Intersections (Wheel of Misfortune)

As we've established, New Zealand's intersections were dangerous places to hang in the 2000s, and this campaign - quite possibly the most inspired of all NZ intersection campaigns - offered a really creative means of illustrating that point. "Wheel of Misfortune" was created in 2008 by agency Clemenger BBDO Wellington for Land Transport New Zealand (who'd inherited LTSA's mantle in 2004), and arguably represents the absolute peak of LTNZ's output. I'd go a step further and say that it represents peak road campaigning, period. When it comes to public information films (or whatever the equivalent international term would be), "Wheel of Misfortune" is one of the all-time greats. Top 10 material, definitely. Maybe even a contender for the Top 5. All of the right ingredients are there - an ingeniously novel set-up, spine-chilling atmosphere, beautifully crafted tension, flickers of grim humor and the kind of indelibly grisly climax that makes any PIF buff weak at the knees. What's more, it has a villain who could give the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water a run for its money. Here, the face of crossroads carnage is actor David Austin, playing a wordless, other-wordly carny who occupies the focal intersection and beckons drivers with the ultimate challenge - the opportunity to Risk It All, Risk It Here. Getting across without giving way is envisioned as a twisted carnival game, straight out of your darkest, most nutmeg-addled nightmares.

The premise of "Wheel of Misfortune" has it that whenever a driver navigating the intersection fails to give way, the other-worldly carny spins the titular big six wheel, determining their fate from five possible outcomes - Near Miss, Minor Crash, Major Crash, Death and an ultra-slim chance of Miracle. The original campaign installment followed a "rule of three" structure, teasing us with the evil possibilities while reserving the most brutal developments for last. The ad was broken up into three different segments, opening with a driver who, laughing with her passenger and presumably not paying adequate attention to the road, pulls out in front of a red van and gets a Near Miss on the wheel. A collision is averted, although the driver of the red van angrily sounds their horn, indicating their mistake. The second segment shows a driver making more sensible choices and crossing the intersection without prompting the carnie to spin the wheel (just as well, as I think he had a kid in the back). The final segment opens with a driver (who I've always thought looks a bit like Peter Gabriel) giving way and making it across the intersection safely, but has a second driver in a grey sedan attempt to cut across right after, throwing themselves directly into the path of a black sedan, and into the wheel's climactic wrath. And here's where the fun part begins - there are multiple versions of the ad, revealing the various possible repercussions for the hapless drivers based on what comes up on the wheel. It is, notably, always the same two vehicles involved in all instances (with a third unhappy vehicle getting dragged into the action in one variation), indicating that we are exploring the alternate consequences of the grey sedan driver's single rash decision, and not different outcomes for other drivers who prompt a wheel-spinning on different days. This is the Sliding Doors of road campaigns. Or Run Lola Run, since there are three possibilities shown.

The first of these variations, the "Death" ending, might be considered our default version, as it contains the most obvious narrative from a cautionary standpoint. We already got our tantalising glimpse of potential catastrophe with the opening segment; surely now it's time for them to hold nothing back and to reveal what absolute disasters we could potentially bring on ourselves. Here, the black sedan duly slams into the grey sedan (and its occupant) with full force, causing the vehicle to crunch and leaving an ominous trail of shattered glass in its wake. The action is intercut with the spinning wheel, and the eyes of the carny as he keenly awaits the results. For a moment, the final outcome seems uncertain, with the pointer resting on the final spoke between Major Crash and Death, but it gets that last little burst of momentum to flip over into the latter, sealing the grey sedan driver's terrible fate. Naturally, this is the very worst thing we see happen to the grey sedan, but it's not the only thing.

Another variation, the "Near Miss" ending, was a real unicorn. I'd seen someone describe it on an internet forum soon after the campaign started airing in New Zealand, stating that there was one version in which the grey vehicle narrowly cleared the black vehicle, only to get a police car on their tail. But I could never find this one on YouTube, and my hunt proved so fruitless that I started to doubt that it even existed. After all, they'd already demonstrated the "Near Miss" outcome with the first segment (albeit without the police getting involved), so wouldn't it be redundant to show it again at the end? Would it not reinforce the very misconception the campaign seemed designed to downplay, that it wasn't a big deal if you failed to give way, since your odds of being involved in a collision were low compared to your chances of getting across safely? I wondered if perhaps the author had misremembered the "Near Miss" variation, by conflating details from the opening segment with a legitimate ending. But no, I can confirm that it does exist, having eventually been signposted to an upload on Vimeo. Seeing the grey vehicle miss the black by the skin of its teeth, having scoured the net for it for so long, and knowing the other versions inside out, was frankly surreal. I can also confirm that it makes more sense in context as a variation, as the Near Miss in this case is a hell of a lot nearer than that in the opening segment, as signified by the pointer once again getting caught between two possible outcomes, Near Miss and Death. In this version, the pointer doesn't quite have the momentum to flip over, staying in Near Miss and averting the collision. It's nevertheless hair-raising to complete just how razor thin a line had divided the more desirable outcome from complete disaster. The "Near Miss" ending makes a point that was implicit in the opening segment (the first time the wheel is spun, you might notice that Death fell immediately after Near Miss, and that's certainly sobering) but not given quite so brutal an emphasis (since the first driver still lands safely in Near Miss). When you fail to give way on an intersection, not only are you playing a foolish game of chance, but the factors that separate one extreme from the other (whether you get out unscathed or get completely pulverised) could be totally miniscule. On top of that, the police indeed show up, indicating that the grey sedan driver will face consequences in the form of a fine. He's not getting to wherever he was headed any sooner.

