Homer Loves Flanders (aka Something About Being Gay)

The first thing to be said about "Homer Loves Flanders" (episode 1F14)  is that it contains one of my all-time favourite low-key Simpsons jokes. The kind that you don't necessarily register on your first viewing, or even your second or third, but which suddenly hits you like a ton of bricks on the fourth. Early in the episode, we find Homer driving to work and listening to the radio, leading to the all-important plot development of the call-in competition to win tickets to the upcoming Pigskin Classic football game between the Shelbyville Sharks and the Springfield Atoms. Before that though, we catch the closing notes of an eerily tortured-sounding a cappella performance, followed by the announcement, "That was Bobby McFerrin's new one: I'm Worried, Need Money." Now I love Bobby McFerrin. I think he's supremely talented, and The Voice is one of those under-championed albums I'm constantly recommending to anyone who cares. Still, I've got to appreciate the humour here. McFerrin ended up with the dreaded "One Hit Wonder" tag, with his 1988 single "Don't Worry, Be Happy" being his only significant chart success. In public perception, a one hit wonder will often appear more of a failure than a none hit wonder. No hits might imply that you just never got your lucky break, or that your music wasn't mainstream enough to catch on with the masses. One hit implies that you had the momentum but couldn't sustain it. For a second there you were on top of the world, and you blew it. This was one of several gags littered throughout Season 5 at the expense of musicians whose chart glory was merely flash in the pan. Carl Douglas was described as a one trick pony in "Bart Gets Famous". "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" had that ironic joke about us not having seen the last of Dexy's Midnight Runners (note: this refers to US perception of the band - Dexy's Midnight Runners are not regarded as a one hit wonder in their native UK, where they had another number 1 single, "Geno"). The McFerrin jab feels particularly caustic, though. There's the fact that the title "I'm Worried, Need Money" goes directly against the ethos expressed in "Don't Worry, Be Happy". All the more biting is the unmistakable, half-broken discomposure in the voice of the alleged McFerrin as he wails out those final disconcerting strains. This is a man who's lost his wits watching his momentary empire crumble around him, wrecked by the fickle nature of success.

This fascination with faded stardom was indicative of an underlying anxiety that would intermittently surface during The Simpsons' run in the mid-90s, back when David Mirkin was the man in charge - the possibility that its own popularity was finite. From the beginning, The Simpsons had taken a healthily leery approach to its status as a pop cultural phenomenon, with examples of meta humor, like the plot trajectory of "Dancin' Homer" and the Macy's Parade gag in "Bart vs. Thanksgiving", suggesting that the series was experiencing a form of imposter syndrome and fully expected the public to see through it before too long. By Season 5 it had been around long enough to know that it had staying power, and to openly contemplate how amazingly far it had already come; "Bart Gets Famous" was an entirely upfront post-mortem of the Bart Mania that had characterised its initial wave of success, from the perspective of a series that had survived the pressures of getting so very popular so early on in its career. Compared to the apocalyptic rumblings that became all-too explicit during the back half of Oakley and Weinstein's reign, life under Mirkin seemed relatively complacent and at ease with itself. But it's here that we can also pinpoint arguably the most direct precursor to that Season 8 brand malaise, in a couple of small but critical moments of "Homer Loves Flanders". Bart is perturbed by the episode's central development, which sees Homer suddenly becoming very chummy with Ned Flanders and wanting their respective clans to hang out together. Lisa is less concerned, having grown savvy to the rules of the game: "It seems like every week something odd happens to the Simpsons. My advice is to ride it out, make an occasional smart-aleck quip, and by next week we'll be back to where we started from, ready for another wacky adventure." As the episode nears its conclusion, Homer and Ned's friendship seems stronger than ever, prompting a dumbfounded Lisa to contemplate the unthinkable: "Maybe this means the end of our wacky adventures."

"Homer Loves Flanders", which first aired March 17th 1994, can be categorized as part a trilogy of Mirkin-era episodes that dealt with the consequences of something being fundamentally off within the Simpsons universe, and where the threats to the characters are happening on an existential level. "The Last Temptation of Homer" and "Lisa's Rival" offer variations on this same theme, although in both of their cases the disturbance is set in motion by the intrusion of an uncannily perfect outsider who is (however unintentionally) threatening to usurp the established territory of one of the family. "Homer Loves Flanders" takes as a different approach, in having the crisis arise from a simple rearrangement of the show's internal dynamics. What's intrinsically hilarious about the notion of Homer and Ned's friendship posing a danger to the very fabric of the Simpsons' world is that it is, on the surface, an entirely plausible and logical development within said world. One day, Homer could very well wake up to the reality that being friends with Ned is more fulfilling than stewing in constant resentment toward him. After all, Ned's a really generous and helpful guy, and of course he's got that neat rumpus room we'd first seen in "Dead Putting Society". Why wouldn't Homer grow to like him, if he could just be persuaded to give Ned a chance? And why would this spell an end to the Simpsons' adventures in general? How many of them were actually dependent on Homer's dislike of Ned? This isn't exactly comparable to Homer dumping Marge for Mindy, which would break the premise of the series completely - in most regards, life could continue pretty much as normal for the family. The answer is, of course, that such a change, however benign, would still go against the status quo, which by now had firmly entrenched rules about what could and couldn't happen. In 1994 The Simpsons had long proven that it had a successful formula, but the prevailing anxiety that seemed to pop up every so often under Mirkin had to do with this formula being nevertheless a fragile one, and the possibility that the slightest amount of tinkering could cause it to completely unravel. It doesn't take much for your fortunes to drastically change. One minute you're on top of the world and feeling happy, and the next minute you're deeply worried and wailing about your desperate need of money.

In making sense of Bart and Lisa's statements on the matter, it's important to keep in mind that while they are a part of this supposedly threatened world, there is a greater extent to which they're serving as audience stand-ins. It's done a touch more subtly than in "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", but it's still conspicuous enough. For the most part, they are passive observers of the episode's developments rather than active participants, the Flimpsons picnic being the only point at which they themselves come into any direct conflict with the Flanders (first through their respective efforts to introduce sugar into Rod and Todd's diet, then by introducing Zesty Italian dressing to their eyes). Lisa is effectively advising Bart that if he doesn't like where a particular Simpsons story is going, not to worry, because there'll be another one next week and the events of this one won't have any lasting impact. Her remark about making the occasional smart-aleck quip alludes to the banalities of sitcom convention, and to the extent to which the viewer is complicit in this process, in favouring what's safe and familiar over anything more challenging or substantial. (It's notable that Lisa's position is at odds with her earlier stance in "Bart Gets Famous" - here she openly welcomes a non-sequitur utterance of one of Bart's catchphrases as being within the spirit of things). Her most telling observation and the one with the bleakest implications, is "And by next week, we'll be back to where we started from". It suggests something of a paradox, in acknowledging both the passing of time and the fact that the Simpsons themselves are at the exact same point in life they've always been. On the one hand, it might be reassuring to know that the family and the world we've come to love so much aren't going anywhere. But what is being denied to the characters in this whole cycle is the opportunity for any kind of meaningful growth or improvement. An eventual friendship seems like a perfectly natural trajectory for the Homer-Ned relations, but it cannot happen - in no small way, because the viewer has grown accustomed to a world in which Homer's hatred for Ned is off the charts.

Heck, Ned himself has grown to accustomed to a world in which Homer loathes him, which allows for the episode's most startling development - Bart and Lisa might do a bit of hand-wringing from the sidelines, but it's Ned who copes the least smoothly with this challenge to the status quo. There's a bit of misdirection in the second act in which it looks as though the main conflict will be about Homer prioritising his time with Ned over time with his own family (making it momentarily reminiscent of your typical Home-Wrecker episode), but this doesn't go anywhere outside of Homer forcing the two families to come together for the aforementioned Flimpsons picnic. "Homer Loves Flanders" is really a character study about Ned and his own complicated, not universally sunny feelings toward Homer. Though Homer insists that the deity he recognises, a waffle tossed up onto the hallway ceiling by Bart (a strange gag, but there are stranger gags still to come), is silently mocking him, it is quite blatantly Ned who is the target of this week's round of cosmic taunting. A little Homer goes a long way, and faced with a Homer who suddenly wants to smother him with his presence 24/7, Ned's status as the mellow and tolerant one in the equation is also thrown into disarray.

