The Case For Sidney's Family Tree (aka Knighty Knight Bugs Is A Stupid Cartoon)

There have been many, many contentious Oscar rivalries across the decades, but few quite as endearingly offbeat as that between Looney Tunes mega star Bugs Bunny and Terrytoons newcomer Silly Sidney the elephant, who in 1959 went against each other for the Academy Award For Best Animated Short Film (or Best Short Subjects, Cartoons, as it was known at the time). Actually, when Bugs' entry, Knighty Knight Bugs, triumphed and Sidney's Family Tree was sent away empty-handed, I doubt it was considered a terribly earth-shattering outcome from anyone within the industry. After years of languishing in the shadows of Disney and MGM, Warner Bros were increasingly becoming the studio to beat for this award; Knighty Knight Bugs represented their fifth overall win, four of which had occurred within the past decade (Knighty Knight Bugs would prove to be the last of their victories, as the 1960s were a spectacularly unkind time to the Looney Tunes, and to theatrical animation in general). Terrytoons, meanwhile, seldom had their shot at Oscar glory, with Sidney's Family Tree being only their fourth nomination in the history of the award, and the taste of victory was consistently denied them. In the years that followed, it seems unlikely that many people lost sleep over the match-up, or even gave it a second thought. And then, 31 years after the fact, it suddenly gained retroactive notoriety, when it became the basis of the Tiny Toon Adventures episode, "Who Bopped Bugs Bunny?" It was 1990, and Sidney was back from the abyss of obscurity...in a manner of speaking. The elephant in question went by the name of "Sappy Stanley" and his character design was given a grotesque modification, courtesy of John Kricfalusi, so that his mouth was located inside his trunk. It was patently obvious that this was meant to be Sidney, however. He was still bitter about losing to Bugs after all these years, and apparently vindictive enough to kidnap the rabbit and steal his Oscar (or Shloscar, as it was called in-universe), setting Daffy Duck up to take the fall along the way - a startling turn of events for an elephant who, in his original series of shorts, was never depicted as having a mean bone in his body. ^[1] That's what the sting of losing to Knighty Knight Bugs had done to him!  This portrayal of Sidney (sorry, "Stanley") was voiced by Jonathan Winters, and for an entire generation of children (yours truly among them) he would have been their introduction to the character. And what a first impression! Casting him as a villain with such a vicious axe to grind might seem like a terribly mean-spirited move (this was, after all, a written-by-the-victors scenario, with Warner Bros mocking a character they'd already defeated once), but they made a singularly cool antagonist out of the neurotic elephant. Far from defiling Sidney's legacy, they gifted it with a fun and affectionate new twist.

When confronted by Babs and Buster, Stanley's justification for his crimes was that he deserved the award by right for good taste, since "Knighty Knight Bugs is a stupid cartoon". That's a standpoint to which I am honestly highly sympathetic. While I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to call Knighty Knight Bugs "stupid", I do find it astonishing to think that the ONLY Oscar of Bugs' entire rich career was for this cartoon. They couldn't have picked a more pedestrian, more middle of the road example of his work if they'd tried. There is nothing outstanding about it other than that it happens to be Bugs Bunny's sole Oscar win. That it won the award while the phenomenal What's Opera, Doc? (1957) wasn't even nominated a year prior feels like a sick cosmic joke in itself. But then nominations for Bugs shorts were surprisingly sparse in general - only two shorts, A Wild Hare (1940) and Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt (1941) had previously attained the honor. The success of Knighty Knight Bugs is a blatant example of the Academy handing out a win not on the merits of the nomination itself, but in compensation for their having overlooked a body of much stronger works to an artist's name. On that basis, I think Sidney/Stanley has every right to feel aggrieved.

Could Sidney's Family Tree actually have beaten Knighty Knight Bugs in a battle based solely on the respective merits of each cartoon? Here's where Sidney's Family Tree would still be at a hot disadvantage - there is little getting around the fact that the animation in Knighty Knight Bugs is of a considerably higher quality than that of Sidney's Family Tree. Terrytoons was, after all, renowned for doing things on the cheap. Studio founder Paul Terry infamously cared more about the quantity of his output than the quality and never had any pretensions to making serious art. Sidney himself came about as part of a new wave of Terrytoons characters created after Terry retired in the mid-1950s, leaving his studio in the hands of Gene Deitch (remembered chiefly for his infamous run of Tom & Jerry shorts in the early 1960s). Deitch's strategy had been to move away from the studio's existing store of characters (Mighty Mouse, Heckle & Jeckle, Little Roquefort & Percy) in favour of implementing new blood, and with only a fraction of the budgets of his already notoriously frugal predecessor. A former apprentice of United Productions of America, Deitch applied that studio's approach of limited animation against basic, undetailed backgrounds (techniques that would prove instrumental with animation's impending shift to being a medium of television). And lo, the look of Terrytoons got even cheaper. A second's glance at Sidney's Family Tree would clue you in that this was a considerably less prestigious production than Knighty Knight Bugs.

Likewise, it is important to acknowledge that the competition for Best Animated Short of 1958 was hardly a two-horse race, three contenders being the category's bare minimum. Sidney had not just the heavy-hitters at Warner Bros to worry about, but Disney too. The also-ran who's largely been squeezed out of this discussion is Paul Bunyan, the House of Mouse's take on the overgrown lumberjack of American folklore. But then again Disney, the undisputed kings of this award in the 1930s, had fallen quite vastly out of favour by the 1950s. Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Bloom (1953) was their only win for Best Animated Short that whole decade. At a hefty 17 minutes, Paul Bunyan was certainly the most epic short in contention that year, although that might even have worked against it. It goes on a long time and offers rather a wishy washy pay-off. I can see why Academy voters might have felt underwhelmed by it. Whatever their shortcomings, Knighty Knight Bugs and Sidney's Family Tree do have the virtue of being short.

Somehow, it's my impression that 1958 wasn't the strongest of years for short animation, and Academy voters weren't exactly left with an embarrassment of riches at the end of it. They had their choice of the mediocre Bugs Bunny cartoon, the interminable shaggy dog story from Disney, or the unassuming but frugally-animated short about the unknown neurotic elephant. "Oh jeez. Well, everyone loves Bug Bunny, and this is his first nomination in 17 years. Let's just give it to him now while we have the chance, and take a load off our consciences." It's not fair, but it's where we are.

Am I really poised to argue that Sidney's Family Tree was the worthiest of the three nominees after all? I'm sure that part of the joke, in Tiny Toon Adventures, was in Sidney/Stanley ever seeing himself as a serious contender to begin with. And yet where Sidney's Family Tree is at an advantage, at least in my eyes, is that, unlike Knighty Knight Bugs, it actually feels like it's about something. That something being neediness. The characters have a loneliness and a vulnerability that makes them endearing, even if it exists largely within the subtext. It may not be the most technically accomplished of the three entrants, but is the one to which I am the most warmly-disposed.

Sidney's Family Tree was only the second of Sidney's adventures (he'd made his debut earlier that same year with Sick, Sick Sidney).  Directed by Art Bartsch, it follows Sidney (voice of Lionel Wilson, better known to modern viewers as Eustace from the early seasons of Courage The Cowardly Dog) in his efforts to find himself an adoptive family. The whereabouts of his biological parents are accounted for in a verse recited by Sidney during the opening credits; they joined a circus and left him alone in the jungle. Initially, his plight is met with little sympathy by the other animals, who remind Sidney that he's 44 years old. Which is one of Sidney's main running gags - his crippling anxieties about having to live in the adult world whilst being a perpetual kid at heart. And really, who couldn't relate to that? The guy's cast off and alone in the world, being in his 40s doesn't preclude him from still not having a clue what he's doing, and all he yearns for is a whisker of emotional security and validation. He tries taking his case to a passing hippo and giraffe, but gets brushed aside in both cases. They've already got offspring of their own, and don't have time to be indulging a neurotic elephant on the side. (The giraffe, incidentally, is named Cleo, and she would become a recurring character in Sidney's subsequent cartoons. For now, Sidney addresses her only as "Mrs So-and-So", which probably isn't going to score him many points in the courtesy leagues. She seems to know exactly who he is, however.) 

Sidney's luck changes when he runs into an animal also looking to fill an emotional void, a female chimpanzee who's desperate for a baby of her own, but doesn't have one. She eagerly agrees to be Sidney's adoptive mother, but her mate isn't so thrilled when she breaks the news that this two-ton elephant manchild is moving in with them. It's through what's implicit in the chimpanzees' interactions that the short adds a dash of hidden substance to its subtext. The male chimpanzee is every bit as keen to start a family as she is, and when she indicates that they've made good on that aspiration, his immediate assumption is clearly that she's pregnant. This is even reinforced with a cheeky subliminal visual gag, wherein he joyously squirts an obviously phallic banana out of its skin on thinking that he's finally managed to sire offspring of his own. It's not a point that the script particularly lingers on, but it's easy enough to read in between the lines and interpret the chimps as a couple who want to procreate, but haven't had much luck with the conception process. The female chimp sees Sidney as the answer to their problems, but the male isn't so willing to accept him as a baby substitute. The interplay between Sidney and his grudging adoptive Pop is where most of the narrative focus lies, as he first attempts to cope with the arrangement and then aspires to get rid of Sidney, but it also takes the time to establish a bond between Sidney and his mother, incorporating a tender moment where she knits him a trunk cozy and bids him a good night. The connection between the two seems heartfelt enough that you genuinely feel a sense of her pain at the end, when her mate announces that Sidney is out of their lives for good.

Sidney's Family Tree is an extraordinarily gentle cartoon. Possessing neither the loftiness of Paul Bunyan nor the anarchic aggression of Knighty Knight Bugs, it coasts along considerably on basic geniality. The very darkest thing that happens is when Sidney's adoptive father attempts to ditch him by trapping him inside a cave, which he obviously doesn't get far with. Even the frugal production values, and the all-round lack of technical sophistication, come together in ways that play to the film's merits. The plain, predominantly yellow backgrounds dusted with crude floral outlines are barebones as can be, yet they radiate a warmth and vibrancy. Phil Scheib's flute and percussion score is repetitive, but adds to the soothing ambience of the piece.

