Bundles of Joyce: Epic (aka Blue and Green Should Never Be Seen?)

I find it fascinating how in vogue the works of American children's author William Joyce were among animation bigwigs as the 2000s were going into the 2010s. In a period of roughly six years, we received no less than three feature adaptations of Joyce's books, each from a different Hollywood animation studio. Disney got in first on this trend, with the 2007 offering Meet The Robinsons, a loose re-working of Joyce's picture book A Day with Wilbur Robinson. In late 2012, DreamWorks' animation released Rise of The Guardians, taken from Joyce's book series The Guardians of Childhood, only for Blue Sky to round out this unofficial trilogy a few months later with Epic, their take on The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs. Joyce, who was also a prominent figure within the animation industry, having worked as a designer for Pixar's early features and a producer for Blue Sky's Robots (2005), had a finger in all three pies, serving as an executive producer for the Disney and DreamWorks entries and a screenwriter and production designer for Epic. A little project I've decided to set myself for 2025 is to provide a full retrospective of all three films, considering not only how they handle the themes and spirit of Joyce's works, but also the personal stamp that each studio managed to bring to the production. I'll admit to having a soft spot for this unsung triad; they basically all came and went, leaving nary a dent in zeitgeist, but stand out to me now as underrated examples of their respective studio's output, each very worthy of revisiting.

We'll be starting this retrospective with Epic - which was, chronologically, the last of the three to see the light of day, but this is a case where I'm allowing the seasons to dictate my ordering. Epic feels the most appropriate to be exploring during the transitional period between spring and summer, when the greenery is lush and the outside world is fully in bloom (the film is, specifically, set at the summer solstice, but I'm sure I can be forgiven for getting in a few weeks ahead). Meet The Robinsons, with its emphasis on overcoming regret and anticipating what the future will hold, seems better suited for the wistful days of a waning summer. The Rise of The Guardians technically takes place at Easter, but it so wants to be a Christmas movie and, as far as popular perception is concerned, it is a Christmas movie, so it can wait until the year is nearly through.

Besides, I have been wanting to get it off my chest for some time just how much I miss Blue Sky, now that they've been consigned to the Hollywood history books. They were not my favourite animation studio. I suspect they were the favourite of very few people, possessing neither the prestige of Pixar, the subversiveness of DreamWorks or Illumination's canniness in conceiving the most prolifically, nefariously merchandisable of characters. They were there, and they were relatively consistent, churning out Ice Age films on a regular basis, and projects that were generally pleasant, if unremarkable. It was easy to take them for granted. And yet when their closure was announced in April 2021, I and a lot of other animation fans felt very melancholic about the news. Just knowing that we'd lost a major voice in Hollywood animation felt like such a massive blow. I wouldn't say that I went as far as mourning the (ostensible) extinction of the Ice Age franchise, which had whittled down whatever patience I had remaining by its fourth installment, but I couldn't help but wonder about all of the other stories the studio might have told, and what new talent and direction could eventually have emerged that we would now never get to see in this timeline. In truth, the writing had already been on the wall for Blue Sky, as soon as their overlords at 20th Century Fox were acquired by Disney. The official explanation for the closure was that COVID-19 had made the studio's operations unsustainable, but even in late 2017, when the acquisition process was in its early stages, I remember there being a lot of speculation as to whether Disney would have sufficient interest in keeping Blue Sky going. They weren't exactly starving for animated output, and Blue Sky had spent much of the late 2010s struggling to find a money maker as reliable as the Ice Age franchise (which itself was beginning to show signs of diminishing financial returns with the fifth installment). Some might look on the development as the Circle of Life at its most unrelentingly brutal, as according to one of the testimonies in Dan Lund's 2005 documentary Dream On, Silly Dreamer, it was the overnight success of Blue Sky and the first Ice Age in 2002 that convinced the heads of Walt Disney Feature Animation to pull the plug on traditional animation. Blue Sky were, at one time, considered a threat by Disney. They played their part in redefining the course of Hollywood animation, only for Disney to ultimately claw its way back to the top, get itself into a position of authority over their former adversaries and to neutralise them without mercy.  As things stand, Annapurna Animation, which was founded by Blue Sky executives Robert L. Baird and Andrew Millstein in 2022, looks set to become their successor, their first release being Nimona (2023), a production previously scrapped under Disney's rule. Perhaps not surprisingly, the demise of Blue Sky wasn't enough to keep those pesky Ice Age critters from resurfacing - a spin-off film, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, dropped on Disney+ in 2022 (sans most of the original voice cast) and Ice Age 6 has since been confirmed, but that's all Disney's bugbear now.

Let's go back to May of 2013, when all that drama was still a number of years away, and Epic was the freshest entry into Blue Sky's canon. The film had been in gestation since as far back as 2006 and at one point had apparently come very close to moving over to Pixar (now that would have been an interesting turn of events, especially given Pixar's otherwise total avoidance of doing adaptations, unless you want to count A Bug's Life as an adaptation of the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant). It pulled in decent enough numbers at the box office, but nothing that was likely to convince the studio to abandon Ice Age in favour of a Leaf Man franchise, and reviews fell largely within the lukewarm range. I confess that I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it at the time. But there is something about it that intrigues me, and over the years has slowly worked its way into my affections. In fact, these days I might even go so far as to call it the standout of Blue Sky's output. That might be a contentious opinion, since I reckon a lot of people would argue that The Peanuts Movie (2015) is where they peaked. And yes, The Peanuts Movie is a very sweet and warm and loving tribute to the brainkids of Charles M. Schulz, but here's the thing - if I want to spend time with Charlie Brown and friends, I'm still far more likely to watch the traditionally animated television specials. It's a nice film, but by its nature kind of a redundant one. Whereas Epic is one of those films with a curious, even ludicrous hold on my fascinations. It's no masterpiece, but its numerous glaring imperfections make it all the more enthralling to me. My obsession with Epic is one with trying to parse the tensions between a messy final product and an underlying maturity that feels like it was desperately trying to find its way out into the open.

Children's picture books don't always make the most auspicious starting point for feature storytelling. Consider Hollywood's chequered history of bringing the works of Dr Seuss to the big screen (Blue Sky's own attempt, Horton Hears A Who, is broadly considered one of the better examples, if not exactly a classic). The recurring challenge tends to be that picture books usually don't have sufficient plot to fill up feature length, so you have to add a lot of extra detail and narrative fussiness to stories that were designed to be told with brevity. On the other hand, picture books often make for enchanting examples of visual storytelling, and it stands to reason that a filmmaking creative might be inspired to want to recreate a bit of that graphic verve on a cinematic canvas. The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs is also a much more plot-driven picture book than A Day With Wilbur Robinson, so in theory Blue Sky should have had the advantage over Disney here. Let's dig in and see how they fared.

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs about?