 "Homer Loves Flanders" opens, appropriately, with focus on another state of longstanding disharmony between neighbouring forces, that of Springfield and Shelbyville, whose football teams are playing against one another in the much-anticipated Pigskin Classic. Why should these two communities, so alike in abrasive indignity, feel so much animosity for one another? It can't all come down to a lemon tree and disagreements about marrying cousins. More likely it's a variation on the same problem facing Homer and Ned, in that people who are stuck together can't help but get on one another's nerves. As per Lisa's account, the rivalry between the two burgs might have started out as a bit of healthy competition, but has escalated into something altogether less wholesome: "They built a mini-mall, so we built a bigger mini-mall. They made the world's largest pizza, so we burned down their city hall." Shelbyville has apparently gotten its revenge by spiking Springfield's water supply (which it kind of already was, by Springfield's own doing). It's clearly in the interests of both cities to put aside their petty grudges and restrict this contention to the sporting arena, but alas, they're too far along that the same path of destructive bitterness, with no prospect of alleviation or self-improvement. The futile rivalry has become too great a defining point for their respective locale's sense of pride and character. Homer of course wants to be there to cheer on the Atoms and jeer the Sharks, but has bad luck securing a ticket, despite missing eight days of work to camp out in the line outside the Shelbyville Stadium (so, the implication is that he's been there for at least ten days?). The only person in front of him happens to be a scalper, who takes all of the tickets (ironically, Homer was advised only moments earlier that a scalper would have been an affordable option if he hadn't forgone all those days of working). He later attempts to win two tickets via the radio call-in, but is beaten to them by none other than Ned. When Ned, ever the genial and thoughtful soul, shows up at Homer's door to offer him his second ticket, Homer immediately takes that as the ultimate sign of the Ceiling Waffle's mockery. He eventually accepts (but not without first contemplating knocking Ned out with a lead pipe and stealing the tickets), and to his surprise actually enjoys the time in Ned's company. The decisive factor that finally convinces Homer that Ned is truly top notch buddy material is when Ned is revealed to be on first name terms with the Atoms' star player, Stan Taylor, who attended Ned's Bible group. Stan offers Ned the game ball as a token of thanks for the spiritual guidance, and Ned persuades him to give it to Homer instead, on the grounds that he would enjoy it more. For once, the kindness of Ned's gesture isn't lost on Homer, and he resolves to spend more time with Ned. He also goes home and tosses out his wedding photo in order to make space for the football (affectionately named Stitchface) upon the family mantelpiece. Homer's infatuation with Ned is such that he's basically replaced Marge in his affections. Although there is one need of Homer's that Ned presumably isn't meeting, requiring him to periodically fall back on Marge - when he brushes off Marge's attempts at initiating conversation with a curtly robotic "Can't talk, see Flanders," he adds the promise of, "Later sex."

There is, from the start, a more obvious problem with this supposed peacetime between the Simpsons and Flanders abodes, which is that Homer comes on so strong in his affections that it doesn't quite seem genuine. The fiery enthusiasm with which he greets the prospect of getting to hang with Ned every day isn't terribly dissimilar from the fiery enthusiasm he had for, say, acquiring a used trampoline earlier that season in "Bart's Inner Child". Or indeed his over the top exuberance on hearing the guitar riff in Eddie Money's "Two Tickets To Paradise" from earlier in the same episode, which causes him to forget his predicament in not having tickets to the game, but only temporarily. You can count on Homer to feel intensely about anything in the moment, but for that passion to peter out just as abruptly (did he even mention the trampoline in the back half of "Bart's Inner Child"?). As sure a sign as any that the friendship is not fated to last is that his obsession with Ned feels more like one of his random crazes than any rational effort to get to know a man he's been reflexively spurning for eight years. Ned's willingness to lay out the welcome mat for Homer remains something the latter can fundamentally abuse, his tendencies to permanently borrow household items from Ned being no less considerate than his newfound tendency to invade the Flanders' space by encroaching on their family dinners, destroying their pool table and interrupting their anodyne television viewing (I don't know if the sheep show Rod and Todd are watching is a parody of an actual cartoon, but it's priceless, as is Todd's somewhat baffled response to its moral implications: "That's all well and good for sheep, but what are we to do?"). Homer is nevertheless touched by the Flanders' seemingly limitless efforts to accommodate him, and attempts to return the favour by initiating Ned into his own family (by which he means his fellow booze hounds down at Moe's), and then by having his biological family join the Flanders for a picnic, an arrangement that, unbeknownst to the wilfully oblivious Honer, the Flanders are every bit as cheesed off about as the Simpsons. This culminates in quite possibly the darkest sequence we had yet seen in any non-Halloween Simpsons installment, in which Ned heads up to the top of a clock tower, pulls out a gun and proceeds to fire upon the innocents below, sensing Homer's presence in them all. Granted, it is a dream sequence, but by Season 5 standards this is still pretty extreme.

For as shocking as this sequence is the first time you see it, and as chilling as it remains on subsequent viewings, the execution is simply beautiful. There's the eerie, Hitchcockian shot of the endlessly winding staircase Ned climbs to carry out his depraved deed, the ominous silence that greets his ascent, the sickly green skies above him, the washed-out blues of his unsuspecting targets down below, and their terrified screams as they realise what's happening. It doesn't immediately betray the fact that it's a dream, but we can tell right away that something is off, and that Ned is headed for some very out of character dealings. The only mitigating detail is that he doesn't appear to have had much success in his attempted massacre, since there are no bodies on the ground. It escalates into something all the more viciously exaggerated, when a mailman shows up and starts firing his own gun back at Ned. As a child, the visual of a postal carrier with an assault weapon concealed inside his mailbag always seemed like such a random bit of weirdness, until I learned that the term "going postal" was coined for a reason. Ned wakes up in a cold sweat, and has some disturbing news to share with Maude - he thinks he hates Homer Simpson.

I'll be honest here - I don't think the hatred Ned professes that to feel for Homer here is really anything new. What's lurking deep within a Springfieldian's soul can't always be detected from the surface - take what we also learn about Moe, and his surreptitious practice of reading literary classics to the residents of hospitals and shelters while tearing up at the sentimental parts (note: those are not valid quotes from either My Friend Flicka or Little Women). On a similar token, there's some level on which I suspect Ned has always privately disliked Homer, way down in the bowels of his psyche. I believe this was evident enough in "Dead Putting Society", when Ned demonstrated that he could actually be pretty darned tetchy with Homer if he really got going. You couldn't hold it against Ned for harbouring those sentiments - he tries so hard to be a good neighbour to Homer, and Homer's always so rude to him in return. Often Ned might come across as being merely oblivious to Homer's position, but I don't think this is the case. Ned isn't stupid, and he recognises those clear displays of animosity on Homer's part. It's more that he sees it as his Christian and neighbourly duty to rise above it and to always be the bigger man - as Homer puts it here, to turn every cheek on his body. Under the usual state of affairs, Ned has grown acclimatized to dealing with Homer's rudeness, so that he doesn't take it personally and keeps his own urges for retaliation in check. It's easy enough when Homer is mostly going to be blowing him off and he can simply walk away from him in the aftermath. But now the situation has changed, and he has to figure out how to deal with a Homer who is as obnoxious as ever, but from the angle of constantly wanting to be in his face and having zero respect for his family's boundaries. This is why the imbalance in the status quo proves particularly dangerous for Ned. It forces him to confront those buried and dormant feelings he'd long considered conquered.

A knock-on effect is that Ned's image as an upstanding citizen begins to deteriorate, both in the eyes of his family and the general public. This is paralleled with Homer's own reputation getting a major boost, when he attempts to assist in Ned's charity work at the shelter and his desire to get it over with as quickly as possible is mistaken for enthusiasm by an adjacent journalist. Once we've reached the third act, Homer's behaviours get ever more cartoonishly silly, to the point where he's chasing the Flanders' car a la the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The story remains grounded, however, by the very real, very painful consequences Ned's itches for a little respite start to bring. First he appears sinful in front of his sons, when he manages to get rid of Homer by telling him that he already has plans that day to take the boys to see their grandmother (presumably the one on Maude's side who later got taken hostage in the Holy Land, and not the beatnik who doesn't believe in rules). Rod and Todd are excited to hear this, at which point Ned attempts to introduce them to the concept of a white lie, and how sometimes it is okay to tell untruths when the goal is to spare another person's feelings. Rod isn't having any of it ("Lies make baby Jesus cry!"). Then when attempting to escape from Homer in the family Geo he gets pulled over for speeding by Chief Wiggum (yeah, well, unlike lying, which might be permissible under certain circumstances, reckless driving is always a bad idea, Ned - don't make me tap the most disturbingly ironic use I've ever seen of Bobby McFerrin, from our friends the LTSA in New Zealand), who accuses him of being high on goofballs in front of a busload of people from the First Church of Springfield. "Where's your Messiah now?" Wiggum asks tauntingly, echoing Edward G. Robinson in The Ten Commandments. Where indeed.

