Ten Minutes Older '02: Addicted To The Stars (Michael Radford)

Ten Minutes Older was a 2002 film project conceived and curated by producer Nicolas McClintock to mark the dawning stages of the 21st century. A selection of prominent film-makers, including the likes of Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders, were tasked with creating a short piece on the subject of time, with the specification that each be ten minutes in length. The title, inspired by a 1978 short by Herz Frank, highlights the fact that the viewer would indeed be ten minutes older after viewing each film in its entirety. But would they necessarily be ten minutes wiser?

Fifteen shorts were contributed in total, and were assembled into two companion features, The Trumpet and The Cello, the titular instruments alluding to the musical compositions heard during the linking titles between each short. I'm not sure if there were any additional themes determining which contributions were sorted into which feature, although it does not escape my notice that all of the really miserable material ended up in The Cello. Despite its deceptive opening, a charmingly meditative fable entitled "Histoire d'eaux" from Bernardo Bertloucci, The Cello is by and far the heavier-going experience - slower, colder and periodically nastier (the nastiest segment of the lot, "The Enlightenment" by Volker Schlöndorff, follows a philosophical mosquito who monologues on the nature of time while observing incidents of human folly at a holiday camp - to quote Milhouse Van Houten, it sounds like more fun than it really is). Reception for both features was fairly mixed - critics found things they admired here and there, though many complained of the uneven tone (somewhat inevitable for an anthology film helmed by so many different hands) - but was generally more favourable toward The Trumpet, which is probably no coincidence. It's not that The Trumpet is an intrinsically more optimistic film than The Cello, but the shorts therein, even at their most haunting and righteously angry, do have an all-round stronger sense of warmth and humanity. The Cello, by comparison, is chilly and cerebral - a fascinating package but, Bertloucci opener aside, not a particularly likeable one.

The overall lack of likeability in The Cello also makes it a harder film to consume in one sitting - compared to The Trumpet, which hangs together more cohesively. Although I've tapped The Trumpet quite extensively for its rewatchability value, to the extent that it now feels like a good, genial friend of mine, The Cello I've only ever viewed in its entirety once, back when I was all-too eager to write the film off as a disappointment. As a whole, it's still got that distant alien quality to me. Yet many of the individual shorts did stay with me, and I've found myself periodically compelled to return to them - in particular, the anthology's penultimate piece, a little science fiction yarn called "Addicted To The Stars" by Michael Radford. Radford's piece is unique among the fifteen for being the only short to attempt to represent a possible future vision of life on Earth. Elsewhere, segments are more interested in exploring the tensions between the past and the present (notably Werner Herzog's "Ten Thousand Years Older" and Chen Kaige's "100 Flowers Hidden Deep", both of which deal with worlds and cultures that have been extinguished with the coming of the modern era) or honing in on small, specific moments in time where something vital hangs in the balance, be it the life or death of an individual (Wim Wenders' "Twelve Miles to Trona", Victor Erice's "Lifeline") or a nation's entire social and political trajectory (Spike Lee's "We Wuz Robbed", Erice's "Lifeline" again).

"Addicted To The Stars" tells the gracefully straightforward story of an astronaut completing an eighty light-year journey and returning to Earth in the year 2146, to be confronted by the consequences of time-dilation. Cecil Thomas (Daniel Craig, a few years before his successful turn as the latest Bond incarnation) discovers that while he has aged by merely ten minutes (it is, I believe, the only short to explicitly evoke the project title) an entire lifetime has elapsed on Earth in his absence. He has only one real interest in the Earth to which he's returned - seeking out a man by the name of Martin (Charles Simon), who is revealed to be Cecil's son. Last seen by Cecil as a sprightly adolescent, Martin is now old and frail and visibly teetering on the edge of his existence. Martin is overjoyed to see his father again, having waited so long for his return, but their reunion proves to be fleeting - the short concludes with Cecil leaving Martin yet again, apparently having grown accustomed to the atmosphere and the solitude of outer space.

Despite pivoting around such a tender moment of human connection, the dominant mood of "Addicted To The Stars" is that very characteristic Cello coldness. The world to which Cecil returns - although it does not look radically different to our own - feels dark, empty and sterile. The busiest, brightest moments occur at the beginning of the short, when Cecil and his co-pilot (Roland Gift) arrive at the space station and get their first tasters of the Earth of '46, but once Cecil ventures beyond, a haunting desolation accompanies his every step. Radford inserts elements of humor throughout - Claire Adamson plays an android whose uncanny smile does not exactly radiate congeniality, and Cecil has an underground encounter with a nun (Daisy Beaumont) who exploits his unfamiliarity with the future London's transportation system in order to scrounge a cigarette - but humor designed to increase our sense of alienation. Little is seen of the natural world, besides the shimmering of the River Thames as Cecil twice crosses the Millennium Bridge (which, back in 2002, was still a very recent addition to the London architecture). Meanwhile, technology and its ability to improve daily living is represented with a wry cynicism, as Cecil learns that the "instantaneous" travel promised by the modern Tube isn't functioning, forcing him to complete the journey to Martin's by foot. The effect is to make the Earth seem like more of a lifeless vacuum than outer space, which is depicted with a vast, awe-inspiring grandeur in the short's bookending sequences. Space is expansive and filled with infinite possibilities; Earth is a dead-end, perfectly symbolised by that run-down futuristic Tube that isn't going anywhere.

The paradox at the heart of "Addicted To The Stars" concerns why, despite his obvious emotional attachment to Martin, Cecil is so driven to abandon him twice over. The answer is hinted in the title, which tells us that Cecil's commitment to space travel is, in part, driven by compulsion. This much is implied during the short itself when, on his journey, Cecil surveys the city skyline and gazes longingly at a bright light streaking upwards across the night sky. But what exactly is the attraction that has Cecil going back again and again, overriding his paternal allegiances down on Earth? The exhilaration? The tranquillity? Regardless, Cecil does not exactly fit the bill of the archetypal negligent father who puts career before family; even if he has missed out on a lifetime with his son, it does ironically appear to be his devotion to Martin that fuels him. The opening shot shows Cecil's hand extending out and collecting a rock from the surface of a barren planet; he later places the same rock on Martin's mantelpiece, suggesting that he is fulfilling a request made to to him by the young Martin before his departure. In the closing shot, we see that Cecil has returned to the exact same spot where he collected the rock, only this time he leaves a photograph of the adolescent Martin in its place. My interpretation of this ending would be that it is Cecil's attempt to give Martin immortality, by taking his likeness well away from an Earth where all inhabitants are doomed to death and decay and preserving him as a static image, forever youthful, out in the depths of space. His final departure is a rejection of time, and of the vicissitudes it has already inflicted on Martin, rather than a rejection of his son per se.

I think "Addicted To The Stars" is best understood as a type of ghost story, albeit one in which the ghost in question is not actually dead, just out of place in a time to which he feels he has no business bearing witness. Cecil's spectral qualities are evoked during a sequence where he gazes out onto the city and comments on a large triangular building that was not part of the architecture when he left. The shot of the night skyline is superimposed with the shot of Cecil looking out at it, a great transparent figure lingering over this futuristic landscape. Cecil left this world decades ago and is aware that it has moved on without him; his return, unaged and practically unchanged, is akin to coming back from the dead. He is unable to adjust to the living world, not because the technology is insurmountable, but because of his understanding that, by the natural order of things, he should not be there. The stars to which he is so addicted can be viewed as a symbolic afterlife; Cecil's adherence to them lies in his desire for immortality, and for total liberation from the tyrannies of time - not for himself, but for the loved one he is counter-intuitively required to abandon in the process. The secondary paradox in this scenario is that the "ghost", Cecil, still has most of his life ahead of him, while the living, Martin, is visibly at the end. If we view Cecil as having already died a symbolic death, we might view his return as an expedition to greet the dying Martin and transport him to his own heavenly existence among the stars - something Cecil fulfils by carrying his likeness up into space. The dawning light as Cecil traverses back across the Millennium Bridge after his meeting with Martin is suggestive of a new beginning, either in Martin's incoming extraterrestrial existence, or in Cecil's newfound liberty, having achieved closure with his remaining Earthly attachment, to look exclusively to the stars.

At the same time, we are reminded of the regenerative potential that still exists on this Earth, even one so cold and impersonal, although this is ultimately rejected by Cecil. The other enigma of "Addicted To The Stars" concerns the character played by Branka Kratic, who lives with Martin and is credited only as "young woman". She could be presumed to be Martin's carer, yet she regards Cecil with a barely concealed awe, suggesting that she brings her own pre-loaded emotional baggage to their encounter. Might she be a descendent of Cecil, either Martin's daughter or his granddaughter? This reading is possibly undermined by her calling Martin by his first name, which seems unusual for a relationship of that nature (although by 2146, who could say?), and yet she clearly feels an attachment to Cecil. Whereas Martin seems resigned to Cecil's inevitable departure, she puts up a muted protest, asking him if he really has to leave. If she is not actually a relative of Cecil's, then the next best implication is that she signifies something of the solitude felt by the residents of the futuristic Earth. Irrespective of her true identity, she stands for the planet's current generation, and presents an opportunity for a fresh connection to which Cecil is mostly indifferent - although he does linger, as if momentarily tempted by her suggestion of a possible alternative outcome.