The third and final variation is "Miracle", and this one basically feels like it's there for a bit of comic levity. This time around, the grey sedan's gambit causes the black sedan and a third vehicle approaching from the opposite direction to swerve in a desperate attempt to avoid collision, and somehow or other, it works. All three vehicles come to a safe standstill without making contact. Gentle choir music plays in order to hammer home the point that this is nothing short of miraculous. Clearly "Miracle" is intended to the jackpot outcome. It only occurs once on the wheel and takes up less space than the others, so the odds of landing on it are significantly smaller than the others. In practice, though, I'm not sure what makes "Miracle" any more of a jackpot than "Near Miss". Nobody gets hurt in either result, no damage is dealt to the vehicles, and both presumably entail heapings of stress for the people involved. Muting the cute music and looking at what actually happens in the "Miracle" ending, if I had been in one of those vehicles, I think I'd have found the experience considerably more traumatic than if I'd been in one of the vehicles in the opening segment. It may just be that "Miracle" falls between "Death" and "Major Crash", the two worst outcomes, so it represents your slim chance to get out of an extremely fucked situation. But there are evidently no winners in this game, just needless risks and varying extremes of punishment. (Some of which spilled over into the behind-the-scenes arena, with a stunt driver requiring hospital treatment during the filming of one of the endings, presumably the Death one.)

The outcomes of Minor Crash and Major Crash were not represented in the television ads, but did receive their own print ads.

At the time, I recall seeing a handful of online voices who claimed that the concept was flawed, since it implied that whether or not you get into an accident is all a matter of chance and had nothing to do with the driver's diligence. I can only assume that those viewers weren't paying close attention, because the ad makes it clear that the carny does not spin the wheel for drivers who don't make bad decisions. That is the whole purpose of the middle segment, where nothing happens, and that's a good thing. That the carny readies the wheel suggests that the second driver was at least tempted to cut across, but managed to resist, and is rewarded by getting to sit out the game. And he doesn't even ready the wheel for Peter Gabriel. We can think of his philosophy as being somewhat akin to that of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, and how it was not his custom to go where he was not invited. By the same token, the carny does not subject anybody to the game who did not take him up on his offer in the first place, however unwittingly. He lets people make their own decisions, and if they choose wrong lets fate make the decisions from there. What makes Austin's performance especially chilling is the air of total impassiveness with which he imbues the character. Compared to the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, there's nothing to suggest that he derives any kind of sadistic relish from being a force of reckoning for these foolish and unwary drivers, but he goes about it with a steely, unflinching sense of duty that's every bit as ghoulish. 

In a campaign brimming with disturbing touches, it might be difficult to isolate the most disturbing, but here's a bit of gratuitous horror that always stands out to me - at the end of the ad, no matter what the variation, we'll get a final shot of the carny and his wheel in motion, signifying the interminable nature of the game, accompanied by a discernible, disembodied whispering. What the whispering is saying isn't fully intelligible, but you can definitely pick out a "Yeah, that wasn't worth it..." at the start. What's more, we hear that same disembodied whispering at the beginning of the third segment, as the ill-fated grey sedan pulls into view and the carny waits for Peter Gabriel to pass. Spooky, no question. But whose disembodied whispering is it? Arguably, it's the carny's internal monologue, which would align with it being juxtaposed with him, but that would imply a degree of emotional investment in the lives of these passing motorists that I don't think he makes. Presumably it's not the ghost of the grey sedan driver because a) we hear it in all versions of the ad, not just the one where he gets Death and b) we hear it prior to him making his stupid decision. It might be that it has no deeper narrative significance, and was incorporated as an extra bit of atmosphere to accentuate the viewers' goosebumps. I've got another theory, though, and it alludes to yet another layer of implicit horror that you might pick up on if you study the details closely. At the start of the ad, the pointer is already positioned on Death. Once the carny has had his first opportunity to spin the wheel and it's landed on Near Miss, we can see that it remains in that position at the start of both succeeding segments, until he has the chance to spin it again. If we read between the lines, then the implication is that the last unlucky sod to play the game before the events depicted in the ad had landed on Death. So I'd suggest it might be their ghost we're hearing, urging the other motorists not to make the same mistake. Maybe even multiple ghosts, all resigned to the same locale to collectively rue the one reckless blunder that cost them everything. I think the implication is definitely that the intersection is haunted, in one sense or another, a monument to the accumulated mistakes made by various individuals in the heat of the moment, the grim consequences of which are now echoing across eternity.

Despite the brilliance of the campaign, coupled with the morbid elegance of Austin's performance, the carny would not go on to have a long-running presence on New Zealand television (I don't know if the disestablishment of LTNZ in mid-2008 had anything to do with that). He appeared in just one further ad, in which he was shown to be stalking the same individual across various different intersections on different days, the omnipresent spectre of what could potentially go wrong, waiting for this patently conscientious driver to make the single slip-up for which he could be punished dearly. This ad did not have multiple endings, although there were different edits, the longer of which resulted in another driver who did not follow the protagonist's shining example, necessitating a spin of the wheel, although the ad cut away without showing us how they fared. That was the final curtain for the Kiwi intersection carny, yet he's never quite gone away. His face, his wheel, his eerie fairground leitmotif...it all still haunts me. There are days when I think I can just make out his silhouette from the corner of my eye, lingering on the roadside and anticipating every possible opening for calamity. Public information legends never retire, they merely enjoy an extended encore in the psyches of their viewers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intersections (Don't Worry, Be Happy)

