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.

FACT: The Pirates Are Out To Get You

It's funny how campaigns on the issue of piracy had this erstwhile tendency to be leagues more apocalyptic than campaigns on issues that might strike you as being immediately more threatening. A few years back, we touched on the classic 1990s cautionary fable regarding Rebecca's pirated VHS experience - I'm still not 100% sure what was going on in that film, but I really did get the impression that the world was ending in that closing shot. In 2002, the Federation Against Copyright Theft got even more on the nose with a little piece called "The Pirates Are Out To Get You", the mere title of which says it all. The imperilled suburban innocence denoted by Rebecca's guileless giggling was now but a distant memory; this film might as well have taken place after the collapse of civilisation brought about by the foolish choices of Rebecca's unscrupulous parents, of which Rebecca herself appeared to have a chilling premonition at the end of her chapter. We find ourselves plunged into a burning hellscape, in the company of a pirate who might as well be the Devil himself. They didn't go so far as to give him pointy horns (although that wouldn't have been any less unsubtle), but he's got red-tinged skin and the glow of annihilation in his eyes. In place of his traditional pitchfork, he wields a brand in the shape of an X (for Forbidden!), which is first submerged in flame and then pointed at the camera, aaand it's not my imagination, is it? This anti-piracy film was intended as a parody of the Flaming Carlton Star? I mentioned in my coverage of that logo that the red-hot star-shaped brand was made all the more unnerving for the fact that we never saw the hand that moved it, enabling it to take on an uncanny life all of its own. Thanks to FACT, we get to discover if the alternative - seeing the sadistic thug with a penchant for scorching - is any more reassuring.

In lieu of turning the brute force of his weapon upon the audience, our demonic brand-wielder instead gets his kicks out of torching stacks of VHS tapes, film reels and CDs. A mere touch of the X is enough to engulf them in a flaming explosion that would make Michael Bay proud. The use of VHS makes the film feel curiously behind the times, as by 2002 the public were well along the process of tossing them out for DVDs, and countless VHS collections were meeting similarly miserable fates at landfill sites the world over. Being a VHS aficionado myself, I'll admit that the sight of all those tapes going up in flames makes my heart a little fluttery. (CDs? Torch as many of the snotty fuckers as you like. In this house it's vinyl or nothing.) By 2002, the Carlton Star had also been operation for long enough for audiences to be well-accustomed to kick-starting their watching experiences by having a burning iron shoved in their faces, so the idea was presumably to offer a startling subversion, with the (sorta) familiar imagery directing us to somewhere altogether more unimaginable. This is the Star's corrupted counterpart, signalling a dystopian world in which those pesky pirates, and not the advertisers, call the shots on what we see and hear - that being a slew of explosions and all the tell-tales noises of a society sinking deep into an apocalyptic chasm (sirens wailing, mobs chanting, gunfire rattling), indicating that our video-killer's actions have further-reaching consequences than a few melted copies of Bend It Like Beckham. I like the concept in theory, although it has to be said that the red hot X, in spite of its ability to make everything it comes into contact with to messily combust, lacks the awe-inspiring potency of its inspiration. We're issued a grim warning on the perils of letting the pirates brand us with their mark, yet "Pirates" doesn't make good on the implications of that threat - unlike the logo it's recalling, it never forces the viewer to endure the simulated experience of having the searing brand thrust directly upon them. It certainly puts a lot more emphasis on the fire visuals, making it a full-on nightmare for any pyrophobe unfortunate enough to find this lurking on the copy of Cheaper By The Dozen they rented, but compared to its counterpart, I never feel the creeping paranoia that the X-shaped brand is coming for me. The C-shaped brand (for Copyright!) that ultimately takes its place, once a bucket of cold water has put a stop to the mindless media-burning, is a slightly different story. Despite having just emerged from the same bucket of water that vanquished the X, it too ignites, with enough fury that it apparently causes the screen to burn out. It glows white rather than red, which I guess is intended to signify its purity, but the use of violent imagery to represent copyright is still jarring, meaning that it's not presented as a healing force that will put the world to rights, but an angry and vengeful one that's out to get you every bit as much as those pirates.