"Addicted To The Stars" is a story of the human desire to continuously push boundaries and transcend limitations, but also of the hidden cost to looking so high up as to fail to take advantage of what is already right there in front of us. Just as unsettling as the regret, lost time and missed opportunities that pervade Cecil and Martin's relationship are those that occur on a more subtle level between Cecil and Kratic's character. Cecil chooses not to stay with her, in part out of his commitment to obtaining immortality to Martin, but also because of his distrust of the living world, and his aversion to becoming emotionally entangled with anything else inevitably doomed to death and decay. Instead, he keeps on walking, and sends himself back to infinity.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #37: Labatt Blue Bear (C-A-N-A-D-EH?)

The Labatt Blue Bear is yet another entry in the curiously prolific subgenre of Horrifying Advertising Animals who were actually humans in moth-eaten bear costumes, following in the footsteps of George the Hofmeister Bear and the Sun Country Polar Bear. Gracing television screens in the late 1990s, and on into the first years of the brave new millennium, here was yet another freak of nature, always hot on the trail of the latest beanfeast, to guide us through uncertain times. The premise behind the Labatt Blue Bear (if he had an actual name, I've never heard it) was that he'd wandered into the United States from the backwoods of Canada, and now spent his days hanging around sushi bars, golf courses, private parties and an assortment of other hip and happenin' venues, staying in touch with his Canadian roots through the endorsement of its imported lagers. Wherever he roamed, the bear was never far from a bottle of Labatt Blue, which was used as a shorthand for his national identity. Whatever the scrapes in which he found himself, the bear usually came through on the back of his Canuck charms and Blue ammunition, but this wasn't a guarantee - in one spot, for example, the bear is unable to persuade a convenience store clerk that he is of legal drinking age.

Although the basic concept of a bipedal bear who'd abandoned the wilds and assimilated himself into civilised culture through an allegiance to its lagers sounds immediately reminiscent of George, tonally this campaign feels closer in spirit to Spuds McKenzie, in that much of it hinges on the sheer absurdity of the various humans the hero encounters somehow not processing or commenting on the fact that there's this beer-swilling bear walking among them. Also like Spud, the bear's knack for beguiling the ladies gave the campaign frequent and inevitable undertones of there being bestiality at play. There was one critical difference, however - unlike Spud, the bear could actually answer back (again, information on the bear is kind of scant, so my apologies for not being able to credit who played and/or voiced him), and he at least had no delusions about what he was. Intermittently, he would reference the fact that he was a bear and his various ursine quirks and eccentricities, and yet the humans seldom seemed to bat an eyelid; they were more likely to comment on his being Canadian than his being a bear. Did they really so oblivious to that particular detail? Hard to say - in one ad, the bear is able to convince an old flame that the reason he's not been returning her calls for the past few months is because he's been in hibernation. The ad ends with him showing up at her door with a conciliatory crate of Blue and her sultrily remarking that, "You must be so hungry...", one of the campaign's many implied interspecies sex gags - unless the implication is he's intending to eat her. Both interpretations are equally valid.

 

In another, particularly skin-crawling ad, we find the bear engaged in a game of golf, and tasked with having to return a ball from the woods to the open green, something he manages with flair. The bear emerges from the trees, whistling nonchalantly, as his companions gawk on in discomfort. He then looks directly at the camera and asks, "What?" What indeed. We all know what bears are reputed to get up to in the woods, and I'm not really sure if my takeaway is intended to be that this bear just soiled the wooded part of these people's green, but I feel as though that's what I'm being goaded to think. I can't imagine what else that intensely uncomfortable "What?" is supposed to imply.

Although the bear's blatantly humanoid figure and lack of expressive facial features give him an unrepentantly nightmarish quality, there is a likeable strangeness to this campaign, with the individual ads playing like miniature fish-out-of-water sitcoms with a eerily off-kilter flavour. The visual grotesqueness of the bear seems to accentuate some kind of hidden malaise in the overriding banality of the various scenarios - the trepidation of the outsider seeking acceptance in another culture - albeit one that our conspicuous misfit looks to have successfully overcome. I don't feel qualified to comment on whether or not there's a joke in here specifically about how Americans perceive Canadians, but the vibe I certainly get is that of a foreigner who feels assured and at ease in the land he's traversing, thanks to a reciprocated love of the product being hawked. The general theme of this campaign seems to be about connections across ostensible barriers, so maybe the whole concept of a bear who blends effortlessly into human society makes for a perfectly apt metaphor. The theme of transnational affinities is most explicitly explored in one ad where the bear bonds with a group of Japanese businessmen in and ends up performing an Al Jolson number with them at a karaoke bar - sweet enough, if you can forgive the fact that the central gag hinges heavily on their very Engrishy mispronunciation of the bear's favoured beverage.

The Labatt Blue Bear was considered iconic enough for a revival in 2013 (and was still just as horrifying as ever), although it's probably fair to say that he didn't make quite the same pop cultural splash, in the dying embers of the 20th century, as his better-known contemporaries, the Budweiser Swamp Gang. It lacks the gleeful, all-out insanity of that particular campaign, going for weirdness of a more muted variety, but the notes it hits are sufficiently unsettling. As a party animal, the bear had more bite than Spuds MacKenzie, for certain.

 

One final point of interest - in the aforementioned ID spot, the bear confirms that he was born in 1992 - which, as the store clerk points out, would have made him 9 when the ad aired in 2001. The bear disputes this, claiming that in bear years he would be the equivalent of 29. Well hey, it's now 2021 and the bear would indeed be 29 in human years. In bear years...he could still be alive. 30 would be at the far end of the average black bear's life expectancy, although I'm not sure what impact a drinking habit is going to have on that.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #36: Eagle Star Direct Macaw

Back in the late-mid 90s, UK insurance company Eagle Star Direct (who didn't have much longer to go before their acquisition by Zurich Financial Services) unleashed a series of ads designed to exploit the common wisdom that insurance is something of an inherently boring product, and any marketer has their work cut out in making it look sexy and exotic to the masses. The point of this campaign - on the surface, anyway - was that it always showed you boring and non-eventful imagery, as a reflection of consumer expectations for the experience of browsing through insurance policies. These were ads consisting of dead, empty spaces, momentary plunges into the abyss of the prosaic, accompanied by Eagle Star's textual admissions that dealing with insurance was typically about as riveting was what you were currently seeing on screen. But if you followed their instructions and gave them a call, then you were (supposedly) going to love what you would hear.

Here's the peculiar thing, though - the ads themselves weren't actually boring. To the contrary, they fell squarely on the side of the curiously confounding. At a time when it was becoming increasingly fashionable for brands to equate themselves with the surreal, overblown and often downright deranged, there was something uniquely charming about Eagle Star Direct's approach, by fixating on the banal to the unabating extent that it too became borderline surreal. Like the inorganic object that appears to move, if you stare at it for long enough (you've heard those legends about the clown in Test Card F), so too did perturbing little auras start revealing themselves in these ostensibly humdrum snapshots. The most authentically, miserably insipid of the bunch focused on a washing machine in motion, its insipidness arising not from the visuals of the machine itself but from the irksomely unimaginative choice of pop accompaniment (what else but "You Spin Me Round" by Dead or Alive?). The others, though, made much more offbeat choices. A key feature across the campaign, and central to its somewhat remote vibe was the near-total lack of any human presence. The focus was largely on everyday inanimate objects, and the ads remained pure in their beguiling fascination with the ordinary and the inert. On the rare occasions humans did appear, they were typically quite muted - for example, we see a human hand (albeit concealed by a glove) operating a mop in one ad, and the torsos of supermarket patrons hovering the backdrop of another. Nothing so intimate or familiar as a human face, however. Animals sometimes showed up, often as visual punchlines. The aforementioned mop ad, for example, concluded with a dog wandering in and tracking mud across the freshly-wiped floor. If you stayed with another ad, this one centred on a roadside kerb and the ambiance of passing traffic, you were rewarded with the sight of a hedgehog making it safely to the other side (revealing that a scenario of seriously stomach-churning tension had been playing out all along - the camera just happened to be largely pointed away from it).

My first encounter with the campaign was via a purpose-made Halloween ad in October 1996, and I remember being genuinely thrown by it. The visuals presented nothing more ostentatious than a stack of pumpkins on display in a supermarket, but the audio did not correspond. Instead, we heard an array of tracks from what I can only assume to be an album of haunted house sound effects - creaking floorboards, ear-splitting screams, malevolent laughter. The visuals and audio alike had a distinctly, purposely frugal flavour, and yet the conspicuous mismatch of the innocuous and the spookhouse had a remarkably unsettling effect, giving off the queasy impression of a hidden grisliness manifesting in the everyday. The innocent shoppers were going about their business unaware that there was something terribly wrong about this picture - in visual terms, it was difficult to pinpoint what, but those sounds made it plain that it was there.

Even more vexing than that pumpkin ad, though, was a spot featuring a blue and gold macaw, who was unusually front and centre for something so blatantly non-prosaic. We had the beguiling juxtaposition of the exotic with the conspicuously non-exotic, a striking bird seated on a perch in a blandly wallpapered living room. Our immediate expectation - that the bird might talk - is deliberately frustrated. Instead, it sits there in total silence for the duration; the only sound heard, early on, is background noise from a ticking clock. Some semblance of a narrative surfaces when this domestic inertia is finally ruptured by the sounds of a doorbell ringing, repeatedly, followed by evidence that our offscreen caller is becoming increasingly irate; the ringing gives way to knocking, and the ad closes with neither the external caller or the internal limbo showing any signs of backing down.