Things come to a head that Sunday, when the church parishioners collapse into a flurry of distrustful whispering as Ned walks through the door, but applaud Homer for his work at the homeless shelter. As Reverend Lovejoy (who teases an upcoming sermon under the spiteful title of "What Ned Did") asks everyone to bow their heads in silent prayer, Ned becomes transfixed with the intrusive sound of Homer's relentless nasal breathing and, unable to bear it any more, blows his top in front of the whole church: "Can't you see? This man isn't a hero! He's annoying! He's very, very annoying!" The parishioners accuse Ned of being jealous of Homer and angrily round on him, but to everyone's surprise, including Ned's, it's Homer who comes to his defence. For as ridiculously exaggerated as Homer's affections might have been up until now, in his climactic speech he suddenly seems achingly sincere, owning up to his history as a less-than-pleasant neighbour and how commendable Ned always was in showing him so much patience. "If everyone here were like Ned Flanders," he argues, "there would be no need for Heaven. We'd already be there." The rest of the church is moved into apologising to Ned. In turn, Ned approaches Homer and thanks him for standing up for him. The two of them reconcile and head off for a game at the Pitch N' Putt, triggering a second round of existential anxiety in our young onlookers, who are bothered that there's now less than a minute on the clock and no sign as yet of things returning to normal.

It's sad, really. At the end of the episode, Homer and Ned had demonstrated that perhaps there was a basis for a genuine and healthy friendship between them after all. Homer had Ned's back when it really counted, and Ned recognised the value of that. Both neighbours were able to move past their respective reservations and reach a shared understanding that looked as though it might reap mutual benefits. The notion of that this kind of growth represents a threat to the series is a little troubling, even when the comic implications are golden. Is there not some part of us that wants to see the characters rewarded with meaningful development when they make an honest effort to better themselves? But, like it or lump it, Lisa's prediction for how this will all pan out proves entirely correct. In the story's epilogue, which onscreen titles helpfully inform us takes place the following Thursday at 8:00pm, Homer arrives home with the deeds to an allegedly haunted property, courtesy of his late great uncle Boris, and plans for the family to prove those superstitions wrong by spending the weekend there. Ned appears at the Simpsons' window to say hello and is told by Homer to get lost. Ned cheerfully accepts and goes his own way. No explanation is given, and Bart and Lisa seem alone in possessing any recollection of the previous week's happenings, furthering the sense that they represent the viewer's perspective - the show's internal world has simply reset itself, and the events of this episode might as well not have happened. The telltale clue is in that oddly specific detail about this occurring on Thursday at 8:00pm, which back in 1994 was when new Simpsons episodes were debuting on Fox. This is in effect, a faux preview for the next episode, airing March 24th. In reality, there wasn't a new episode that aired on that date (the following installment, "Bart Gets An Elephant", had to wait until March 31st), so while I doubt that writer David Richardson and the crew could have foreseen this at the scripting stage, it plays as its own bit of irresistible meta humor. This is effectively a preview for a lost episode.^[1] Brilliant!

There, is however, a bit more to unpack in this epilogue than the inexplicable reset between Homer and Ned. Richardson's script is sly enough to weave in a subtle warning on how, by denying progression and keeping the characters trapped within the same time loop ad infinitum, there might be a price to pay sooner or later. The set-up for Homer's haunted house story, coupled with the name drop of a deceased relative we'd never even known existed until now, sounds dubious as sin. Obviously, it exists in quotation marks, as code for the kind of creaky sitcom devices we'd ordinarily regard as being beneath our favourite show. That's how we know the script is having some fun with us. But it's also a playful concession to to the likelihood that if The Simpsons persisted on its current path, it was going to struggle to stay fresh. Change is risky, sure, but is stagnation any more enticing as an alternative? Where else did The Simpsons have to go from here, if it wasn't permitted to do a little evolving? These are questions that Oakley and Weinstein would grapple with more consciously throughout their upcoming tenure, and for all the experimentation and world-building that was allowed to happen in their time, they arrived at basically the same conclusion. There's not a world of difference between the underlying implications of this ending and Troy McClure's foreboding in "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" on the potential developments in the series' future ("Did someone say long-lost triplets?!"). Both are snide reminders that if you get too limited in your options, eventually you're going to end up in shark-infested waters, and you can bet then that you're going to start jumping. 

Now this wasn't the first instance in which the series had implemented a faux preview for the purposes of mocking the hoariness of lesser sitcoms. It happened previously at the end of "Treehouse of Horror II", where the preposterous set-up of Homer having Burns' head stitched to his neck promised to pave way for future hi-jinks with the two of them butting their connected skulls over whether to attend an all-you-can-eat-spaghetti dinner or a reception for Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Homer even had a potential catchphrase in the works ("I hate having two heads!"). Sometimes you've just got to lampoon crummy sitcoms for the pleasure of lampooning crummy sitcoms. On this occasion, though, the outcome is more obviously linked to the wishes and expectations of outsides forces, through our audience surrogates Bart and Lisa. That's not to say that the onus is being played on the viewer for this predicament - Bart and Lisa had little direct influence on the situation, after all - but the viewer is rather being implicitly not to get too comfortable with the current state of things, because sooner or later something has to give. Consider what Bart and Lisa are actually doing in this scene. They're so relieved for the confirmation that Homer and Ned are no longer pals that they don't bat an eyelid at the kind of wacky adventure Homer is proposing, which is to spend the weekend in decrepit old house that's potentially haunted. Surely they'd be much safer staying in Evergreen Terrace while their dad and Ned enjoy a friendly game of pool in the rumpus room next door? Instead, they assume that since the world appears to be running according to its usual rules, they know what they're getting from it and all is right within. In actuality, they might be headed for something that is, by the standards of their universe, all the more profoundly wrong. The final moments find the Simpsons inside the house (which we only see from the exterior), and Homer reassuring the others that the place definitely isn't haunted, before the lights go out and the family screams in unison at some off-screen horror. We leave the Simpsons face to face with the dark unknown - which is precisely what Bart and Lisa were looking to avoid. Moral of the story: just because you're in familiar hands, don't assume that they're necessarily good hands.

 

 [1] A variation on this set-up later showed up in the Season 7 episode "Bart The Fink", with further jokes about how improbably hoary it was. It was quite blatantly a different situation, however. There it was Homer's great-aunt Hortense who'd passed away (not the same aunt Hortense who was already dead in "Bart Gets Hit By A Car", surely?), and they didn't get the house itself, they just had to spend the night there to get their financial inheritance. It's a standard clause.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #52: How To Explain Pixels To A Dead Hedgehog THE PROLOGUE!

Okay people, this is a big one. I recently experienced a "Eureka!" moment that was, on a personal level, utterly tectonic. After much tireless searching, I am finally able to close the book on a television mystery me that's been haunting me for over 30 years. As a young child, I have very distinct and very uneasy memories of being repeatedly exposed to an advertisement that confounded the living daylights out of me - in part because I couldn't make head nor tail of its intended message. By then, I was just about worldly-wise enough to know that the purpose of advertising was to attempt to sell you something, but basically paranoid enough to not put it past the powers that be to throw in random bits of stimuli just to make your sleep at night a lot harder. I had no other means of explaining the existence of this ad, which had no discernible agenda other than to whack you with a weird, confusing and, above all, disturbing scenario entailing the apparent imperilment of a small, fuzzy animal (albeit one obviously played by a puppet). I know I've mentioned it in these pages at least once before, in my review of "Who Shot Mr Burns?: Part One", when trying to explain the personal anxieties I associated with the term "To Be Continued...", so let's just copy and paste the synopsis I gave back then:

"There was a short period, some time in the early 1990s, when the bane of my TV-watching existence was a most peculiar and disturbing TV ad in which stock footage (I presume) of an enormous truck hurtling down a desert highway was interspliced with the cries of a terrified critter, apparently in the path of the truck and in danger of being crushed by it. The creature itself was of no discernable species - the most we ever saw of it was its huge plastic eyes rolling open and shut as it stood there, seemingly powerless to alter its fate. Then, the action came to an abrupt halt, the words "To be continued..." were flashed across the screen in big bold letters, aaaaand I never did figure out what that was all about. As far as I'm aware, the scenario never was continued, and maybe that was the joke in itself, but it was never apparent to me what the advertisement was actually selling, and it's haunted me ever since. If you're wondering why you've never seen this featured as a Horrifying Advertising Animal, it's because I've never been able to find it. Not having a clue what the campaign in question was for has seriously impeded the whole search process. I would love to put the matter to rest once and for all, because as things are, that whole scenario still lies suspended in my head, with no clarity as to the fate of that plastic-eyed critter or what the heck I was even watching."