The film's most memorable component was its infamously foreboding monologue, which wasn't actually claiming anything that Rebecca's ordeal before it didn't. There, terrorism and organised crime were also said to be the beneficiaries of our dodgy video investments, although their invisibility made them more effective foes; the mere mention of the man at the market was ominous enough in context, but the suggestion that this only scratched the surface of a far more sinister agenda unfolding beyond the eyeline of Rebecca's ignorant parents was genuinely spine-chilling. The tactic was to prompt questions about the hidden costs of piracy and, through the highly emotive figure of Rebecca, what kind of world we were building for our children as a result. In attempting to provide more concrete answers to those questions, "Pirates" ends up feeling a lot more hyperbolic, in no small way because of its exceptionally bombastic choice of visual accompaniment (in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the specific charge that "piracy funds terrorism" had also become an especially loaded one). It was an even more drastic leap from "Daylight Robbery", the anti-piracy film we all got sick of seeing at the start of our tapes in the late 1990s, in which the pirates were represented by a cartoonishly belligerent market vendor who played like a nastier version of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses. Obnoxious to the core, and not the kind of bloke you'd feel comfortable doing business with, but at least he was only a bloke and not the Devil incarnate, claiming your hard-earned fiver for a barely-functional copy of Trainspotting but sparing your soul. "Daylight Robbery" was a notably lighter kind of anti-piracy ad, its tactic being to present piracy as a particularly loathsome inconvenience as opposed to an all-destroying force, and it found room for humor in its featured scenario (the vendor claims that his trade was "advertised on Crimestoppers"). "Pirates", by comparison, takes the path of excess. The pirates are depicted not as unscrupulous criminals, but as unearthly demons on a mission to set the whole world ablaze, who get one step closer to succeeding every time someone fails to source their copy of Minority Report from a reputable retailer. Its message is conveyed with thoroughgoing seriousness, and yet its hyperbole is so hilariously bald-faced that it ends up getting the comedic edge on "Daylight".

For as much notoriety as its doom-laden monologue amassed, it has to be acknowledged that it is rather clunkily-constructed. There are snippets that work well enough, like the eerie ambiguity in the statement that piracy "will destroy our development and your future enjoyment." Obviously, they're talking about the jeopardy facing the entertainment industry, but after that mention of terrorism it's hard not to get the sense that they're alluding to the possible destruction of society as a whole. But the equation of those two concerns - the repeated criss-crossing between the proclamation that the very worst, most malignant kinds of people stand to overwhelmingly benefit from piracy and the affirmation that the film and music industries have everything to lose - is overall unwieldy (the use of explosive imagery to imply that these two concerns go hand in hand feels especially ham-fisted). It's further weighed down by the surplus of inelegant fire analogies - in addition to the aforementioned "Don't let them brand you with their mark!", there's "Don't let the pirates burn a hole in your pocket!" and "Don't touch the hot stuff. Cool is copyright!" (which immediately contradicted by the image of that C catching alight). You get the distinct impression that several different marketing slogans were proposed and, after a backstage deadlock on which was the punchiest, all of them were tossed into the final script, with the effect that they cancel one another out.

As easy as it is to poke fun at "Pirates" for its intensely over the top tone and production, its crudely nightmarish charm always makes it delightful for a nostalgic revisit. It also looks positively sophisticated when up against FACT's upcoming specimen for 2004, "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" (aka the worst anti-piracy film ever made). All I'll say is that it's impossible for me to watch that one and not hear Tweety Pie's voice echoing at the back of my head. "You wouldn't steal a car..." "Her don't know me vewy well, do her?!"

Walter's Story (A Found Footage Nightmare In 60 Seconds)

"Walter's Story" is the most singularly peculiar of a series of ads that ran on UK television in the late 1990s, showcasing the array of anal retentive German weirdos (supposedly) responsible for bringing the VW Passat to fruition. The campaign tagline assured us that the Passat was "a car born out of obsession", with each ad giving us a portrait of the assorted perfectionists who'd endeavored to give the world the exemplary driving experience. Each was an individual in their particular fixation, a running feature of the ads being a close-up of their worker ID tag, to specify their esteemed place within the company process. In some cases, there was an endearing air of genius to the obsessiveness (see that one ad with qualitatskontrolle expert P. Fischer, the man determined to engineer just the most sonically pleasing effect when you shut your Passat door). "Walter's Story", has a sadder, more sinister quality in a way that seemingly anticipates the found footage boom that was all set to take horror cinema by storm with the impending release of The Last Broadcast and The Blair Witch Project. This ad is keenly aware of the camera's function as a grotesquely intimate confessional and a device that, far from passively recording reality, actively obscures and distorts it.

Meet W.I. Froegel, aka Walter, our resident Detail Meister. His ad takes the form of a video diary, documenting his journey from 20th October 1994 to 14th February 1996; within that span of 16 months he's able to perfect a number of ancillary details, including the car's pump-adjustable seats and fan-shaped water jets that help reduce the weight of the car. On the surface, his fastidious monologue offers a playful means of listing off the Passat's various mundane perks. It is, however, a notch more narrative-driven than others in the series, since it's effectively telling two stories at once. There's an underlying narrative thread that is, as it turns out, being literally overridden by the one we see, but which still makes itself known throughout and emerges especially plaintively at the end. Walter's titular story is not simply a document of how he went through all of the Passat's tinniest features with a meticulously fine comb, but of how he destroyed his marriage in the process. At least, we're given enough information to arrive at that conclusion, but it exists largely within the cracks of the ad.