Sidney remains too naive and trusting to ever cotton onto the fact that his adoptive father doesn't want him around, interpreting his hostility as tokens of affection. His priorities seem to change, however, when a female elephant happens to wander past and catch his eye, and Sidney is compelled to follow after her, seemingly forgetting about his simian kin. The male chimp is giddy with delight, attempting to sell the outcome to his heartbroken mate as a case of nature running its course, an empty nest an inevitability she signed up to when she chose to take on a baby. His relief proves to be short-lived; as it turns out, Sidney still has no intention of taking his place within the adult world, reaffirming his commitment to his protracted childhood by inducting his new mate Hortense into the fold. The elephants show up at the chimps' tree and announce that they'll be moving in with them until they find their feet (as if that's ever going to happen). Sidney believes that they make the nicest family in the jungle, and while the closing visual gag, in which the branch collapses under their combined weight, would ostensibly undermine that, what's important is that they all go down together - a chaotic and unconventional unit, but ultimately as valid as any other, connected firmly by the basic need to be needed on both sides. I'm sure the male chimp will come round eventually (or maybe not - later Sidney shorts appear to indicate that Cleo the giraffe wound up becoming his parental figure after all, along with a lion who was ironically named Stanley).

Sidney's failure to beat Bugs to the Oscar did not deter him from enjoying a prosperous enough run of shorts. His cartoons continued up until 1964, by which point he had made the transition from theatrical animation to television (such were the changing times), finishing up his career as a supporting segment on The Hector Heathcote Show. Since then, he hasn't exactly remained at the forefront of public consciousness (few, if any, Terrytoons characters honestly have in the 2020s). An elephant never forgets (nor forgives, as his thinly-veiled resurfacing on Tiny Toon Adventures would bear out), but the world forgot Sidney long ago. His 1990 grudge match against Bugs, Babs and Buster, far from being a mean-spirited dig, was a real shot in the arm of relevancy for a character who'd been otherwise consigned to stagnation. My only regret is that they restricted Sidney/Stanley to that one episode and he did not become a recurring nemesis for the Tiny Toons gang. It was not, however, his last hurrah - Sidney was a featured character on Curbside, an attempted Terrytoons revival project made by Nickelodeon in 1999, in which he was voiced by Dee Bradley Baker, although this never got further than the pilot. As to whether we'll ever see Sidney again, who knows? Paramount Pictures currently owns the rights to the Terrytoons characters, but don't appear to be doing a great deal with them.

At the very least, Sidney has an Oscar nomination to his name, and that's something that can never be taken away from him. It's also one more Oscar nomination than Daffy Duck ever received (sad, but true).

Now if Tiny Toons Looniversity would just do something as awesome as to bring back Sappy Stanley, it might even be worth my while to watch it. So far as I can tell it hasn't happened, so the revival gets a hard pass from me.

[1] Although a latent dark side was arguably hinted in the short "Meat, Drink and Be Merry". This is the one where Sidney attempts to become a carnivore, and the way it plays out is so weird and unsettling, like he's aspiring to be the neighbourhood serial killer.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #50: John Smith's Penguins (featuring Jack Dee)

For the 50th entry in this retrospective, I'm doing something very special and going in search of one of most heavily-guarded of all of my personal advertising-inflicted traumas. Lurking somewhere within the darkest depths of my psyche is a penguin-shaped cicatrix that on occasion still throbs and causes me to lose sleep to this day. It's high time we put a spotlight on one of the freakiest, unholiest, most thoroughly cursed unions in advertising history - the union between John Smith's Bitter, a waddle of beady-eyed, singing, tap-dancing penguins, and morose comedian Jack Dee, never for a second dropping the mask and giving the impression that he wanted to be there. Such was the man's charm. I should confess upfront that I am mostly unfamiliar with Dee's work outside of this campaign, but it's my understanding that the moroseness and the unenthusiasm were part of his brand. And singing, dancing penguins are ostensibly the antithesis of all that, and of John Smith's. Ostensibly.

The partnership between Dee and John Smith's originated in the early stages of the 1990s, but it took a few installments for penguins to be added to the formula. A ladybird theme was dabbled with at one point (in theory, they should have been the ideal counter to Dee, since they're such bright, colourful and cheering bugs), but it didn't stick. From the start, the basic premise of the ads, pinned to the slogan of "No Nonsense," was about putting themselves in quotation marks, professing an awareness of how hackneyed it was to have fake animals and (one assumes) equally fake celebrities endorsing your products. This was a campaign about the naffness of other campaigns, which in practice amounted to it getting to have its cake and nosily scarf it down too. Dee's sour face provided a humorous departure from the plastic grins of your typical celebrity shill, while the ladybirds he was initially and all-too-reluctantly paired with lampooned the kind of hollow visual gimmickry endemic to television advertising. In one installment, Dee was surrounded by people in ladybird costumes chirping some inane jingle. In another, Dee himself was physically transformed into one of the spotted bugs. All very much against his will in the ads' internal narrative, for Dee was a down-to-earth man who preferred to tell the people about the virtues of John Smith's straight, with no bells and whistles. Then in 1995, somebody decided that the ladybirds were too subtle and what Dee really needed to go up against was a plague of musically-inclined penguins. And with that, a full-blown televisual nightmare was born. That first diabolical penguin spot happened to catch me unawares as a child, and I could practically feel my personality warping in eight different directions just watching it. The world didn't seem like quite the same place after. Nothing seemed quite the same.

What did the penguins have that the ladybirds didn't? I think a lot of it goes back to what I said in my piece on the Bud Ice Penguin. Spheniscids give off that unique cocktail of cuddliness, clownishness and, owing to their vaguely human-shaped appearance, utter uncanniness. Viewed from just the right angle, they can seem strangely off-kilter, a quality that the "No Nonsense" leans into with a particular dry fiendishness. I maintain that my visceral reaction to the John Smith's penguin, as a child, was not the result of a callow mind overreacting to offbeat stimuli - there's something about these birds that I find innately sinister to this day. Compared to them, Feathers McGraw seems like the sweetest-faced of jokers. All by design, I'm sure. The "No Nonsense" had to walk a careful tightrope between revelling in the very lunacy it appeared to decry and establishing some distance from it. On one level, the penguins were intended to be comical; the viewer was supposed to laugh at the hilarious contrast between the singing spheniscids and the po-faced Dee. But they were also intended as a parody of the general inaneness and vapidity of advertising, a point communicated by giving them a certain grotesqueness. The over the top spectacle of the penguin chorus is meant to feel reminiscent of a fever dream; the viewer is bombarded with absurd sounds and imagery at a faster rate than they can reasonably process it. The flashiness of television advertising, the campaign warns us, is something that should engender suspicion. The penguins, however superficially amusing, embody the falseness and the hollowness of product marketing, the sourpuss tones of Dee and the taste of John Smith's representing the welcome interjections of reality undercutting it at every turning. The two forces appear to be at odds, but are actually cozy bedfellows; something that is gone for even more full-throttle with the penguins than it was with the ladybirds is the sense that we are being given leeway to enjoy the silliness while pretending to sneer at it. Above all else, the "No Nonsense" ads are concessions to the guilty pleasures of advertising, and to the base level on which our brains respond to the absurd spectacle of dancing penguins, even when knowing we should be above such things.

The initial penguin spot ended with Dee banishing the offending creatures from the bar. But of course, he couldn't keep them at bay for long. The birds proved such a hit that they returned in subsequent ads to continue their uncanny song and dance routine, with the caveat that Dee invariably got to send them packing with his abuse. (Dee typically limited his abuse to verbal put-downs, but at least one ad, which contained a nod to puppeteer Rod Hull, involved implied physical abuse. The penguins scream in that one.) Somehow, the campaign took an even stranger turn in 1996, in an ad that parodied the bombast of Hollywood blockbusters as much as the vapidity of advertising. The twist here was that the penguins were finally given the upper hand (or flipper) and had free reign for the entirety of the ad. Dee was completely oblivious to their presence, with the narrative that the penguins had been added in the aftermath using green screen technology, and without Dee's consent; he thinks that he has finally succeeded and convinced the advertising executives to ditch the gimmicks, when in actuality they have settled a devious workaround. And the results were utterly terrifying, with the penguins having adopted an apparent vindictiveness after so many turns at being berated by Dee. They have dropped their song and dance routine in favour of aggressive mockery, and scatology. Not only could the penguins now breathe fire, they could apparently also propel themselves into the air by farting fire. Perhaps in retaliation for that earlier Rod Hull gag, one over-sized penguin even stuffs Dee up its rear and then belches him out through its beak. At the end of the ad, Dee's image was even manipulated so that he appeared to be wearing a penguin suit, a playful admission that Dee and the marketing sidekicks he supposedly loathed were really birds of a feather.

The Dee campaign came to an end before the decade was out, with one of the last installments yielding what felt like the perfect punchline to the series. Dee finally got his wish - we found him alone in a room with only a pint of John Smith's and "no gimmicks, no penguins". A slight pause. And then: "Might as well go down the pub." Indeed. In the end, our fascination with kitschy advertising amounts to much the same thing as our fascination with what lurks at the bottom of a pub glass. If it's not about escapism, then what is it for?

Cadbury's Creme Egg: Float On (aka Creme, Get On Top)

Note: It was initially my intention to try working this in as another edition of "Horrifying Advertising Animals", but all the while I had the voice of David St. Hubbins from Spinal Tap bellowing in my head: "They're not animals, they're signs of the Zodiac!" Fine, it can stand on its own.