 

I was never quite able to shake the psychological baggage the experience left with me. A barrage of questions lingered. Did the ad actually make good on its threat of continuation? Did the animal in question escape being crushed beneath the wheels of that hulking great truck? Was the animal a species or character I was intended to recognise? What the hell was that advertisement trying to sell me? As I entered adulthood and the bewilderment persisted, I knew the only way to overcome it was to confront the source head-on and to go in search of my televisual demon. After all, the establishment of YouTube had made it so much simpler to access nostalgic advertising online, if you knew what you were looking for. Problem is, I didn't. After all this time, I couldn't even second-guess what brand the ad had been covertly hawking, which made it very hard for me to narrow down my searches. The best I could do was take a stab at the specific period in which I was likely to have seen it (I knew it was either late 1992 or early 1993 - I could swear I had seen it on CITV around airings of Tiny Toon Adventures, but this was pre-Animaniacs), scout out uploads of adverts from those years and hope for the best. In practice it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. For the longest time, I got zilch. Nada. Bupkis. Which surprised me, because I seem to recall this ad being horribly ubiquitous back in the day. It's a good thing that I'm so enthusiastic about old school advertising in general, so trawling through upload after upload for years on end wasn't a total waste of time. I got to relive plenty of other memories, some fond, some unsettling in their own way. But none quite so prized as the Holy Grail of traumatic advertising, which continued to taunt and elude me, an image too persistent for me to cast it aside, and yet one so elusive it was beginning to feel as though I was the only person on the planet who bore its terrible weight of its memory.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when I happened to find the infernal thing, tucked away in an obscure YouTube upload. Now finally, I have the answers I craved. They weren't necessarily the answers I wanted, mind. I pulled back the lid on this thing and, well, it turns out there's actually a pretty fiendish twist to this story that I was totally unprepared for. At the time, I'd suspected that the whole "To Be Continued" thing was intended as a parody of melodramatic television cliffhangers (this was post-Truckers, which had always ended with Edward Kelsey giving those exact words in his eerie sign-off each week, so I was able to attach some theatrical significance to the term) and that the joke was that the scenario wouldn't be continued. I couldn't logically link that joke to any identifiable product, but I was certain, looking back, that I must have missed a trick - perhaps it was part of a bigger ad and there was another segment I hadn't noticed it had always segued into. But no, the actual answer was far more distressing. I did indicate in the above synopsis that if I were ever to uncover this ad, I would cover it as a Horrifying Advertising Animal, so here we are.

My description of what happened in the ad was fairly accurate, but for a few minor details. The eyes of the fake animal turned out to latex rather than plastic, and they didn't roll open and shut. Instead, they showed the reflection of the approaching vehicle, a detail I clearly didn't absorb at the time. I also couldn't say for certain whether stock footage was used for the visuals of the truck (Maybe? I don't know). I was only majorly wrong about one thing. The onscreen threat that this ominous scenario was "To be continued" was no joke. There WAS a follow-up ad. And this is where it all gets bitterly ironic -  it was one that I'd been well-familiar with for all these years. In fact, I'd already covered it in this very series all the way back in 2020, not realising there was ever a connection. I've termed this the 52nd Horrifying Advertising Animal, but that's something of a cheat. This is really a revisit of the 27th.

Remember this guy?

That's right. This flat-out nightmare of an ad, which at the time I had registered as a baffling one-off, transpires to have been a prelude to the equally nightmarish (but marginally more comprehensible, at least from the standpoint of it existing to sell me a product) ad for Sonic the Hedgehog 2, in which Steven O'Donnell fiddles with an unresponsive hedgehog in a fruitless attempt to revive it. It was all a teaser, to account for how the hedgehog got so unresponsive in the first place. The animal seen cowering in terror at the approaching truck was none other than the same hedgehog puppet we later saw with a coroner's tag on its toe and in the questionable care of O'Donnell. The answer was right under my nose all along. I'd just never put it together. Seriously now, was I supposed to? Aside from the fact that they feature the same spaghetti western leitmotif, there's not a lot to overtly connect the two ads. The hedgehog puppet doesn't look amazingly recognisable in its stationary form, and the follow-up doesn't incorporate any flashback material, at least not in any airing that I saw. I surely can't have been the only person confused by this?

Here's a far pettier nitpick of the ad's execution. The vehicle in question looks like an American-style truck (with the elongated snoot) and the landscape it's hurtling down very much like an American desert. It even sounds, to my ears, like the hedgehog is saying "Uh-oh!" with a discernible American accent. Which is flawed, because hedgehogs aren't found in the wilds of America (judging by its colouration, this is meant to be a European hedgehog and not an African pygmy hedgehog, which is the kind you can keep as a pet). If you'd asked me to guess what type of animal it was intended to be from the teaser alone, I'd have ventured armadillo. (I'd also remembered the puppet as having more cat-like features, another factor that evidently kept me from connecting the necessary dots.) The hedgehog is also implied, in the follow-up ad, to have ended up in some twisted parallel universe version of St Tiggywinkle Hospital in Aylesbury, UK, so something strange is definitely going on with the campaign's sense of geography. Actually, I'd wager that the truck and the desert highway in the teaser were intended as a homage to the movie Duel - which does have the added effect of making it seem as though the truck is assaulting the hedgehog on purpose, the honk of its horn resonating as a murderous battle cry. The spaghetti western music likewise reinforces the sense of a deliberate showdown between these two blatantly mismatched forces. The poor hedgehog didn't stand a chance.

The upload I have to thank for getting me reacquainted with this childhood nightmare was not one of the random advertising blocks I've been trawling through for years, but an obscure educational VHS titled Sega Invades Your Schoolwork, which was apparently intended to be shown to school kids as a teaching tool on the value of marketing. They included both hedgehog ads, as examples of how Sega's advertising proved that they were better than the competition, and I've now got the answers I've been seeking all these years. As I say, though, they weren't exactly the answers I was hoping for. I refer you back to what I said in my "Who Shot Mr Burns?" review about how "that whole scenario still lies suspended in my head, with no clarity as to the fate of that plastic-eyed critter or what the heck I was even watching." It is undeniably a weight off my mind having closure on the latter (since the question was only going to chew away at my sanity the longer it went unaddressed). With regard to the former, I think I actually preferred living in blissful ignorance. Knowing the scenario didn't end well for the imperilled critter really is a massive bummer. I had always assumed that if the cliffhanger had been picked up again, it would have found some way to escape the incoming vehicle. The heinous truth could only sour my elation in having untangled this longstanding mystery. Do you understand how deflating this is? I located my white whale and it took a big salivary bite out of me.

I'd already considered the chief installment ,with O'Donnell prodding the inert hedgehog, to be disturbing enough on its own merits, but now that I've put the whole narrative together this is easily one of the most singularly, purely horrifying ad campaigns I've personally come across. If I were tasked with picking out the advertising animal I'd rate as the most purely horrifying, I would, without question, go for Kevin the Levi jeans hamster (with the irony that I did not technically cover Kevin as part of the Horrifying Advertising Animal retrospective, since I wrote about him before it occurred to me that I could spin a whole series from the notion - although you can consider him a proto Horrifying Advertising Animal, along with the Coca-Cola swimming elephant and the bizarre menagerie in that Roysters crisp ad). The only detail that makes the Sega campaign slightly more palatable is that, unlike the Levi's ad, which used a live hamster and a stuffed one according to the needs of the story, they never used a real animal at any point. The doomed hedgehog is clearly always a latex imposter (its little lifeless eyes are still enough to rupture your heart, however). But it's still an amazingly grim and mean-spirited premise through which to sell a video game that was, at the end of the day, supposed to be a bit of innocent diversion. For context, it was part of a wider "Sega TV" campaign, which was renowned for taking a weird and edgy approach to hawking the Sega Mega Drive to UK audiences. The release of Ecco The Dolphin, for example, was teased with a faux commercial for "Ecco" washing powder (what, they didn't want to keep the theme going and do a teaser with a dolphin puppet struggling in a tuna net?). On those terms, the sheer WTF-ness of the Sonic campaign at least fits in perfectly with the broader brand. But I do find it a bit astounding that nobody influential enough within Sega's UK arm apparently remarked, "The dead hedgehog? Bloody hell, don't you think that's a bit much?" (as opposed having a giant image of said dead hedgehog plastered across their headquarters at the time of the game's release - I mean, seriously? And they had a miniature Sonic making the peace sign in the corner as if he wouldn't be deeply mortified by this mockery of his species). Sonic The Hedgehog is supposed to be a kid-friendly franchise, after all. Did kids really want to have it sold to them by having a dead hedgehog shoved in their faces? Did adults, for that matter?