It would be wrong to suggest that the Eagle Star Direct ads in general were devoid of conflict (despite the impression they strove to give) - the mop ad pivoted on the classic battle between cleanliness and chaos, and the road ad with the plucky hedgehog said something of nature's plight in an increasingly human-modified world, although it was within the macaw ad that the conflict was the most salient. We never find out who the caller is or what they were calling about, but they were clearly pretty danged desperate to meet with those vacant occupants. The conflict is so pronounced, in fact, that it feels like an outlier to the rest of the campaign - though the Eagle Star Direct ads had their own unique tone and aesthetic, this one in particular feels like an escapee from a contemporary line of KitKat ads (the "Have a Break" campaign was still going strong, but had graduated from roller-skating pandas to similarly static situations that were not likely to be resolved any time soon). The nature of the conflict is mundane, but this is counterbalanced by the strange visual of the parrot, whose presence is basically superfluous - Eagle Star Direct might have made their point just as efficiently by focusing on a less unusual domestic item, after all. And yet, the parrot significantly alters the entire tone of the ad. The futility of the caller's struggle seems all the more absurd for that it does not, technically, go unacknowledged - the parrot gazes in its direction with the same indifference as it had regarded whatever was holding its interest (quite possibly nothing) before the disturbance came, a non-human passively observing the ludicrousness of a human going to war with absolutely nothing.

All of the Eagle Star Direct ads purported to be about nothing - or, more accurately, about staring into a vacuum of unrelenting monotony - but it is here that the vacuum seems to be most markedly regarding us back and smirking at our impotence, the ticking clock in background accentuating each and every precious moment being drained away in the process. Perhaps that sense of silence indifference is best embodied by a parrot, a creature from which entertainment has long conditioned us to expect loquaciousness.

Oliver & Company (aka Reviewing The Situation)

Growing up, I had the strangest relationship with Disney's 27th animated classic, Oliver & Company (1988). It was the first brand new Disney film (and the first brand new film, period) that I got to see on the big screen, and I do remember it getting quite a lot of hype at the time - the TV spots appeared in every advert break, there were various promotional tie-ins with cereals and fast food outlets, and I was given a copy of the Ladybird storybook. I was genuinely pumped for it, and the film did not disappoint my callow expectations (the two things that stood out to me most were Georgette's entrance and the villain's demise, which must be one of the most gruesomely unique in Disney history). Then something strange happened - there came a point, no more than a year later, where the film seemed to vanish without a trace. Merchandise tie-ins completely dried up (I collected an array of Disney comics at the dawn of the 1990s, in which I NEVER saw any mention of Oliver and his friends) and, whenever I raised the movie with my peers, I found that they would invariably shrug their shoulders and profess to never having heard of it. The one thing I was truly anxious for - a home video release - was not forthcoming. I sat back and watched as seemingly every other Disney title trickled out onto magnetic tape, and this one remained in its elusive black hole. If not for that Ladybird book, which gave me tangible proof of the film's existence, I'm not entirely sure that I wouldn't have written the whole thing off as a particularly fanciful dream. Instead, I had the peculiar and alienating experience of being the only person on the planet who apparently remembered this thing that had once seemed so big and prominent. Finally, in 1996, the film did resurface, with a theatrical re-release and, slightly later, a belated VHS release. The damage was already done, however. Disney had allowed cultural memory of this film to evaporate, simply through not caring enough to keep it alive. Oliver & Company seems forever doomed to its status as one of Disney's "forgotten" features.

It's odd, in a way, because Oliver & Company was a box office success at the time, narrowly beating out its rival, Don Bluth's The Land Before Time, at the domestic box office and pointing to a more optimistic future for Disney feature animation after a turbulent decade in which they'd endured the disastrous box office of The Black Cauldron (1985) and the humiliation of being upstaged by Bluth's previous feature, An American Tail (1986). It did, however, get very middling reviews from the critics (as did most Disney films from the so-called Dark Ages), which might be the major factor keeping it firmly out of the Renaissance era in most retrospectives, despite setting multiple precedents for the Renaissance era formula (among them, a pop-Broadway soundtrack - Oliver was Disney's first bona fide animated musical in some years - and an increasing emphasis on celebrity voices). Personally, I think what doomed Oliver & Company is that it had the misfortune of being followed up by The Little Mermaid (1989), the film that REALLY got people excited about Disney animation again. The success of Mermaid completely blew Oliver's out of the water, and I suspect Disney didn't see the point in keeping Oliver's fire lit now that they had something much more lucrative. Which doesn't quite satisfy me as to why the home video release was so belated, mind. Oliver was pushed to nearly the back of the queue, only marginally ahead of the maligned Black Cauldron (I love that movie, but it has more of an actively toxic reputation than does Oliver), and that's something I still don't understand.

I am biased, of course, since the film had such significance for me personally, but Oliver & Company deserved better. Among other things, it was only the second Disney animated feature to espouse the most radical suggestion of them all - that cats and dogs could live together in perfect harmony. Before then, One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) was the sole entry bold enough to propose that feline-canine relationships could be rooted in anything other than total enmity (and I am strictly only considering the animated features here, so please don't bring The Incredible Journey to my attention), an idea regarded by earlier Disney features as an aberration. This is a big deal, as we all know that Disney have a long-running love of traditionalism, their films tending to reinforce the idea that everything has its proper, preordained place, and though Disney were always happy to depict all-round congenial spirits among the woodland set, the image of cats and dogs sharing a roof together was typically code for a horribly corrupted state that demanded rectification. The barely-sustained pseudo-harmony between Bruno and Lucifer in Cinderella (1950) was emblematic of the distasteful union between Cinderella and her abusive step-family; Cinderella's suggestion that they all try to get along is ultimately refuted, for it concludes violently, with Bruno brutally defenestrating Lucifer, much as Cinderella gets to reject her step-family once and for all. In Lady & The Tramp (1955), the Siamese cats' ill-gotten entry into Lady's home signifies the point at which her domestic utopia begins to dangerously unravel. The Aristocats (1970), which cast the cats in a heroic role for a change, took a more neutral stance. The dog characters, Napoleon and Lafayette, never directly encounter the feline protagonists, aiding them only unwittingly through their harassment of antagonist Edgar. A loose affinity is forged at the end of the film, but from a comfortable distance, when the dogs overhear the cats' final musical performance and are compelled to howl along.

Oliver & Company took inspiration from Charles Dickens' classic novel Oliver Twist, although it's naturally a very loose adaptation, with all but the basic plot trajectory - rags to riches, rags again, and then safely back to riches - and a handful of the character names having been retained. The film follows Oliver (Joey Lawrence), an abandoned kitten struggling to eke out a living on the streets of New York. There, he encounters Dodger (musician Billy Joel, who is actually quite good in the role, but alas, doesn't seem to have taken his voice acting career any further), a savvy terrier who first cons the impressionable cat into helping him rob a hot dog vendor, but subsequently initiates him into his pack, a ragtag crew comprised of Rita (Sheryl Lee Ralph), a down-to-earth Saluki, Tito (Cheech Marin), a lecherous Chihuahua, Francis (Roscoe Lee Browne), a Shakespearean bulldog, and Einstein (Richard Mulligan), a drippy Great Dane. All five dogs belong to Fagin (Dom DeLuise), a hapless down-and-out who uses them to "fetch" money and other valuable items. Fagin's current economic woes are rooted in the substantial debt he owes to a loan shark named Sykes (Robert Loggia, whom you may remember as Norman Bates' therapist), who has threatened grave consequences if Fagin does not produce the goods in three days. Oliver is separated from the dogs during a botched attempt to rob a limousine, but the limo's passenger, a well-off but lonely girl named Jenny Foxworth (Natalie Gregory), takes pity on him and elects to keep him as her personal pet. This turn of events suits Oliver, who is clearly better cut out for the sheltered lifestyle supplied by Jenny than for a life of petty street crime, but it isn't long before his old canine cronies attempt to restore him to their ranks, and Oliver finds himself at the centre of a vicious clash between the classes.

Word has it (and I'm not sure just how credible the sources are on this) that Oliver & Company was at one point intended to be a sort-of sequel to The Rescuers (1977), in the same way The Rescuers could once have been a sort-of sequel to One Hundred and One Dalmatians by casting the Cruella as the villain. The original idea was that Oliver would be picked up by Penny, the waif rescued from Devil's Bayou by Bernard and Bianca, now living in New York with her adopted family, but the decision was ultimately made for her to be a separate character, Jenny, with the similar name a nod to the character's conceptual ancestry. Fascinating though it is to think about the possibility of a shared Disney universe, I do have a couple of questions regarding the practicality of working Penny into this particular story. Firstly, there's the matter of temporal distance. Both The Rescuers and Oliver & Company are set in their respective modern times - the final scene in The Rescuers presumably takes place on January 13th 1978, which did indeed fall on a Friday, while Oliver & Company is set in 1988, a full decade later. I'm not sure how old Penny is supposed to be during the events of The Rescuers, but I wouldn't peg her as younger than 7; by the time of Oliver & Company she would need to be in her late teens at the youngest. Secondly, and it's entirely possible that the Penny connection was dropped before this particular story detail was cemented, there's the fact that Jenny's domestic life, prior the arrival of Oliver, isn't exactly idyllic, which would somewhat undermine Penny's triumph at the end of The Rescuers in being adopted and reinstated to a family. It's a significant, although not massively overstated plot point in Oliver that Jenny's parents are neglecting her, leaving her with only the companionship of Winston (William Glover), a benevolent but ineffectual butler, and Georgette (Bette Midler), the family's self-absorbed show poodle. Not exactly the life I suspect Penny had in mind when she finally made it out of the orphanage.