Somehow or other Cadbury's Creme Eggs managed to crank out an awful lot of UK marketing mileage from a question that I seriously doubt very many level-headed people cared to complicate: "How do you eat yours?" (or alternatively, "How do YOU do it?"). The implications of this campaign hook were both grotesque and banal. Banal, because how many variations can there even be when it comes to ingesting a piece of egg-shaped chocolate confectionery? The average consumer is either going to eat the whole thing together in bite-sized chunks like a civilised person (relatively speaking, given the product) or extract the fondant innards with their tongue or forefinger and then eat the chocolate shell; is there really a great deal else to be done with the thing? And grotesque because...do I really want to know some of the possible answers to the question I just posed? I think that forefinger option is frankly already pushing it. And is focussing on the various disgusting methodologies other people might apply to the act of eating likely to boost our own appetites? There reached a point, round about the new millennium, where the campaign started to lean quite heavily into those gross-out implications, with ads showing people dunking chips into the fondant and other mank images that I swear were only a step away from belonging in a John Waters movie (granted, IIRC the woman doing the chip-dunking was pregnant, which explains her oddball cravings, but I still can't say that I enjoyed the visual). Which, by coincidence or not, is around the time I went off creme eggs as a product. Possibly chips for a while, too.

The least repulsive campaign ever spun around the concept arose circa early 1990s, and hinged upon a cute idea - that the way you ate your creme egg, like your star sign, spoke volumes about your personality. What it was actually trading on, which meant absolutely nothing to me at the time, was 1970s nostalgia. The campaign was structured around a clever reworking of "Float On", a 1977 hit for soul group The Floaters, notable mainly for its spoken word interludes, in which each Floater gave his name, his star sign and his mating preferences in a style designed to recall the formalities of video dating. The TV ads mimicked this format in having a representative of each star sign step out before a microphone and deliver some slick statement on how they did it with their creme eggs, while the song's titular hook was modified into a jingle directly extolling the product. Having no prior reference for "Float On", my kid brain accepted it as an original tune, and to this day, whenever I hear the actual Floaters tracks my neurons are invariably wanting to work a "Cadbury's Creme Egg!" in there.

The campaign's real magic ingredient, though, was its visual wit. The characters in question were all claymation figures, courtesy of the ever-reliable Aardman and animated (I believe) by one of the studio's founding fathers, Peter Lord himself. The twist being that when they spoke about their respective pun-laden affections for creme eggs, they each morphed into the creature or item that symbolises their sign. As with Aardman production, even their advertising work, the amount of care, heart and craftsmanship that goes into the process is simply impossible to ignore. The ads had such a warmth and a vigor to them, and it's on that basis that they had me so enraptured as a small child...even when pretty much every other aspect of the premise was floating on right over my head (aside from the obvious - the pro-creme egg message). Astrology was not something I understood at the time; it was enough for me to think that the characters were turning into animals and other beings that somehow symbolised the quirky nature of their chocolate rapacity. Something else I was obviously not going to get was the very blatant sexual innuendo that permeated the campaign from top to bottom. Because yeah, that's the other thing that makes it an interesting series to revisit as an adult - it's hard to seriously entertain the notion that the characters are talking about creme eggs. Here, you get the impression that the eggs are really just the metaphor.

There exists a 90 second super-cut of the campaign combining all twelve star signs into one, but at the time I only ever saw these aired in three separate 30-second segments, with four characters apiece. Note that the ordering within the shorter versions differs from that of the full edit (and in neither case does the ordering align with that of the actual Zodiac). Here's a rundown of who appeared where, and what salacious quips they each came out with:

Ad #1: Leo/Gemini/Sagittarius/Taurus

• "Hi, I'm LEO! I eat the lion's share! Roar!" He has a rapacious appetite and he dominates.
  
• "GEMINI! And I like to slurp it!" "Bite it!" "Slurp it!" "Bite it!" I remain divided on whether these are actual twins we're seeing here or if the implication is that Gemini has something of a split personality when it comes to her mode of creme egg consumption. If the former, then they're licking/biting from the same egg, which is as gross-out as this campaign gets.
  
• "SAGITTARIUS! I could eat two or three on the trot!" Cos he's got hooves, see? Are centaurs known for their promiscuity or am I getting them mixed up with satyrs?
  
• "TAURUS! And I go at it like a bull in a sweet shop!" This is an odd one, for multiple reasons. Obviously it's a play on the expression "bull in a china shop", referring to a person who behaves gauchely in a situation that demands subtly or delicacy, with the words tweaked to make it more pertinent to the product being touted. Bovines aren't exactly renowned for being sugar addicts, but I suspect it was also intended to play as an amalgamation with another expression, "like a kid in a candy store", meaning to be overwhelmed by the array of wonderful options before you (now, that's a pun that might have worked a treat for Capricorn). That in turn makes me conscious of the fact that Taurus, like most of the swingers on parade here, has an American accent, so is he likely to say "sweet shop" instead of "candy store"? I guess what he means to convey is that he's going to throw his weight around with sheer excitement. Taurus wears a leather jacket, which is appropriate to his bull motif, although it's maybe a little morbid for him to be wearing the skin of the animal he ultimately morphs into.
  

Ad #2: Pisces/Aries/Libra/Cancer

• "PISCES! And I dive right in!" I'm a Pisces, and I find my sign's representation a bit on the mixed side. Visually it's great; I like how Pisces' sparkly sequin dress transforms into fish scales, and I absolutely dig how, as a fish, she's got both eyes on the side of her face like a flatfish (even if her overall design seems to be based more on a swordfish). But the innuendo's not the most tantalising, and I'm a little hung up on the fact that Pisces is represented specifically by TWO fish swimming in opposite directions - was there no way of working that concept in here? Or did they feel that the split personality motif would get too repetitive alongside Gemini? Incidentally, Pisces is the only female character to undergo any kind of beastly transformation (since Scorpio is a no-go in that regard - see below).
  
• "ARIES! I give it a good battering!" This ad so makes me want to be an Aries, given that sheep boy gets by far the sauciest innuendo. Fun fact: a snippet of his dialogue was also sampled in the Gorillaz track "Aries". His attire is, naturally, wool-themed - he wears a woolly sweater AND a jacket lined with wool. How is he not boiling under those stage lights?
  
• "LIBRA! I like to weigh up the alternatives! Weigh-hey!" I've seen a lot of speculation that Libra was voiced by Danny John-Jules, who is best known for playing Cat in Red Dwarf. I've yet to find any official source on the matter, but yeah, it certainly sounds like him. Libra seems like a tough sign to incorporate into this particular premise, since it's represented by an inanimate object, not a creature, but they managed to have him embody those scales in a way that feels slick and not excessively goofy. He holds an egg in each hand in a weighing motion, and his eyes turn into the dials. Gotta love the bonus pun he signs off with too.
  
• "CANCER! And I'm a shell man myself!" Nice crab nod, but unless I'm missing something, not much in the way of innuendo. And why is he wearing a hoodie and not a shell suit? If you ask me, Cancer got the most short-changed by this campaign. His sideways scuttling exit in the 90-second version looks cool, at least.
  

 

Ad #3: Aquarius/Scorpio/Virgo/Capricorn

• "AQUARIUS! And sometimes I get carried away!" Yeah, I'll say. Aquarius gets the kinkiest visual of the lot, in that she pours the contents of the egg all over her face and proceeds to lick it off. It's worth noting at this point that the creme eggs seen in this campaign are ALL disproportionately large, but Aquarius's really takes the cake. Hers is an ostrich egg edition.
  
• "SCORPIO! One nip from me and it's history!" Scorpio is, strangely, the only animal sign who doesn't morph into the critter in question. Instead, her pigtail rears up behind her in the manner of a scorpion's tail and slashes the creme egg open. She looks properly badass, but if you were hoping to see an actual scorpion then it's an anti-climax nevertheless.
  
• "VIRGO! Ah-hem. This is my first one..." For a while, Ad #3 was the only installment I was having difficulty locating on YouTube, and a large part of what was stoking my curiosity in the meantime (besides completism) was wondering how on earth they were going to represent Virgo. It's an awkward concept to have to work with in this context, more so than Libra. What they came up with was definitely clever - this girl's never had a creme egg before, and she's understandably nervous about putting something this dubious-looking into her mouth. Virgo is, unsurprisingly, the least sexualised of the bunch, with plain clothing that's supposed to convey a mix of chasteness (the collar blouse) and girlish innocence (the bow in her hair). For some reason she's also the only character to not speak with an American accent. I guess the idea was make her sound a less sultry than the others; she's out of place within the soul music ambience.
  
• "CAPRICORN! Mind if I butt in?" So Capricorn's style is that he's a thief. He steals Virgo's egg, in the only instance of two signs interacting, thus forcing her to retain her creme egg virginity. Capricorn wears a turtleneck sweater (presumably made out of mohair), has a goatee and also two weird bumps protruding from his head that I guess are supposed to be his hair? Dude comes off as somewhat of a creep (stick a pitchfork in his hand and in his human form he could pass for your archetypal cartoon devil), but he does make one heck of a charming aqua goat. In fact, if I'm applying to this fictional dating agency, then Capricorn's the one I'm coming away with, just on the basis of his winsome goat grin.
   

Bart The Genius (aka The Kid That Made Delinquency an Art)

"Bart The Genius" (7G02) is a Simpsons episode of immense personal significance for me. This is, in part, because it was one of the first Simpsons episodes I ever saw. That in itself isn't too outstanding - I was around when the series debuted; this would have been one of the first episodes seen by most people of my age. It was, after all, only the second installment in the show's protracted history, and its initial airing, on January 14th 1990, marked one of the first really earth-shattering pop cultural turnings of the decade. One 23-minute peek into Bart's academic angst and the world was never quite the same again. "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire" had already weathered the gargantuan challenge of introducing the series as its own standalone thing, proving that the characters could handle longer-form storytelling than sketch show interstitials or candy commercials, but arguably had an easier ride of it in debuting during the holiday season, when tolerance for animated drivel tends to be a lot higher. The question of whether this unassuming cartoon show could cut it as a weekly thing, and as appointment viewing for the adult crowd still hung in the balance. "Bart The Genius" had the task of getting viewers accustomed to that more regular Simpsons flavour - which included, among other things, the first usage of the show's now-iconic opening sequence (or rather, the prototypical version, where Bart steals a stop sign and Lisa makes it home first, but all of the really important beats are already nailed - the chalkboard gag, the couch gag, Marge nearly running Homer down). It could not have gone over more swimmingly. Viewers of all ages were endeared by the underachieving underdog and his penchant for anarchy, and a thousand trashy t shirt slogans were unleashed upon an unsuspecting market.