I've reflected on it, and I've come to the bleak conclusion that Britain must have gone through a cultural fascination with dead hedgehogs in the 1980s that trickled over into the early 90s. After all, BBC sketch show Not The Nine O'Clock News very notoriously incorporated a sketch where a hedgehog was gruesomely crushed by the wheels of a truck, followed by a faux apology in which they clarified that the hedgehog was stuffed, and then suggested that responsibility for promoting hedgehog abuse ultimately lay with the hedgehog taxidermists, whoever they were. This was such a defining example of NTNON humor that they adopted a dead hedgehog as their go-to mascot and had it brazenly centred on the covers of their LP releases, most memorably between slices of bread and cheese as a hedgehog sandwich (I should emphasise that this was a real hedgehog, in their case, not a puppet). Pictures of dead hedgehogs sold records in the 1980s, apparently. So perhaps it wasn't such a huge leap to suppose they might sell video games too. We can trace this campaign to the release of Sonic The Hedgehog 2 in November 1992; thus, it represented the tail-end of the UK's sordid love affair with hedgehog misfortune. What was coming in 1993, however, was to change zeitgeist forever. The Animals of Farthing Wood was set to take the UK by storm, and it too featured a critical scene in which a couple of hedgehogs were crushed beneath the wheels of a hulking great lorry. On this occasion, the occurrence was presented as a tragedy, a harrowing consequence of humankind's encroachment upon and indifference toward the natural world, and the nation was left collectively traumatised by what they saw. After that, we couldn't go back. To quote Farthing Wood's own Fox, there was nothing to go back for.

Now that I've got my closure on this matter, I can't tell you how eager I am to move on from it. I do need a new advertising white whale, however. How about the cat food ad where the guy eats his cat's food (and loves it), mistaking it for leftover stew his girlfriend prepared? I only remember seeing it once, but you're not going to convince me that I dreamed it.

I'd Rather Be In Sidcup (Signs That Say What Volkswagen Wants You To Say)

I'm not sure that I can adequately explain this, but "Left Bank Two", a popular De Wolfe library track recorded by Dutch outfit The Noveltones in 1963, is one of those musical compositions that automatically sets my hair on end. Take that series of advertisements for the Volkswagen Golf Mk4 from 1998, in which a succession of characters communicate, in lieu of spoken dialogue, by holding up a hand-written sign with some kind of revelatory statement about their innermost selves. I found the results creepy as hell, something I attribute 100% to their choice of musical accompaniment. It's a jaunty piece for sure, and any agency that opts to feature it in their advertising no doubt does so with the intention of relaying a sense of whimsy, but for myself that whimsy has always come in heavy quotation marks. "Left Bank Two" sounds to my ears like a strangely mocking tune, like there's a joke that everyone else is laughing at but I'm not getting - a joke that, for all I know could be at my own expense. Its presence invariably makes the atmosphere feel slightly cursed.

I could be in the minority, though. BMP DDB, who devised the campaign, likely selected the track for its nostalgic properties and because it has, for multiple UK generations, been a track associated with self-expression. "Left Bank Two" rose to prominence when it was used in the "Gallery" segments of BBC children's program Vision On (1964-1976), in which viewer-submitted artwork was showcased before the screen. The track became so iconic that it was retained for sequel series Take Hart (1977-1983) and Hartbeat (1984-1993), both presented by Tony Hart, who had co-presented Vision On, and for CBBC series SMart (1994-2009), which kept it relevant well into the 00s. Its appearance here is a clue that, just as those unassuming pencil sketches served as charming little windows into their young creators' souls, so too are the signs in the Golf campaign meant to be heartfelt statements on who their holders really are. In a way, my own interpretation seems perfectly fitting, since there is an extent to which the central joke of the campaign is very much at the viewer's expense. The nature of the signage is about subverting the narratives we might otherwise be inclined to project onto the subjects - the mismatch between what you see and what you get, as the tagline puts it. Some offer expressions of surprising vulnerability (the fisherman who complains of seasickness, the hiker who's reached the top of a rock formation only to decide that the experience is unfulfilling and he'd rather be in Sidcup). Other statements disclose traits that might not ordinarily be attributed to their authors, be they emotional (the "sensitive" nightclub bouncer), intellectual (the model with an IQ of 158 or, far more absurdly, the toddler who writes out a complex maths equation) or carnal (the very prim and proper woman in a supermarket car park who reveals her twin obsessions with chocolate and sex). Elsewhere, a businessman at a train station gestures to their fluid sense of identity, with the message, "At weekends my name is Mandy", the statement that most sharply encapsulates that discrepancy between how the subject presents for the sake of societal convention, and how they actually identify.

For these figures, the hand-written sign becomes a form of empowerment, a compelling shorthand for a secret being confided between the subject and the viewer, as an inner act of rebellion against the social constraints that would otherwise define them. Such defiance, the campaign suggested, made them soulmates of the Golf Mk4 itself, the humble exterior of which concealed a whopping 2864 improvements - as was boasted on the sign accompanying the vehicle in the closing image of each individual. I am aware of at least three different versions of the ad, each of which offered a slightly different arrangement of figures, and pictured a different character positioned beside the Golf at the end, as a further reinforcement of their spiritual alliance. In one, the bouncer. In another, the fisherman. In the third, the naturist who doesn't play volleyball.

The volleyball-shunning naturist stands out as by far the most puzzling of the subjects, given that the signage itself functions as a form of constraint that would at first appear to run contrary to the overall premise. Societal convention requires that she keeps her offending parts covered on daytime television, a purpose that her message, split across two strips of cardboard, conveniently serves. This does mean that she's denied the freedom of physical movement, lest the inoffensive arrangement be disturbed, a point emphasised by the highly animate nature of the other unclothed campers seen whizzing past on bikes and kicking footballs. Then again, her statement indicates that she wishes to be defined by her inactivity. Her dour expression, in contrast to the merriment unfolding around her, is a further indicator that she isn't the carefree, fun-loving naturist of stereotype. In one of the campaign's more touching situations, another subject, a man wearing a heavy frown, goes a step further and uses his sign, showing a drawing of a smiling face, to obscure his entire image, as a complete rejection of the outward narrative. He evidentially isn't great at expressing emotion, but wants you to know that he's a kindly soul within. (Did I say it was touching? The crude smiling face is honestly more disconcerting than the frown. But the gesture is noted and appreciated.)

The campaign was the cause of some controversy, when artist Gillian Wearing, a then-recent recipient of the Turner Prize, accused BMP DDB of having ripped off the concept from her 1992/93 project, Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say. In Wearing's case, members of the public were approached and given a marker pen and blank sign with which to create their own message. As with the Golf campaign, a large part of the appeal of Wearing's images lay in the disconnect between the subject and their selected statement - the most infamous had a well-dressed businessman holding a sign that said, "I'm desperate". Wearing contended that many of the scenarios used by BMP DDB were too similar to be coincidental (she felt, for example, that the nightclub bouncer holding up a sign that said "Sensitive" was evocative of her own image of a policeman holding up a sign that said, "Help"), but ultimately chose not to pursue legal action, citing a recent case in which director Mehdi Norowzian had sued Guinness and lost, following claims that their "Anticipation" campaign had borrowed excessively from his 1992 piece Joy. For their part, BMP DDB denied that they had stolen Wearing's idea, indicating that she was merely one of several sources that had fed their inspiration, (another being the iconic promo video to Bob Dylan's 1965 single "Subterranean Homesick Blues"). Myself, while I don't really blame Wearing for being cheesed off at what she saw, I think that some of the alleged connections are rather too tenuous to suggest transparent copying. I suspect that businessmen making "surprising" revelations were a feature of both because businessmen are an easy bunch to categorise as nondescript. A bouncer holding up a sign that says "sensitive" makes for a disarming image, but doesn't have quite the degree of troubling irony as a policeman holding up a sign reading "Help".  It would be inaccurate to suggest that the Golf campaign is devoid of social commentary (the ads are, after all, exercises in the unreliable nature of perception, and the toddler who's a maths whizz notwithstanding, there's no reason why the featured scenarios couldn't accurately describe any real-life people), but its main intention was presumably to be cute rather than challenging.