We get only a fleeting glimpse of Walter's presumed spouse, in a single entry of his video diary. Walter is in what appears to be his own living room, talking to the camera about what a wonderful innovation the fan-shaped water jets are, when she sneaks up behind him in a dressing gown and is visibly annoyed to find him blathering into the void about that infernal car. This is our first direct clue of the tensions arising from the overspilling of Walter's work life into his domestic life. It takes on sharper significance at the end, as Walter is being applauded for his achievements by his fellow technicians, and his ostensibly triumphant image is suddenly swallowed up by a barrage of VHS lines, to reveal the butchered remains of the recording he was taping over all the while - a family wedding that took place in the decade prior, on 16th August 1985. His own wedding, I presume? There are certainly enough seedy details in the subtext of the ad that point us to that conclusion - the sequence in which he demonstrates his pump-adjustable seats feels eerily evocative of a beak-seat make-out session, and it's likely not a coincidence that Walter's final recording takes place on Valentine's Day. Walter's interests have clearly moved on, the car he's played a crucial role in birthing having replaced his wife in his affections. The blissful promises from that summer of 1985 lie now lie in ruins; what remains haunts Walter's present-day obsessions like a ghost, undermining whatever triumph could be gleaned from within. The chapel bells in the wedding video seem to actively counteract his colleagues clapping - no longer the sounds of joyful celebration, they become a mournful ode to what was abandoned en route to the Passats's being.

Which is really a bit weird as a selling point for the Passat, is it not? True, it wouldn't be the first time Volkswagen used a relationship in unsettling peril to promote one of their models, and I've no doubt that it was all intended as an elaborate joke, the wedding video being the final punchline in illustrating the full ludicrous extent of Walter's fixations. But with that as our closing image, it all feels rather poignant, almost as if the ad is conceding that it it couldn't have commanded such unrelenting obsession without breaking a few hearts on the side. It's notable that, while the campaign obviously wants to present the Passat's creation as a worthwhile endeavor, Walter himself is portrayed as a broadly ridiculous figure throughout. At best, you can say that he has the enthusiasm of a small child at play, most prominently seen in the sequence in which he's fiddling repeatedly with the locks (a shorter version of the ad existed comprising only this sequence, allowing Walter's kiddish indulgence to stand as a self-contained thing). But there is an uglier side to his kid-like demeanour, a self-absorption that's totally averse to any form of intrusion from the outside world. Walter is, above all, depicted as foolish, his self-importance persistently undercut by the hustle and bustle unfolding around him - his introductory recording climaxes with him having to shout down his colleagues, while another entry has him totally inaudible. So long as he can hear the sound of his own voice, he seems oblivious to whatever is behind him, both directly and temporally - at the end of his diary, as he stands there smirking like an idiot while clutching that headlight as though at an award ceremony, one wonders if he's even noticed that his marriage has been disintegrating around him. But then the final status of Walter's relationship, while doubtlessly not rosy, is never revealed. It is an unknown piece of the narrative puzzle that lurks tauntingly within the blank space of those ominous VHS flickers. What we're left with is a series of images that force us to get uncomfortably up close and personal with Walter, immersing us in the overwhelming awkwardness of his Passat-dominated world. We come away grateful that we don't know the Detail Meister, even if we do feel a lingering curiousity about the car on which he was working. Obsession, the ad illustrates, can be an ugly and merciless thing, yet the campaign hinges on the notion that it delivers the goods nevertheless. Obsession fuels the drive for making those little details function - even if we do end, hauntingly, by giving the final word to the bigger picture bypassed along the way.

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.

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. 

 

Two Weeks Vacation (aka Do Ya Need A Break From Modern Livin'?)

Somewhere within my family's vast collection of abysmal-quality VHS recordings from the late 1980s, there lurked a broadcast of the 1952 Disney short Two Weeks Vacation. As a child, I found myself drawn to this recording over and over, in part because the narrative cut-off point, where Goofy, in the midst of his quest for a fortnight's respite from the demands of the 9 to 5, settles down into a secluded motel bed, only to have the headlights of an approaching train blaring directly into his eyeballs, seemed such a baffling and arbitrary place to wrap things up. The appearance of the train, never explicitly explained with the dialogue, unnerved me, but what unnerved me still was the realisation that Goofy had never gotten anywhere with his travels. He had clearly taken the wrong turning somewhere or other, and having wandered too far down his precarious path, the film seemed content to leave him there. You see, the title of the short is actually a lie. The time frame is a little nebulous, but the bulk of the story appears to take place across a period of roughly 24 hours, not the promised two weeks. More crucially still, no vacation ever materialises. The effect of the short very much hinges on the discrepancy between what you're sold and what you're actually stuck with.