What makes comparing road safety shorts the world over particularly fascinating are the cultural discrepancies that will occasionally arise. Take the issue of intersection safety, which is not a subject I've seen brought up too often in campaigns from the UK or Australia, but has an entire subgenre dedicated to it in New Zealand. I don't know what it is about New Zealand that would necessarily make their intersections any more dangerous than anyone else's, but LTSA and their successors certainly cranked out an awful lot of classic televisual trauma from the premise. Among them was this cheeky compilation, circa mid-00s, which was really an exercise in just how deliriously you can abuse the gentle warmth of Bobby McFerrin by matching it with the most flagrantly incongruous material imaginable. McFerrin's 1988 hit "Don't Worry, Be Happy" plays over clips of motorists attempting to navigate various intersections in Wellington and beyond, which starts out relatively serenely, but it isn't long before McFerrin is having to compete with a cacophony of horns honking, tyres skidding and metal crunching (along with, presumably, a few bones). I find that I'm deeply worried for quite a number of the persons involved, particularly the pedestrian and the motorcyclist who had the misfortune of getting caught up in the insanity. The results are expectedly horrific, but the presence of the McFerrin track gives the mayhem an unusually comic edge; we would expect road safety ads to be miniature horror shows, gravely undermining as the razor-thin line between the mundane and the catastrophic, but this one seems to be positively revelling in the absurdity of these stupid humans and the avoidable chaos they insist on creating.

What I can't quite figure out is whether the ad should be seen as pro or anti "Don't Worry, Be Happy". Is the song's stoic philosophy being viciously sent up by the accompanying carnage, or can it be interpreted as being somehow in on the joke? Whose narrative voice is is the track intended to represent? A good starting point might be to compare it to the Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives PIF "In The Summertime", which was very conspicuously anti the titular Mungo Jerry ditty. The song was part of the trap, both for the subjects and the viewers, the anthem for the hedonistic appetites that brought about the former's ruin, and the duplicitous host that greeted the latter before abruptly pulling the rug out from under them at the end. "Summertime" was designed to trick the viewers into thinking they were watching a more benevolent ad, with the upbeat familiarity of the track lulling us into a false sense of security, and then becoming part of the mockery once its true intentions were exposed. The words "Go out and see what you can find", heralding the haunting final shot, are put into a much darker context than the song itself originally implied, and yet an explicit endorsement of drink driving was already right there in lyrics - the outcome of the PIF is presented as the logical extension of what was already lurking within the song's lotus-eating soul. "Don't Worry", by contrast, doesn't use McFerrin to deceive the viewer, since the nature of the ad is established early on. The initial incidents are fairly minor, with build-up to the nastier accidents, but the sense of unease is instilled almost instantly. The effect of the song is double-edged, adding an obvious sense of humor to the proceedings, but also exacerbating our discomfort by emphasising the wrongness of what we're seeing.

A possible clue might lurk in the campaign tagline, "Take Another Look At Intersections", which serves as both at literal command, urging drivers to look more thoroughly before pulling out into the path of an incoming vehicle, but also asks us to reconsider our perception of intersections in a broader sense, as dangerous venues where all manner of chaos could potentially go down. With that in mind, it seems logical to interpret the song as illustrating the disconnect between the nonchalant assumptions of the drivers, who do not worry about the risks at intersections, and the stark reality, in which hardly anyone is finding much in the way of happiness. The song becomes the anthem of those who do not live in the real world, an outlook doomed to sooner or later bring them crashing down messily to earth. But that almost seems a bit too easy to me. By my preferred reading, McFerrin's song is being posited as a hopeful (if sardonic) ode to the alternative, the ideal that nobody can possibly obtain because everyone is in such a terminal frenzy. The problem isn't a lack of worry, but the perpetual sense of hurry and urgency that has everyone zipping in all directions, to the point where they don't have the patience to wait a few lousy seconds for their fellow motorists to pass. The song still represents the breezy ideal clashing with the grim reality, but it now becomes the moral locus. If we took life at a more relaxed pace, as McFerrin suggests, we might avoid bumping into one another and taking a further toll on our blood pressure (or worse).

As per the campaign blurb on the old LTSA website that I dug out using the Wayback Machine, failure to give way was, at the time, the third largest cause of death and injury on New Zealand's roads, but it's noteworthy that the issue is cited as being a relatively new one for LTSA's advertising. I also note that New Zealand's current road safety authority, NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA), doesn't cover the issue in any of its contemporary campaigns. Does that mean that the problem was at its peak in the 2000s? If so, I wonder what the story was there?

Lightyear (aka Sad, Strange Little Man)

In mid-2022, former Simpsons showrunner Mike Reiss tweeted something that really stuck with me. It was in reference to DreamWorks' Animation's latest, The Bad Guys, and how reminiscent it was of one of "those fun movies" that Pixar used to do before they started trying to "teach us the meaning of life" all the time. I still think he was only partially right. Whatever its merits, I wouldn't say that anything about The Bad Guys particularly recalls Pixar's early works (The Bad Guys is a full-on farce, more comparable to, say, The Emperor's New Groove than anything in Pixar's canon). Furthermore, at the time he made that tweet Pixar's most recent feature was Turning Red, and I'd wondered if it really deserved that knock. Or Luca before it for that matter. Both were charming, achingly personal coming of age stories with light fantasy twists and simple, unassuming messages about embracing your inner self (and resisting generational trauma, which is the prevailing concern in contemporary animation). Not necessarily everyone's cup of tea, but definitely not the kind of material that obviously warranted the specific snarky charge that Reiss had levelled against them. I was, for a time, inclined to dismiss it as a variation on those mindless remarks made by fellow Simpsons alumni Mike Scully in the 2000 documentary Wallace & Gromit Go Chicken about how animation was inherently better suited to comedy than to drama, just phrased in a more amusing way. Then Lightyear hit, and Reiss's words suddenly gained a wad of retroactive credence. If ever there was a Pixar feature that had busted had its body under the weight of wanting to say something grand and important, it was the Toy Story spin-off purporting to be the origin story of everyone's favourite upstart space toy. Lightyear is the very definition of a film that desperately wants to teach us the meaning of life when it should have been having fun. And yet here's the really goofy thing about it - I can safely say that I've had more fun with Lightyear than I have any other Pixar film from the 2020s. I do not intend that as an insult. With the exception of Onward, I've enjoyed just about every Pixar feature this decade has yielded thus far. It's just that Lightyear is the one I've found myself reaching for time and time again. Objectively, I don't think it's a good film, but I am fascinated by it nevertheless. I feel the insatiable urge to keep revisiting it, to pick over its every baffling and misguided decision, to marvel that a film so mind-bogglingly misconceived ever came to being.