Oliver recalls both Lady & The Tramp and The Aristocats, in that it too revolves around an uneasy intersection between classes of animals, albeit with a conclusion that seems more favourable to both. First, though, let's look at the ways in which its predecessors already diverge from one another. The Aristocats, often criticised for recycling many of the narrative beats of Lady & The Tramp, in some respects represents a more radical take on the same story. This time, the intersection is between two classes of cats living in France in the early 20th century - Duchess, the beloved pet of a retired opera singer, and her three kittens, and O'Malley, a charismatic feral who helps the family when they are uprooted from their swanky Parisian abode and abandoned in the countryside by a disgruntled butler. O'Malley leads the wayward family back to Paris but, like Tramp before him, attempts to dissuade Duchess from completing the last leg of her journey, advocating instead that she stay with him and give ferality a try. Just like Lady, Duchess's interest is overridden by her sense of obligation toward her human. The conflict is resolved, in both cases, through the reverse scenario - the male suitor gives up his life of ferality and is fully inducted into the domestic sphere. Much as Tramp had to acquire a collar and licence, as badges of his revised allegiances, so too must O'Malley don a bowtie to show that he has been successfully assimilated into Duchess's elite milieu. Unlike Tramp, however, O'Malley is not required to totally renounce his roots in the process - as it turns out, all of his alley cat associates will be moving in with him, as part of Madame's bold new initiative to transform her fabulous mansion into a sanctuary for Paris's homeless cat population. Quite a contrast to the bleak implications for the uncollared dogs at the end of Lady & The Tramp, whom the film and characters alike are quite happy to leave impounded and destined for euthanasia. The two films are united in advocating the supremacy of the reigning class and the elimination of the class that undercuts it, whether through eradication or assimilation, although the nature of the ending in The Aristocats, which has Scat Cat and his crew reprising their energetic jazz number, "Everybody Wants To Be A Cat", suggests that their bohemian spirit may not be so easily broken-in. Do we get to bow out on more of a compromise, then? Meanwhile, the murine home invader, a symbol of complete domestic breakdown in Lady & The Tramp, is here on friendly terms with the cats (and I believe this is the first instance of a Disney animated feature to show the cats and the rodents getting along). Unfortunate Asian stereotypes are still represented by cats of the Siamese breed, but at least this Siamese is jovial, good-natured and one of the guys, compared to insidious and malignant aliens Si and Am.

The baby, who occupies the centre of the household in Lady & The Tramp and is to be protected above all else, is dispensed with in The Aristocats - for Madame, the cats occupy the void that might have been filled by a more conventional family, and narrative is satisfied that this is their rightful place (to the irritation of some viewers, who find it easy to sympathise with the root of Edgar's indignation - being passed over in favour of the cats in Madame's will). Although Lady and Duchess initially reject their respective suitors for much the same reason, the two pets clearly have very different ideas about their place within the domestic equation. Lady, who was forced out of her role as baby substitute when the actual baby arrived, has settled on a new occupation as the family's protector; peripheral to the core family unit, it is now her job to monitor and uphold it. If she were to leave, she asks Tramp, "Who would watch over Jim Dear, Darling and the baby?" Duchess, on the other hand, has more confidence in her worth as a companion: "She'd always say that we're the greatest treasure she could own. Because with us she never felt alone." (The archetype that was formerly villainised through the character of Aunt Sarah - the crazy cat lady - is vindicated through Madame.) Paradoxically, this requires Duchess to pass up an opportunity to fill the conspicuous void in her own family unit, ie: the absence of the cat who sired her litter of kittens, something that is not explicitly addressed outside of O'Malley's observations that the kittens could use a father figure. This in itself is quite a contrast to O'Malley's initial stance on encountering kittens, when his knee-jerk reaction is apparently to have nothing to do with a female cat who carries additional baggage. By the end of the second act, it appears that O'Malley has come around to the prospect of familial responsibility, but not domesticity (in Lady & The Tramp, no state of possible separation is ever shown to exist between the two) - he dismisses Madame as "just another human". O'Malley's major arc as a character - the putting aside of his negative assumptions about hairless ape overlords - is, surprisingly, never brought to the forefront of the narrative. By saving Duchess and the kittens from Edgar, he reaffirms merely his commitment to them - unlike Tramp, he does not have to prove his worth to human authority before being permitted to climb the social ladder, as Madame never learns the full extent of Edgar's treachery. Instead, Madame is shown combing O'Malley's fur in the final scene, and the conflict appears to have neatly resolved itself off-screen. O'Malley has accepted that, in order to be truly worthy of Duchess, he needs to fully integrate himself into her culture.

Oliver & Company replaces the central romantic relationship with a surrogate father-son bond between Dodger and Oliver (the class-crossing romantic arc is instead delegated to supporting players Tito and Georgette, and is played exclusively for comic effect). Although Dodger's initial interest in the youngster is wholly exploitative, he later warms to the idea of having a protege. When he learns, in the second act, that the cat's preference would be to abandon him for Jenny, he exhibits a greater sense of personal betrayal than either Tramp or O'Malley, for in his case he had a claim on Oliver's affections first. Or so he assumes - Oliver's professed aspiration was always to be a conventional house pet. Unlike its two predecessors, which start out within the safety of the domestic sphere and involve the protagonists being forced out from their familial bliss and into a more dangerous open, Oliver begins with its protagonist already literally in the gutter. Oliver's starting point is closer to that of Penny from The Rescuers - he too is an orphan who has lived through the sting of repeated rejection, but is still hopeful that he may one day be initiated into a family. Like Penny, whatever home and family he formerly knew is no longer open to him - his original owner having already discarded him, Oliver spends the opening portion of the film watching as his various siblings also abandon him one by one.

One reason why I believe that Oliver & Company is a far more interesting Disney feature than it's frequently given credit for is that it shows, more so than any other Disney feature before or after, a nightmare scenario in which the parents have completely vacated and left the children to fend for themselves. The total lack of any actual parental figures is pronounced, even if the film makes little explicit mention of it. Oliver's biological parents have been removed from the equation before the story even begins; his early life remains a blank spot that he never so much as mentions. Jenny's parents are mentioned a handful of times but not seen, having wilfully distanced themselves from the action. During the events of the film, Jenny's parents, who are apparently business partners as well as marital partners, are away at a conference in Europe, and Jenny is disappointed to learn that they will not be returning home in time for her birthday celebration (sneakily, they break the bad news via a letter, so Jenny cannot voice her objections). Absent parents are a notoriously ubiquitous feature of Disney's canon - there are only a scant number of pictures in which both parents are present and make it to the end, although few others which this absence is to be attributed to total apathy on the part of said parents. The Rescuers is its most obvious predecessor - we never learn the circumstances under which Penny became an orphan, but it is clearly the lack of active adult guidance that causes her to be seduced and assimilated into "weird" Medusa's more twisted version of the family unit; the police had apparently given up on trying to locate Penny long before Bernard and Bianca became involved, which reinforces the general air of adult indifference. Bernard and Bianca's mission to retrieve Penny from the swamps becomes a redemptive one for the traditional family; the two mice fill in the role as Penny's parental figures, protecting her where the adult world has failed, but only until she is safely returned to civilisation, whereupon the adult world is finally vindicated through Penny's successful restoration to a clean-cut family, the malign influence of outsider Medusa now vanquished and out of the picture. This is less the case in Oliver & Company, where the world that has already failed Jenny is ultimately diminished through the rise of a younger generation that intends to rectify the mistakes of its parents. The two abandoned children come together to create their own foundational unit, although Oliver and Jenny are not regarded as equals in the matter, as we will soon see.

Oliver is likewise intriguing because it rests on the premise that the safe hands in which the future was presumed to be at the end of Lady & The Tramp have ultimately failed. Lady & The Tramp presents familial domesticity as a pristine utopia that is constantly under threat from foreign containments and must be defended. The domestic family we find in Oliver, by contrast, is already in a state of decline, brought about not by outside influence but by its own internal apathy. The parents have absconded; Winston, their ostensible stand-in, seems compassionate enough but has no genuine authority, with every command or suggestion he makes throughout the picture being duly ignored. Georgette, the pampered pet of the household, is neither Lady or Duchess; she's vain and aloof, and appears to have little interest in a role as either family guardian or cherished companion. Judging by the assortment of pictures and trophies that adorn her bedroom, and by the lyrics of her musical number, "Perfect Isn't Easy", she prefers to keep herself immured in her own personal world in which she is perpetually at the centre. She reacts to Oliver's arrival with the same indignation as Lady to Si and Am, but whereas Lady's ailurophobia (and worse) came from her selfless desire to uphold the purity of Jim Dear and Darling's abode, Georgette's response springs entirely from her own self-interest. Oliver's intrusion is a threat to the purity of her world specifically, something he unwittingly demonstrates by eating a meal served to him in Georgette's bowl. Georgette could even be viewed as the anti-Lady, who does not so easily relinquish her spotlight once the new baby has moved in. Georgette is shown to resent the close and loving relationship between Jenny and Oliver, but there is no evidence to suggest that this is because she aspires toward such a relationship herself; rather, Georgette seems averse to the reminder that the entire world does not revolve around her. The film goes so far as to depict Georgette as something of a false friend to Jenny; not only does she exercise treachery by aiding Dodger and his gang in abducting Oliver, she later pretends to comfort the crying Jenny while actually snickering behind her back. Georgette is subsequently forced into the role of reluctant protector to Jenny, when she decides to venture out to the docks at night on receipt of Fagin's ransom note (again, one can only assume that the presence of active parental oversight might have have put a stop to this). When Jenny is kidnapped by Sykes, Georgette finally rises to the opportunity to prove herself the kind of worthy guardian that Lady aspired to be, although she does so as part of a team effort spearheaded by Oliver and Dodger; it thus takes the redemptive influence of the outsider to reinstate the values that the domestic realm formerly modelled. Hearteningly, it is the very outsider that Lady & The Tramp and The Rescuers alike regarded with so much suspicion.