Regardless of whether or not the campaign pilfered its premise wholesale from Wearing, her objections highlight the other sense in which the joke here is ultimately at the expense of the viewer. As is noted by Russell Ferguson in the 1999 publication Gillian Wearing, "It is all the more painfully ironic...that the visual style of [Signs] has been repeatedly co-opted for commercial advertising - the epitome of signs that say what someone else wants you to say, of self-expression defined as your choice of commodities." (p.48) Whereas Wearing's work evokes the unpredictability and spontaneity of the everyday, the scenarios in the Golf campaign were entirely manufactured, and purposely designed to convince us that the ultimate form of self-expression is to buy a Golf. Just as the subjects' statements become shorthands for individuality prevailing in the face of society's preconceived notions, the Golf becomes a shorthand for their personal statements - to the point where there is nothing personal or individual about it. The apparent self-empowerment afforded to each figure, in getting to direct the course of their own narratives, inevitably steers us to the exact same conclusion, with the Golf Mk4 and its 2864 improvements. Still, with the sinister sauce of "Left Bank Two" at its disposal, it can scarcely fail to have its own eccentric vibe.

Dog of Death (aka Operation Scapegoat)

It's recently dawned on me what an uncharacteristically dark turn The Simpsons took in its third season. I tend to think of Season 8 as the one in which the tensions in the writers' room became startlingly manifest, and Frank Grimes (and others) served as handy whipping boys. But maybe there was something in the air in Season 3 too. Al Jean and Mike Reiss had taken over as showrunners, and we know that they tended to favour more extreme situations, with less obligation to realism than their predecessors; I'd hazard a guess that one of their starting approaches was to make the drama of the early series a notch edgier by throwing in a heightened sense of peril. (Unlike Oakley and Weinstein, who got steadily more cynical and pessimistic as they went along, Jean and Reiss seemed to get the darkness out of their system by the second half of their tenure, with Season 4 being a considerably lighter collection.) As a result, the series entered a phase in its burgeoning life in which it was suddenly prepared to get malevolent on a regular basis. Specifically, we had three episodes - "Bart The Murderer", "Dog of Death" and "Black Widower" - which (as their titles might imply) all entailed the threat death calling on a particular denizen of Springfield. In all three cases that threat was not ultimately realised, but the possibility that it could have gone that way was nevertheless palpable. It's not that the previous seasons weren't prepared to go to morbid places too. Season 2 had one episode, "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" that was all about Homer having to face up to his own mortality, having learned that his latest dining experience might have deadly consequences. Elsewhere, Bart had a near death experience in "Bart Gets Hit By a Car", while "Old Money" had a character actually die (albeit a one-off one). But Season 3's own Death Trilogy feels different. The threat of mortality comes from characters being very active and very willing hazards to one another. In the case of "Dog of Death" (episode 8F17), the danger to Santa's Little Helper originates from natural causes, with the kink in his digestive system that could be remedied with a costly operation. The real danger, however, rests on whether or not the Simpsons would choose to abandon him to his gruesome fate because he's suddenly become a financial burden. Then by the end the tables have turned, and the episode title is revealed to have a sinister double meaning. We've entered a situation in which Santa's Little Helper might become a dispenser of death, and Bart's life hangs on whether or not the dog will lose the urge to rip his erstwhile master's throat out.

"Dog of Death", which first aired on March 12th 1992, can be viewed as an uglier variation on the previous season's "Bart's Dog Gets an F", with the family once again at loggerheads as to whether they can keep Santa's Little Helper. The issue this time isn't the dog's desire to chew everything in sight, but his medical bills jeopardizing such luxuries as beer, ham night and weekly lottery tickets, when a trip to the vet reveals he has a twisted stomach. Realism in television: as a child, "twisted stomach" sounded to my ears like some fucked-up, made-up illness, but this is actually a legitimate disorder of which dog owners need to be wary. The technical term would be Gastric Dilatation Volvulus, when the stomach fills up with gas, causing it to expand and twist. All dogs can be affected, but the greyhound's body structure makes it one of the more susceptible breeds. The Simpsons clearly hadn't prepared for this possibility by having Santa's Little Helper insured, but maybe that wasn't such a big thing in 1992. Marge and Homer's initial response is that the $750 operation that will save the dog (about $1,676 in 2025 money) is too much to ask, and they instead turn to preparing the kids for the likelihood that they'll have to let their pet go. The kids aren't quite so accepting of this outcome, with Bart once again being the most motivated to fight in Santa's Little Helper's corner. Marge and Homer eventually relent, and figure out how they can afford the operation, if each member of the family is prepared to give up a regular expenditure. It's an easy enough thing to agree to upfront, but when the dog is restored to a clean bill of health and the family are having to adjust to a deluge of lifestyle changes, resentment starts to pile up toward their four-legged chum. Thus, "Dog of Death" explores a possibility that "Bart's Dog Gets an F" left untouched - what if Bart, whose bond with the dog is clearly the strongest, momentarily lost patience with Santa's Little Helper? The upshot is that Santa's Little Helper, feeling unwanted in the Simpsons' home, takes to the streets and ends up in the ownership of Mr Burns, who is set on transforming the gentle family pet into a savage attack dog.

Right now I'm revisiting the Santa's Little Helper episodes, which have traditionally been some of my least favourite episodes of the series, in the hopes that I might find something new in them now that I am myself a dog owner. But I'm already no stranger to the trauma of pet illness and the inconvenience of costly vet fees, so in many regards this is an episode that cuts close to the bone for me. Too close, in fact. I find this one rather difficult to watch, to the point where I'm compelled to automatically consign it to the bottom of my SLH rankings. It's a paradox, honestly, because compared to its competitors, "Dog of Death" does have quite a few things going for it. A criticism I'll often make of the Santa's Little Helper episodes is that they're prone to flimsy plotting, but that's not a charge I can really lay against "Dog of Death". Of the four SLH episodes from the classic era, this one has by far the strongest narrative bones. The stakes are high from early on, each act flows logically into the next and the lottery subplot is a perfect thematic complement in an episode where financial struggles play such a vital role. It's a basic story, but up until the last 90 seconds or so it is decently told, which gives it the edge over the greatly more sluggish "Bart's Dog Gets an F". The major disadvantage "Dog of Death" has next to "Bart's Dog Gets an F", and indeed every other SLH episode, is that it is an immensely difficult episode to like. Here's the most damning thing I can personally say about it: other than for the purposes of this review, I'm not sure that I've ever chosen to watch "Dog of Death" on my own terms. I've sat through it whenever it's on, but it's not an episode I've found myself scrolling to whenever I've felt like sticking on a Simpsons disc; there are at least 200 other episodes I'd be more inclined to give my time. Even "Secrets of a Successful Marriage", which is officially my least favourite of the classic era, has elements that make it more rewatchable.

Part of the problem is that the central scenario, while highly relatable, is bleak all over. The writers certainly had their work cut out in finding the humor in the matter, and most of the best jokes occur in the first act, in the lottery B-story (Kent Brockman is on particularly good form here). There's certainly nothing wrong with taking a dramatic approach and allowing a situation that's naturally downbeat to be so, but "Dog of Death" doesn't get the balance quite right. In fact, it frequently tips over into being downright mean-spirited, despite the production team explicitly stating on the episode commentary that their intention was to make it heart-warming, like the Christmas episode. Ostensibly, the Santa's Little Helper episodes were written to appeal to the animal lovers in the series' viewership, yet there are jokes in here that feel like they were purposely designed to rub animal lovers the wrong way, particularly if their affections lie with non-dog life. If you paid attention to some of my quibbles with "Bart's Dog Gets an F" and "Bart The Genius", you might have guessed that there were two jokes in particular I was going to take issue with, so let's just get them out of the way now. First, the black cat in the room. Writes Nathan Rabin in his review on the AV Club: "Santa’s Little Helper has it rough. He’s only trotted out when it suits the plot and more often than not he’s in some sort of terrible scrape." Not to sound like a broken record, but I once again feel the need to point out that Snowball II has it so much rougher. She (as far as we knew, still a he at this stage) seldom gets to be the centre of attention, and is usually only trotted out to be the target of some gratuitous put-down in episodes centred on her canine counterpart, a tradition originating with "Dog of Death". In this case, it's the punchline of the entire episode. As Santa's Little Helper is welcomed back with open arms and the entire family is clamoring to lay their loving hands upon him, Marge suggests that Homer pet the cat instead. Homer retorts, "The cat? What's the point?" Hey, just leave Snowball II alone, okay? She never did anything to hurt anyone. It seems an unnecessarily sour point to me that these dog episodes should be at such pains to assure us that the Simpsons love Santa's Little Helper deep down, whilst simultaneously implying they feel nothing but contempt for the family cat - a sentiment that's honestly not that evident outside of Santa's Little Helper episodes. It seems blatant enough that the Simpsons felt attachment to the original Snowball, so I'm not buying them as a clan of cat haters. The issue might be that Snowball II isn't living up to her predecessor's greatness, but since the series never cared to elaborate much on the household's feline dynamics, the family just come off being as inexplicably mean to an animal that's so unassuming. Yes, it's as clear as day that there are some strong anti-cat feelings amongst the writing staff, but I kind of feel that if they wanted the Simpsons to be vessels for that, they shouldn't have made them cat owners in the first place.