I later discovered that I had been deceived in quite another way. Unbeknownst to me as a child, the broadcast I had on tape had severely truncated the short, shaving off the entire last minute of the narrative (which I'm going to assume happened out of time constraints as opposed to anything within that final minute being considered objectionable). I never caught another TV broadcast of this short, so for years I was none the wiser. It wasn't until The Complete Goofy was released on DVD in the early 00s that I had the opportunity to see how it actually ended; it came as something of a revelation to discover that the scenario ran on for an additional 60 seconds, rounding things off on what felt like a more obvious punchline, but offering little additional closure in narrative terms. Still Goofy did not get his vacation. Not really. The title of the short remained as vexing as ever.

Directed by Jack Kinney, Two Weeks Vacation occurred toward the end of Goofy's initial run of theatrical outings, at the point where he had long abandoned his role as a comic foil to Mickey and/or Donald, and was living under the assumed identity of "George Geef", an everyman (everydog?) having to navigate his way through the trails and tribulation of mid-century suburbia (with those shorts touching on Geef's misadventures in parenting providing the basis for the character's redefining as a modern single father some four decades later, with the arrival of Goof Troop and its feature-length sequel A Goofy Movie). Two Weeks Vacation follows the familiar formula, the humor dependent on the contrast between the string of physical mishaps Goofy endures and the voice-over narration (here supplied by Alan Reed), which puts an incongruously buoyant spin on each and every calamity. It envisions Goofy (aka George, voice of Pinto Colvig) as an office worker, contributing fifty weeks per year to the capitalist grind in the beholden knowledge that he's been allocated two weeks in which to ditch the office walls and get back to nature. The central gag being that the vacation itself never gets underway, as Goofy gets bogged down with the insurmountable task of getting there; once he's traded in civilisation for the lure of the open road, he finds himself upon the fast-track to nowhere. There isn't a scrap of vacation to be had out there for the put upon everydog.

I'd dare suggest that Two Weeks Vacation would make ideal companion viewing to Steven Spielberg's Duel, in that it also deals with the perils of leaving the (relative) order of the urban world and venturing out into the vast unknown, which operates according to a vastly different set of rules. Naturally, the results are more comic in tone than in Spielberg's film; in place of a hulking great truck, Goofy finds a recurring nemesis in the form of a motorist with a camper trailer hitched to their vehicle, who seems entirely indifferent to everything going on around them and unleashes a deluge of unending inconsiderateness Goofy's way. The trailer becomes an omnipresent menace, its obstructive form effectively indistinct from the hands that keep it in motion (we see the driver, but never get as up close and personal with him as we do the great hindrance at his rear). Compared to Duel, where the truck, with its mostly invisible driver and their seeming lack of a motive for the all-out war they declare on Dennis Weaver's character, embodies the nature of the open landscape at its most frighteningly unknowable (at least to the city dweller who has wandered too far outside their comfort zone), the trailer's owners (it becomes apparent that, in addition the driver, there's actually a whole multitude of them hanging out within the trailer itself) potentially serve as a warped shadow to Goofy's own intentions. They are, presumably, fellow holiday-makers, their fault being that they are inclined to make themselves a little too at home in a land that they are merely passing through. It is unclear if their ill-mannered habits constitute an overspilling of the city's excesses, as the landscape is swallowed up by crass tourists for their own recreational use, or a reflection of the looser morals of the road. At any rate, we're given no reason to believe that the archetypes who regularly reside there are any more benevolent. The roadside is populated by types who range from the exploitative (the mechanic who fleeces Goofy for a new motor, before abandoning him to take a vacation of his own, although it is hard to say if this is done out of crookedness or incompetence) to the hostile (the eloquently-spoken drifter who curtly refuses Goofy's offer of a ride when his vehicle fails to meet his exacting standards) to the downright sinister (the unseen motel owner, who arguably makes the short as pertinent companion viewing to Psycho as it to Duel). Even nature itself appears to conspire against Goofy in one scene, a rain cloud parking itself directly above his vehicle so as to ensure that our hero can't enjoy even a little time basking in the sun while immobilised by a stop sign.