What is conspicuously absent in Jenny's home life is shown to be present in its more destitute counterpart. Fagin's crew of down-and-outs practice the kind of traditional family ritual that Jenny is presumably missing out on, when Fagin reads his animals a bedtime story, in a sequence clearly designed to illustrate that, despite their partaking in criminal activity, there is a sweet, wholesome underbelly to their alliance. This is a direct inversion on the situation in The Rescuers, with the "trashy" class who live outside of the law preserving the virtues that the upstanding class has allowed to disintegrate - that Fagin and Medusa both live on houseboats (in Fagin's case, possibly squatting) only reinforces the connection. The class is comprised, predominantly, of uncollared dogs, the very class denied a happy ending in Lady & The Tramp (a couple of the same breeds are even represented). In the absence of biological kinship, these down-and-outs have formed a metaphorical family unit among themselves, of which Fagin is ostensibly the presiding parental figure, although it is Dodger, in practice, who serves as the patriarch of the group. He is a breadwinner who provides for his family's basic needs (Dodger's cruellest action, exploiting Oliver in his hot dog heist, is ultimately shown to have been carried out for the benefit of the other dogs) and who orders the group strategically. Rita, the only female member, is our obvious mother archetype, upon whom it falls to keep order within the group in a more moral sense. This includes intervening in the regular sparring between Tito and Francis, the figurative children of the group, whose interactions are molded by a heated sibling rivalry. Einstein, finally, is the gang's overgrown toddler - he is the most simple-minded and child-like of the dogs, being the one to request a bedtime story from Fagin. Once Oliver has been accepted into Dodger's family, he becomes the more traditional sacred child, recognisable from Lady's pristine household, around whom all of the other members rally to protect. They do this first by shielding him from Sykes' Dobermans and later by going out of their way to "rescue" him when he is taken by Jenny. His allotted function within the family is thus to reinforce its unity. Paradoxically, in order to successfully integrate him into their group, the very innocence that makes him its moral focus must be obliterated, as the dogs attempt to school him in the art of street crime. There is evident honor among these thieves, but they are thieves nevertheless, and as such their role in Oliver's journey is a purely provisional one. This outsider family can support the conventional family in recovering its former glory, but they cannot actually be allowed to replace it.

Despite the camaraderie extended by Dodger's pack to Oliver, the viewer is never given any real incentive to doubt that his rightful place is with anyone other than Jenny. On a subliminal level, we are prompted to favour the bond between Jenny and Oliver, not simply because she's a clean-cut child who could offer the cat a more conventional home than those criminal dogs, but because she does the one thing that Dodger and his friends have failed to do - she addresses him by his real name, Oliver. Dodger and the gang have, up until now, only cared to acknowledge him as "Kid". It's easy enough to conclude that, since Jenny is the first character within the context of the story to call him Oliver, she is the one who gives him his name. But that's actually not the case. Pay attention during the opening musical number, "Once Upon A Time In New York City", and you'll notice that Huey Lewis's narrator does indeed refer to him as Oliver within the lyrics of the song. From the viewer's perspective, Oliver has been the cat's name all along - it's made pretty explicit in the title of the film, after all - and when Jenny refers to him as such, it feels less like a grand revelation than the film's internal world finally coming up to speed with an intrinsic reality. Jenny, more so than Dodger, recognises Oliver for who he really is, and that's why she has the strongest claim on him.

The love and attention Jenny lavishes on Oliver is, we suspect, rooted in a desire to fill the void left by her absent parents, their relationship reminiscent of that between Tod and his surrogate mother, Widow Tweed, in The Fox and The Hound (1981). The unspoken narrative lurking at the back of Tweed's interactions with Tod is that of her deceased husband and her need to fill that gap, something conveyed only in the "Widow" portion of her name and her comment, on adopting Tod, that she is "not going to be so lonesome any more." By the end of the film, the one character thread that has not been resolved, at least not overtly, is the matter of Tweed ending up alone again (naturally). Tweed is forced to abandon Tod in the second act, restoring the natural order by returning him to the wild but re-igniting her former problem. From then on, Tweed seems resigned to solitude, an outcome subtly facilitated by the lyrics in her song, "In my heart there is a memory, and there you'll always be", which doubles as a final rumination on her grief for her lost husband. Through the symbolic release of her husband substitute, she learns to make peace with her husband's memory. Oliver, like Tod, is taken in as a substitute for a relationship that has already been ruptured, but unlike Tod he is ultimately validated in his ability to fill that role. Whereas The Fox & The Hound comes down heavily on the side of traditionalism, in insisting that there is an inflexible order to which is characters must inevitably adhere, Oliver & Company seems more inclined to empower the younger generation in reconstructing their own family units, albeit within conventional frameworks. The family is not simply reinstated, as in The Rescuers - redemption occurs through a shift in the very nexus of the family, reordering it so that Oliver is placed at the centre. In the end, Oliver gets to live the dream that was utterly unfathomable to Lady and Duchess. Why be the baby when you can be the boss?

A common criticism of Oliver & Company is that Oliver himself is a rather passive hero, tending to drift into scenario after scenario, while most of the action is driven by various other characters battling to determine his fate (let it not be said that the cat lacks tenacity, however - if he did, he would never have insisted on tracking down Dodger and those sausages). He is, in fact, a textbook example of what Sarah Harwood, in Family Fictions: Representations of The Family in 1980s Cinema, calls a "redeemer child", an archetype endemic to the cinema of the era: "They are objects of exchange between adults, trophies within various conflicts, but trophies that are also invested with the power to redeem and reconstitute the family scenario." (p. 127) For much of the film, Oliver's greatest strength lies more in what he signifies than in anything he does. He represents the seed of the incoming generation, and whichever party manages to secure him in their ranks is naturally advantaged for it. For Dodger and his pack, he is additional blood, presenting the possibility for the prolonged existence of their non-biological family. For Jenny, he represents the opportunity to regenerate her decaying family unit through the creation of a new foundational relationship. Initially, Jenny attempts to achieve this by fulfilling the vacant parental role herself, nurturing Oliver and enabling him to remain in his position as a passive trophy. The tables are turned at the film's climax, when Jenny, in attempting to be a dutiful parent and retrieve Oliver from a supposed kidnapper, is herself kidnapped, and Oliver takes an active role in rescuing her. While Oliver remains literally a child for the full duration of the film, his figurative coming of age is signified in his shift from waif to guardian, his empowerment coming at the expense of Jenny, who is herself reduced to the role of a trophy to be secured (Oliver does not enjoy the same privilege over his surrogate father, Dodger, upon whom he is still reliant for help in facing up to Sykes and the Dobermans). Jenny gets abducted because she lacks awareness of her own obvious vulnerability - she too represents the seeds of the future, and is therefore a lucrative asset for Sykes. Fagin is temporarily corrupted by his desire to exploit that future generational seed (in the form of Oliver), in a move that garners him approval from Sykes, and is redeemed by his decision to protect it (in the form of Jenny), when he assists the rescue mission, despite receiving the attractive offer from Sykes for his debt to be forgiven in exchange for his silence. Jenny's actual parents, meanwhile, remain distanced even when their daughter is at her most endangered - the task of having to negotiate with Sykes falls to Winston, who predictably cuts little ice.

Even when Jenny has been successfully delivered from Sykes, the climax yields one final bit of tension by doing the very Disney thing and suggesting that Oliver might have been killed in the effort. In the fifty-two year stretch between Bambi (1942) and The Lion King (1994), however, benevolent Disney characters were all but guaranteed their immortality (the lone exception being Gurgi from The Black Cauldron, who was technically dead for nine minutes), so seasoned viewers were very unlikely to be fooled. Jenny may ultimately be delegated that all-important role of sacred generational future, but it is Oliver who gets to decide whether or not the ending is happy on the basis of whether he lives or dies, thus determining the precise direction of that future. The matter of Jenny's absent parents is resolved at the end of the film, albeit somewhat redundantly - in the final scene, Winston receives a telephone call from Jenny's father; his voice is not heard, maintaining his status as a non-character, but it becomes apparent from Winston's one-sided conversation that her parents expect to be back later that day after all. Winston declines to tell Jenny, preferring for her to enjoy the surprise. Disney cannot resist but pander to the viewer's desire for a traditionally happy ending, but the anticipated reconciliation between Jenny and her parents goes entirely unseen, regulating the matter to the status of an mere afterthought and reinforcing that Jenny has, thanks to Oliver, already achieved resolution independently of them. It is clear that, even if Jenny can expect a more positive relationship with her parents going forward, it will be less important to her than her relationship with Oliver.