My own first viewing of "Bart The Genius" was through a VHS release, where it was paired with "The Call of The Simpsons" (remember that The Simpsons initially aired as a Sky exclusive in the UK, so those VHS tapes were the only way most of us were going to see the show). It was an experience that changed my life, both for better and for worse. From the start, I loved the world and its characters and knew that I had to delve deeper into the series' canon. But "Bart The Genius" also sticks out for being the Simpsons episode that left me with something of an indelible psychological scar. I was only six years old at the time, and there is a very specific moment in "Bart The Genius" that went some way in teaching me what a fucked up place the world intrinsically is. To this day, the episode holds a very special place in my heart. I have likewise never forgiven it.

"Bart The Genius" is of course the episode where Bart cheats in an IQ test by exchanging his paper for that of resident egghead Martin Prince. He is subsequently assessed as a misunderstood genius by educational psychologist Dr Pryor, and strings are pulled for him to be sent to a more appropriate schooling environment, the Enriched Learning Center for Gifted Children. On arrival, Bart is greeted by his new "learning coordinator", Ms Melon, who straight off the bat has some obvious features in common with his erstwhile teacher, Ms Krabappel. Both are voiced by Marcia Wallace and both have fruity pun monikers, only hers is a lot sweeter on the ears, so it's easy to form the impression that she's Krabappel's nicer counterpart from an all-round gentler universe. But oooooh, she soooooo isn't. Melon introduces Bart to a few of his classmates, including a girl by the name of Cecile Shapiro who's standing beside a couple of hamster cages. Bart, naively assuming that the hamsters are the class pets, asks for their names. Cecile gives a response that's already unpleasant enough in itself, but mostly went over my head as a small child: "Hamster number 1 has been infected with a staphylococci virus. Hamster number 2 is the control hamster." Then the ultimate bombshell. Bart is advised by Melon not to get too attached to the control hamster, since he's scheduled for dissection next week. I had no idea what that meant, so I turned to my dad and asked him to explain. He told me they were going to cut the hamster open and look at what was inside him. And just like that, a little something inside of me died then and there. Until then I'd had no idea that that was even a thing. The hamsters do escape and flee the premises at the end, and that helped to take the sting off, sure (writer Jon Vitti explicitly states on the DVD commentary that they couldn't have gotten away with the dissection remark if they didn't later show the hamsters escaping), but it was like Artax's last-minute resurrection in the coda to The Never-Ending Story. We'd already seen that horse sink into the bog. And I'd already heard Melon announce her intention to slice that hamster open. In both cases the damage was done.

Watching that scene more than three decades on, I still feel a lingering twang of young Scampy's pain. Granted, it probably hits me particularly hard because I am both a rodent lover and a hamster owner, but there is something about that line that strikes me as entirely willful in terms of how gratuitously unsettling it is. Clearly, we're not supposed to accord with the Enriched Learning Center as an institution, no matter how ostensibly attractive some of its philosophies, such as its lessened emphasis on punctuality (Bart is told by Pryor to show up at nine-ish) and its encouraging of students to shape their own learning. The kids who communicate in palindromes and backwards phonetics instantly emit warped mirror universe vibes, Melon gives the bombastic instruction that students "discover" their desks, and there's an evident mean-spirited disdain for popular culture in their implied assumption that people who read comic books are effectively illiterate. The hamster remark, though? Doesn't it just completely poison the atmosphere inside that place? I'm not sure that anything could have turned me more vehemently against the Enriched Learning Center. I didn't want to see Bart become a part of this school. Instead, I found myself hoping that Bart would bring the entire institution down by the end of the episode. As it happened, he came close enough in blowing up the science lab, covering its occupants with a revolting green slime and allowing the hamsters to run free. Mission accomplished! As far as I was concerned, this entire ordeal was all worth it, if Bart had managed to save a couple of rodents from the scalpel. Why they insisted on working in that horrible line in is, I suspect, to create greater disparity between Bart and his new environs in a way that paints Bart in a much more wholesome colour. Bart might not explicitly oppose the pending hamster dissection, but it clearly clashes with his first instinct to want to know the creatures by name and to bond with them. That those instincts should prove so out of place within the Enriched Learning Center sets up an ugly side to these young geniuses, in depicting them as being above sentiment. Give these kids a a hamster, and they don't see it as a pet to be cared for and enjoyed but as a resource to be mercilessly exploited. In the end their keenness and their thirst for knowledge comes off as basically cold.

The one saving grace about this school, however? The lunch boxes. One kid, an obvious chess enthusiast, has an Anatoly Karpov lunchbox. Another has one themed around Brideshead Revisited. I love how, right from the start, the series had an eye for such intelligent and miniscule details, and the tremendous amount of character they inject into the furthest corners of each scene. We're not given much of a chance to get to know any of Bart's new classmates as individuals (see below), but low-key details such as this give us a world of insight into who they each are.

It's fair to say that "Bart The Genius" is a less plot-driven installment than "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire". The premise of Bart being mistaken for a prodigy and whisked away to an educational setting for the precocious is a strong one, but one that actually isn't developed all that far, at least in terms of what happens within the school itself. In one scene, it looks as though the other students might be cottoning on to Bart's fish-out-of-water-ness, but nothing too significant comes of it - they dismiss him as "rather a mediocre genius", as opposed to a total fraud, and apparently decide to shun him (we hear that nobody will volunteer to be his lab partner). And despite incorporating a moment where Bart manages to blow up a chemistry lab, the school arc reaches a surprisingly quiet and civilised resolution, wherein Bart simply tires of the deception and openly confesses. I suspect that if this same premise had shown up any later down the line (even in Seasons 2 or 3), he might have been put through more of a dramatic noose-tightening before the beans were inevitably spilled. None of these observations are intended as a criticisms of "Bart The Genius"; the developments within the school are kept reined in by choice, because they clearly aren't where the emotional heft of the episode is intended to lie. The script has plenty of sharp observations to make about the education system and Bart's endless frustrations therewith, but this is fundamentally a story about how Bart relates to the rest of his family, particularly Homer. Its greatest interests lie in taking valuable time to explore the main cast, the way each Simpson reacts to Bart's newly-declared genius offering a telling snapshot of where their own characterisation would soon be headed. Small scenes centred on the family dynamics, such as the opening one with the Simpsons playing Scrabble (a tribute to Canadian apocalyptic comedy The Big Snit), might feel like remnants of the series' origins as a collection of shorter-form sketches, but they do so much to cement who they are and how it's going to matter for the succeeding twenty minutes. Homer is an ill-educated grouch, Marge is the family mediator, Lisa is precocious and, most importantly, Bart is an audacious rebel with real creativity when it comes to undermining the rules. Bart might not be a genius, but there is an appealing inventiveness in how he plays his made-up word "Kwyjibo". As would be explored in greater depth in the Season 2 opener "Bart Gets an F", the kid's got real talent. Sadly, it's just not the kind of talent that can be channelled into any kind of academic success.

Here are my two favourite takeaways from the Scrabble game:

1. The "Oxidize" joke is brilliant (a variation on the "CARROST" gag from The Big Snit) but even if Homer had recognised the word, he wouldn't actually have been able to play it. If you study the tiles on the Scrabble board, you'll see that he had no way of inserting it into what was already on there.
2. Having said that, there's also no way that Homer should have been able to play "Do" either. The layout of the Scrabble board changes between shots. An F disappears. The word "My" appears. Ah well, this must be a magic Scrabble board.
   

 

That Lisa remains the least vocal on the episode's pivotal development (after Maggie) might strike one as its most jarring facet from a modern perspective. It's hard to imagine a latter day version of this scenario where Bart is sent to a genius school and Lisa doesn't resent the shit out him. But you know, still waters run deep, and in Lisa's deceptively minimal role she gets to speak volumes. The middle Simpsons child remained something of a dark horse going into the series proper, and you can see how they were using that as a springboard for her hidden depths. Vitti's script is already laying the groundwork for Lisa being the unsung genius of her family (and to a lesser extent Maggie, who, in a wonderful sight gag, spells EMCSQU with her alphabet blocks at the start of the episode). It just doesn't place it front and centre, layering it amid the various episode subtleties for viewers to pick up on themselves. It's Lisa who plays the most advanced word during the family's otherwise vapid game of Scrabble (the girl did love her psychological parlance back in the day). She also knows that "nurturing" is the word Marge wants when she talks about encouraging Bart to grow (Marge compliments her "brainy brain", but immediately goes back to Bart). Most revealing of all, Lisa is the one character who isn't duped by Bart's test scores (Skinner too has his reservations, but brushes them aside when he learns that he can offload Bart onto another school). She knows her brother too well not to know that something is up. Bart, just as revealingly, doesn't put up any pretence in front of Lisa. When she taunts him at the breakfast table with her insistence that, "I don't care what that stupid test says, Bart, you're a dimwit", he does not refute her observation, instead retorting, "Maybe so, but from now on this dimwit is on easy street." Lisa makes no active effort to expose part as a fraud, in part because she's blatantly savvy enough to know that it isn't needed. She operates on an unspoken trust that the truth will eventually out itself, as indicated by her totally unfazed response to seeing Homer blow his top with Bart at the end: "I think Bart's stupid again." Where the episode is locked into a more prototypical version of her character is in her relationship with Bart feeling a little too fundamentally antagonistic. Her battle cry of "Yeah, Bart!" whenever Marge or Homer put him in his place was briefly carried over as her catchphrase from the Tracy Ullman days. Compare it to "Bart Gets an F", where Lisa's purpose was still to explicitly remind Bart of his failings, but from the perspective of wanting to steer him in the right direction. And yet Lisa isn't entirely at odds with Bart throughout the episode. When the family attend their first opera and Bart and Homer are inclined to riff their way through the utterly alien experience, Lisa ultimately succumbs to the same temptation and giggles along with them. On this occasion she can't help but see the funny side to Bart's subversive desire to rewrite the rules of the game.