Published in 1996, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs tells the story of an elderly woman who loves her garden and recalls it being a place where magical things occurred in her childhood, although her memories are hazy as to the finer details. One day the woman falls ill, and her favourite item within the garden, a rosebush, begins to decline along with her. The grief of the woman's grandchildren is paralleled with that of the bugs who live in the garden and fear for the bush's future. A small metal toy that has lain lost in the garden for many years advises them to summon a legendary band of creatures known as the Leaf Men; to do so, they must ascend to the top of the tallest tree just as the full moon touches its topmost branch. A guild of doodlebugs (woodlice) makes the daring climb, and is opposed en route by the malicious Spider Queen and her ant minions, but manage to summon the Leaf Men, who defeat the Spider Queen. They then restore the rosebush to health and carry the Long-Lost Toy to the bedridden woman, along with one of the flowers from the bush. The woman is suddenly hit with a flood of memories, recalling that the toy and the rosebush were gifts from each of her parents as tokens of how they would always love and protect her. The woman recovers from her illness, and shares with her grandchildren the stories her parents told her in her childhood about the Leaf Men who lived in the garden and watched over it. Her grandson asks if the stories are true; the woman responds: "Things may come and things may go. But never forget - the garden is a miraculous place, and anything can happen on a beautiful moonlit night." The final illustration shows the bugs standing around a framed photograph of the woman as a small child, planting the rosebush with her parents. The book is dedicated to the memory of Joyce's friend John, described as his "brave, best pal".

 

How much of this is in Epic?

Not a lot. At this point I should highlight that the source story is specifically credited in Epic as the inspiration for the Leafmen characters ("Leafmen" being the stylisation the film prefers), which in itself is very telling. They are the only participants from Joyce's pages to have recognisably survived the transition to Hollywood blockbuster. Gone are the woman and her grandchildren, the doodlebugs, the Spider Queen, the ant goblins and the Long-Lost Toy.

Instead, the plot of Blue Sky's film focusses on the teenaged MK (voice of Amanda Seyfried), who following the death of her mother has returned to the home of her estranged father, Professor Radcliffe Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), an eccentric scientist attempting to prove the existence of a race of tiny humanoids in the local forest. MK takes one look at his research, decides that he's a lunatic and she should scarper, only to get shrunken down and caught up in the ongoing conflict between the very real Leafmen, promoters of life and growth within the forest, led by the hard-headed Ronin (Colin Farrell), and the sinister forces of decomposition, the Boggans, led by the smarmy Mandrake (Christop Waltz). The forest's ruler, floral being Queen Tara (Beyoncé Knowles), has just selected the pod set to bloom into her equally benevolent successor - but should the pod fall into Mandrake's hands, it will become corrupted, and the seed of the forest's inevitable destruction.

Director Chris Wedge called Joyce's original story "wonderful" but also "quaint", and cited Star Wars as the narrative the film more closely resembled. Between this film and Pixar's Lightyear, I am starting to think that it's maybe not such a great sign when an animated feature (or any type of feature) claims that it's specifically out to replicate the scale and feeling of Star Wars. Star Wars was one of those real lightning-in-a-bottle successes that Hollywood has been trying to emulate since the film's release in 1977, and learned many times over that it can't be done on demand. Still, in Epic's case, there is a certain poetic charm in the comparison. Star Wars was all about looking out to the galaxies beyond and wondering what kinds of vast, sweeping stories they could accommodate. Epic is about looking inward, at our own world, and wondering what kinds of similarly vast, sweeping stories might be happening on a microscopic level beneath our feet. There is plenty of magic, it argues, in the blades of grass growing beside our own doorstep, a view that is not out of step with the final assertion of Joyce's book. The Star Wars influence broadly manifests in the re-envisioning of the premise as a larger-scale struggle between forces of good and evil, but is at its most salient during a bird-racing sequence that seems consciously designed as a homage to the infamous pod race in The Phantom Menace (1999). Otherwise, comparisons feel more apt with Bill Kroyer's traditionally animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), another tale of a shrunken human accommodated by a race of tiny magical beings within a threatened forest.

Of the three Joyce feature adaptations, Epic is also notable for having the title that's furthest removed from its source material. The film's working title had been Leaf Men, and the decision to change it to Epic was apparently forced on the production by Fox's marketing department, to Wedge's chagrin (I do not blame him; Epic is a silly title). I can only assume that this was done in response to Disney's early-2010s love affair with vague, one-word titles designed to be snappy and to conceal any whiff of fairy tale quaintness (see Tangled, Brave, Frozen and the cancelled Gigantic).

 Where does Epic falter?

The translation from book to feature was an evidently uneasy one - there are five credited writers (including Joyce himself), a sign that it underwent multiple rewrites - with a finished production that feels like it's pulling in a myriad of directions. I can feel Blue Sky really wanting to grow and mature as a studio through this project. Wacky buddy comedies with talking animals were their bread and butter for most of their lifespan, so I did appreciate the attempt to craft a story with a noticeably more serious sense of adventure and mythology. Old habits die hard, however, and Epic isn't the radical break from the studio's formula that it might have been. The anthropomorphic minibeasts, though a part of Joyce's original story, muddle the world-building and mostly lower the tone (the non-anthropomorphic creatures, by contrast, are brought to life with flair and majesty, particularly a mouse that's able to be both adorable and wickedly threatening in the same sequence). The comic relief molluscs, Mub and Grub (Aziz Ansari, Chris O'Dowd), are very typical Blue Sky characters, heavily reminiscent of the possum duo from the Ice Age series, and so functionally useless as to suggest that they were worked in very late into the drafting process. The worst offender by far is an amphibian bookie voiced by Pitbull, whose screen presence proves mercifully minor. Every last detail about this character - his dialogue, his demeanor, his design, his wardrobe - marks him out as egregiously out of place within this world, and better suited to one of those "hip" and "modern" Beatrix Potter "adaptations" that weren't so far on the horizon.

Something else that I suspect was compromised between drafts are the environmental themes that go hand-in-hand with this type of setting, and feel frequently as though they're on the tip of the movie's tongue, only for it to pull back and play things entirely safe. The environmental themes in FernGully: The Last Rainforest are often criticised for being too broad and on the nose, but at the very least that film was entirely confident in what it intended to say via those themes. It's a cautionary story about humankind's sense of disconnect from the natural world, something that's challenged through the absorption of a man into a hidden world and his coming to see the consequences of his actions from a new perspective. As an eco-narrative, Epic seems hesitant to say anything much bolder than that the forest is good, and maybe mysterious. It's not that its environmental themes are more subtle than those of FernGully - more that they've been watered down to the point where they're barely present and, at times, barely coherent. We're told early on that, at its purest, the conflict between the Leafman and the Boggans constitutes a "balance", implying that both sides are playing a vital role in maintaining the forest, and that they might do well to look past their enmity and see their interactions as a form of as cooperation. This makes sense when we consider that decay is part of the process through which life is perpetuated. But it's belied through the depiction of one side as inherently good (identified as such in the opening narration) and the other as innately evil. The Star Wars model of a light side and a dark side seems curiously misapplied to the natural order.