The ending of Oliver & Company diverges from both that of Lady & The Tramp and The Aristocats, for here the intersecting classes settle upon a state of co-existence, so long as a safe enough distance is established between them. Although Fagin and his dogs are welcomed at Jenny's birthday celebration, the union is only temporary, and when the party has concluded they set off again, leaving the Foxworth residence in peace and presumably resuming the same life of petty crime they were leading before the story began. In direct contrast to both Tramp and O'Malley, Dodger exits with a triumphant (on the surface, anyway) reaffirmation of the very same values he championed at the start of the picture. Meanwhile, the possible mergence suggested in the romantic relationship between Tito and Georgette is refuted in a comedic fashion, with Tito hurriedly rejecting Georgette when she makes an active attempt to domesticate him. What we have, then, is a less melancholic variation on the ending to The Fox and The Hound, where resolution is achieved through having the titular parties reconcile on an emotional level while simultaneously affirming their commitment to their respective family units. Unlike The Fox and The Hound, Oliver attempts to create some ambiguity as to whether this separation will necessarily be permanent, with the dogs making vague promises that they will see Oliver again. Dodger goes so far as to offer to keep a position open for him in the gang, should he ever change his mind, enabling the ending to give the impression that both possible character trajectories for Oliver are equally valid. Perhaps it is not a completely false one - where the intersection is maintained is in Oliver himself, who demonstrates to Dodger, during their final interaction, that he has internalised the lessons he taught him, by replicating Dodger's earlier gesture of a denied high five. Oliver must be restored to the domestic sphere to ensure its regeneration, but he remains identifiably the surrogate offspring of Dodger, putting the final emphasis on the successful transference of paternal mettle over Oliver's newly-secured relationship with his surrogate mother-cum-child.

That the dogs are not required to actively renounce their life of crime by the end is certainly interesting, and the film also privileges them in allowing them to have the last word, yielding the illusion it does perhaps see them as embodying the future direction of the family after all. The film closes with a final display of unity between the dogs, as Dodger sings a reprise of his signature song, "Why Should I Worry?", and this time the rest of the pack joins in, changing the lyrics to, "Why Should We Worry?" The precariousness of their position is, nevertheless, illustrated in the closing image, which shows them disappearing into the traffic of New York; whereas Oliver achieves stability, his friends are lost amid a sea of chaos. There is, furthermore, the tiniest hint of a shifting dynamic within Dodger's metaphorical family. Dodger flirts with a couple of passing female dogs, as he did during his original rendition of the song, but here we see Rita become visibly jealous and tug Dodger away. Although Dodger and Rita occupy the respective paternal and maternal positions in their unit, this is as explicit as the film gets in suggesting a romantic pull between the two. It indicates that Rita at least has a growing interest in settling down and creating her own more traditional family unit, undercutting Dodger's boisterous reaffirmation of the carefree life and subtly answering the question he poses in the lyrics by suggesting that, sooner or later, he will indeed have a whole new batch of charges to worry about. Changes are occurring, and for all of the enthusiasm with which the dogs resume their life on the Streets of Gold, one gets the impression that its days are numbered.

Oh, and post-Oliver & Company, the state of relations between Disney dogs and cats has actually been relatively peaceful. The Lion King is more of a cat vs cat film (since hyenas are more closely related to cats than to dogs). Bolt and Mittens got off on the wrong foot, but they worked it out in the end. Goofy and Pete (if they even counted in the first place) became suburban neighbours, and while they were still regularly at odds, their rivalry was a much more civilised one. Curse you, Frankenweenie, for letting the side down.

The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular (aka As The Weeks Went On, So Did The Cartoons)

It's been a while since I last talked about a Simpsons clip show on here. Long overdue is my coverage of the clip show that many fans (although not I) would rate as the strongest of a questionable bunch - "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" (3F31), which first aired December 3rd 1995 as part of the show's seventh season.

"138th Episode Spectacular" is a more challenging episode to analyse than "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show" or "Another Simpsons Clip Show", thanks to the total lack of anything resembling a traditional Simpsons plot. Whatever our feelings on the artistic merit or integrity of being served up a casserole of reheated clips in place of a completely fresh narrative, its predecessors do at least offer the family the opportunity for a little personal growth and reflection amid the forced reminiscing; the recycled material is structured, however vaguely, so as to be building toward something of meaning for the Simpsons in the present. "Spectacular" eschews a framing narrative in favour of linking segments with everyone's favourite C-list fish fetishist, Troy McClure, who in a bit of reality-blurring is presenting the celebration from the Springfield Civic Auditorium. Troy, who prior to this episode had never interacted with the Simpsons in person and should logically have no idea who these people even are (although that would all change soon enough), has temporarily detached himself from the show's internal universe in order to provide to provide an external commentary. As such, this boasts the distinction of being the series' first non-canonical episode outside of the Treehouse of Horrors. It's an obvious precursor to the criminally undervalued Season 8 offering "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", which uses Troy in a very similar fashion. Both episodes are characterised by a veneer of showbiz phoniness purposely designed to signal creative bankruptcy, and Troy, with his feigned enthusiasm and fixed plastic smile, provides the perfect human face for that veneer. I suspect that the unusually protracted emphasis on Troy is a huge factor in why this episode enjoys a somewhat sunnier reputation than others of its ilk. Both of Phil Hartman's recurring characters are obviously firm fan favourites and, compared to Lionel Hutz, Troy rarely got the opportunity to be involved directly in episode plots, "Spectacular" being one of only three appearances in which he was used as more than just a one-scene side character. That in itself makes it quite a rare and precious thing.

"The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" was written by Jon Vitti, who was no stranger to the clip show arena, having previously penned "Another Simpsons Clip Show". In both cases, Vitti was so uneasy about having his name attached to something so discreditable that he hid behind the moniker of a certain child-eating, shape-shifting clown (this time, director David Silverman followed suit and assumed the pseudonym Pound Foolish). Vitti admits on the DVD commentary that he felt more comfortable with how this one turned out, chiefly for the fact that it advertises its magpie nature upfront, whereas "Another" opens more deceptively, like any regular Simpsons episode. Vitti also feels that "Another" hampered itself by approaching the series with a degree of reverence that "Spectacular" utterly spurns. The killer clown doth sell "Another Simpsons Clip Show" too short, methinks, although there's no denying that "Spectacular" gave the show an opportunity to be inordinately uncharitable toward itself, one of its most infamous gags being a particularly brutal one at the expense of the late Bleeding Gums Murphy, whose passing was viewed as a more serious matter in the episode in which it occurred (although in that regard he still fared better than poor Dr Marvin Monroe, who wasn't even considered important enough to receive his own exit arc). Gruellingly honest "Spectacular" may be, but it's also one of the series' fluffier pieces, and probably the fluffiest of the entire classic era. For all of its self-deprecating charms, the lack of even a perfunctory narrative does mean that "Spectacular" inevitably comes off as a shallow affair, one that's fun but offers little substance beneath the novelties (say what you will about the two previous clip shows, there were stakes in both their cases). I would suggest, however, that there is, once again, an implicit narrative being conveyed amid the collaging - it's one that I think "Spin-Off Showcase" would tackle a whole lot better later on, but "Spectacular" still makes for a perfectly respectable test run.

All three classic era clip shows, regardless of how straight the face with which they play themselves, contain a particularly pivotal line of dialogue that accentuates the unmistakably sour intentions behind the reminiscing. In "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", it was about attempting (perhaps in vain) to relive long lost summers. In "Another Simpsons Clip Show" it was about opening up old wounds - discovering that certain summers are perhaps better off lost. In "Spectacular", I think the ethos of the episode is best summed up in Troy's comment, "As the weeks went on, so did the cartoons" - a seemingly banal statement on the development of the Ullman shorts that encapsulates, in the tidiest of nutshells, the entire history of The Simpsons and a few of the contemporary anxieties about where it might be headed. In its predecessors, the most grudging attacks on the entire clip show exercise were reserved for the episode titles, and "Spectacular" is really no exception, the 138th episode being a conspiciously arbitrary milestone. There's nothing particularly special about that number, aside from the fact that it was, at the time, considered a big one for a show of this nature. "Hasn't this cartoon been running for an extraordinarily long amount of time?" seems to be the underlying point at the heart of "Spectacular", a question that speaks to the impressive strength and endurance of the series, but also to the eternal drudgery in having to keep the damned thing going. It was a tension that dominated much of Oakley and Weinstein's tenure as showrunners, the implicit problem one that Troy McClure would raise explicitly at the end of "Spin-Off Showcase" - how do you keep The Simpsons fresh and funny after so many years? "Spectacular" is not so much a celebration of the show's longevity as a public unmasking that openly invites us to see the cracks within the series, something perfectly encapsulated in the visual metaphor of the auditorium set, which has been done up to resemble the family's living room, and which, from certain angles, betrays intermittent glimpses of the dark, empty stage space beyond.

When I covered "So It's Come To This", I noted that the prolificness of the clip show in US television (at least back in the day) can be attributed to their conforming to the basic principles in George Ritzer's theory of McDonaldization, mainly efficiency (clip shows mean a higher episode count at lower costs) and predictability. The assumption behind clip shows is that audiences don't mind being offered the same material all over again because humans are naturally drawn to what is familiar and and will enjoy getting to relive all of their favourite gags in quick succession. In that regard, "Spectacular" is something of a boat rocker; it offers a very different clip show experience to its predecessors, in pooling from a more adventurous range of material. Only around the middle portion of the episode, when Troy answers a sampling of faux fan mail, does it settle for simply regurgitating the familiar, yielding a couple of demo reels for Homer's devolving intelligence and Smithers' closet sexuality. Elsewhere, the episode concerns itself with quite unchartered territory, extending way back beyond the usual boundaries to the series' roots and to the dark corners that had previously been concealed from public eyes. For viewers familiar only with the show in its current, stand-alone form, it was a rare (and potentially startling) opportunity to get acquainted with its origins as a series of crudely animated supporting skits on The Tracey Ullman Show - a step further back than the show, in its contemporary form, was perhaps comfortable with its memories being cast. Elsewhere, discarded footage from favourite episodes saw the light of day for the very first time (Troy's term, "Cut-out Classics", being an obvious oxymoron) and, most shockingly of all, we learned of the existence of an alternate solution to the previous summer's "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter, in which Burns named a different suspect as his shooter. Unlike a more conventional clip show, its purpose is not to immerse you in the cozy glow of nostalgia, but instead to upset everything you thought you knew about The Simpsons. It is, in many respects, an anti-clip show, a clip show for people who don't like clip shows, not altogether dissimilar to the South Park episode "City on The Edge of Forever", in that it presents us with a version of The Simpsons were everything is fundamentally wrong at every turning - not least, the fictitious representation of series creator Matt Groening as a gun-toting crackpot who, unbeknownst to us, was feeding us subliminal right-wing messages in the opening sequence every week.