Are cats the most abused animal in all Simpsons history? That might depend on whether we're counting Scratchy among those mistreated critters. If so, there isn't much of a contest. If we're only including animals that are real, flesh-and-blood entities in-universe, then there is another creature the writers seem inordinately fond of harming. I've noticed that gags about hamsters being imperilled, abused or killed happen with surprising frequency within the series. By "Dog of Death", we were up to at least our third incident of hamster misfortune, and we already seem far removed from the cautiousness of "Bart The Genius", in which the hamsters were allowed to escape before the threat of dissection could be carried out. In this case, we actually have a dead hamster onscreen, getting zapped repeatedly by a defibrillator before a vet picks it up and tosses it through a basketball hoop into a waste bin, accompanied by squishy little sound effects. Damn, that's just cold. (This same clip works its way into "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", which is another reason why "Another Simpsons Clip Show" is superior.) If the former cat person in me gets a little miffed with certain assumptions in "Dog of Death", then the lifelong rodent lover is absolutely going to recoil. I can't imagine what the writers' beef with hamsters could be, but they obviously have it in for them (gerbils too, judging by "Who Shot Mr Burns? Part One").

But let's even out that burst of negativity by putting a spotlight on what "Dog of Death" does right. I do like the realism with which the initial Santa's Little Helper conflict is handled. It was apparently based on a real dilemma faced by writer John Swartzwelder's family when their dog got sick (although in their case it didn't have a happy ending), and there is an appropriate amount of gravitas surrounding Santa's Little Helper's illness. Episodes in which the family's financial troubles played a significant role were set to become a dying breed as we moved further into the 90s (when, with some rare exceptions, such as "Homer vs. Patty and Selma" of Season 6, the Simpsons had the means to do just about anything on a whim), but were a major part of the early seasons' integrity. As per the commentary, the sum of $750 was carefully chosen, as an amount that Homer and Marge would immediately balk at but could plausibly scrape together if they made the right allowances in their budget. The scene in the kitchen where the family argue over Santa's Little Helper's fate is very effectively delivered, particularly Bart's horror on realising that he and his parents aren't on the same page. There's a potent tension between his loving innocence and their more detached practicality. Santa's Little Helper might be a cherished member of the household, but the bitter truth is that Homer and Marge view him as essentially expendable - there is a part of them that would be willing to let him go, if it means keeping up all of their lifestyle habits. Homer's preliminary solution is to paper over the children's impending trauma by attempting to sell them on his vision of a Doggie Heaven, which takes an even more disturbing turn when he decides that there's also a Doggie Hell, and that Blondi and Checkers are likely sniffing at each other's butts therein, alongside a rogue Lassie. (I'm a lifelong fan of Benji, but nowhere near as well-versed when it comes to Lassie lore - does anyone know what the hell Homer is talking about when he brings up the bad Lassie who bit Timmy? Did that happen in one of the movies or was it something reputed to have occurred on set?) Bart's position, however, is the righteous one (something he carefully avoids compromising by expressing it without expletives), and Homer and Marge are persuaded that something more valuable is at risk here than their precious creature comforts - that is, until the stark realities of having to substitute pork chop night with chub night begin to sink in.

I also have "Dog of Death" to thank for introducing me to the work of author Shirley Jackson (if it hadn't, then I might never have written this piece on her story "Charles"). The name drop in this episode encouraged me to seek out and read "The Lottery", and Brockman didn't lie about its contents. "A chilling tale of conformity gone mad" would likewise be a pretty apt summary of a typical day in Springfield - this is the community who were previously prepared to lynch Homer and Bart over the beheading of a statue, so I daresay they are only a hair's breath away from implementing a ritual stoning. For now, "Dog of Death" offers up a relatively mild example of the townspeople's mass conformity, via their hysteria for a state lottery that trades in glib promises of easy wealth but is, as Moe neatly puts it, an exploiter of the poor and ignorant (of course, as a peddler of booze he doesn't quite grasp the irony). The way the lottery set-up first segues into the main story, with the family being too transfixed by the possibility of their numbers coming up to even notice the financial time bomb staggering across their living room, is an especially clever touch. Homer's bizarre fantasy of being transformed into some kind of gold-coated giant via a $130 million jackpot would be absurd under any circumstances, but seems particularly out of touch when the immediate reality is clearly signalling that things are about to get grim. Alas, the lottery win was as a pipe dream as delusional as those aspirations of having 14 karat gold grafted to his skin. Despite forking out for 50 tickets, Homer discovers that the odds were always brutally stacked against him, as the jackpot is snagged by none other than Brockman himself. The question of whether or not obscene wealth is the answer to all of life's ills becomes a touchy one in "Dog of Death", as Brockman's initiation into the millionaire lifestyle is contrasted with the Simpsons' sharp dip into a more frugal standard of living. Seeing the blinged-out Brockman flaunt his riches on TV, Homer churlishly retorts that there's one thing $130 million (plus a salary of $500,000) can't buy, and that's a dinosaur. (Maybe not a dinosaur, although Brockman does get a llama that bites Ted Kennedy, one of multiple Michael Jackson references in this script).

Shirley Jackson's lottery, which caused some controversy when the story her first published in 1948, is of a very different nature. The "winner", Tessie Hutchinson, voices her objections to the process, but is permanently silenced by the onslaught of stones thrown upon her by the very people who, up until a short moment ago, were her friends, neighbours and even family, and who regard her sacrifice is necessary for their collective benefit. It is a terrifying demonstration of the perils facing the individual who has been singled out and turned on by the group, who will no longer recognise them as one of their own, but as a scapegoat on which to vent their darker emotions. The reference in "Dog of Death" feels all the more pertinent for how the plot deals with Santa's Little Helper's own status as a member of the Simpsons family being jeopardized by a simple twist (literal and figurative) of fortune. His GDV leaves them divided - whereas Bart continues to see a beloved companion in dire need of help, Homer and Marge see an inconvenience that must be sacrificed for the family's greater good. Later on, the family all come to jointly scorn Santa's Little Helper, having settled the irrational sentiment that he's to blame for their frugal miseries. It's easier to blame something tangible, at which you can actively direct your rage, than simply fate for dealing you a lousy hand, as Marge discovers when the universe plays another of its sneaky cosmic tricks and has her exact numbers come up the first week after she's been made to give up on the lottery. Lisa likewise is tasked with writing a report on Renaissance astronomer Copernicus just when she was required to skip out on the relevant volume of Encyclopedia Generica (although in her case the universe is also merciful enough to leave a third-rate biography on Copernicus for her to find at the bus shelter, which is it's better than nothing). Homer is reduced to degrading himself for amusement of the patrons at Moe's Tavern, in the hopes that they'll give him change for a beer. Even Bart gets in on the scorn, after a budget haircut from a student barber takes most of the shape from his hair. (Of course, it could be worse. He could have been sent to Jake's Barber Shop, as in the "Deep Deep Trouble" video. Then there would be nothing but stubble.) The experience is enough to reduce his beloved friend into a "dumb dog" in Bart's eyes. When the Simpsons cease showing their dog any warmth or affection, Santa's Little Helper takes the hint that he can't run with this pack any more, and absconds the second the gate is left unsecured.