But, enough carping. I've already established that Epic is no masterpiece, but I do think that it also has a lot going for it. The reason why it's slowly grown on me, particularly in the years since Blue Sky's closure, is that it is the picture that best exemplifies why I was so saddened to see them go. They were a studio that had the potential to grow into something much greater. They never quite got there, but you can see the glimmers of ambition and adroitness in this production. It's an incredibly good-looking film (there is a slight stiffness to some of the humanoid characters, but my god is that foliage to die for) and it takes itself and its world seriously whenever those molluscs and the (Pit)bullfrog aren't the focus. And for as little DNA from Joyce's book appears to survive in the final product, the hearts of the respective stories really aren't in such disparate places. There are themes from The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs that Epic carries over and recontextualises very ably into its revised setting.

 

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs REALLY about?

Nestled in Joyce's quaint story of brave bugs and arboreal soldiers is an implicit message about death, loss and renewal. The woman's parents are presumably long-departed, but we see how they have continued to be an active part of her life through her relationship with her garden, the items that were tokens of her parents' devotion and the memories they created together. The Long-Lost Toy (aka the Metal Man), a gift from her father, represents a connection to childhood innocence that was not gone for good but lying dormant all this time, waiting to be rediscovered. The rosebush that was planted by her mother gives life and comfort but requires nurturing in return (much like Mother Nature) - when the woman falls ill and is unable to care for it, the bush shrivels, threatening the creatures that depend on it. The triumph of the doodlebugs and the Leaf Men over the Spider Queen is the triumph of hope and resilience against the forces of despair. The fate of the garden is linked to the fate of the woman, but at the end of the story we see her pass the baton to the incoming generation by telling her grandchildren of her parents' legacy, through the gifts they left behind and their stories of the Leaf Men who continue to watch over the garden. The inevitability of death is evoked in the woman's reflection that "Things may come and things may go," but the garden is upheld as a constant in which wonderful things may continue to happen. This ongoing cycle of parental (and grandparental) reassurance is intertwined with the broader cycle of life, with the natural world becoming a site in which youthful imagination and wonder may remain forever active. It is a connection to the past that sustains the present while holding the seeds for the future, and much like the memories of our departed loved ones, requires that we cherish and tend to it for it to remain fresh and vibrant.

 

And how much of this is in Epic?

At heart, Epic is not fundamentally a story about tiny people who live in the forest and battle pint-sized decay-spreading demons. All of that action adventure stuff is really window dressing to a story about a father and daughter re-establishing communication after years of silence and coming to terms with their mutual grief for the absent mother. It's the scenes in Bomba's abode, focusing on the interactions between the our two human participants, that I specifically find the most earnestly intriguing. Bomba is the film's strongest character, not least because his character design is the most distinctively Joyce-esque.

The initial interplay between MK and Bomba establishes that communication between both parties is totally defunct. MK does not take Bomba up on his offer of discussing her bereavement, insisting that she is working through it on her own terms. And Bomba in turn does not pay due attention to MK when she attempts to raise the possibility that she might do better to live independently. When the shrunken MK later returns to the house and attempts, in vain, to gain her father's attention, very little has effectively changed, with Bomba still failing to grasp what is right under his nose because his sights are focussed in the wrong direction. Bomba has dedicated years to a fruitless hunt for the legendary Leafmen, peering at the world by way of the assorted surveillance cameras and monitors he has installed around the area, revealing to him only leaves and hummingbirds (we discover that the Leafmen are well aware of this "stomper" on their trail, and have been purposely misdirecting him this whole time). There transpires to have been a hidden agenda to this seemingly psychotic preoccupation - Bomba later admits to MK that he became increasingly subsumed in his study of the Leafmen because he'd hoped that if he proved their existence it would bring her mother back to him (an end goal that was ultimately more delusional than his belief in the Leafmen). This obsession with a past that's already slipped him by has merely impeded his ability to take advantage of what is there for him in the present, allowing his relationship with his daughter to grow distant and stagnant in a way that's contrary to his desire to salvage the family he's thoroughly alienated. At one point, MK calls him out for being so fixated on taking advantage of every given opportunity to scout out the Leafmen that he misses an opportunity to be there for her as a father.

A prevalent theme of loss runs all throughout Epic, with most of the main characters grappling with some form of personal bereavement (this theme becomes all the more palpable with the knowledge that MK, or Mary Katherine, was named after Joyce's own daughter, who sadly passed away in 2010). Nod (Josh Hutcherson), the brash young leafman with eyes for MK, was taken under the wing of Ronin after the death of his biological father. Ronin suffers his own loss when Queen Tara, his long-running love interest, is fatally wounded protecting the pod (like MK, however, he chooses to keep his emotions bottled). Even the evil Boggans are not immune to feelings of grief. Adding a little dimension to Mandrake's villainy is that he is himself in mourning for his son and general Dagda (Blake Anderson), who is killed in an early confrontation with the Leafmen. Part of his motivation for seizing control of the pod is that he sees it as a way of regaining the heir that was taken from him. A very paternal figure, his quest becomes a darker echo of Bomba's objective of obtaining proof of the Leafmen in order to regain his lost life; both are scenarios in which destruction will invariably follow.

What MK and Bomba have in common is that both are alone in the world. Bomba has spent the last decade or so being shunned professionally and familially for devoting all of his time and energy to his crackpot research project, while MK has just lost her caregiver and emotional bedrock and been consigned to a man who is effectively a stranger to her. They spend the narrative in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a beautiful but remote wilderness that emphasises their sense of separation from anything beyond themselves, not least one another. There is, notably, only one other human character seen in the entire 102 minute runtime, that being the taxi driver (Judah Friedlander) who drops MK off at her new abode and promptly high tails it out of there. Bomba is absorbed in the Leafmen's domain in a figurative sense, lost in his aspirations of finding vindication and recovery within. MK's literal absorption, meanwhile, becomes a metaphor for her having to navigate through a big and overwhelming world in which she is seemingly all on her own, unable to make herself heard and at constant risk of being devoured whole. She finds solidarity in the Leafmen, who introduce her to their philosophy of "Many leaves, one tree", by which all things are connected and each individual becomes valuable in relation to a bigger picture. This is challenged by Mandrake, who proposes that the tree is ultimately indifferent to the fate of the individual leaf, pointing out that, "In the end, every leaf falls and dies alone". Mandrake gives a menacing voice to MK's feelings of parental abandonment, while the Leafmen, whose final display of unity is enough to decisively thwart the king of decay, become proxies for familial devotion, reaffirming the same sense of enduring parental security as they did in Joyce's book. The symbolism of nature as a force that nurtures and sustains us all is also discernible.

The rosebush and the Metal Man do not feature in the film, but there is a character who serves as a kind of equivalent to both, in the form of Ozzy, the three-legged, one-eyed pug who was the Bomba family's pet during their time of unity, and was left with the professor when MK and her mother moved out. Quite how long MK has spent apart from her father is not established, but it's clearly longer than the average pug's lifespan - on arriving at her father's home, MK is vocally surprised to be greeted by Ozzy and to discover that her childhood pet is still alive. The dog is a connection to a more innocent past, and an indication that her bond with her father is not as dead in the water as she assumes; Ozzy's battered physique reflects the damage inflicted on their relationship by their time apart, but his amazing vitality offers reassurance that their underlying love has ultimately endured. A photograph showing the young MK with her parents and Ozzy as a puppy features a couple of times in the story, echoing the photograph illustration seen at the end of Joyce's book. Ozzy's movements and actions often anticipate Bomba's, indicating that he functions as an extension of her father; he becomes an inadvertent threat to the shrunken MK right before Bomba unwittingly creates trouble for her, and he later saves MK from a Boggan, prefacing Bomba's coming to her aid at a crucial moment in the climax.

