that Cleo the giraffe wound up becoming his parental figure after all, along with a lion who was ironically named Stanley).

Sidney's failure to beat Bugs to the Oscar did not deter him from enjoying a prosperous enough run of shorts. His cartoons continued up until 1964, by which point he had made the transition from theatrical animation to television (such were the changing times), finishing up his career as a supporting segment on The Hector Heathcote Show. Since then, he hasn't exactly remained at the forefront of public consciousness (few, if any, Terrytoons characters honestly have in the 2020s). An elephant never forgets (nor forgives, as his thinly-veiled resurfacing on Tiny Toon Adventures would bear out), but the world forgot Sidney long ago. His 1990 grudge match against Bugs, Babs and Buster, far from being a mean-spirited dig, was a real shot in the arm of relevancy for a character who'd been otherwise consigned to stagnation. My only regret is that they restricted Sidney/Stanley to that one episode and he did not become a recurring nemesis for the Tiny Toons gang. It was not, however, his last hurrah - Sidney was a featured character on Curbside, an attempted Terrytoons revival project made by Nickelodeon in 1999, in which he was voiced by Dee Bradley Baker, although this never got further than the pilot. As to whether we'll ever see Sidney again, who knows? Paramount Pictures currently owns the rights to the Terrytoons characters, but don't appear to be doing a great deal with them.

At the very least, Sidney has an Oscar nomination to his name, and that's something that can never be taken away from him. It's also one more Oscar nomination than Daffy Duck ever received (sad, but true).

Now if Tiny Toons Looniversity would just do something as awesome as to bring back Sappy Stanley, it might even be worth my while to watch it. So far as I can tell it hasn't happened, so the revival gets a hard pass from me.

[1] Although a latent dark side was arguably hinted in the short "Meat, Drink and Be Merry". This is the one where Sidney attempts to become a carnivore, and the way it plays out is so weird and unsettling, like he's aspiring to be the neighbourhood serial killer.

[2] Mind you, while Terrytoons never won this award, there was precedent for UPA doing so twice, with the Mr Magoo shorts When Magoo Flew (1954) and Magoo's Puddle Jumper (1956).

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.