The character who I do think comes off as really undefined at this point is Marge. She's a little all over the place in this episode. The most significant character development she gets is in interpreting Bart's alleged genius as a cue to start introducing the family as a whole to more highbrow cultural fare like opera and Scandinavian arthouse. During the Carmen sequence, she gets to be the solitary sensible Simpson with an ideal of how she'd like the family to be, and is inevitably mortified when they fail to conform to it. Homer would be cast in the exact same role in "There's No Disgrace Like Home", suggesting that the writers were still fairly open at this stage with regard to the family's internal dynamics, but this is an important first step for Marge, in establishing that she privately hungers for something outside of her bland domestic sphere. Elsewhere, I kind of get the impression that Vitti wrote her to be as much of an airhead as Homer, just from a sweeter-tempered angle. Take Marge's response on being summoned to Skinner's office on account of Bart's vandalism: "He's a good boy now and he's getting better, and sometimes even the best sheep stray from the flock and need to be hugged extra hard." It's a much nicer and more sensitive response than Homer's go-to angry outbursts, but as a solution feels every bit as vacuous. Marge, like every other adult in this episode, is applying her own preconceived narrative to Bart's behaviour and is failing as much as anyone to get to the root of why he's acting out the way he does. It's this tendency toward preconceived narratives that keep the adult characters from realising the truth staring them square in the face the whole time - that Bart is not a kid genius, just a kid with a particular adroitness for subversion and bluffing.

"Bart The Genius", much like "Bart Gets an F", deals with the cruelties of the school system and its eagerness to pigeonhole students into categories that stifle personal development more than encourage it. We get some insights into the horrors of being pegged as an underachiever in the first act. Edna Krapabbel, making her debut appearance, has already written Bart off as incorrigible and is astoundingly upfront in her acidity ("There are students in this class with a chance to do well. Will you kindly stop bothering them?"). We can see just how callous and unsupportive her remarks are, following a visually inspired nightmare sequence in which Bart makes a sincere attempt at working out a math problem before the process overwhelms him. And then when Pryor pigeonholes him into another category, that of the misunderstood genius, Bart soon grows just as weary with having to live with that designation. It drives a wedge between himself and his peers, leaving him friendless and alone; the prodigies won't accept him, and his old friends Milhouse, Richard and Lewis no longer want anything to do with him (for reasons that the script doesn't make overtly clear, but they're presumably angry at Bart for how he upped and abandoned them). The adults, meanwhile, prove frustratingly obtuse in picking up on Bart's fraudulence, something that should make it easier for Bart but in practice gives him nowhere to go; much like Edna K, they've already made up their minds about Bart, and their responses are every bit as unhelpful in weighing up his educational needs. When Bart can't make a simple experiment work, Pryor's immediate assumption is that the Enriched Learning Center isn't challenging this brightest of sparks enough. Eventually, Bart learns to play into Pryor's preconceived narrative, when he advocates his reinstatement to Springfield Elementary, on the understanding that he'll be conducting some kind of covert scientific enquiry into the psychology of the average child (like Jane Goodall and the chimps, as Pryor so condescendingly puts it). But he's only willing to play along so far. In the end, Bart decides that maintaining the ruse is more trouble than it's worth and just confesses, stating what should always have been patently obvious to Pryor, Melon and co. Still, for as woefully as Pryor misconstrued the situation as a whole, there is one matter on which he probably was always entirely correct, and that's that Bart's rap sheet of unruly behaviour represents his lashing out at a system that doesn't value him. For this much, Pryor has no solution, nor any enthusiasm for understanding Bart's discontent, and this is the bleakest thing about the episode's resolution. Bart must return to a normality in which he was already flat-out told that he had no future social status or financial success. When the narrative can't be spun into something as joyously positive as your disobedience being a symptom of latent genius, you're very much on your own. Bart's trajectory ends up upholding the one nugget of paradoxical wisdom he was able to bestow on his classmates at the Enriched Learning Center - you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

Somewhere at the back of Bart's sorry tale is the tale of a real young genius who's also ignored, at least by the narrative progression. "Bart The Genius" introduces us to Martin Prince, who good as disappears after the first act, but dominates every scene he's in (Russi Taylor was a legendary voice actress and is very much missed). He's another character who doesn't seem to be fully nailed down at this stage - obviously, he's the anti-Bart, but the script seems to vary on just how knowing he is in his anti-Bartness. He can't help being an insufferable goody two-shoes, compelled not only to report Bart's act of vandalism directly to Skinner but to comment on the carelessness of his vandalism in not using the preferred spelling of "Wiener" with the i before the e (though conceding that "Weiner" is an acceptable ethnic variant). To begin with, Martin doesn't come off as being motivated by spite; he simply can't bare to see such flagrant disrespect for the school grounds, and makes a sincere, if socially inept attempt to get Bart to see it that way. The next thing you know, he's reminding Krabappel that Bart is supposed to face the window during exams, lest he be tempted to copy his neighbour's paper, and there's such unmistakable joy in Taylor's delivery that you just know the little snot is doing it on purpose. Then later on, he's making rude faces at Bart from beneath the tree. Given that Martin is basically the victim of the story, I would guess the intention was to make him a little unsympathetic. But that's a loose end the script leaves hanging - we don't find out what the consequences were for Martin when he gets saddled with Bart's miserable score, and it's something that's always nagging at the corner of my mind whenever I watch the episode. His narrative is allowed to fade into the backdrop, a brief reappearance with his parents among the spectators of Carmen being the nearest thing he gets to closure. It's not clear if Martin was even vindicated in the end; Bart admits to cheating but doesn't explain how he accomplished this. Here, Martin doesn't get to be a whole lot more than a plot device and a further reflection of Springfield Elementary's endless hostility toward Bart. But what an enduring first impression.

There are probably a heap of different directions in which the scenario might have been further developed, but it would have overcomplicated what's ultimately a straightforward study of the love-hate relationship between Homer and Bart. Bart might be dejected and lonely as a perceived genius, but the one bright spot of the experience is that he and Homer suddenly find it a whole lot easier to relate to one another. Homer's ill-gotten pride at the prospect of having sired this pint-sized brainiac might be based on a lie, but what it effectively gives him is leeway for connecting with Bart on the basis of the talents he genuinely has, now that he's no longer an embarrassment who gets him summoned to Skinner's office on a weekly basis. We see ample evidence that Homer actually enjoys and identifies with Bart's penchant for mischief, so long as he isn't the butt of the joke (as was the case with the "Kwyjibo" incident). He might be incensed by Bart's vandalism (particularly when Skinner indicates that the Simpsons are financially liable for the damage), but he also accords with the observation, in Bart's graffiti, that Skinner is a "weiner". And Homer and Bart are on an equal wavelength in their inability to see the production of Carmen as anything other than a snooty ritual to be taken down. There's also a genuinely tender sequence where they play baseball after dark, having ducked out of an evening at the film festival, and the two engage in some very natural father-son banter. I guess it doesn't surprise me that Rabin would go after this sequence in his AV Club review, calling it "sweet if overly sentimental and incongruously sappy", but I'm inclined to defend it. From a story perspective, it establishes what's really at stake for Bart, since he was on the verge of coming clean with Homer before their bonding exercise caused him to reconsider; even with genius school having lost his lustre, he sincerely regrets the idea of disturbing his newfound connection with his father. I also think that a little emotional vulnerability was entirely warranted in order to give the story's very gleefully unsentimental resolution its sting. We've already witnessed how Homer and Bart are fully capable of seeing eye to eye, and having the ideal father-son bond, should the circumstances allow it. But in the end that all gets thrown out the window, as their respective worst traits each get the better of them. When Bart finally confesses the truth to Homer, he points out that the two of them have grown closer as a result of the lie, and on that basis it shouldn't be seen as a bad thing, but Homer doesn't fall for it. As he shouldn't. It's amazing just how quickly Bart's confession slips from a place of brutal honesty to barefaced manipulation.

We conclude, then, with the disturbing sight of a raving Homer chasing a butt-naked, literally off-colour Bart through the house. Bart's final victory comes in being smart enough to one-up his father, who changes tactics and plays his own emotional card when his quarry conceals himself in his bedroom, promising that if Bart comes out, he will comfort him and make him feel better. Bart points out that he isn't dumb enough to fall for that, and Homer collapses into a violent rage once again. The episode bows out with the two of them still at their ridiculous impasse; Homer slamming his body repeatedly against the bedroom door, and Bart committed to the dubious endeavour of having to stay in there forever. Equilibrium restored!

As a final note, a feature carried over from the Tracy Ullman shorts that would soon be discarded was the practice of inserting prominent framed pictures into the backdrop of each scene. Unlike in the Ullman shorts these pictures no longer appeared to possess a life and animation of their own, but they were still rather odd and dislocating in their way. Check out that Droste effect going on in the one in the Simpsons' kitchen. Doesn't it just speak to the infinitely monotonous entrapment in which the characters find themselves?

Reebok: Escape The Sofa (A Darker Chairy Tale)

At the dawn of the millennium, rival sportswear brands Nike and Reebok tapped into a compelling marketing hook, one that emphasised the value of physical fitness in a manner far exceeding the usual perks of looking cool and having a competitive edge. Regular work-outs, we were reminded, are a matter of meeting a primal survival need, the ability to run and stay ahead of anything on our trail being one of the most basic and effective anti-predator tactics at our disposal. Nobody today would seriously entertain the possibility of having to outrun a sabre-tooth cat on their way to the office, but there is still a plethora of horror to be projected onto the modern world if we care to see it. It was a train of thought that allowed for some creative and tongue-in-cheek campaigning, humorously extolling the benefits of exercise by playing around with the conventions of horror cinema. Nike had a particularly infamous and controversial spot designed to accompany the 2000 Sydney Olympics, in which a gym rat is pursued by a Jason Voorhees type, who quickly throws in the chainsaw when he realises he has no prospect of keeping up with her. (Their "Run. Because of What's Out There" print ad was of a similar vein, but I am unable to put a precise year to it). Reebok tried something all the more knowingly ludicrous in 2001 with "Escape The Sofa", a miniature horror about an aspiring sportsman looking to avoid being devoured by a tatty old couch. If you're thinking that a sofa is too prosaic an item to make for functional nightmare food, then you really should see this one in action. The ad was devised by Lowe Lintas & Partners and directed by Frank Budgen, who previously helmed the "Bet on Black" spot for Guinness. The prospective sofa chow is played by Ashley Artus, whom you might recognise as one of the Death Eaters from Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.