The interlude at the motel was always the segment of the short I found most fascinating, since it's here that Two Weeks Vacation veers closest toward the territory of horror and we get our clearest glimpse of the haunted underbelly of the ostensibly carefree road. As darkness sets in, Goofy faces a fresh challenge in locating a refuge for the night, and his status as an outside attempting to fit into an unwelcoming and treacherous domain becomes all the more pronounced. Goofy is now alone on an all-lit and abandoned road, where nary a sign of life is stirring, except for - at the most inopportune moment - his old nemesis the trailer owner. By sheer fluke, he ends up outside a motel, just slightly off the beaten track, with a vacant cabin, but soon discovers that it conceals an unpalatable secret...one that, in practice, amounts to little more than yet another mundane travel inconvenience, but that plays out as its own miniature nightmare. As Goofy attempts to settle, he discovers that the motel is situated right beside a railroad track - apparently at a turning, so that the train initially appears to be headed directly for him, before swerving and causing the cabin to vibrate so violently that Goofy is given no choice but to bail out. (Here, a small plot hole - Goofy had run out of gas before arriving at the motel, so it's never explained how he manages to get out.) There is something unsettling about this whole set-up - the inspired sight gag in which the cabin's picturesque front is revealed to be a fake, obscuring the more decrepit building right behind it, works on two levels, comically puncturing through the assumption of the roadside venue as a place of hospitality for the traveller, and having the distinct aura of a trap, of something more sinister stirring behind the romance. When Goofy arrives at the motel, nobody answers the door, with Goofy finding his own way into the cabin; the motel seems utterly deserted, the powers that operate it non-existent. The looming train that immediately shatters Goofy's prospects of a peaceful night's sleep is a nocturnal force that reveals itself only when the world is at its darkest and Goofy at his most isolated and vulnerable. Like the truck from Duel it is a raging beast stalking across its natural habitat, as seemingly devoid of human (or anthropomorphic canine) agency. Itself a mode of transport, the train represents an ostensible connection between two ports of call, yet once we've slipped into that ominous void in between there is an overwhelming sense of detachment from wherever we came from and wherever we thought we were going (at this point, Goofy's intended destination barely seems to matter any more, as his journey devolves into a case of navigating from one horror to the next). The train, much like everything else out here, is another force chugging aggressively onward, relentless in its opposition to us ever finding our way back out from the void.

As to whether Goofy ever finds his way back out from the void, I would say that he only marginally succeeds. Two Weeks Vacation does not resolve with the ending we'd be primed to expect, ie: a cyclic one, in which Goofy makes it back to the office with a newfound appreciation for the order and formality of the fifty working weeks ahead. Instead, much like Weaver's character from Duel, Goofy is left stranded in the hostile beyond, the restoration of the familiar never coming, although perhaps by the end he has (somewhat) made his peace with this. Following his stopover at the motel, Goofy gets in one last showdown with the trailer; its occupants are indulging in some kind of wild party, and nearly get Goofy killed in a manner reminiscent of one of the truck driver's tactics in Duel. When Goofy manages to overtake the trailer, he discovers that the driver has absconded (although how is not exactly clear, given that he was glimpsed in a preceding overhead shot), allowing the trailer to completely subsume his identity. Through another sheer accident, Goofy ends up taking a hold of the absent driver's wheel, giving him the chance to grapple physically with the omnipresent and exert some degree of personal control over the all-out chaos around him - at which point the law, whose presence seems immediately out of place in this domain, chooses to rear its head. For Goofy, this represents a victory of sorts - up until now, a lawlessness has pervaded the open road, and just to reconnect with law and order comes as a relief, even if he finds himself on the wrong side of it. Last seen in a police cell, Goofy becomes boxed in once more, and he accepts this as as close as he's ever going to get to a proper vacation. Enclosure is equated with security, and maybe that's substitute enough for the office building from whence we strayed. The message that the real refuge is to be found in containment is present after all.

Fifty Percent Grey (aka Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens)