Lightyear is one of those movies that exists purely to be made fun of. Although let me be clear about this one thing - hate watching is not an idea we promote on this blog. My mockery comes squarely from a place of affection. For as ridiculous as Lightyear is, and as feverishly reluctant as I am to accept this as an authentic part of Toy Story canon, it is a movie that's won my heart. It's wretchedly dorky mess, and I guess I relate to that on some level.

What Lightyear is not is a movie about the plucky action figure voiced by Tim Allen. This is a movie about the "real" Buzz Lightyear, the intrepid space explorer that toy Buzz was initially deluded into thinking was himself, voiced here by Chris Evans. This is where it lost an awful lot of people, who couldn't get their heads around the idea that there was this other version of the character, leading an entirely separate existence to the toy Buzz. Many of them heard the term "origin story" and were even more lost ("He was made in Taiwan! What more is there to say about the origins of a toy?"). The trailers did an amazingly bad job of communicating it, but this is allegedly the film within the Toy Story universe that prompted Buzz action figures to be manufactured in the first place. Allegedly. 

Released in June 2022, Lightyear was intended to be Pixar's triumphant return to the big screen, after the Covid pandemic had prompted Disney to dump a couple of years' worth of the studio's slate directly onto Disney+, even during periods when cinemas were fully operational. Lightyear should have been a safe bet, given the strength of the Toy Story brand, but it raked in surprisingly weak box office numbers, amassing a worldwide total of £226 million - a steep drop from the billion plus grosses the more recent Toy Story installments had enjoyed. There was a lot of talk in the aftermath about what was to blame, with certain outlets being all-too eager to attribute the film's failure to the presence of a brief lesbian kiss, but I doubt that was the biggest factor here. As I see it, the problems Lightyear had to contend with were threefold. First, there was general debasement of the Pixar brand caused by the aforementioned decision to send Soul, Luca and Turning Red directly to streaming, and not even as those Premier Access titles you had to pay extra for (I'm of the opinion that Disney used the pandemic as an excuse to prioritise their streaming service, and they did their pals at Pixar particularly dirty in the process). If audiences weren't convinced that this was a big event movie they had to rush out and see RIGHT NOW, they'd been conditioned to expect new Pixar titles to show up on Disney+ before very long. Which leads us into our second problem - Lightyear had a confusing and unimaginative marketing campaign that did not make it clear, to the casual viewer, what this version of Buzz had to do with the character they knew from the four Toy Story films. The third problem was the most sadly inevitable, which is that Lightyear was a misconceived project from the go. It isn't a question of what went wrong. On a conceptual level, pretty much nothing about it went right. Pixar's Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter basically conceded as much when he was asked to reflect on the film's failure a year later: "We asked too much of the audience. When they hear Buzz, they’re like, great, where’s Mr. Potato Head and Woody and Rex? And then we drop them into this science fiction film that they’re like, What?”

To be fair, the idea of wanting to go back and explore Buzz's origins as a science fiction hero isn't the most illogical line of thinking. The original Toy Story did make it fairly obvious that Buzz Lightyear was based on some kind of pre-existing property within its universe, but never elaborated on what exactly, beyond the ultra-vague premise of Buzz needing to protect his galaxy from the advancements of the evil Emperor Zurg. We knew there was a "real" Buzz Lightyear, and that Andy and his friends had completely lost their minds over him, we just never got to see him first-hand (this is in stark contrast to Woody, whose origins in the beloved mid-century puppet show Woody's Roundup were clearly explained in Toy Story 2). It remained a loose end in Toy Story world-building, a mysterious franchise within a franchise that Pixar always had viable scope to expand on. I just think that director Angus MacLane wrong-footed himself straight out the gate in assuming that Andy had seen a movie, and what's more, a movie that was effectively his world's equivalent of Star Wars. I don't know about you, but that possibility had never once crossed my mind. My assumption was that Buzz Lightyear had started out as a character in a Saturday morning cartoon show, the kind that could very feasibly get kids like Andy hooked and wanting to buy a lot of merchandise, but likely wasn't anything prestigious.