After an adventure in the wilderness that would make Benji proud, Santa's Little Helper is captured and impounded by the authorities (the Simpsons clearly didn't have him microchipped either, but maybe that also wasn't done in 1992). He's been expelled from his former position as a family dog, but there is a whole new identity on the horizon for him to fill - Mr Burns is looking for a replacement guard dog, now that his long-serving Crippler is about ready for retirement, and when he catches sight of Santa's Little Helper he senses potential in the homely greyhound. It is a mite questionable that Burns should go to a shelter and pick up a stray when it would be much more efficient for him to purchase a dog that had been specially bred and trained for the purpose (Burns doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd have a "Don't shop, adopt" policy). But then I think the unwholesome implication is that Burns gets some sadistic pleasure from personally breaking and transforming a placid pet into a slavering beast. It's here that the script once again gets a little too mean-spirited for comfort, as Burns' procedure for conditioning Santa's Little Helper to want to immediately tear the flesh from the bones of everything he meets frankly makes Winthrop's training methods in "Bart's Dog Gets an F" look positively civilised. That horrifying sequence with him giving Santa's Little Helper the Clockwork Orange treatment is arguably a little too ridiculous and over the top to be taken seriously - and I do get a guilty little smile out of Burns' declaration that it will turn the dog into "a vicious, soulless killer", which was entirely the opposite intention of the treatment Alex received in A Clockwork Orange, but wittily gives the lie to the idea that the process was about healing and not dealing further damage. But we also see Burns punching Santa's Little Helper with boxing gloves and leaving visible contusions on his face, and that's just distressing to watch. To their credit, the animators do an excellent job of making the reprogrammed Santa's Little Helper look genuinely frightening, and like he could potentially do some serious damage to Bart when they inevitably cross paths again. I suppose it's in Burns' abuse of this naturally benign dog that we see some implicit suggestion of how the Simpsons were always much richer than the icy billionaire, even when subsisting on their diet of organ meats and chub. Burns has no understanding of a dog's value as a loving companion; to him, it's just a resource to be broken and turned against the world he wants to keep at bay. The Simpsons have experienced a pleasure that's totally beyond him, even if they are intermittently inclined to take that for granted.

I've already indicated that "Dog of Death" loses its way somewhat in the last 90 seconds; alas, it's here that it falls victim to the same trap as "Bart's Dog Gets an F", in reaching a solution that feels overly convenient and cliche. Naturally, the Simpsons come to miss Santa's Little Helper when he disappears and regret their ill-treatment of him. Bart once again is the most driven to action, and goes about knocking on every door in town on the chance someone has seen him; when he reaches Burns' mansion he has the hounds set on him, and naturally Santa's Little Helper leads the offence. I think this sequence is very well-staged and coveys the danger of the scenario to nail-biting effect - so it perhaps registers as a little hokey when the dog is suddenly and totally placated on hearing Bart say the words, "I love you." All of the Santa's Little Helper episodes, with the exception of "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", rely on some form of "boy and his dog" triteness to reach their happy endings, but none hammer it in with quite the degree of gruesome manipulation as "Dog of Death". This is supposed to be the redemptive light at the end of a harrowing tunnel, but it feels like the episode taking the path of cheap sentiment after a discordantly malevolent ride, in an attempt to pass itself off as sensitive after all. I will give it that from a thematic sense it is at least more explicable than the solution to "Bart's Dog Gets an F". The Simpsons, especially Bart, had already demonstrated that their love for Santa's Little Helper was stronger than their need for life's various bells and whistles. No matter how much they grumbled about it in the aftermath, they still bought the dog the operation that saved his life. So this is Santa's Little Helper returning the favour by demonstrating that his bond with Bart is ultimately stronger than any of the vicious tendencies Burns has pummelled out of him. If they had applied a subtler had (say, lost the flashback montage altogether), some version this outcome might have worked. The element that I find unforgivably cheesy, though, is when Santa's Little Helper single handedly defends Bart from Burns' remaining guard dogs. We've acknowledged that Santa's Little Helper looks really scary when he's mad, sure, but the notion of him being able to frighten off an entire pack of blood-lustful hounds^[1] is a touch hard to swallow. Oh well, back home to shower the dog with praise and disrespect an inoffensive cat.

As if that particular double standard weren't enough, "Dog of Death" closes with a strange disclaimer, in which we're informed that no dogs were harmed in its making, but that a vomiting cat and a dead duck were somehow associated with its production. There's a fiendishness deep in this episode's heart that really doesn't mesh with its professions of tenderness, but at least it goes out gleefully upfront on the matter.

[1] Come to think of it, are Burns' dogs actually hounds? They look more like they were modelled on some kind of terrier breed. But maybe "Release the terriers!" doesn't have quite the same wham.

DETRiments: Mike and Joy

"Mike and Joy" was the outlier of DETR's "What's It Like?" drink driving campaign of late 1999, for various reasons. It centred on the perspective of bereaved relatives, in a series themed predominately around conversations with perpetrators, and how they accommodated the terrible knowledge that their lack of judgement had resulted in the death of another. It also forwent the baffling expressionism that punctuated the sorry testimonies of Terry, John and David; the surreal images of an undressed performance artist and misplaced eels are replaced by close-ups of the characters' physical surroundings, mostly remnants of the deceased in a manner designed to suggest a ghostly, lingering presence. What immediately connects it to the WIL series is the title card at the beginning. In accordance with the changed perspective, it asks a different, less lurid but equally grave question ("What's it like to lose someone?") and closes with an extension of the campaign tagline that explicitly connects it to the Y2K. As the title would indicate, this is the only duologue of the series, with the titular Mike and Joy telling the story of their daughter Michelle, who was died of head injuries when a drink driver smashed into the back of her car.

"Mike and Joy" is the entry that's the most strongly reminiscent of the campaign's then-recent predecessor, Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives. It too was more interested in the suffering of innocents than the remorse of the perpetrator, to the point where the drink driver's lack of corporeality became a running feature. The focus of D&DWL, at least in the beginning, was the knock-on effects of accidents caused by drink driving, with its earlier installments tending to illustrate how people who weren't directly involved in those accidents were also impacted. We had the quietly devastated family in "Funeral", the lonely mother in "Jenny", the lamenting school friends in "Classroom" and the shaken first responder in "Fireman's Story" ("Pier" was unusual among that first wave in focusing on a crash victim who had survived to tell his own story). "Mike and Joy" most obviously recalls "Funeral" and "Jenny", not only with its depiction of parental grief, but with its closing emphasis on stopped time; just as the watch recovered from Stephen's jacket and Jenny's undisturbed teenage bedroom are reminders of a progression cruelly denied, the photographs of a smiling Michelle convey her own stolen future by reducing her to a series of static images. Like the mother in "Jenny", Mike and Joy are condemned to share in that stagnation, haunted by the absence of their daughter and the loss of the future that should have been. Joy states that life now consists of "a void, and there's nothing to fill it...nothing at all"; they are in a situation in which the world has stopped turning. The explicit reference to the millennium at the end of the PIF represents an attempt to tie this in with the broader concerns of the Y2K, evoking a sense of anticipation that teeters on the apocalyptic. The tagline alludes to the place of the individual within the grander scheme of time, both in terms of our vulnerabilities but also the potentially far-ranging impact of our personal choices. Against a backdrop of cultural celebration, in which our civilisation was giving itself a pat on the back for still being around after 2000 years, WIL served as a grim little countermove, playing on the tension between our best intentions and aspirations, and the world we might inadvertently create through the worst of our weaknesses.

Although "Mike and Joy" avoids the aggressively surreal imagery of the rest of the series, even it can't resist hitting us with at least one baffling and unsettling image. The commencing frame shows the silhouette of a ceramic angel that appears to be missing a wing, presumably a knick knack from Mike and Joy's house, with the sounds of an unseen fly buzzing in the backdrop. The fly obviously signifies death and decay. The angel should be a symbol of purity and salvation, but it seems corrupted, with its dark and broken form, a further indicator of thwarted potential. Elsewhere, "Mike and Joy" captures that distinctively nightmarish qualities that characterised the whole series; the horror of the situation is so uncanny that it appears unreal. Similar tricks are deployed to the other interviews - the alternating proximity to the subjects, and shots in which they appear to speak without moving their lips, suggesting an internal pain that persists below the surface. Most strikingly, the PIF is presented in a queasy purple hue, a representation of the emotional fog Mike and Joy now inhabit. Unlike David, who conducted his interview from a prison hallway, and Terry and John, who spoke in a more generic meeting room, Mike and Joy give their testimony from their living room, and there is a notably more overstuffed mise-en-scene, with the various decorating touches lending as an unnerving a feeling as the institutional backdrop of David's ad. They too are prisoners of a world that's been warped into an unearthly shape, with no prospect of refuge in what lies beyond. The view from window behind the broken angel displays only the vague impression of an oppressive brick wall. Our first glimpse of Mike and Joy shows them gazing from their living room window, into an indistinct space that, save for the outline of some not-so-green greenery, reveals essentially nothing.