Content warning: suicide, graphic head injury

Anybody looking for their fix in offbeat ghoulishness who only has a scant handful of minutes to spare would do well to seek out the 2001 computer animation Fifty Percent Grey. An early project from Irish film-maker Ruairí Robinson (who did not persist with animation as a medium thereafter, although dystopian narratives remained a favourite subject of his), it starts out by evoking the kinds of plot devices well-ingrained into the popular psyche from classic Twilight Zone installments, in which a protagonist finds themselves thrust into an unknown situation and tasked with making sense of where they are and where they might be headed from here. It takes an archetypal nightmare scenario - the threat of being mired for all eternity in a featureless space with no prospect of growth or change - and milks a whole lot of twisted fun from it. The result is a note-perfect bundle of dark humor and existential dread mixed with just the slightest dash of visceral horror, all packed in to slightly less than three minutes. The early-millennium CG animation might look a tad primitive by modern standards, but has a grotesque expressiveness that perfectly compliments the morbid underpinnings of the narrative. Fifty Percent Grey was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2002 but lost to Pixar's submission, For The Birds. No surprises there - the gentle cartoon slapstick involving the big-eyed feather-brains was always more likely to placate mainstream sensibilities than Robinson's ingeniously sick vision of the hypothetical next world (besides, this was the same year that DreamWorks beat Pixar rather unceremoniously to the first award for Best Animated Feature, so it is nice that they at least got to triumph in the other animation category). Fifty Percent Grey, though, definitely strikes a stronger chord with the desolation in my own psyche. Actually, it was a fairly good year in terms of quickies - also in the running was Cordell Barker's Strange Invaders, one of my all-time favourite animated shorts, so you are urged not to sleep on the competition.

The film sees a man - his name is not cited in the film itself, but the synopsis on the Irish Film Institute website indicates that we are to call him Sgt Cray - wake up in what appears to be the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a grey, barren landscape that seems to stretch out into infinity. We can deduce from the dripping blood and the visible wound in his chest, which rapidly closes up, that he is an ex-human and likely died in combat. He still has his gun, and the battle armor that blatantly did not protect him. Cray gets up, and notices a television set situated immediately before him, causing him to drop his helmet in surprise. He activates a video recording, which greets him with the upbeat announcement that, "Congratulations, you are dead!" and welcomes him to Heaven, where it promises he can enjoy eternity in peace and tranquillity. Cray looks around and, noting that the monotonous world around him bears no resemblance to the paradisaical images flaunted in the video, sets off in the hopes of encountering something more. Cray keeps on walking, until eventually a speck appears on the horizon; he rushes excitedly toward it, only to find himself face to face with the very television he'd contended with earlier, distinguished by the helmet he'd abandoned right beside it. He has, in fact, been walking in a circular loop the entire time - there is nothing to this "Heaven" except endless grey inertia. Horrified by the implications, Cray puts his gun to his head and shoots himself, hoping to end his entrapment but merely restarting the process - he wakes up in an identical grey landscape, in the vicinity of yet another television. Cray activates the video message, which greets him in the same upbeat tones, the crucial difference being that this time it welcomes him to Purgatory, advising him that he's here because mistakes were made. Cray inserts his gun into his mouth and fires it once again. By now, a clear pattern is emerging, so you can probably guess where this is headed next, although you might not be prepared for the smattering of body horror that accompanies Cray's next awakening, as he rubs his head to find a sample of his pulverised brains leaking out. His wound immediately heals, and Cray finds himself faced with the same inertia and yet another television. "Congratulations, you are dead!" proclaims the video recording. "Welcome to Hell! You are here because..." This time, Cray doesn't wait for the message to finish - he turns his gun on the television and blows it to smithereens. He then puts the gun to his head, whereupon he discovers that he only had a finite number of bullets, leaving him stranded in this grey monotonous "Hell". Not that it makes any difference, given what his other two options were.

I've seen some viewers forward the interpretation that Cray was in Hell all along and the looping inertia part and parcel of his damnation, but that reading gets a hard disagree from me. I think it's much funnier if the implication is that all three places are indeed exactly the same. Besides, what I find objectionable about the all-Hell interpretation is that it hinges on the need to presume that what Cray is experiencing now is somehow karmically proportionate to sins committed in life, and I see that as contrary to the absurdist nature of the short. The kind of person Cray was in life is really of no odds when the joke is that we are all inherently fucked. Having said that, the fact that he is a soldier does seem to be of greater significance than merely accounting, in narrative terms, for why he would have that gun on him, suggesting as it does two potentially contradictory readings of the situation he has come from. We might equate military combat with heroism, but it does entail the rampant destruction of life. The clue there may be in the title - life is never completely black and white, and it's possible that the afterlife has followed suit, with any potential rewards and retributions merging together and cancelling one another out, leaving us to tread an interminable grey platform signifying the intrinsically murky terrain of human existence. (The title is also a cunning reference to the 50% grey layer technique, which is used to add light and texture to pixel imagery.)