Adding to the confusion was that some fans thought we already had a canon answer, by way of the 2000 animated series Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, which was explicitly framed as being the in-universe basis of the character. It's important to keep in mind that while Pixar provided the introductory sequence, with the Toy Story gang watching it from Andy's room, it was primarily a Walt Disney Television Animation production, and didn't necessarily represent how Pixar would choose to portray the fictitious Buzz Lightyear franchise on their own terms. I confess I never got into it, so I can't comment on how well it worked as its own thing (it was made by the same team who later did Kim Possible, one of Disney's better shows from the early 00s, so I'd expect it to at least be decently entertaining), but from the outset the existence of such a series really did make it look as though Disney weren't in on the original joke. Let's be serious - when toy Buzz recited his marketing blurb to Andy's toys ("As a member of the elite Universe Protection Unit of the Space Ranger Corps, I protect the galaxy from the threat of invasion from the evil Emperor Zurg, sworn enemy of the Galactic Alliance!") did you really think, "Sounds riveting, I wish I were watching that right now"? Or did you think that it sounded cookie cutter as hell and you knew everything about it you would ever need to know? That the "real" Buzz Lightyear should remain a total non-entity, while Buzz the toy was the one we got to know and accept as the genuine article seemed very much the point. When Woody taunts Buzz by asking if he thinks he's "real Buzz Lightyear"...well, it ends up becoming its own piece of charming irony. And while it would be a mite hypocritical for Pixar to have gone overly hard on this next point (they'd allied themselves with Disney, so they must have known what was coming), it was also easy enough to detect a slight critique of consumerism in the way Andy's infatuation with the character made him want to own everything Lightyear-related and essentially reshape his identity around him (to the point that he temporary abandoned the older values embodied in his attachment to Woody). "What did Andy see?" IS a valid question, but nothing within the Toy Story films indicates that it should be approached with anywhere near the degree of reverence as it is in Lightyear.

But that reverence is one of the things that most kills me about Lightyear. The film is so ridiculously earnest about everything it's doing, to the extent that it's almost heartbreaking. Based on MacLane's previous writing and directorial credits, which consisted of the Toy Story shorts Small Fry (2011) and Toy Story of Terror! (2013), I wouldn't have seen it coming. He had the potential to write something far goofier, and far better fitting with the details of the mother franchise, and and instead he chose to make this a sincere love letter to cinema and its ability to awaken the senses and imagination of those experiencing it early in life. He wanted to retroactively make Andy's Buzz obsession a vessel for the same kind of awe and wonder he felt after seeing Star Wars as a child. A lot of people were quick to dismiss this project as a straight-up cash grab, but I genuinely can't do that, since MacLane's passion is so palpable throughout, and there's something very warm, sweet and even admirable about it. I don't doubt for a second that the man loves the science-fiction genre and cared about creating a self-contained adventure for Buzz that treated said genre with the utmost respect. I just think that passion was mismatched with this particular project. It's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's disarming, but it also contributes to the film's weirdly (and delectably) confused tone.

For an idea of how confused the film is, we only need to look to its opening title card, which contains a concise and effective link between the respective worlds of Toy Story and Lightyear (more than the trailers ever managed), but also a massive error of judgement that will fundamentally cripple the picture for the full 105 minutes: "In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favorite movie. This is that movie." On the one hand, there is something very charming in its evocation of Pixar's beginnings, and the implication that the following film should be taken as not merely as an origin story for the character of Buzz, but for our relationship with the studio as a whole. The reference to 1995, in lieu of a more direct shout-out to Toy Story, seems designed to take the thirtysomethings in the audience (likely to be there with kids of their own) back to the experience of seeing Pixar's debut for the first time, and to the wondrous possibilities it opened up, both as the first 3D animated feature, and as the dawn of an innovative voice in Hollywood animation. It takes advantage of the fact that Toy Story, like Star Wars, was a film that changed cinema (for better or for worse), in a bid to have the viewer feel an immediate connection with Andy's enthusiasm, by reminding of us of our own excitement in getting to know Andy and his toys for the first time. The title card, coupled with Michael Giacchino's swelling score (did they miss a trick in not using "Also Sprach Zarathustra" for this one moment?), anticipates that seeing Lightyear will be akin to finding a missing piece of a puzzle, an integral aspect of Toy Story canon that's been lying dormant all these years, just waiting to be picked up and to reveal the fuller picture of how the world we know and love came together. It wants to take us back to the thrill of experiencing cinema through young eyes and discovering what it has to offer, with the awareness that we might now be instilling that same sense of discovery in our own children. That reference to 1995 carries so much potency. Unfortunately, it also ends up being one of the film's single greatest undoings. By connecting Lightyear to such an explicit point in cinema history, it engenders a set of expectations that the film itself has no intention of delivering on, which is to say that this will be a throwback specifically to the blockbusters of the 1990s. It does seem mighty unfair to evoke the nostalgia of those of us who remember 1995, and who cut our own cinemagoing teeth attending the films of that very era, and to not go whole hog with it.

Alas, there is good as nothing in Lightyear beyond the title card to discernibly connect it to the trends and zeitgeist of the 1990s. Some critics suggested that Sox, the name given to Buzz's robotic feline sidekick, was a contemporary reference to presidential cat Socks, but if you ask me that's grasping at straws (psst...Socks is a very common name for a cat with paws coloured differently to its body; I'm pretty sure this had nothing to do with the Clintons). And, speaking of Sox, what exactly is he supposed to be within the pretence of this being a live action production in Andy's universe? What special effects would have been used to render such a character in 1995? Crappy 90s CGI? An animatronic? A real cat with metallic dust sprinkled over its fur and with digitally added lip flaps (I mean, Babe had managed to pull off the latter in 1995)? Lightyear never lets on. It's so committed to upholding the reality of its internal world that it takes barely any time to explore its possibilities as a pastiche. Compare this to the sheer lovingness with which those brief snippets of Woody's Roundup were brought to life in Toy Story 2. The visible strings on the puppets. The unabashed silliness of the gags. It took itself much more lightly, and yet it had considerably more conviction and credibility as a slice of Toy Story world-building. (The marketing for Lightyear likewise missed a golden opportunity; think how much fun they could have had recreating the way trailers were put together in the 1990s. You know what I'm saying here - they should have brought back the voice-over guy!)