What most amuses me about Budgen's ad is how the set-up calls to mind Claude Jutra and Norman McLaren's classic 1957 short A Chairy Tale. That too was about the conflict between a man and an item of animate furniture - a man who wanted to sit and a chair that emphatically did not want to be sat upon. Here the struggle is flipped on its head, so that the sofa becomes the dominant force in the equation, with Artus having to pry himself away in order to assert his status as a man and not the sedentary object it desires him to be. It offers a clever inversion on what we might suppose to be the actual problem going on beneath the metaphor, in which the sofa presents too safe and comfortable a haven for the occupant to have much of a mind to get his keister off of it. The sofa is instead envisioned as a maniacal entity, one intent on smothering the energy and resistance out of whomever might sit on it. It might lack facial features, yet it is strangely convincing as a beast on the rampage. The spot's most unsettling image arises from a brief interlude between the grappling, when both parties find themselves locked in a momentary stand-off and we're left facing the sofa head-on. Here, the sofa doesn't do anything other than pant heavily (how? I'm pretty sure it doesn't have lungs!), a loosened cushion hanging from its base like a tongue protruding from its non-existent mouth, a sight so eerily unnatural that it might bring out a few honest-to-god goosebumps. At the time, I was also genuinely spooked by the sofa's evident ninja prowess, during that specific moment when Artus retrieves his branded sports bag from the kitchen and attempts to make a break for the door, only for the sofa to have somehow gotten there before him. 

For all the ad's potential to inspire epiplaphobic reactions in susceptible viewers, it never loses sight of the fact that it is a story of a man who takes a physical walloping from a predatory sofa. It keeps the tone light, with one foot always in the absurdness of the matter and the other in the uncanniness. The sofa fights by stripping Artus's jeans from his body and exposing his underpants, a tactic as brutal as it is comical. The sofa is, after all, degrading Artus, shooting down his aspirations of entering the outside world and honing his athletic mettle. In that regard, he is effectively fighting himself. The sofa is the only object in Artus's apartment that appears to be alive (excepting the house plants), yet it plays as a monstrous reflection of his broader implied lifestyle. Our first glimpse of Artus in his natural habitat shows him sprawled out in an inelegant slouching position; the unvacuumed floor and haphazard piles of magazines suggest that he is accustomed to leading quite a slovenly existence. At this point, he is harmony with the sofa; it is the desire to get up and become physically active that suddenly pits him against this manifestation of his own slobbishness, one that threatens to swallow him whole. Meanwhile, the dark, somewhat chintzy leaf-patterned wallpaper in the backdrop is a subliminal clue that this seemingly calm domestic space is actually a wilderness, one in which Artus will shortly discover that he is not the apex predator. There is another implicit irony to the arrangement; we will be watching the battle play out from the "comfort" of our own sofas, our attachment to which, the ad suggests, may be consuming us through less dramatic means.

Still, it's a well-known fact that the saddest moment in any monster movie is when the monster dies. Here, the sofa isn't actually destroyed, but it is thoroughly vanquished when the pursuit takes it out of Artus's apartment and down a flight of stairs. The sofa becomes caught in the doorway and, while it continues to struggle, is left largely immobilised. Artus takes the opportunity to slip out from under it, refasten his jeans and exit the building, headed for the gym with his Reebok bag and his dignity salvaged. I am left reflecting at this point as to I really wanted Artus to succeed in the end, or if my sympathies were really with the sofa all along. I'm gripped with an irrefutable twang of regret in seeing this formidable beasts reduced to such a state of helplessness and vulnerability. I wonder if perhaps its intentions were really misunderstood, if it was motivated less by the desire to engulf Artus than by simple separation anxiety. Maybe it feels an attachment to Artus, likes the feeling of his body pressed against its fabric, and is fearful that his implementing a fitness regime will spell the end of their partnership. But it does also get me thinking about the nature of their relationship beyond this single incident. Artus is, presumably, not escaping the sofa for good. He is going to have to come back to his apartment later that same evening, and the sofa will still be there. This possessed item of furniture chomping at his thighs on a nightly basis is something that he's going to have to live with. In which case, is this how we should expect things to play out on every occasion where he fancies a visit to the gym? Are we to assume that the more in shape Artus gets, the more mastery he'll have over the sofa? Or will they eventually reach a peaceful compromise, as the two participants of A Chairy Tale did, one where they each aspire to see things from the other's perspective by allowing the sofa to momentarily lie on Artus? It's a thought that warms the cockles of my heart.

Kronk's Bite of Banality (Disney's Most Inexplicable Sequel?)

It might not be fashionable to admit this, but there was a part of me that, for years, was privately hoping for Moana 2. When Zootopia 2 was first announced, along with Frozen 3 and 4, while the rest of the net was fuming about the woeful lack of originality on Disney's horizon, I was largely just annoyed that we Moana fans appeared to have been overlooked. There'd been a few ominous rumblings about a live action remake, but I'm not sure how many Disney fans, even the ones who watch live action remakes, were sincerely clamoring to see the film redone a measly seven years after the original's debut (stupidest idea ever). So long as we had any possibility of a good sequel, one that expanded on the original's world in a thoughtful and meaningful way and allowed us to spend a little more time with that wonderful cast of characters (including Tamatoa - obviously - but ONLY if Jemaine Clement would return to do the voice) I couldn't say I was totally adverse to the idea. So when Moana 2 was announced a couple of months back, I was genuinely buzzing with excitement. For about a micro-second. Before I read the fine print and realised that this was really just the upcoming Disney+ series edited and repackaged as a theatrical release. A Disney+ series that, by all indications, wasn't even planning to use the original voice actors. And then my heart just sank like a stone. Look, I will ultimately suspend my full judgement until I've actually seen the thing, but I don't think that's a good starting point for any canonical sequel, let alone one to an original as strong and beloved as Moana. (As for Tamatoa, I'm calling it now - he'll appear to some capacity, but it will be a non-speaking cameo that purposely forgoes the need to re-enlist Clement.)

Part of the reason why the basis for Moana 2 fills me with such trepidation is because I feel that we've been here before. Cast your mind back to 1994, when Disney released The Return of Jafar, a direct to video sequel to its 1992 smash hit Aladdin. It too had started life as a television project, specifically the pilot to the upcoming Saturday morning spin-off (Saturday morning spin-offs of hit movies being a staple of the age, and not just for Disney), until somebody had the bright idea to upgrade it and market it as the company's formal follow-up feature (sources vary on whose bright idea, and on whether producer Tad Stones championed this upgrade or opposed it). By its nature, it was not designed to stand toe-to-toe with the original, and it couldn't. The quality of its animation and music were just too significant a downgrade (on a more positive note, it was able to get a lot of the voice cast back, just not the one specific voice who'd been the original's big draw). And yet, it sold very, very well on video (I bought a copy, so I can't exactly complain), ushering in one of the most abominable, nothing-is-sacred eras in the company's history - the era of what has been unaffectionately termed the Disney "cheaquel".

I'll concede that The Return of Jafar is one of the more distinguished of the cheapquel gallery, in that its main raison d'etre, as a story, was to account for why Iago, the secondary antagonist of the original picture, should be part of Aladdin's crew in the series (which, as a quirk of this being marketed as a standalone project, launched months ahead of its upgraded pilot, creating a continuity snafu). It had ideas that were a little more ambitious and forward-thinking than the specimens it inspired, and who doesn't love a nice redemption arc? It's just unfortunate that, in exalting that smart-mouthed macaw, it ends up doing its titular character so incredibly dirty. Jafar is still voiced by Jonathan Freeman, so that much works in his favour. He also gets at least one genuinely great line (his response to Abis Mal questioning if genies can kill - "You'd be surprised what you can live through!" - is absolute gold). The trouble is he dies at the end. And that's kind of a drag, no? Jafar did incredibly well to survive the original Aladdin, given that most Disney foes of his era were sent hurtling to their doom, so for him to have that taken away from him by a film this cheaply constructed is, let's face it, a bit of an insult to such a great villain. The real deal-breaker, though, is that Jafar looks to be in a heck of a lot of pain when he dies. At least with most other Disney villains - Gaston, McLeach and even Sykes from Oliver & Company - it would have been over for them very quickly. Jafar really suffered on the way to death, and I gotta resent that.

The reason I'm digging up this particularly soiled patch of Disney history isn't merely because I see it as a worrying precedent for where Moana 2 might be headed, but because I find it helps to keeps things in perspective in terms of Disney's current situation. We all know that Wish is a current favourite chew toy of the internet (make no mistake, it wasn't great), and what a disastrous year 2023 was for Disney on the box office front, at a time when they were almost embarrassingly intent on getting the world to celebrate their centennial. But having lived through the cheapquel era, and some of the other hopelessly bad decisions the company made during the dawn of the 21st Century (the Circle 7 debacle, and Eisner's willingness to cut ties with Pixar springs to mind), I'm not inclined to freak out. These things come in cycles. There was a time, in the mid-00s, when I honestly didn't see a way back for Disney. The rise of 3D animation, and the shifting dynamics of the Hollywood animation industry, had knocked them too high and too violently from their pedestal. I believed the company would live on, but in a diminished form, with direct-to-video knock-offs of past glories as their bread and butter, while Pixar and DreamWorks only swelled into more formidable giants still. It didn't happen, but for a moment there it all seemed frighteningly plausible. If Disney can recover from an ebb as low and as brand-degrading as their cheaquel proliferation - the age of "yes, this is good enough to be marketed as an official sequel to a timeless classic that's stood on its own for generations" - they can recover from Wish, no problem. Heck, if they can recover from Chicken Little, they can recover from Wish, so stop your hand-wringing.