How I'm inclined to interpret Fifty Percent Grey is as less as a commentary on human notions of morality than on the television's role as an authoritative voice. It is a horror short in which the chattering cyclops emerges as our villain, albeit in a somewhat different manner to the child-abducting television set in Poltergeist. The afterlife (in all three of its purported dimensions) is infused with a troubling corporate coldness; it appears that God/the Devil/Charon/whoever cannot be bothered to greet any of its denizens in person and instead leaves a pre-recorded video message to do the heavy-lifting. The television is the closest thing Cray has to a companion (mimicking how the television might function as a substitute for social interaction in real life), and his sole means of making sense of the world around him - the joke being that the world around him never changes, but the narrative the television is feeding him does. Horror and humor alike arise from the discrepancy between what is promised (or threatened) on the TV screen and what you actually get, with Heaven, Purgatory and Hell all constituting the same experience as it is continuously repackaged and resold. One of the sharpest gags, with regards to Cray's so-called Heavenly encounter, is that the closing statement actually sounds more ominous than inspiriting, the alleged perk being in the opportunity to, "Sit back and unwind as you contemplate the mysteries of the universe," followed by the baleful reminder that, "You have all the time in the world!" What is immediately chilling about this afterlife is the total indifference of whatever higher powers are pulling the strings - and, to my mind, the horrifying stasis with which Cray is faced is a reflection squarely of this and not anything that he might have done in life. Even the Heavenly images that accompany the original message have a distinctly lackadaisical quality, a banality that's reminiscent of the kinds of still images that once populated old Windows screensavers. It offers a paradoxical glimpse into a vision of a promised land that is blatantly not there and yet one that effectively mirrors the unbearable vacuousness of the space Cray already occupies.

As the short progresses, the television becomes less of a proxy for these indifferent higher forces than an oppressor in and of itself. There is a visual clue hinting toward this early on, when Cray walks away from the television set, and we see an eerie shot of with TV in the foreground, appearing to dwarf the wandering man. It gives the impression of dominance on the part of the television, that it "knows" something that he does not. The TV's non-benignity is reinforced through its persistent presence yet shifting appearance, as if different layers are being stripped away to reveal the corporate malevolence lurking underneath - Robinson incorporates a witty sight gag in which the televisual technology is downgraded the lower Cray descends in his metaphysical journey. I'm not sure, but I think he may even have a laserdisc player in "Heaven", while in "Hell" he gets a clunky-looking model of VHS machine. I am, unsurprisingly, won over by the latter's retro charm - I would say that, of the three options on offer, it would be better to be in Hell, if you at least get to gape at truly vintage home video technology. That's just me, though.

Fifty Percent Grey was released in the same year as Richard Linklater's feature animation Waking Life, and in some respects represents a more brutally comical variation on the same basic formula, where the (potentially deceased) protagonist repeatedly fails to find their way out of an increasingly oppressive otherworldly state of being. In both films, the protagonist intermittently turns to a television set for guidance, the television representing a window through which to view and process the grander scheme. In Waking Life, the punchline to one of these sequences is supplied by an advertising jingle that breezily proclaims, "Now I'm free to see the world!"; this alludes, jokingly, to the liberation that both the television and Wiley's possible disconnect from the corporeal world should theoretically provide, all while he remains incongruously in his sedentary position as a passive observer (at the time, Wiley is engaged in channel surfing, an act that implies the intersection of creativity and passivity). In Fifty Percent Grey, I've no doubt that the central gag lies in the tension between the television's dual function as a mode of escapism and and a means of numbing spectators into accepting the status quo they are looking to transcend. Cray engages in warfare with the television as it attempts to exert control over his perception, striking back with a vengeance at his every effort to duck out of the narrative it projects onto the void and instructs him to consume, its rhetoric becoming more aggressively damning (quite literally) with each round. Cray might have the right idea at the end, in resolving to shoot the television and silence his opponent before it can complete its final condemnation, but it registers as rather a hollow victory. After all, it's not like he has anything else to stare at out there, except into that infinite grey abyss.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #44: Rocky Robin (The Early Bird Catches The Earworm)

I wonder how many popular songs have been irrecoverably ruined for young ears because they first heard them not in their default forms, as delightful slices of chart-topping bubblegum, but as corrupted versions carefully modified to tout the virtues of branded cooking oils and sunflower spreads? To children of a certain era, "Rockin' Robin", a 1958 hit for Bobby Day that was later memorably covered by a young Michael Jackson, sounds inherently wrong coming out of the mouths of either artist, and as a ballad detailing the rhythm-loving avians of Jaybird Street. To their ears, the song is at its most authentic when performed in a thick Geordie accent, by Tim Dealy (I've yet to see any official sources confirming it, but everyone seems pretty convinced that it's him) and from the perspective of an audacious robin praising a brand of sweet treat from Kirklees-based manufacturers Fox's Biscuits. If you feel compelled to insert the songbird's catchphrase, "A chock-a-block, man!", onto the ending of your each and every exposure to the Day and Jackson versions, then I see you, fellow member of the Rocky Robin generation. The cartoon robin's reign during mid-1990s children's television was brief but relatively prolific, the result being that our consumption of said tune has forever been hijacked.