By the end of the film, MK and Bomba have succeeded in overcoming the hurdles that have prevented them from efficiently communicating. MK finds a way to let her father in on her location, by repositioning a thumb tack on his map of the forest, while Bomba is able to use the technology he's honed during his pursuit of the Leafmen to make MK intelligible to his ears. By the time MK has been restored to her proper size, she and her father are now firmly on the same page. The wilderness that once reflected their mutual isolation becomes a source of open affinity, with MK able to freely resume her dialogue with Nod via the surveillance monitors, mirroring the open communication she now enjoys with her father. Whether Bomba can get the wider scientific community on board with his latest findings now that he has his daughter to back him up is irrelevant - what matters is that the study of the Leafmen, a once contentious topic that kept them at odds, is now a means for them to grow and learn together. We leave with them racing out enthusiastically into the woods, eager to enhance their bond with their diminutive friends.

One criticism I do have of how Epic handles the theme of loss, compared to its source material, is that the deceased mother is never fleshed out in a way that causes her to feel like anything other than a plot device. We don't learn anything about her other than the most obvious details needed to kick the conflict into gear - ie: that she was close to MK and disapproved of her husband's research. The parents in The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs were never seen in the flesh, but had a distinct presence via the components of the garden and the memories the woman had created therein; you felt as though you knew so much about their relationship and they ways in which they were still being felt just by glancing at that poignant illustration of the Metal Man and the rose in her hand. Epic would have benefited from giving us at least a little more flavour of who MK's mother was, perhaps through an item of her own that she'd left behind at the house. But as a story about mending broken bridges and finding your way back into a kinship thought long-lost, it really is quite lovely. That we may perceive in it an expression of Joyce's own desire to reconnect with the real Mary Katherine makes it all the more poignant, and genuine.

In addition, I really do love that entire sequence with the predatory mouse. It so neatly exploits the fact that, when you view a mouse or rat's head from the underside, it does kind of resemble a shark.

Living In The Bottle: The Trial (One Foot In The Grave)

Of the pentad of bottle episodes that emerged during the run of BBC sitcom One Foot In The Grave, "The Trial" stands out as the obvious outlier. The other four more-or-less adhered to a certain set of narrative rules, laid out by the first of these efforts, "Timeless Time". Victor and Margaret would be mired in some uncomfortable situation where time had been brought to a complete standstill, Victor would openly muse on whichever of life's assorted annoyances was bugging him most in that particular moment, intermittently pushing Margaret to breaking point along the way, until finally their testiness dissolved into mutual melancholia, as they reflected on past heartbreaks and scuppered ambitions ("The Beast In The Cage" being the only one to do so without delving into any specific, hitherto-unspoken-of instances from the characters' backstories). The seemingly mundane framing scenarios - a sleepless night, a bank holiday spent seated in a traffic jam, a stretch in a waiting room where every other client seems to be called before you, an evening in a prolonged blackout - become clever metaphors for life's broader trials and aggravations, and close deliberately without resolution, other than Victor and Margaret quietly acknowledging that their only recourse is to grin and bear whatever lies ahead. Each episode did its own thing to differentiate proceedings ("The Beast In The Cage" added supporting player Mrs Warboys to the dynamic, while "Threatening Weather" has apocalyptic undertones that seemed to knowingly anticipate the impending end of the series), but the basic structure was not immensely different. "The Trial", which aired on 28th February 1993 as part of the fourth series, makes the most radical deviation from the formula, by removing one key element - on this occasion, Margaret does not have to share in Victor's entrapment. This one deals with Victor being stuck indoors whilst on call for jury service, having been sent home to await further instructions on when he'll be needed. Margaret, meanwhile, is out of the picture, presumably working in her day job as a florist, although it's never explicitly stated where she is. Most bottle episodes were basically two-handers, focussing on the dynamic between Victor and Margaret and emphasising that they were fundamentally in all of these hardships together (however reluctantly on Margaret's part) by virtue of their union. But this time the hardship was Victor's to bear, and Victor's alone.

The result is the only episode of One Foot In The Grave in which Margaret never appears. Even the Comic Relief sketch from the same year, "The Bath", which consisted of Victor musing on more of life's inconveniences from within the tub, managed to incorporate Margaret somewhere, by way of an answering machine recording. But what's more surprising is how little indirect presence Margaret has; Victor mentions her in precisely one scene, when he realises that he can't find his flannel because Margaret has tidied it away, purportedly so they'll always know where it is, which in practice only makes it harder for him to find. It's a rare moment in which we get to see Victor grumble about Margaret's annoying tendencies behind her back (the reverse happens a lot more frequently throughout the series). Otherwise, "The Trial" plays almost as a glimpse into a parallel reality in which Victor lives alone, and doesn't have Margaret to act as the neutralising straight woman to his continual carping. And make no mistake, that is the real entrapment. Victor is stranded not merely inside his own house, but inside his own head, having nobody to play off of except himself. Tempting though it will be to file this one in the Index of Conflict as a Man vs. God narrative, it's really a case of Man vs. Self. Well perhaps. Man vs. God is certainly the narrative Victor perceives throughout - he sees himself as perpetually at the mercy of some divine judgement, cruel and arbitrary in its retribution, and with a particular interest in sabotaging his day. It's an opinion he expresses early on, in his churlish observation that the storm clouds currently cluttering up the sky only appeared as he was starting to unwind the flex on his lawnmower. And in its opening shots, the episode certainly invites the viewer to share in his paranoia that there may be darker forces conspiring around him; in lieu of the opening sequence with the tortoise stock footage (which would disappear from the bottle episodes from this point onward) we're faced immediately with those ominous, rumbling clouds, followed by the curious foregrounding of a crow perched in a tree branching overlooking the Meldrews' house, that cliched symbol of foreboding.