Odie Henderson, reviewing the film on Roger Ebert's site, potentially saw something that I didn't: "Director Angus MacLane and his co-writer, Jason Headley do a very good job gently mocking the type of space movie that would have existed in the 1990s." Thing is, I can't help but feel that Henderson immediately undermines that point by citing a list of visible influences on Lightyear, NONE of which are from the 90s: Star Wars: Return of The Jedi (1983), Avatar (2009), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Last Starfighter (1984). Because how many iconic space-bound sci-fi adventures came to being in the 90s anyway? It wasn't exactly a golden age for the genre. Obviously the Star Wars special editions don't count, and The Phantom Menace didn't make it until the very tail-end of the decade. Before then, I remember going to see precisely one space movie, the big screen adaptation of Lost in Space from 1998. How prophetic the title wound up being. It was a film that went absolutely nowhere (in terms of both its internal narrative and its cultural impact), and that nobody other than myself now remembers (their loss? Maybe? We'll pick this up in another entry...). It is nevertheless my default yardstick for what a space movie that existed in the 1990s would have looked like. Bombastic, choc full of special effects that have aged hideously, and so desperate to sell itself as macho when it is so very, very camp. I suspect Henderson picked up on Lightyear's own palpable eagerness to be taken seriously and assumed it was part of the joke. It was no joke at all.

The dead giveaway occurs in the first act, which is the one where Pixar is most conspicuously straining to teach us the meaning of life and, in fairness, also happens to be the film's strongest. We open with Buzz heading out with his fellow space rangers to explore an uninhabited planet, and accidentally damaging the Star Command vessel, getting the 1200-strong crew stranded in this unknown world. Buzz becomes obsessed with righting the wrong, devoting all of his time to the testing of a highly unstable hyperspace fuel that could potentially get them home, while the rest of the crew makes peace with their situation and establishes a thriving colony. Every time Buzz goes into hyperspace, he ages only minutes but returns to the colony to find they've had a good few years in his absence. Time dilation, you rascal. If this is all sounding oddly familiar to you, it might be because it's essentially the same scenario as the Michael Radford short, "Addicted To The Stars", in which Daniel Craig plays an astronaut who ages only ten minutes up in space while some 80 years have passed on Earth, and reacquaints with his son, now in his 90s. The main difference is that Buzz, unlike Craig's character, only loses four years at a time and has ample opportunities to give up and become an active part of the terrestrial community, much like his commanding officer Alisha (Uzo Aduba), who finds love, gets married, raises a son and becomes a grandmother all while Buzz is popping in an out of hyperspace. He bears witness to these developments from an angle in which he only gets the highlights, not the lived reality. (Side-note: I wince every time I hear Buzz say, "You got engaged to someone you just met?", because it sounds like one of those bad attempts at self-aware humor that modern Disney is so fond of inserting into their own films.) Inevitably, there comes the mission where Buzz arrives back to find Alisha gone. She has, however, left a hologram message through which to say her goodbyes. "Sorry I won't be there to see you finish the mission," she tells Buzz. "To infinity.." She extends a trembling hologrammatic finger. "And beyond," Buzz mournfully responds, meeting her finger with his own. The moment is played with such thoroughgoing seriousness, as is most of the material involving Buzz's peripheral relationship with the colony (but for the welcome comic relief facilitated by the introduction of Sox the robot cat, voiced by Peter Sohn). But I fear the attempt to reconfigure Buzz's most iconic line into a more poignantly profound statement about the nature of life and death couldn't help but harpoon it. There are several points throughout the script where Buzz recites classic snippets of dialogue from his Toy Story counterpart, repurposed for a brand new context, and while this largely comes off as a cute (if distracting) touch, in this instance it's wholly detrimental. "To infinity and beyond!" might be the dialogue we most associate with Buzz, but it is, by design, goofy as hell, the kind of catchphrase you'd expect to hear spouted by a broader, more bombastic hero. Because Buzz is, by design, kind of an inherently goofy character. This evocation of his inherent goofiness really takes me out of the moment, and I'm snickering when I should be in floods of tears.

Still, I did say that the film's first act was its strongest, and there is a sliver of poetic beauty in that sequence where we see Alisha's life play out from Buzz's perspective, in breathtaking motion. It captures something of the ephemeralness of life, and the wonderful things that will pass you by if you can't figure out how to embrace them in the moment. Of course, it's also very reminiscent of something Pixar had already accomplished, in their 2009 film Up, in which we see Carl and Ellie's married life whizz by in just a few minutes, with all the grand plans they'd made while they were young not being realised (at least not in the way Carl had always anticipated). Heck, it's also got shades of the "When She Loved Me" sequence in Toy Story 2 (which is still, for my money, the single most emotionally devastating sequence Pixar has ever crafted), where Jessie witnesses Emily growing up while she stays the same and inevitably gets left behind. The sequence in Lightyear suffers by comparison, but it's not without its own quiet power.