Rocky's shtick is that he was "hard", like the brand of chocolate-coated biscuit he favoured, something he demonstrated with both his old-school Jimmy Dean get-up and his knack for antagonising various garden-dwelling predators and getting away with it scot-free. I'm aware of at least three ads from the original campaign, and Rocky was given a different nemesis for each - cat, dog and corvid, respectively - all of whom wound up on the receiving end of cartoon slapstick for attempting either to eliminate the pesky robin or to come between him and his Rocky bars. Meanwhile, Rocky would perform some variation on his corrupted take on "Rockin' Robin". The robin's catchphrase, "A chock-a-block, man!", made enough of an impression within its time, at least judging by the high number of children in my own playground compelled to replicate it, and before the campaign closed one company, our defunct chums at Blockbuster Video, were canny enough to take advantage of it with a tie-in promotion, for which Rocky (predictably, but slickly) modified his slogan to "A chock-a-Blockbuster!"

 

What stands out to me about the campaign now is that Rocky is kind of a jerk, particularly to Spot the dog, whom Rocky both explicitly insults in his lyrics and renders the victim of a really mean prank. In fact, I think Rocky's treatment of Spot is positively sociopathic. For a start, I think we could devote an entire subgenre of Horrifying Advertising Animals to ads where dogs are purposely enticed with chocolate-based products - I'm not sure how widely educated people were on the issue of canine chocolate toxicity in 1995 (seven years prior, Disney had apparently had no qualms with giving Georgette the poodle a box of chocolates in Oliver & Company), but it's difficult to watch any such scenes now without feeling really uneasy. Here, Rocky stops short of putting that all-destructive theobromine into Spot's digestive system, but what he does instead isn't much nicer, which is to say feeding him his own tail and turning him into a canine Ouroboros. Thereby upholding his point that Spot is one seriously thick rover, but, erm, Rocky - what did Spot ever do to you that warranted such thoroughly uncompassionate behaviour? Rocky wasn't exactly blameless during the cat installment either - the cat was actually sleeping peacefully until Rocky began strutting uproariously around its territory - but at least there there was ultimately an element of self-defence involved. Here, Rocky goes after Spot for seemingly no greater reason than to demonstrate that he's at the top of this particular garden ecosystem, and that the larger denizens underestimated him at their own peril. A more charitable interpretation would be that Rocky is using aversion therapy in an effort to train Spot to shun chocolate products, but I still can't say I think much of his tactics.

Rocky had all but disappeared by the latter half of the decade, but he made an unexpected comeback in 2003 when Fox revived him as the face of a new product, Rocky Rounds. This wasn't the Rocky that you and I had known, however. This was Rocky R, an audacious, biscuit-loving robin for the new millennium. The world had changed significantly over the last few years, and 1950s throwbacks, Geordie accents and Tom and Jerry-esque calamity were no longer what the cool kids responded to - hip hop was in, and Rocky was accordingly reimagined as a rapper leading a swanky playboy lifestyle. The ads parodied conventions of rap music videos, with corrupted renditions of "Rockin' Robin" naturally being off the cards. Likewise, 2D animation was sliding rapidly out of fashion, so this new incarnation of Rocky was a computer generated creation who intermingled with the real world. He bore so little resemblance to his 90s counterpart that it would be easy enough to interpret him as a different character altogether, if not for lyrics in which he specifies that "Rocky R is back". It was a strange set-up, openly anticipating prior familiarity with the character while blatantly out to exploit nobody's nostalgia for the original campaign - it's hard to tell, but I don't think any of those placards wielded by Rocky's adoring fans reads, "Chock-A-Block, man", which is about the peak of my personal disappointment. Otherwise, I'm pretty clement toward rappin' Rocky. I know some old school Rocky fans aren't so hot on Rocky '03, feeling they went the Poochie route in attempting to amplify the character's hip factor, but as far as I can see the spirit of the original campaign is still more-or-less intact. Rocky is as cocksure as ever, and while he's traded his avian chorus girls for flesh-and-blood human groupies and is no longer in the business of evading cartoon predators, the paparazzi show up to be the target of slapstick violence in their place (albeit not caused by Rocky directly). It was an amiable enough attempt to take the character into a brand new era, although possibly hampered in lacking the earworm factor of its predecessor; nothing the rapping robin comes out with is going to bore its way into your brain quite as ferociously as that earlier jingle. On the flip side, he doesn't pull anything half as sociopathic as that japery with feeding Spot his tail. Rocky R is clearly more of the humane sort.