That crow is, incidentally, the only living being glimpsed onscreen for the full 28 and a half minutes other than Victor himself. "The Trial" is really a full-on monologue, in which Richard Wilson is presented with the challenge of having to carry the action entirely by himself, something he accomplishes with utter aplomb. That's not to say that Victor doesn't get ample opportunities to butt heads with anyone else for the duration, but always from a distance - he gets into multiple heated exchanges via telephone, in which we're only privy to what's being said at Victor's end. And a familiar character still manages to worm their way into the happenings. Margaret may be uncharacteristically absent, but Mrs Warboys puts in a surprise (though not to Victor) contribution, ambushing him with a telephone call to fill him in on the boring particulars of her recent visit to Cork (in her case, her muffled but unmistakable voice can be momentarily heard coming down the line). Intrusions from the outside world are sparing, and there's a sense to which they might even offer Victor some relief from the monotony, a chance to direct his loathing outward rather than inward. One such interlude yields the episode's most enduring visual gag, when Victor opens the door to his downstairs toilet to reveal that a yucca plant he'd had delivered earlier has been inserted directly into the pan, in an all-too literal reading of Victor's instructions on where to leave it. Victor likens the unseen young delivery man to Frank Spencer, the notoriously accident-prone hero played by Michael Crawford in 1970s BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, an observation that's not without irony given that Frank and Victor don't strike me as altogether dissimilar creations. Both are sitcom leads renowned for their characteristic attire, their perfectly quotable catchphrases, their inability to keep any new source of employment for long and, most crucially, their tendency to be on the receiving end of a deluge of outrageously improbable mishaps. Both are accustomed to grappling with chaos wherever they go, and they invariably do so badly. Victor's obviously a whole lot smarter and Frank's a whole lot sweeter, but both men are united in each being their own worst enemy. ^[1]

Unlike Frank Spencer, whose flaws were ultimately mitigated by his unrelenting innocence, Victor has a reputation for being rather a nasty character, and that's always seemed unfair to me. Victor could unquestionably make things a lot easier for himself if he learned to rein in his temper a little, but then who wouldn't be tempted to completely blow their top if they went to use their toilet only to find a yucca plant protruding out from it? There's an extent to which Victor is merely the product of a universe that is every bit as chaotic and inconsiderate as he perceives it to be, the classic figure of the sane man who to an insane universe must appear insane (as he himself points out, just look at the outcome of the 1992 general election). "The Trial", being the OFITG installment that forces Victor to look the most relentlessly inward, is our most extensive study into where one interpretation begins and the other ends. He holds himself to account for a couple of instances where he recognises that his rage was disproportionate, and ponders if he might just be the villain of his own story. The episode builds up Victor as a ridiculously paranoid individual, only to tease us with the parting implication that, actually, they might just be out to get him after all. The viewer finally becomes the juror, and is left to make their own verdict.

The title of the episode has multiple meanings. Most obviously it alludes to an event that should be happening within the narrative, but isn't. Victor murmurs that this is his fifth day of being on call for jury service, and he hasn't even set foot inside a courtroom (side-note: I was summoned for jury service myself once, and my experience was the same as Victor's - I would show up only to be sent home every day, and never even saw that jury box). The implicit suggestion is that the process of waiting and having nothing to occupy one's mind other than the most menial of distractions should itself be a trial. For a while, that looks to be the central joke, but the title suddenly acquires renewed significance come the third act, when Victor perceives himself as being put on trial by a higher power for his most recent misdeed. It's also a reference to Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial, the dystopian tale of a bank clerk apprehended on a charge that is never specified and forced to navigate a labyrinth of head-spinning bureaucracy (in Victor's case, that labyrinth is largely his own self-inflicted concoction). David Renwick's script immediately makes us mindful of this allusion, by having Victor evoke another of Kafka's works, The Metamorphosis, in the very first sequence. It's likely not a coincidence that, whilst on the phone to a switchboard operator, he sardonically introduces himself as "Victor Meldrew the talking cockroach", a nod to the nightmarish premise of Kafka's novel, in which the protagonist awakens to find he has been inexplicably transformed into a giant insect and is placed under house arrest by his mortified family. (The more pedantic viewer might point out that, in Kafka's novel, the form Gregor acquired was never explicitly identified as a cockroach; it is, nevertheless, the interpretation most favoured by popular culture.)

Victor's in-universe reason for likening himself to a cockroach is that he feels that the switchboard operators have been treating him like an insect; aside from adding shades of the Kafkaesque to his ostensibly mundane predicament, it functions as a cunning bit of foreshadowing, the third-act crisis being directly informed by Victor's erratic reactions to the creepy crawlies infiltrating his abode. Early on, he spies a daddy long legs on the lampshade (note: the term "daddy long legs" can refer to multiple species, depending on which part of the world you're in, but in the UK it's a crane fly) and while he's keen to evict the intruder, he does so with an evident level of care and compassion, making an effort (albeit an unsuccessful one) not to break any of the insect's legs while handling it and, having cast it outside, following it long enough to observe it finding alternative shelter by limping into a discarded Lucozade can. Later, he notices a woodlouse crawling across his kitchen floor and gloatingly squishes it. There's no discernible reason why one house pest should have warranted such a humane response and the other found itself on the receiving end of Victor's meanest impulses, other than that they happened to encounter Victor at slightly different points in his immurement. This is something that Victor himself openly reflects on, and he's disturbed by the arbitrariness of his own judgement. This paves way for the climactic conflict, when Victor projects that arbitrariness onto the wider universe. If he would choose to punish a woodlouse with death for the crime of crawling across his kitchen floor, then why wouldn't some higher power, to whom he must appear as small and insignificant as a woodlouse, choose to punish him with death for the crime of disproportionately punishing a woodlouse? Victor openly notes that he is not a religious man, but he is too fundamentally suspicious an individual to not suppose that there must be some kind of malicious conspiracy going on around him, its basis in the cosmic. The murder of the woodlouse is the misdeed for which he specifically believes he's being tried, although one senses that this is the culmination of a whole lifetime's worth of rash responses to minor annoyances that he realises, with hindsight, could have been handled better. (Such uneasy introspection is anticipated by a sight gag where Victor manages to spread ink from a leaky biro all over his face before noticing, two minutes later, how ridiculous he looks in the mirror.) Also prodding him into his repentant despair is a passive-aggressive missive pushed through his door by a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses to whom he was recently rude. "May the Lord have mercy on your soul", they tauntingly close, which conjures up notions of a death sentence.

The twist, then, is that Victor ends up becoming the defendant in a trial of his own making. But it doesn't stop there. He also becomes the jury, judge and executioner (he is, after all, the only person around to play any of the parts), and it's that final role he seizes with by far the most relish. Why does Victor become so convinced that he's been sentenced to death? He notices a mole on his stomach that he swears wasn't there the last time he looked and panics about what that might mean. The viewer, of course, is unlikely to share in Victor's paranoia, which is blatantly over the top. Earlier sequences have already established Victor as a hypochondriac, prone to browsing through his medical dictionary and construing the most minor of ailments as an indication of something much nastier ("Colon tumor! Often no symptoms in the early stages...exactly what I've got!"). Victor appears to settle upon a rational line of action, and rejects it - he notes he's seeing a skin specialist next week and can discuss it then, only to conclude that he'll probably be dead by next week. He's now so committed to the narrative that he's getting what he deserves for his incorrigibility that his first inclination is to lie down and take it. "I've had a good life," he muses, before taking a moment to register what he's just said, and throwing the universe's verdict bitterly back at it. "I'VE HAD A BLOODY AWFUL LIFE!"