It's also where the movie peaks. Buzz learns that Alisha's successor, Cal (Isiah Whitlock Jr), does not intend to authorise any further hyperspace missions, believing the colony is safe where it is. This comes just as Sox, who has dedicated Buzz's continuous stretches of absence to conducting his own research, has finally figured out how to keep the fuel stable. The authorities apparently decide that Sox's newfound knowledge is a threat and decide to have him terminated. Upon hearing this, Buzz grabs Sox and escapes into hyperspace with him. They arrive back twenty-two years into the future to find the colony under siege from a mysterious army of evil robots, who communicate using only one ominous word: "Zurg". On the outside, Buzz and Sox encounter an inexperienced defence fighter named Izzy (Keke Palmer) who transpires to be the grown up granddaughter of Alisha, and has aspirations of following in her grandmother's space ranging footsteps, despite suffering from a crippling astrophobia. Izzy introduces Buzz to her two teammates, Mo (Taika Waititi), a chaotic Kiwi with no threshold for stress or danger, and Darby (Dale Soules), a tech-savvy convict whose participation in in the defence forces amounts to some kind of work release program. (They've got a robot sidekick of their own, DERIC, voiced by MacLane himself, but he's quickly dropped from the narrative action, only reappearing during a post-credits scene.)  All in all, not the types that Buzz would necessarily choose to accept as his cadets, but he makes do under the circumstances, and the five characters get up to the expected hi-jinks in the second act, evading the Zurg bots, and the aggressive insect lifeforms endemic to the planet, all while seeking to blow up the Zurg mothership that powers the robots below.

Until they stop to eat sandwiches, at which point the movie suddenly gets baffling as hell all over again. Buzz is perturbed to discover that the sandwiches of the future are made in reverse order, with a single slice of bread in the middle and the filling now forming the two outer layers. (Why? Was there a bread shortage somewhere in the colony's timeline?). The results look spectacularly ugly, like someone removed the sandwich's internal organs and but them on the outside of its body. It is a ridiculously impractical way to eat a sarnie, and despite Mo's insistence that getting grease on your fingers is the main attraction (I'm sorry, what?), you can only imagine the level of mess you'd have to clean up when working with ingredients like hummus, mayonnaise or peanut butter, so I doubt this would catch on. My assumption, the first time I watched this film, was that the sandwich would form the basis of an analogy that would prove vital in the third act, about doing things in an unorthodox order, but that doesn't happen. Instead, Buzz's sandwich alienation gets to be its own bit of stand-alone weirdness. And here's the kicker - it isn't even played as one of those absurd things from the future that Buzz has to get used to (a la the similarly temporally misplaced Fry from Futurama). It's played with total melancholy, with Buzz finally conceding that the future sandwich tastes pretty good that way, before a bemused Izzy asks "Bread, meat, bread...how long did you do it that way?", and a mournful Buzz responds, "Forever", as if the script is somehow in full agreement that that is a miserable approach to sandwich consumption. I'm sure the intention was for there to be something a little deeper going on here than just sandwiches, but whatever it is, it doesn't make itself known.

Amid all this sandwich nonsense, you might be wondering when the big Z is finally going to show his face. Based on how his toy was characterised in Toy Story 2, he has the potential to be such a camp, hilarious and larger than life villain, and Lightyear could definitely use a shot of that in the arm...if they're seriously stopping the story to get doleful about sandwiches. Alas, when Buzz does finally come face to face with Zurg, it really does serve as the final nail in the coffin with regards to this being a functional precursor to the Buzz franchise as we've known it (spoilers follow). The Toy Story films were vague on the specifics, but there was one significant nugget of Lightyear lore that was openly touted and fans had happily accepted as canon, which is that Zurg was Buzz's biological father. This was revealed in a comic interaction between the Zurg action figure and a second Buzz Lightyear figure in Toy Story 2, as a playful nod to Darth Vader's kinship with Luke Skywalker. I'm surprised that MacLane, being such an avid Star Wars fan, didn't retain it in his film. But no, that would have been too easy and straightforward a choice (a bit cliched, sure, but that was precisely the point), and judging by this film's track record, you surely must have anticipated they'd do something way more discombobulating. MacLane and co-writer Jason Headley do at least appear to have been conscious of this particular point when crafting the story (unlike the matter of the film supposedly hailing from the 1990s), finding a way to acknowledge it, if not actually adhere to it. "Dad?" Buzz asks, when Zurg removes his suit and is revealed to look a lot like himself, only older. "Guess again", says Zurg, as a much more beat-up version of Sox limps into view and to his side. Shocker - Zurg is really Buzz himself, from an alternate future timeline. Definitely not his father then. True, you could make the argument that it was toy Zurg, not the "real" Zurg, who claimed blood (plastic?) relations, and toy Zurg might not have known what he was talking about. But then Lightyear does very heavily imply, through all the deliberate parallels it draws, that toy Buzz came with an innate possession of the original's thought processes, speech patterns and tendencies, so I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for toy Zurg. His presumption that he was Buzz's father had to have come from somewhere, and that toy was fresh out of the box. How, according to this film's take, did future Buzz come to acquire the moniker Zurg? Apparently it all comes down to his robot underlings saying "Buzz" with an accent.

By now, it shouldn't surprise you that Zurg is neither a camp nor fun villain, and has instead been bitten by the same seriousness bug as everyone else. It's all a bit confusing, but Zurg is supposedly Buzz from his original timeline, in which Buzz evaded arrest by Cal by escaping centuries into the future and gained access to advanced technology. He eventually figured out how to travel backwards in time, and in doing so created some kind of timeline split with the Buzz we've been following. Zurg's goal is to go back far enough to prevent the Star Command vessel from ever landing on the planet, thus ensuring that the stranding will not happen and that everything in the aftermath will be undone. He has, however, exhausted his time travel fuel supply, and needs to obtain some from the current Buzz in order to complete his journey. This Zurg isn't in it for the evulz, he's just a sad, strange little man who's been warped by his obsession - the very lonely path that our own Buzz was destined to tread, had he not been convinced to pal up with Izzy and friends and learn about the value of social connection. Buzz's problem was that he was always too distant. He might have forged a close bond with Alisha, but he wouldn't allow himself to become a part of her new life on the colony. Even his relationship with Sox, while he obviously cared about him, was initially more functional than tender (he mistook the purring that came out of the cat for the sounds of malfunctioning when Izzy gave him an affectionate belly rub). Zurg-Buzz claims to be doing everything for the benefit of others, but lets his real motivation slip when he tells Buzz, "We're supposed to be space rangers. We're supposed to matter." What Zurg wants, even if he's not fully conscious of it, is the esteem of being the hero, and he doesn't see the irony of what he's turning into in that pursuit. Our Buzz demonstrates that he's grown in a way that Zurg-Buzz hasn't, when he contemplates that Alisha found happiness and a whole new purpose within the colony, and all that would be taken away from her if the vessel was prevented from landing. He points out that Izzy would not exist in the new timeline, but Zurg-Buzz never met Izzy, so the argument is lost on him.