The question is, are we at a point now where we might even be able look back at the cheaquel invasion and laugh about the whole thing? I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but I'll admit that glancing over their last few years' worth of output and noting just how conceptually out of hand the practice was getting brings me just a little in the way of perverse amusement. Basically, everything from 2004 onward. There are some predictable titles in there (Mulan II, Tarzan II), some more questionable entries (Brother Bear 2, an alternate reality Lilo & Stitch follow-up that doesn't mesh with the continuity of the transparent Pokémon rip-off they did two years prior), some very sick jokes (Bambi II), some seriously weird shit (The Lion King 1½, Cinderella III: A Twist In Time), and some borderline inexplicable shit - namely, The Fox and The Hound 2 and the subject of today's entry, Kronk's New Groove. With The Fox and The Hound 2, I guess it will forever amuse me that Disney got round to sequelising a title from their mostly shunned 80s era but left Hercules on the shelf (it's odd that Hercules was the ONLY Renaissance picture not to be exploited in this way, other than The Rescuers Down Under, which was already a sequel, just not a cheapquel). And 2005's offering Kronk's New Groove, which is...well, what even is Kronk's New Groove? It's a puzzle. I have never quite made sense of it.

If nothing else, I think Kronk's New Groove is one of the more harmless DTV sequels. Understand that "harmless" is not a characteristic I would attribute to a great very many of them. I think a number of them are very actively harmful to the movies whose characters and legacies they flagrantly mishandle. The paradox with most Disney cheapquels is that they enter in with the pretence - nay, the delusion - of being wholly reverent to the original, when by their very nature they cannot help but be anything other than grotesquely irreverent. It's like trying to shoot a respectful follow-up to Citizen Kane called Citizen Kane II: The Rosebuddening on your iPhone in your back yard. It can't be done. The Lion King 1½ (2004) marked something of a turning point in that regard - a cheapquel with a smidgeon of self-awareness that its existence amounted to a tampering with the original's legacy, not a meaningful expansion on it, and for once seemed to wear that irreverence freely on its sleeve. It's as if somebody at Disneytoon Studios said, "If we have to keep making this direct-to-video junk, couldn't we at least try having some fun with it? You know, just as an experiment?" I don't look on The Lion King 1½ as a resoundingly successful experiment, but it pissed me off less than Simba's Pride and I'll give it marks for effort. Kronk's New Groove, likewise, is a lot more flippant about its existence than most other cheapquels. It has no pretensions to being a serious follow-up, although that has much to do with the fact that its predecessor had no pretensions to being a serious picture, period, and it needed to follow suit. Switching the focus to Kronk (Patrick Warburton), the villainous henchman from the original, was on paper a solid enough step in attempting to succeed something as gleefully rebellious as The Emperor's New Groove. It meant forgoing the obvious route suggested by the rules of the cheapquel formula - which is to say, a plot about a mature Kuzco parenting a disobedient child who desperately wants to be a llama. You just know that someone pitched that exact outline, however.

Instead, Kronk's New Groove follows Kronk's endeavours, post-Yzma, to land a wife and become a homeowner. If those strike you as awfully prosaic plot goals following a first installment where the lead character gets turned into a talking llama after a failed assassination attempt, you would be dead on. Kronk's New Groove plays less like The Kronk Movie then The Alternate Reality Kronk Sitcom - the narratives in which it places Kronk play conspicuously like the kinds of trite situation in which the protagonist of a nondescript sitcom is likely to find himself. I say "narratives", because there are actually three of them playing out in succession. Kronk's New Groove belongs to a particularly cynical subcategory of cheapquel known as the anthology cheapquel, in which a triad of individual 20-minute stories were strung together to create a single feature. Whenever you got one of those, it was usually a safe bet that you were looking at the upcycled remains of an abandoned television series. Atlantis: Milo's Return (2003) was one such Frankenstein creation, comprising three episodes of a TV spin-off that was canned when its predecessor nosedived at the box office. Before that, there was Belle's Magical World (1998), an unsightly glimpse into a Beauty & The Beast cartoon show that never made the grade. Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (2002) was hotly rumored to have been salvaged from yet another discarded television project, but I don't know if this was ever confirmed. (If so, then little mystery as to why it was discarded. Holy shit, was that thing dull. The most interesting thing that apparently happened after Cinderella married the prince was Jaq becoming human so that he could bone Cinderella - while she was still married to said prince, no less. Come to think of it, a scenario that steamy has no business playing out as tediously as it does.) So it follows that we would approach Kronk's New Grove with a similar level of suspicion. Was this also an abandoned TV project? Are we indeed watching a spin-off Kronk sitcom that might actually have been in another universe?

I have to admit I'd find that hard to fathom. I'm not sure how far into development a prospective Kronk sitcom could get before conventional wisdom kicks in that Kronk is, simply put, not a strong enough character to front his own series. Comic sidekicks in general don't tend to thrive in the limelight, which is why they were made the sidekicks to begin with. True, Timon and Pumbaa might be considered an exception - they had their own TV show long before they landed their own cheapquel - but they were also  a duo with an established Ren & Stimpy dynamic. They had one another to play off. Kronk was hilarious in The Emperor's New Groove, but he was hilarious primarily as a foil to Yzma - his slow wit and artless pride in his home cooking provided the perfect contrast to her extravagant fury. Remove Yzma from the equation (or at least, greatly diminish her presence) and Kronk as a whole suddenly becomes a lot less fun. As it happens, there's barely enough to be mined for a one-off feature; his stand-alone quirks run out of steam distressingly soon into this film's 72-minute running time. But if Kronk's New Groove isn't an upcycled television project, then it begs the question as to why on earth it should play like one. My take would be that there had already been enough anthology cheapquels by now for the format to have become a formula unto itself. And while it would probably be giving Kronk's New Groove a mite too much credit to suggest that it was consciously conceived as a send-up of a lost TV spin-off, there are at least sparse moments where the film seems attuned to its sitcom-esque triteness and positively revels in it. Bare in mind that the entire thing is building up to that very hoariest of sitcom scenarios - the predicament where one character has to pose as another's spouse in order to ward off some intruding relative. Anyone with a television set will have seen over a dozen variations on this particular storyline. Even a sitcom as intelligent and ground-breaking as The Simpsons couldn't get further than its ninth season without resorting to it. This is the enigma of Kronk - the way it hangs between a state of half-parody and half not being hip enough to get the meaning of its own jokes.

The intruding relative in question is Kronk's father, Papi (John Mahoney, who was also Frasier's dad and by extension Sideshow Bob's). He sends an urgent llama-gram (llamas, for their significance to the original tale, are worked in only arbitrarily here) to announce that he'll be paying a visit to see the new life his son has procured for himself - a life that, so Kronk's prior communication has led him to believe, includes a wife and a grand abode. Kronk was in fact jumping the gun when he told his dad he had either of those things, and spends the next two acts recounting to Matta (Patti Deutsch), the waitress from the first movie, how he came to acquire a house and then lose it, and how he met the love of his life only to royally alienate her. So far, so very like watching a clip show to a garden-variety series that never existed. What's truly devastating to Kronk is the thought of missing out on his opportunity to finally secure Papi's approval - growing up, Kronk was never able to impress him with any of his talents (his baking and his squirrel whispering) and has since craved the infinite validation of receiving a thumbs-up gesture from his dad. So when Papi shows up, Kronk resolves to bluff his way through the situation, as sitcom characters do, by convincing local villager Pacha (John Goodman) to dress in drag and act like they're married.

As strange as it might sound, Kronk's New Groove is the DTV entry that merits the most direct comparisons to the Echidna of all cheapquels, Return of Jafar. Tonally, the two would seem utterly non-comparable (Jafar took itself seriously as an adventure story, while Kronk does not take itself seriously on any level), but the premise is remarkably similar. The villainous sidekick of the original, having parted ways with the primary bad, is plopped in the protagonist chair (Kronk is simply more upfront about this move than Jafar), and tasked with reaffirming their commitment to the path of innocuousness when their ex-boss sneaks back into their lives and tries to lure them with another nefarious scheme. The main difference being that, with Kronk, that's only one third of the conflict. Some might argue that Kronk, unlike Iago, was never truly evil to begin with, but let's not split hairs - the man might be a lovable goofball, but he is an attempted murderer. He knowingly put poison (or what he assumed to be poison) into Kuzco's drink. And his "redemption" in the original film was, by design, entirely shallow. He had the occasional quibble about the morality of what he was doing (hence the interjections from the shoulder angel/shoulder demon), but his final reason for turning against Yzma was because she bad-mouthed his spinach puffs. From there, everything he did to help the heroes was basically by accident. With that in mind, I can't help but feel that the opening to Kronk's New Groove slightly misrepresents the events of the original. The first musical number, "True To Your Groove", tells us that Kronk lost his groove "when he fell in with a woman who wanted to take over the world" (Did she, though? I don't remember Yzma saying anything about global conquest in the original, she just wanted to usurp Kuzco as emperor). Kronk also claims, in the prologue, that he "helped save the emperor", and technically that's true, but definitely overstates his role in the predecessor's resolution. Kronk's New Groove opens with the premise of Kronk now being a universally beloved and accepted pillar of his community, and while I'm all for magnanimity, there is something about this set-up that's kind of disingenuous. At least Iago's crimes weren't totally disregarded, and not 100% pinned on Jafar.