It strikes me as significant that the incident with the woodlouse, followed by the missive from the Jehovah's Witnesses, comes after Victor's aborted attempt at writing a letter to his brother Alfred. Alfred was previously introduced in the Series 3 episode "The Broken Reflection", where he was played by Richard Pearson. While it's not a requirement to have seen Alfred's prior appearance in order to understand "The Trial" (which does a perfectly succinct job, on its own terms, of illustrating that communication between the brothers is strained), it probably does help to know the full background. As per "The Broken Reflection", Alfred lives in New Zealand and he and Victor seldom have any face-to-face contact. In that episode, Alfred came to visit Victor, and while Victor was initially hostile to the intrusion, he came to realise that a lot of his disdain for Alfred was rooted in the reality that they were actually very alike. This prompted Victor to treat Alfred with a newfound tolerance, which unfortunately came too late; Alfred happened upon a dictaphone recording in which Victor had unwittingly expressed his prior dislike and, figuring he wasn't wanted, returned to New Zealand. "The Trial" perhaps lessens the sting of that ending, in confirming that Victor and Alfred have since reconciled and maintained a relationship by postal communication, even if Victor still struggles in relating to Alfred. While Alfred has no physical presence in "The Trial", the structure of the episode seems to place their relationship curiously at the centre, suggesting that Victor's failings toward his brother are indicative of his broader failures as a human. It's in his indifference toward Alfred that Victor goes down his dark path, turning away from the task at hand and noticing the woodlouse. It's also Victor's second attempt at writing to Alfred, on the premise that he doesn't have much time left, that yields his salvation - in his last letter, Alfred had sent an old photograph of the six-month-old Victor and, on studying it more closely, Victor realises that the mole in question was actually on his body the entire time. Perhaps it has less to do with Alfred in particular than the notion that, in reaching out to another, Victor is momentarily escaping entrapment in himself and whatever distorted perspective of reality it's concocting, prompting him to take a more objective view. As with Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter, the solution turns out to have been under Victor's nose (or, more accurately, under his navel) all along. Come to think of it, that corvid seen at the start of the episode might even have been an allusion to Poe, in sly anticipation for how this pickle would ultimately resolve.

Victor rejoices his deliverance, albeit with the backhanded observation that he was "sentenced to death and I managed to get off with life". It gives him, momentarily, a renewed perspective on life. "I'll never be rude to another Jehovah's Witness for as long as I live", he declares, before pausing and upping the ante: "I'll never be rude to anyone again." We know that this much is beyond Victor's reach. Like his earlier resolution to add healthier variety into his junk food diet of chocolate, crisps and chips cooked in fat with OK fruity sauce, it's well-intentioned but doomed from the outset to failure. The two failed resolutions are cleverly linked, in the episode's final, revolting discovery. Prior to discovering the mole, Victor had been musing about a baker in the local supermarket who had recently lost his toupee. Having at last settled on a nourishing lunch option he would actually enjoy (beans on toast), Victoria slices into a loaf of bread, only to find that terrible missing toupee concealed inside! Whereupon he gets on the phone to the supermarket manager and starts blowing his top once again; just to make it plain that he's relapsed into the same old cycle, the language used mirrors that of his earlier call to the garden centre. The question is, can you blame Victor for his reaction? After all, finding a misplaced wig in your intended lunch would be an even more disconcerting experience than finding a yucca plant lodged in your toilet. No matter how sincerely you had vowed to mend your ways, you would totally go to pieces. Is it therefore fair to suppose that Victor is actually the villain of his own story? The episode closes with deliberately mixed signals on that front. Victor, for whatever reason, cannot resist trying on the wig himself, if only to confirm, on glancing in the mirror, how ridiculous it looks. He reaffirms himself as a fool and seemingly embraces that identity for the sake of getting his momentary catharsis against the supermarket. And yet the final shots of the episode have us panning back out of the Meldrews' house and back into the torrential downpour outside, suggesting that Victor might well have been the victim of a cosmic prank and that an Old Testament deity is raining its unabating, gleefully disproportionate wrath down upon him. Or is the wrath all Victor's, an utterly proportionate response to a chaotic universe that gets the Victor Meldrew it certainly deserves? (Which probably shouldn't apply to that harmless woodlouse, mind). As with all of the series' bottle episodes, it ends without clear resolution. Victor is still under house arrest, and the jury still hasn't returned.

PS: I don't get Victor's jab at Robert Mitchum, since he was in some riveting thrillers (really, Victor, you were bored by The Night of The Hunter?). There is something intuitively sound, however, in his bracketing of the Dudley Moore Trio with the six-legged menaces with which he won't share a bathroom.

[1] Fun fact: Richard Wilson was in an episode of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em ("Wendy House").

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. 

 

It Sucks To Be Me #6: Hard Cheese (Survival)

 

We come now to the final edition of Survival, and one of only two contributions by John Norris Wood (here supplying text and photography but not the illustrations, which are credited to Derick Brown). And "Mouse" is, honestly, a pretty good note to bow out on, not quite up there with "Squirrel" and "Otter" but still one of the series' stronger titles. On the whole, I found the level of challenge to be relatively easy, but thoroughly satisfying. Coming off the occasional arbitrariness of Wood's previous effort, "Frog", the death endings in "Mouse" (we're back to a total of six once again) are all perfectly well-incorporated and readily attributable to faulty thinking on your part. There's not a lot about the gameplay of "Mouse" that' especially innovative, but it gets the job done fine.

Above all, I give "Mouse" credit for being possibly the quirkiest installment in the Survival series - there is at least one choice (possibly two) you can make where the outcome appears to be something of a joke. Something I likewise find endearing about "Mouse" (besides the murine-orientated content), is that it is the Survival edition in which your player animal comes the closest to conveying something of a personality. I get the impression that this mouse is a proper little scrapper, and that feisty, determined spirit makes it hard not to warm to it as your murine manifestation. As with "Frog", you're playing as a very small animal, and there is naturally a lot of emphasis on how vulnerable you are, in a world where everything seems dead set upon devouring you, or at the very least beating you up and taking your food stores. And yet I would say there is just as much emphasis, if not more, on how surprisingly tough and capable you are of meeting the challenges that world throws at you. Being a small animal does not make you a pushover, and "Mouse" contains a lot of situations, probably more than any other edition of Survival, in which you're prompted to make bold decisions on whether it's advisable to stand and confront something that could potentially deal you a wad of damage. Do you take on a marauding squirrel? A legless lizard? A hive of bees? A cartoon-friendly mousetrap? Where are you inclined to draw the line? Part of the allure of the Survival series is in the fragile barrier it so elegantly (and harrowingly) depicts as fluttering between life and death, but "Mouse" equally provides a crash course in what a deluge of adversity you're capable of living through.

If I have one nitpick with "Mouse", it's that Wood doesn't make compelling use of the game's points system, in either of his contributions, but then this was something that Tabor before him was really inconsistent with. "Fox" and "Squirrel" were the only two in which it was possible to lose points for non-fatal mistakes - with every other book, so long as you keep advancing through the narrative, you'll gain points, only losing them if you run into a death ending. And the number of minus points allocated for each death, while ideally reflecting the obviousness of your misjudgement, also seem kind of arbitrary in practice. Personally, I was always invested in Survival for primarily the narrative/puzzle element, and found the points aspect really hard to give any attention to. Maybe it's more fun if you're looking to compare your results with a friend's, as the introduction suggests, but I am a lonely Survival-ist.