For me, the best of the clip shows will always be "Another Simpsons Clip Show" - I know that's not a popular opinion, but it's a hill I will nevertheless die on. It's the one that I think does the best job in illustrating the futility of retreating down memory lane and taking comfort in past adventures - adventures which, on closer inspection, have distinctly negative implications that might reverberate within the present. It is, however, of little surprise to me that "Spectacular" is the one most commonly favoured among fans. After all, it has a ton of footage that, at one time or another, you couldn't see anywhere else, almost to the point that I feel that the presence of so much novel material gives it an unfair advantage over the other clip shows. The question is, how does it hold up now, when the march of time and media have brutally chiselled away at a chunk of that novelty? 

Clip shows in general are today regarded as something of an outdated television convention - The Simpsons hasn't made one since "Gump Roast" of Season 13 - making more sense in an era when viewers would not have known if or when they would get to see their old favourites again. The increased availability of complete show inventories through DVD box sets and, more recently, streaming has somewhat robbed them of their function. In a post-DVD world, "Spectacular" is left with little advantage over its brethren - deleted scenes, alternate endings and all sorts of miscellaneous goodies that, in Troy's words, "You were never meant to see" can be easily accessed at the touch of two or three buttons. As Erik Adams notes in his review on the AV Club, the episode now has the air of a "glorified DVD extra...were it not for the extra work that went into the Troy McClure sequences, it’d be indistinguishable from a retrospective featurette whipped up for the Complete Seventh Season box set". A distinction "Spectacular" does retain is that it's still one of the very few venues in which you can legally see a selection of the Ullman shorts, although only two of these, "Good Night" and "Bathtime", are shown in their entirety. The Ullman shorts have remained a surprising obscurity across the years, although if you're really interested then uploads of those can be easily accessed online, albeit seldom in outstanding quality.

Ultimately, "Spectacular" is at its strongest when it does appear to be making some statement on the current status of the series, even if very little from the show's regular inventory is actually shown. Of all the Simpsons clip shows, this one feels the most consciously structured to comment pointedly on not only the development of the show and how far it had come, but also its imminent, possibly concurrent decline. Professor Lawrence Prince's hilariously concise observation that "Homer gets stupider every year", represented a common charge from fans on Homer's continued debasement over the years (the people expressing this concern back in 1995 did so not unreasonably, although I think that Bachman Turner Overdrive might have had apt words for them nevertheless). The selection of clips used to assess this point is somewhat lackadaisical - for Season 6, they used a clip from the "Treehouse of Horror V" segment "The Shinning", in which Homer's over the top behaviour is NOT a sign of excessive stupidity, but a well-observed parody of Jack Nicholson's scenery chewing in the role of Jack Torrance - but we nevertheless get a decent taste of how increasingly outlandish the series had gotten as it went along, starting in the relatively grounded world of "Blood Feud" and "Flaming Moe" and (discounting the Halloween clip) ending up with the plausibility stretchings of "Deep Space Homer" (put a pin in that, because it comes up elsewhere in the episode).

The episode as a whole takes us from the visual grotesqueness of "Good Night", and the show's messy birthings, to more-or-less the present day and the conceptual grotesqueness of "Who Shot Mr Burns?", an intriguing mystery that ended with the deliberately far-fetched revelation that a baby had pulled the trigger. It's important to note that the alternate scenario shown in "Spectacular"  - where Burns was wounded by his best friend Smithers - was a dummy ending created purely to keep the animators from leaking the answer, and never considered seriously as a possible solution to the mystery (I emphasise that, in part, because I find the mere suggestion of Smithers as the gunman to be profoundly upsetting). Nevertheless, we might ponder if its existence undermines the validity of the ending we were given, in illustrating just how arbitrarily things could be tweaked in another direction, or if it ends up vindicating the actual solution as the only one that makes any kind of narrative or intuitive sense. The thinly-veiled cultural reference in Troy's remark about ignoring Simpson DNA evidence aside, that actually isn't the issue with the Smithers solution - Burns still has his lollipop tussle with Maggie, so he could presumably have acquired her eyelash in much the same manner. The real issue has to do with how the gun used to shoot Burns ended up inside the Simpsons' car, which isn't accounted for in this version of events (and Smithers obviously kept the gun on him, if he still went on to shoot Jasper). But the DNA thread does, at best, get turned into rather a weak red herring, while Smithers' established alibi is casually fudged. Ultimately, though, the major selling point behind Maggie being the shooter is underlined in the flagrant ridiculousness of Burns and Smithers' relationship resuming normalcy outside of a 5% pay cut for the latter - she was one of the few characters who could do the deed and reasonably face no repercussions. There is the status quo to maintain (Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital notwithstanding).

Of all the truly salacious tidbits on offer, I'd say that the "Cut-out Classics" hold up the least well. It's a fairly arbitrary selection of deleted scenes (if you've trawled through the extras for each season's DVD release, you'll know that they had a lot of options to choose from), with only two clips that really benefit from being recontextualised here. It is, in all cases, easy enough to deduce why they might have been cut - presumably, the writers had enough confidence in their comedic merit for them to have made it into full animation, but the majority of them are weird tangents that don't contribute anything to the overarching narrative. The deleted scene from "Krusty Gets Kancelled" is the only one that would have furthered the plot in any way, in that it contains the pivotal development promised by the title, but even then the final edit had more impact for omitting it. The excised scene from "Treehouse of Horror IV" gives Lionel Hutz more closure than he received in the version that aired, but I think the implication there - that he scarpered and had no intention of coming back - is far funnier than him returning to present Marge with an empty pizza box. Sometimes less is more.

Some of them may have been excised for slightly more complex reasons than needing to speed up the narrative flow. As per the DVD commentary, the clip from "Homer and Apu" was cut because Bollywood was deemed too esoteric a target for The Simpsons to be ribbing. The clip from "Burns' Heir" was cut because Richard Simmons was deemed too obvious a target for The Simpsons to be ribbing. And, let's face it, as delightfully unnerving as that robotic Simmons is, it would be an inanely out of character item for someone as zeitgeist-challenged as Burns to own. Whereas most of these cut-out classics I can readily swallow as once having conceivably been part of their respective episodes, there's something about that robotic Richard Simmons encounter that strikes me as intrinsically inauthentic - it's so over the top, left of field and at odds with the friction of the scene in question that it's difficult to contemplate it fitting in without the benefit of Troy's quotation marks. I am not questioning the legitimacy of the clip, but it does feel like it was always conceived to go along with a show of this nature than with its supposed mother episode. It comes across more as a parody of a deleted scene than an actual one, an alternate resolution to the stand-off between Homer and Burns that's deliberately jarring in how much sillier it is than anything leading up to it (I think there's a good reason why they saved this clip for last - it may be one of the most out-there Simpsons cut scenes, period). That the clip receives a callback at the end of the episode, when we're treated to a montage of naked Simpsons arranged to the same KC & The Sunshine Band track emitted by robot Simmons, merely reinforces the idea that the clip's natural environment was always right here amid the show at its loosest and most pointedly self-aware. And yet, it seems that one of the greatest legacies of "Spectacular" has been to permanently rewire many a viewer's perception of "Burns' Heir" - I've encountered a number of fans who report that, upon hearing Homer's challenge of "Do your worst!", they reflexively connect the dots to Burns' response in "Spectacular", and it feels jarring when Simmons doesn't appear (I won't lie, I do it myself). Something in their heads tells them that this is how the scene should play out. Which raises an interesting question - if a scene is excised, but we see it anyway, is it still a legitimate part of the episode? Does it potentially undermine the authenticity of the cut we were given? At the very least, it gives us a glimpse into what could have been (and, in the case of robotic Richard Simmons, was anyway, thanks to "Spectacular"), making the final product seem less like the definitive version, but just one of several possibilities.