This is Pixar in barefaced meaning of life mode, although the message itself is honestly nothing more radical than the kinds of morals the studio conveyed from the beginning. Was it not the implicit message of the very first Toy Story, when Woody assures Buzz that being a toy is a better deal than being a space ranger (an assertion that, with hindsight, comically undermines the value of spending time with Buzz the space ranger)? That a humble life filled with small but beautiful moments, even if they cannot last, is more fulfilling than one of fame and glory. Toy Story 2 had a variation on this same theme, when Woody rejected immortality as a museum artefact, deciding that he would sooner live life than watch it pass him by from the other side of a glass pane. Which is what Buzz was doing here, more-or-less, in that first act, when he was watching Alisha's life play out but not participating, to the point that he effectively squandered their friendship. I reject Reiss's assessment that Pixar started out as this fun studio who lost their way when they started implementing messages about what's really important in life, because it is the same damned thing they've been doing since 1995. But perhaps there is an argument to be made that the need to impress critics and adult audiences with its weighty theming has constrained Pixar, to the point where they couldn't make a picture that's first and foremost about the gleeful insanity, like The Bad Guys. In the case of Lightyear, that constraint was twofold. MacLane wanted to make a film that lived up to the Pixar model, and to sell it as a film that inspired Andy on a profound level, even though Andy was canonically six years old in 1995, and most of this would have gone over his head anyway. Wouldn't a child of his age have preferred something with more colour and kinetic energy? If ever there was a Pixar project that demanded to be light and tongue-in-cheek (with an obvious heart at the centre), this was it. There's a haunting parallel to be drawn between Lightyear itself and the corrupted Zurg-Buzz. It fervently believed that it needed to be grand and important, when it just needed to connect with people on a far simpler level.

The film gets to have its cake and eat it at the end, once Buzz defeats Zurg and returns to the liberated colony, where Cal forgives his past transgressions in light of his recent heroism, and agrees to hire Buzz as the leader of his new squad of space rangers. Buzz is given the opportunity to create a team from scratch with the colony's most elite soldiers, but chooses to retain his current team of Izzy (now astrophobia-free), Sox, Mo and Darby. Because being a space ranger is as brilliant as being a toy after all, so long as you're sharing the experience with people you love. The film concludes with Buzz blasting off with his crew toward their next adventure, and one final melancholic iteration of "To infinity and beyond!", even though this is the one place in which it would have been entirely appropriate for him to say it with the usual bombast. But stay tuned, because there are a couple of extra tidbits to come after the credits. First a comedic one in which we pick up where we left off with DERIC, who has sadly been forgotten by his friends. Then, at the very end (after Luxo Jr has made his appearance), a more dramatic stinger where Zurg, having been flung into the depths of space, is revealed to have survived, and is presumably set on menacing Buzz and co on another day.

With that, I've found a way in which Lightyear obviously recalls Lost in Space '98 (well, actually two - both films involve the protagonists interacting with alternate future versions of themselves in a way that feels a bit tepid as our third act conflict, especially when they had an entire universe filled with possibilities to play around with). They both end with hooks for sequels that were never realised. Both films had high hopes of being the next big thing, but underperformed at the box office and were stopped in their tracks, and now we'll never get to know what else they had planned (society's loss? Maybe?). I'm possibly being a tad presumptuous in concluding there'll be no Lightyear follow-up - as we know, the window for sequels with Pixar is a long one, and there's every chance that this could acquire a cult following down the line, a la Tron - but given its catastrophic failure to launch I doubt it will be a priority for Pixar any time soon. The 1990s had no shortage of these event picture blockbusters intended to kickstart franchises, that came with a blitz of marketing and merchandising, and then in a few short weeks had been all but memory-holed by the general public (Dick Tracy, The Shadow and that terrible American version of Godzilla, to name a few others), so it wouldn't be at all out of place in that regard.

Call me obstinate, but I will not accept Lightyear as the canon explanation for Buzz's origins in the Toy Story universe. The two worlds don't mesh, even in the context of one being a fictional franchise within the other. I've a sneaking suspicion that a toy Sox will show up somewhere in the upcoming Toy Story 5, which might make it harder to keep the two separate, but for now I still prefer my old assumption that Buzz came from a cartoon, be it Buzz Lightyear of Star Command or any other. I am, however, very glad that this film exists. I look on it as a failed experiment in the spin-off potential of the Toy Story franchise, with a handful of things that are legitimately good (the animation is beautiful and Sox is a charming enough character), and a lot that's endearingly ludicrous. I've got sympathy for MacLane, because I think he came to this from a position of love, but I also think he was seeing things in Buzz that weren't actually there. From there, almost every decision he made was either misconceived or incomprehensible, and the resulting picture is a glorious mess that's so wrong it's right. Lightyear is a head-spinning curio for the ages, one I will love and cherish every step of the way.

Andy thought it was the best movie ever. Allegedly. But what does a little kid who plays with cowboy dolls know about quality anyway?

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.