The points system does have one practical application in "Mouse", however. One of those aforementioned aggressors you can either fight or flee from - Wood actually gives you contradictory information with each potential outcome, suggesting that both choices were perfectly valid responses. One scores you twice as many points as the other, however, making it obvious which you should have gone for.

One last time, then. What horrors and wonders await our intrepid murine explorer as they venture into the big wide open? Click below for all of the answers. But a word to the wise - I personally found "Mouse" the easiest and cheapest edition of Survival to get a hold of, so I'd recommend you look into sourcing your own copy before spoiling.

It Sucks To Be Me #4: Oh Nuts (Survival)

Hurrah, we're at the "Squirrel" edition - the last Survival book to be penned by Roger Tabor and, if you ask me, the point at which the series reached perfection. If I were to pick just one edition of Survival for the purposes of enticing somebody with no prior familiarity with the series, I would unquestionably give them "Squirrel". "Deer" and "Fox" feel like they were still getting the hang of the format, "Otter" is a mite too bleak and upsetting, but "Squirrel" really nails that balance between creeping paranoia punctuated by regular bursts of nail-biting tension and good clean role-playing fun. I'll confess that of the six animals you get to play as in Survival, the squirrel happens to be my personal favourite, but lest you're thinking that bias might have coloured my judgement, that was, honestly, just as likely to have worked against it - I wasn't exactly relishing the prospect of encountering those Grey Screens of Death and the little lifeless squirrel bodies that accompany them. The puzzles in "Squirrel" are simply very well-constructed, evoking even greater suspense than those of any other Survival volume; in most cases, I had a strong inkling as to what the answer would be, but there was often a nagging sense of doubt that kept me from wanting to fully commit. "Squirrel" might also be the most punishing edition of Survival - whereas in "Fox" you could potentially wander around for pages without running into danger, here all three opening scenarios lead you directly into hazards that can kill you straight out the gate if you fail to assess the situation wisely (although one of them is somewhat nicer than the others, in giving you a chance to course correct if you get it wrong).

"Squirrel" offers a very different perspective to the previous three editions of Survival, in which you played relatively big animals, and there wasn't a whole lot that was going to kill you besides humans and the knock-on effects of human activity. From this point onward we begin our descent rapidly down the food chain - our player animals are only going to get smaller, and we'll find ourselves on the menu for an increasing variety of critters, giving us all the more incentive to watch our backs wherever we go. In "Squirrel", we get an even split between deaths at the hands (as it were) of natural predators and man-made peril. Note that, unlike "Otter", where most of the deaths were gruesome accidents, in "Squirrel" all of the human-engineered demises were quite deliberate - with at least one, there's ambiguity as to whether you were the intended target, but all of these humans set out to kill.

The hero of "Squirrel" is specifically a red squirrel - a species that, much like the Eurasian otter, saw significant declines in England and Wales throughout the 20th century. This is largely on account of competition from the eastern grey squirrel, a native of North America introduced to Britain in the Victorian era that went on to widely displace it. I would presume that "Squirrel" is intended to take place in Scotland, where red squirrel population still retains a few footholds (and this is supported by one of the predators you encounter likewise being largely absent from the rest of the UK). Curiously, the impact of the grey never comes up in "Squirrel", perhaps due to the geographical specificity of the problem; unlike the otter, which was dying out all over Europe, on a worldwide scale the red squirrel is classed as a Least Concern species, so extensive focus on this particular threat might have impeded the book's ability to transfer to overseas markets. I should note that I am working with the US publication of "Squirrel", so I don't know if Tabor's notes in the UK edition included any reference to the greys; they are, however, completely absent from this jaunt around the forest.

Despite the species' precarious position in the British Isles, "Squirrel" doesn't carry so pronounced an environmentalist undercurrent as "Otter" - we obviously do learn something about the impact of human activity on squirrels, but the undercurrent I detect seems geared more toward starting a conversation with young readers about the perils of accepting treats from strangers. In "Squirrel" there is a small running theme in which the apparent generosity of man is revealed to have sinister consequences.

 

To dig up what hidden horrors lie buried in the ostensibly tranquil forest ambience of "Squirrel", click below. If you wish to remain unspoiled, keep moving.
 

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #41: Blockbuster Nights (aka Rabbits and Guinea Pigs Shouldn't Live Together, They Are Totally Different Animals)

Dogs and cats might be notoriously volatile company, but we've already established that there's no reason why they can't get along, so long as there's sufficient quantities of J2O to go around. If you're looking to promote your product as the kind of universally agreeable artefact around which consumers from all backgrounds and walks and life can find common ground, then having a couple of infamously antagonistic species seeing eye to eye on the matter can make for a persuasive metaphor (see also: that Coca Cola ad where a polar bear and a seal are able to put aside their differences with said effervescent beverage). But when your advertising campaign derives from the assumed harmony two traditional best buds who may, in actuality, be anything but, there's likely to always be a layer of unintentional discomfort nestled at the centre. In other words, don't copy the example of the following campaign.

When I was a child, there was a popular misconception that guinea pigs made better companions for rabbits than other rabbits, and it was common to see the two housed together. This was slightly before the era when neutering rabbits became standard procedure; groupings between males and females were obviously a huge no, while social aggression in same-sex groupings could be a more challenging issue for rabbit owners to have to rein in, so circumventing the problem altogether by having your rabbit shack up with a cavy was seen as an ideal life hack. I mean, they're both herbivores; what's the worst that could happen? Needless to say, nowadays it's not encouraged - rabbits and guinea pigs are both highly social animals, but they are very different social animals, and they thrive on the companionship of their own kind, not some alien species whose various signals and/or vocalisations are going to mean nothing to them. Also, since the rabbit tended to be the bigger and brawnier participant in such groupings, the guinea pig was unlikely to have very much leverage in the situation, and there was a very real risk that, if things did turn nasty, the rabbit could do some serious damage to the guinea pig with those enormous hind legs of theirs. Finally, rabbits are vectors of certain respiratory diseases that, while harmless to other rabbits, can be fatal to guinea pigs. All in all, keeping them together is not a smart idea. So it would be an unfortunate thing if any prospective pet owners were negatively influenced by this light-hearted Blockbuster Video campaign from the early 00s, which centred on the residents of 173 Jefferson Avenue - Ray, an overly-excitable guinea pig, and his long-suffering straight man roomie, a Dutch rabbit named Carl. Ray gets on Carl's nerves in just about every installment, so in reality this arrangement would probably have ended in bloodshed, but here the ill-matched critters (CGI creations animated by Tippett Studio) were able to maintain some level of decorum through their one notable area of common interest - DVDs and their prolificness in the venue opposite. At this point VHS hadn't completely gone away, but DVD was very much the shiny new kid in town, and the campaign provides a window into a time when $14.99 for a used disc was considered an absolute steal.