The other deleted scene that I feel works a lot better here than it would have done in its original form, or even as a stand-alone DVD extra (albeit for very different reasons), is that of "Mother Simpson", an episode that would at the time still have been pretty fresh in viewers' minds, having aired only a couple of weeks prior to "Spectacular". It's also the most restrained cut-out of the bunch - no dancing robots or pornography-peddling clowns, just Homer and Mona sitting at the breakfast table, continuing their game of catch up after decades apart. Ostensibly, the punchline of the scene is in Homer assuring Mona that, despite working at a nuclear power plant, he does not, in practice, support the nuclear power industry on the grounds that he's such a lousy worker. But a far subtler gag occurs just before, when Homer references the events of "Deep Space Homer" of Season 5 and asks Mona if she was aware that, two years prior, he was blasted into space as part of a publicity-baiting mission by NASA. The pivotal beat is in Mona's casual response - "I read all about it...after all, it was national news" - which is, when all is said and done, a more passive-aggressive variation on Frank Grimes' overtly disgusted reaction on being related the exact same story a season later. In both cases, it's an acknowledgement on the show's part of how debased its own adherence to basic plausibility had become in recent seasons, with Homer the astronaut being their mutual watermark for the series at the very peak of its absurdity (although a baby gunning down an old man has got to come close). In its early years, the kinds of adventures the family were involved in were of the low-key variety that typically wouldn't extend far beyond the local papers, if they even made that. Since then, Homer has enjoyed exposure of such magnitude that even someone as supposedly out of the loop as Mona has a decent idea of what he's been doing. Such humor was a defining characteristic of the Oakley/Weinstein era, when the series was evidently building toward an existential crisis regarding its own longevity, a malaise that came to dominate a significant chunk of the atmosphere in Season 8 (see below). You can catch traces of it in Season 7, but it tended to be a bit more stealthily disguised - take Marge's pep talk to Bart and Lisa toward the end of "The Day The Violence Died", for example, the actual purpose of which was touched on a little in this entry - with Mona's line being one of the earliest, if not the earliest examples. It's probably for the best that it didn't make the final cut of "Mother Simpson" - such snarky self-deprecation would have felt out of place in one of the most sincere and heartfelt episodes of the entire series - but it's great that "Spectacular" managed to preserve that status nonetheless.

Mona's words have additional resonance in this episode, for their logical conclusion is something that Troy makes all-too explicit in his closing reflection: "Who knows what adventures they'll have between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable?" Judging by a few of the adventures the family had in Season 8, this was a question that was evidently causing the production crew a few sleepless nights (not that they were sleeping much anyway, on their work schedule). A quarter-century later, and Troy's grim prophesy has still not come to pass, but throughout Oakley and Weinstein's reign the series seemed increasing resigned to likelihood that it was nearing the end of its natural lifespan, with multiple episodes underlining the basic practicality as to what more there possibly was to do with these characters after so many years on the air. Troy's words are ostensibly optimistic, pointing to the many exciting possibilities that lie ahead, but are undercut by a stark and deliberately unsentimental reminder that everything, even a cartoon institution as formidable as The Simpsons, is ultimately mortal, and that profit has the final word on everything. But there is another implicit threat in that statement, and one that did prove far more prescient - the suggestion that the show would keep on going specifically until it became unprofitable, as opposed to bowing out because the best of its years were now behind it. With hindsight, Troy's statement wasn't a warning that the end was in sight, but that the insanity was only just beginning. You thought Homer going into space was stretching the limits? Do Bachman Turner Overdrive have words for you!

Milky Way: Red vs Blue (aka The Cars That Ate Paris, Texas)

If there was an advertising character who simultaneously terrified me and had my deepest sympathies, it's the Red Car from Milky Way's "Red vs Blue" campaign. The animated TV ad, which first appeared in 1989, depicted a race between two auto-mobiles, a red 1951 Buick Roadmaster and a blue 1959 Cadillac on an hours-long journey between the fictional towns of Lunchville and Dinnertown, located in some kind of alternate reality mid-century America. A mid-century America where the cars are not only living beings, but some are apparently predisposed to devouring anything unfortunate enough to come into close proximity with them. The ad was of course a cunningly-conceived metaphor, with Red and Blue symbolising two contrasting strategies for making it through the long, monotonous hours between lunch and dinner. Red is a compulsive snacker who consumes anything indiscriminately (from trucks to prickly trees, as we are both told and shown), while Blue eats only one item along route - the chocolate/nougat concoction manufactured by Mars and named for a galaxy - which gives him the energy to complete the journey without putting a dent in his appetite. Ultimately, the binge-eating Red is forced to drop out of the competition (literally), as he gets too overloaded to reach Dinner, while the leaner of our two sugar junkies speeds on to victory. You may already be detecting something slightly questionable about this whole scenario - it's not the broader issue as to why a car would be compelled to eat the local scenery in the first place, although we will get to that.

The ad ends with Blue passing a neon billboard proclaiming the Milky Way to be "The sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite." It's not clear to me on what science Mars were basing this audacious claim; I kept my eyes peeled for a footnote or disclaimer and couldn't see one. I suspect it basically all came down to the fact that Milky Way bars were lighter in density than their close cousins, the Mars Bar and the Marathon. Or Snickers.

Not surprisingly, there was some backlash against the campaign from anti-sugar lobbyists, who questioned why Mars was positing a candy bar as a healthy between-meal snack. The Independent Television Commission sided with Mars, on the grounds that the ads clearly depicted indiscriminate snacking as a negative thing via the cautionary example of Red. I'm not sure if that ruling holds up to scrutiny, however, as Mars weren't exactly promoting healthy eating habits, but rather championing the lesser of two very blatant evils. The ad's perspective on nutrition is obviously quite superficial; a Milky Way is hailed as a sensible snacking choice because it "won't ruin your appetite", as opposed to how much good it actually does the body. We all know that there's a plethora of healthier options the Blue Car could have chosen over a Milky Way. And, let's face it, the explicit encouragement to eat candy in between meals always was something of a dubious marketing angle for a campaign targeted primarily at children. Keep in mind, though, that this was an era when junk food advertisers basically had free rein over children's media - they were, after all, what was keeping commercial kids' television afloat. The campaign lived on long enough to garner a sequel, this one science fiction themed, focussing on a race between a red meteor and a blue satellite. Same narrative, different dress, only in this case I cry foul, as it looks to me like the twin planets Boss n' Nova deliberately sabotaged the meteor's run. Where was the referee?!

When the campaign debuted, I would have been four years old, and I suspect the central metaphor was lost on me. Pretty much every food product advertised on television suggested that you would acquire super powers if you signed their figurative dotted line - whether that power entailed turning into a fuzzy yellow monster (Sugar Puffs), making your enemies flee in terror (Weetabix), or just making you inhumanly cacophonic (Trio) - and I doubt that I saw Blue Car's example as any different. I was much more preoccupied with the nature of the scenario and how freakishly disturbing it was. The idea of a living, breathing car that lunges at everything it passes and violently packs it into its non-existent digestive system is like something out of your darkest nightmares, or at least one of the more warped Monty Python sketches. And having Red eat a truck, of all things, certainly raises a barrage of uncomfortable questions. If the Red Car and the Blue Car are alive, then what reason is there to believe that the truck isn't either? And if it isn't alive, then isn't the implication that Red ate it with the driver inside? In either case, would that be considered murder? Or maybe just the law of the jungle in this auto-mobile society? To be fair, Blue did look pretty intimidated when the truck came into view, so an argument can possibly be made that Red swallowed in self-defence. It is admittedly difficult to assign moral value when you're dealing with anthropomorphic cars. But already I find this living auto-mobile universe to be infinitely more enthralling than Pixar's attempt.

The Red Car, of course, was supposed to come off as somewhat monstrous. We're clued in right from the start as to which of the two we're intended to sympathise with by the nature of their respect smiles (more of a grimace in Red's case) - they gave Red pointy predator teeth and Blue a cheesy, non-threatening grin. Here's the thing, though - as much as that Red Car and his insatiable voraciousness terrified me, he was always the one I sincerely rooted for. I'd like to say that I always knew, on a subconscious level, what that Blue Car was really up to, but I think that Red appealed to me because, in the end, his freaky eating habits were as endearing as they were alarming - that hair-raising moment where he swallows a truck and its hypothetical occupant whole was, on top of everything else, delightfully animated. Blue, by contrast, was frankly rather dull. He might have had all the glory, at least as far as the ad was concerned, but there's no question that Red had all the character. As such, I was always really bummed by that ending where he not only loses the race (inevitable though it was), he drops down a ravine and we never even learn if he came out again in one piece (and the frenzied way the narrator screams "Oh no, the bridge has gone!" was ultimately more chilling to me than anything Red himself got up to). There was a print version of the ad that showed up in various children's comics in the early 90s (nowhere were impressionable young eyes free from Mars's nefarious agenda) which had a less gruesome outcome for Red - there, he simply couldn't fit through a gate to the final location - but it's the principle, dammit. Red was a colourful anti-hero, while Blue was a flashy corporate shill.

Like this ad or lump it, it is a fondly-regarded classic, enough so that Red and Blue were later returned to television screens in 2009 in time for its twentieth anniversary. The world they lived in had visibly changed, however. For one, they were no longer competing in hours-long races between Lunchville and Dinnertown, but Playville and Light Town. And the explicit message being conveyed by Mars had undergone some notable revisions. 2009 was an entirely different ball game - after decades of bombarding children with non-stop encouragement to eat unhealthy food products, people were suddenly starting to get very jumpy about the consequences. Childhood obesity had become one of the hot issues of the day, and there were now much tighter restrictions on how junk foods were allowed to promote themselves. Any suggestion that candy bars could constitute a wholesome between-meals snack was now a huge no-no. In its place, we're told that Blue chose the Milky Way, not because it wouldn't spoil his appetite, but because it's "something that tastes just right", while the neon sign he passes at the end instructs us to "Lighten up and play." A common concession that junk food marketing now made was to include some kind of disclaimer about the importance of counterbalancing their consumption with regular physical activity, and I presume that the switch from Lunch/Dinner to Play/Light was an attempt to change the implied metaphor from between-meal snacking to rewards between exercise sessions. The implication now, I suppose, is that Red indulges so much that he leaves himself too bloated to participate in further activity. Which works well enough for the purposes of the metaphor I guess, although it does make me contemplate the irony that, by the very nature of that metaphor, Red was always a proponent of burning calories as you consumed them. He was, after all, up for running the hours-long route between Lunch/Play and Dinner/Light - the Buick was no couch potato.