Then suddenly Yzma returns (having largely, but not entirely reversed her feline-isation from the first movie) and like Jafar before her, she's the character done the most flagrant disservice by the cheapquel - although, also like Jafar, they did get her original voice, Eartha Kitt, to reprise the role, so it isn't a total wash. I am not sure which villain is ultimately treated worse. Yzma does slightly better than Jafar in that she doesn't die. (Maybe...the film ends with a brick joke where she's attacked, now in rabbit form, by a couple of newly-hatched condor chicks, but since we don't actually see them finish her and the situation is played wholly for laughs, I don't find it overly ominous.) Jafar, though, still had the basic dignity of getting to be the single greatest threat to Aladdin and co for the entirety of his cheapquel, even whilst making bad Psycho references. Yzma barely qualifies as a threat this time round. Her scheming peaks with a hackneyed plot to fleece a bunch of old folks with a fake youth tonic (working in a left-of-field bid for her to become emperor again, which the script openly acknowledges as utterly nonsensical), before she's removed from the action after only the first flashback. Again, there's a smidgeon of self-awareness in the distinctly glib fashion in which Kronk attempts to gloss over her thwarted intrusion ("Let's all reflect on these lessons on our way home tonight"), but it doesn't cover these sins any more aptly than would the glibness of an actual sitcom. Really, the most interesting thing we have to reflect on is how remarkably unsubtly the youth tonic plays as an allegory for heroin addiction, with the old folks selling all of their worldly possessions to fund their habit. I also want to make note of a joke where Yzma announces that she's come to Kronk with a proposition, only for Kronk to screw his face up in disgust before she specifies she means a business proposition (yep, that old chestnut). Based on the nature of their interactions, I'm not sure just how well the cheapquel cottons on to the subtle implication that Kronk, in the original, was basically Yzma's gigolo. You might recall that one of the animators in the documentary The Sweatbox explicitly introduced Kronk as "Yzma's boyfriend." Which honestly tracks with the sardonic way Kuzco describes him in the movie proper ("Every decade or so she gets a new one. This year's model is named Kronk.") and that intensely awkward dinner table conversation in which Kuzco probes Yzma about Kronk's age  ("He's what, in his late 20s?") To circle back to Wish for just a moment, you'll have heard by now that the original plan was for Magnifico and Amaya to be partners in crime, and mutually evil, as countless fan artists and YouTubers lament the loss of what could have been Disney's first villainous couple. I'd say that's only true in the sense that they'd have been Disney's first open villainous couple. Before them, there were at least two antagonistic pairings who could be easily interpreted as physically intimate behind the scenes. Yzma and Kronk are one. Prince John and Sir Hiss from Robin Hood are another.

Alas, we move on swiftly from Yzma, and to a story centred on Kronk's newfound calling (cemented at the end of the first film) as a Junior Chipmunks scout master, heading a troop that includes Pacha's two older children, Chaca (Michaela Jill Murphy) and Tipo (Eli Russell Linnetz). Here, he encounters the prospective new woman in his life, Ms Birdwell, who unfortunately happens to be the leader of the rival troop on course to beat them in the camp championships. You know how it is. First the bitter competitiveness, then the realisation of the bubbling erotic tension. By all rights, this should be the most tedious section of the movie - no Yzma, a trite conflict that's played mostly straight, and a standout candidate for the script's most insufferable joke (Chaca and Tipo debating whether the correct term is "spit and polish" or "snot and polish"). Yet it's propped up immeasurably by the casting of Tracy Ullman as Birdwell, doing a sweeter variation on her Emily Winthrop voice from the Simpsons episode "Bart's Dog Gets an F". It's a strong vocal performance, enabling Birdwell to sound appropriately sensitive in a scene where she helps one of her charges overcome their fear of the water, but officious enough that she'd initially rub Kronk the wrong way. Ullman is a very good match for Warburton, and while it's nowhere near as fun as the dynamic he had with Kitt in the first film, it works well for the purposes of this story. This episode also contains what has to be the film's most mind-bogglingly weird sequence, a protracted interlude where Kronk and Birdwell, having admitted their feelings for one another, are dad dancing to "Let's Groove" by Earth, Wind & Fire. As in, the actual song, not some cover version performed by the characters in-universe. And that's jarring as hell. Anachronistic humor is part and parcel to The Emperor's New Groove, I know, but there's something about having the characters jive to a real-world disco track (or post-disco, if you please) that completely disrupts the reality of their world. I will give it a pass (just) on the grounds that its presence is presumably non-diegetic (the characters are clearly reacting to it, but the sequence is largely a shorthand for their mutual euphoria, is it not?), but it's still bafflingly out of place. Also, it literally now occurred to me that they used this song (as opposed to "September") because it has "Groove" in the title. Anyway, the goodwill between Kronk and Birdwell predictably doesn't last, when Tipo sabotages Birdwell's troop's entry in the camp cheerleading contest, and Kronk admits to having previously encouraged the impressionable kid to resort to cheating. Alone again, naturally!

You might have noticed that the one character from the original I have yet to say anything about in relation to the cheapquel is Kuzco himself. He is in the spin-off, and is still voiced by David Spade, but has easily the biggest downgrade of all the main players, popping up only intermittently to provide a running commentary from some weird space outside of the story's reality. Here, he's every bit as self-obsessed and obnoxious as he was in the original, but his lack of direct involvement in the narrative action means that we get no functional sense of his development in the previous adventure being undone. Honestly, that's a pretty smart move that allows Kronk's New Groove to have its cake and eat it with regards to Kuzco. The problem is that his interjections become increasingly superfluous and annoying as they go. The most interesting, and telling, thing that Kuzco gets to do is to flash up a sample of preliminary concept art for the film's DVD cover, which seems a lot more honest about the nature of the feature than the cover we eventually got (see several paragraphs above). The final cover shifted emphasis away from Birdwell, Chaca and Tipo, putting all of the focus instead on the returning fan favourites. It's move that's downright deceptive, given how very little time we get with Kuzco and Yzma in this installment. Heck, Bucky the squirrel has less screen time here than he did in the original, and contributes nothing that's functional to the narrative progression, besides showing up to warn Kronk about the presence of a rival troop. One character who does get a hugely increased amount of screentime, besides Kronk, Chaca and Tipo, is Rudy, the elderly man defenestrated on Kuzco's orders at the start of the original. As a presence, he doesn't exactly benefit from the expansion, but this at least enabled his voice actor, Disney veteran John Fiedler, who died a few months before the film's release, to go out on a substantial enough closing note.

That's the other weird thing about Kronk's New Groove - the way it's caught between the slavish need to recreate the familiar beats of the original whilst feeling entirely disconnected from anything that actually happened within the original's world. It plays overwhelmingly like a calculated effort please the cult following Disney had surely noticed Kuzco and co acquiring in the five year gap between the two features (I assume that Kronk's New Groove was created off the back of that following; this was blatantly not a sequel rushed into production before there'd been a chance to gauge response to the original, which is presumably how Brother Bear 2 came to be). Switching focus to Kronk, the breakout character, was already a massive act of fan service in itself (though given the massively reduced roles of Spade, Kitt and Goodman, I haven't ruled out the possibility that Warburton simply had greater availability). For much of the time, the film is looking to very consciously evoke the experience of watching the original, right from the prologue, where a distraught Kronk promises to fill us in on how he came to be covered in cheese like a human pizza, just as Kuzco promised to account for how he came to be a llama (Kuzco, obviously, has the juicier story to tell). Fan favourite gags are recycled at every turning, a few of which work - I have to admit I chuckled at Yzma telling Kronk to pull the lever, reassuring him that "I worked out the bugs" - but most of which feel like superficial bids to replicate its predecessor's charm. It's of no surprise that the shoulder angel and shoulder demon should reappear wherever Kronk is on the verge of a moral dilemma - which in this movie happens regularly enough for the characters to rapidly wear out their welcome, but more fatally still, they're used in ways that suggest an intrinsic failure to understand their appeal the first time round. There, the joke was that the angel and the demon were both equally incompetent and had zero clue what they were each doing. Here, the angel consistently makes valid points and always has the upper hand over the demon (no fun). It's also noticeable how much more timely and unsubtle the appetite for popular culture references had gotten in the post-Shrek world. Consider that in the original Emperor's New Groove, the most explicit movie reference was a shout-out to the 1958 film The Fly (the fly screaming "Help me! Help me!" before being devoured by a spider). In Kronk, Rudy does a direct impersonation of Gollum as portrayed by Andy Serkis in the Lord of The Rings series, which immediately dates this feature to the mid-00s, when everyone and their grandma was doing impersonations of Gollum as portrayed by Serkis. Elsewhere, Kronk gets a couple of personal assistants called Marge and Nina, purely so he can spin a groan-worthy Andrew Lloyd Webber pun out of their names (which I won't spoil here, on the off chance you haven't figured it out).

It goes without saying that Kronk's New Groove is in no way a meaningful expansion on The Emperor's New Groove, but to be fair, it's not as though The Emperor's New Groove was the kind of picture that warranted meaningful expansion to begin with. It too was light and silly. The difference being that it was light and silly in ways that seemed daring and subversive - a full-on deadpan farce at a time when Disney was renowned mainly for its epic melodramas. It was lightning in a bottle, which was really nothing short of miraculous given the tortured conditions under which it was made. What Kronk represents is a commodification of all of that, the taming of this utterly spontaneous Disney world into something altogether safer and more familiar. What we get is a window into an alternate reality in which a once distinguished character becomes a vehicle for weekly outings with banal stakes and pat resolutions. Like the hackneyed comedies it's recalling, it's just about inoffensive enough to make for a pleasant(ish) time-killer. I doubt that the phantom Kronk sitcom it's inexplicably peddling would have racked up even 13 episodes before its inevitable cancellation, but it wouldn't have been completely intolerable if you had absolutely nothing else to do. What I find both intriguing and frustrating about Kronk's New Groove is how, every now and then, it does appear to be on the verge of doing something a little more knowing and playful with this omnipresent mundaneness. There is, notably, a point during Papi's third-act visit when the spiralling farce that obviously ensues swells to mind-boggling proportions, with everyone in town chiming in and attempting to pass themselves off as Mrs Kronk. Here, the cheapquel does, if only evanescently, feel like it's somewhat in on the joke, in making a winking concession to how overly familiar a jam this all is. Just as Kuzco manages to weasel his way into the climax (also posing as Mrs Kronk), so too does a trickle of the original's subversive spirit. Right before it culminates in an unconvincing moral reflection where Kronk, drenched in the physical manifestations of a lie blown up in his face, realises that the people he's helped and the friends he's made along the way are the real wife and house he was seeking all along, and enough to earn him the coveted thumbs-up from Papi.

And then he gets to marry Birdwell anyway, albeit as mainly an afterthought. She shows up at the end with Tipo, who's apparently managed to straighten things out with her off of screen. An epilogue plays out over the end credits, showing us what happens in the immediate aftermath for Kronk and Birdwell by way of a series of holiday snapshots. We see that they spend their honeymoon in France, where they visit the Eiffel Tower and...hold up guys, you do know the Eiffel Tower wasn't built until 1889, right? Unless the implication is that Kronk and Birdwell gained access to a time machine on their travels, then these anachronisms have officially gone too far.