What does stand out when watching the Jefferson Avenue campaign is how great a debt it blatantly owes to Budweiser's "Swamp Gang" campaign from just a few years prior. I don't think it's unfair to say that it constitutes an urbanised, more family-friendly take on much the same idea, in revolving around a bunch of sardonic talking animals with no actual logical connection to the product being hawked, just that they happen to be situated in close proximity to its signage, and clearly have nothing better to do with their time and their gift of the gab than to comment on it. (Bonus: Ray the guinea pig is frequently mistaken for a hamster by some viewers, much as the chameleons from the Budweiser ads were often mistaken for iguanas, because an awful lot of people are species-illiterate.) In Ray and Carl's case, they lived in the window display of a pet shop located directly across the street from a Blockbuster Video, so they were always alert to the latest deals and promotions. It seems a pretty safe assumption that neither Ray or Carl had accessed a VCR/DVD player in their lives, so the notion that they would be so excited over the release of Bad Boys II, or that they would attach so much hysterical importance to the knowledge that Blockbuster was giving away free vacations to lucky customers might be a testament more to the monotony of life in that pet shop than to the awesomeness of Blockbuster. (Very conveniently for continuity, Ray and Carl also never seemed to attract any prospective buyers of their own - the fact that they were themselves purchasable stock came up in only one ad toward the end of the campaign's cycle.) The ads were absurd, sure, but then most memorable advertising is in some way or another, and I'd wager that this intrinsic silliness was in no small way accountable for their appeal, which was considerable - the public, clearly not put off by the campaign's derivativeness, took Ray and Carl to their hearts, and the ads proved to be quite popular, despite their relatively short run. The original campaign ran between 2002 and 2003, but in 2007 saw a brief revival to promote Blockbuster's ill-fated Netflix rival, Total Access, albeit one made up of recycled footage from an existing promo entitled "Mouse Click", in which Ray and Carl attempt to get online by pounding repeatedly on a mouse (the kind more endemic to the pet shop ambience).

Blockbuster managed to secure some fairly prominent voice talent for the campaign, with Ray being voiced by Jim Belushi. Carl, meanwhile, was voiced by James Woods, whom you'll probably recognise as the voice of Hades from Disney's Hercules, and in a clever bit of casting, the mouse he abuses in the aforementioned "Mouse Click" spot was voiced by Bobcat Goldthwait, aka Pain, one of the two shape-shifting demons Hades was similarly fond of pummelling.

Although they were, in a way, just as far-out as anything involving the Budweiser lizards, the Ray and Carl ads largely forwent the self-consciously weird humor of their swamp-dwelling models in favour of gags centred around the Odd Couple dynamic between the two central characters, playing like miniature sitcoms about mismatched roomies who, in this instance, just so happened to be a rabbit and a cavy living in a pet shop window. Occasionally there might be a movie connection - in one ad, Ray annoys Carl by dancing to the song "Maniac" from Flashdance, while in another Ray attempts to act out a tribute to his purported favourite genre, kung fu, and incurs the wrath of both Carl and a team of ninja mice. Most of these gags seem entirely peripheral to Blockbuster itself, however - Ray and Carl could have lived across the street from a Starbucks and I'm sure the overwhelming majority of them (mainly hinged around the implication that the rabbit, like everyone else, barely tolerates the guinea pig) would require only minimal tweaking to have made every bit as much sense. On the other hand, there is an appealing irony in the fact that, for Ray and Carl, the Blockbuster storefront itself functions as their nightly entertainment, their shop window effectively being a giant television screen into which they can gaze and receive endless diversion (something evoked in the spot where Carl's ears function as antenna, and Ray has to adjust them to get a decent reception of the street beyond). With no first-hand access to the media in question, Ray and Carl could experience the thrill of the Blockbuster rental only vicariously, through the deals and offers afforded its patrons. I am not convinced that they necessarily understand what Bad Boys II is, but they bear nightly witness to the desire of the human urbanite to seek out a copy, riddled with scuffs and finger marks from the like-minded individuals who were there before them, for escapism from the drudgery of the brick and mortar that otherwise surrounds them. And that, ultimately, is what gives the campaign its unique flavour, despite the conceptual similarity to the Swamp Gang - the sense it captures of a vibrantly interconnected, yet indifferent and emotionally estranged urban world outside. If the Swamp Gang campaign depicts a humorous collision between the forces of nature and human consumerism, with Ray and Carl we see a world where, much like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, man's connection to nature seems almost non-existent, with concrete dominating where wilderness once stood. Unlike the Swamp Gang ads, where the featured critters were usually spectators but would intermittently encroach on the human world by raiding the tavern or wrecking the neon signage, the animal kingdom has here been completely neutralised, the only specimens within range being entirely docile and safely contained in glass enclosures (they also go curiously unnoticed; I find it odd that no passers-by are stopping to enjoy the cute animals showcased right beneath their noses, seemingly more interested in the shiny discs being offered across the street). For some reason it is always night in Ray and Carl's world - likely to tie in with the tagline, "Make it a Blockbuster Night", but the lack of sunlight merely adds to that overwhelming sense of artificiality. Crucially, Ray and Carl are unable to interact with the world beyond their window, only look at it, which mirrors the patrons' own relationship with the kind of escapism Blockbuster is selling, suggesting that both worlds are implicitly characterised by a shared claustrophobia. I can't help but feel that Carl's excitement, on seeing the promise of a prospective free vacation, is fuelled by the mere possibility of escape being dangled before him, even if (as with most of the contest's real-life entrants) it remains utterly out of his reach. (Note: the same scenario was recycled for a number of different promotions, and Carl went just as wild over the promise of a free Stuart Little 2 poster. The inconsiderate rabbit never did learn the value of knocking.)

The terribly depressing thing about reviewing this campaign from the vantage point of 2022 is that we all know it ultimately didn't have a happy ending. Blockbuster peaked in the mid-00s, with most of their stores not making it into the mid-10s, as the company found itself up to its neck in debts and increasingly overshadowed by the media behemoth it had once infamously pooh-poohed (in 2000 Blockbuster passed up an opportunity to buy Netflix outright, a decision that seems flagrantly poor with hindsight, but then Netflix weren't exactly making a killing at the time). The Blockbuster at Jefferson Avenue would have packed up years ago, meaning that the current residents of the pet shop opposite (assuming they too didn't go out of business in the interim) would being spend their days gazing at a laundrette or trendy coffee bar. Lots of exciting signage there, I'm sure. Ray and Carl themselves would sadly also be long gone (we can only hope they eventually wound up with owners more attuned to the risks of letting rabbits and guinea pigs mingle). Meanwhile, the ghost of Blockbuster lingers on as a quintessential touchstone of 90s nostalgia, a ubiquitous presence throughout many a Gen X-er and Millennial's halcyon days the world is suddenly mournful it allowed to die off. Nowadays, if you want to go back, you'll find you're in much the same boat as Ray and Carl, able to gaze longingly at that garish blue storefront through old pictures and YouTube uploads, but the cold barriers of time are keeping you firmly inside that sawdust-filled box. Maybe we're at the point where, like Ray and Carl, the mere (erstwhile) existence of such a brand is its own form of delirious fascination.