The Call of The Simpsons (aka The Simpsons Have Entered The Forest)

Something that really is astounding about The Simpsons' premier season is the sheer variety of stories it was capable of offering straight off the bat. It took its core premise (a modern suburban family who were far from perfect, but capable of standing by one another) in a host of directions, delving into each character's perspective within the equation and seeing what new angles could be applied. Who'd have thought that you could follow up "Moaning Lisa", a moody and melancholic exploration of childhood angst, with "The Call of The Simpsons" (7G09), the closest thing that fledgling year would produce to an all-out farce, and for the two stories not to feel like they came from entirely disparate universes? Of the original 13 installments (and arguably beyond), "Call" is the one that revels the most in the absurdity of its cartoon world, so much so that it might be easy to dismiss it as an overly lightweight affair. Landing midway through the season, on February 18th 1990, it is what producer Mike Reiss describes on the DVD commentary as that archetypal camping episode that most animated series like to do at about seven or eight episodes in, just to switch up the scenery and manufacture a few easy escapades: "Nobody's copying anyone, it's just something you feel...oh gee, that's a natural, let's throw them in the woods and see what happens." I can't say that I've noticed such a distinct pattern myself. South Park took barely any time to throw Stan, Kenny, Kyle and Eric into the wilderness, The Critic waited as long as episode 18 to pack Jay and Marty off to fat camp, and I don't remember the Binfords from Family Dog going camping at all (come to think of it, The PJs had a camping story in their ninth episode, although the joke there was that they never actually left the projects). But The Simpsons certainly makes the most of the alleged cliche, seizing the opportunity to be as feral as it pleases once civilisation is a speck on the horizon. If you think Homer and co are an uncultivated enough bunch within the comfort of their own neighbourhood, then what further indelicacies could Mother Nature possibly tease out of them? 

I should preface my review of "The Call of The Simpsons" by noting that this is a significant episode for me personally as it was the first Simpsons episode I ever saw, some time in 1991 when the show was being held captive in the UK as a satellite exclusive (causing the awe Bart feels here for an RV with a satellite dish to hit a particularly bittersweet spot). If you didn't have Sky, then you weren't completely out of luck - Fox Video had come to the rescue with a series of VHS releases containing two episodes apiece. My brother had gotten hold of a tape that had this and "Bart The Genius", so I finally got to see the series that my classmates had been raving about for months. Of the two, "Genius" resonated with me a little better, if only because the school-centred narrative was more relatable as a child (as way off guard as that hamster joke caught me), but "Call" wasn't a bad place to start - it's fun, it's colourful and it gives you a strong impression of who each of the core family are. What I find most remarkable about the experience, with hindsight, is contemplating that there ever was a time when the lack of a couch gag in the opening would not have struck me as at all peculiar - here, the Simpsons rush in and sit down and...nothing happens. When it's your first episode you won't know any better. Watching it now, it practically becomes a joke within itself. Judging by the level of inconsistency the first season had with implementing the opening sequence, it took the producers a while to figure out quite how they wanted it to work; a handful of episodes forewent it altogether, and the seventh installment does seem like a truly random place to insert the "default" version with no additional mayhem (surely it would have made more sense to start with that one and let the couch gags get wilder as we went along?). Of all the episodes they could have stuck it in front of, this one feels like by far the most deceptive.

"The Call of The Simpsons" was writer John Swartzwelder's second contribution to the series, following "Bart The General", an episode that started out with a scenario so small and relatable (having to stand up to a school bully) before kicking it up to an audacious extreme. Already he seemed to be cementing a reputation as the writer who went bigger and broader than everyone else, testing the limits of what could be achieved in this animated reality without breaking the sense that the characters lived in the real world and not some cartoon fantasy realm. Which is not to say that goofy antics were his particular trade - his next script would be "Life on The Fast Lane", the most subtle and adult-skewing of the original season, and yet another outing that pushed the envelope in terms of what the series could do, albeit more in terms of its drama than its humor. Gutsiness was Swartzwelder's trade. He was willing to write episodes that, one way or another, took big swings that made you sit up and notice. "Call" is a markedly stronger entry on the narrative front than "General', which as an episode had an awful lot going for it, but also a conspicuous amount of padding. The plotting still isn't the tightest, particularly in the middle act when the family gets lost in the wilderness and the script does a lot of meandering between their three separate story stands, but it has more going on (so much so that there was apparently talk of expanding it a two-parter at one point), and comes together nicely for a hysterical third act that makes the pint-sized, water balloon-wielding platoon from "General" look like a subdued and sensible solution to that story's problem. It gets so wild and over the top, in fact, that the ending presented a particular challenge in terms of how to finally bring it back down to earth. The philosophy of early Simpsons was that episodes could be hilarious, they could be harrowing and they could be hair-raising, but the one requirement was that they always be human. You needed to be able to identify in some way with what the family was going through. The plot trajectory of "Call" is based around Homer's humanity being slowly stripped from him, first by nature and then by something even more razor-fanged (a media circus), with the extreme outcome that he's mistaken for the cryptid Bigfoot and the scientific community are left debating on whether to class him as a below average man or a brilliant beast. And sure, what could be more relatable? Isn't that what humanity basically is at the end of the day? A brilliant beast? We can all see a little of Homer in ourselves.

The episode's title is an obvious nod to Jack London's 1903 novel The Call of The Wild, concerning a collie-St Bernard hybrid who goes feral and learns to live among wolves against the backdrop of the Klondike Gold Rush. As such, it contains the implicit joke that for the Simpsons, trading civilisation for the wilderness represents a kind of homecoming. As a premise, it recalls one of the early Tracey Ullman shorts, "Zoo Story", in which Homer takes the family to a zoo and encourages them to laugh at the "stupid antics" of a troop of monkeys who bear an uncanny resemblance to themselves. The gag there was in the Simpsons evoking the most primitive, crude and grotesque qualities of human nature, to the extent that they barely seem any more evolved than their simian counterparts (and that one of the monkeys is able to trade places with Bart and make it all the way to the backseat of the family's car without them noticing). Most of all, "Call" stands out to me as the less sentimental, summer-themed cousin of "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", in that it puts Homer through a series of humiliating trials designed to squeeze out his every remaining drop of dignity, and on this occasion denies him the triumph of a sweetly redemptive ending (while allowing him to salvage a tiny scrap of pride, thanks to Marge). As with the Christmas show, a recurring bugbear of Homer's existence is the need to keep up with the Joneses, or rather the Flanders, with the entire conflict being kicked into motion by Ned's acquisition of a swanky new RV. This was only Ned's second appearance, and while he would become a more rounded character with the following season's "Dead Putting Society", for now his raison d'etre is still to lure out Homer's green-eyed monster with his splashy consumerism. He is, nevertheless, presented in a more favourable light than in "Roasting", where he came off as kind of insensitive to the Simpsons' financial struggles. Here, he gives Homer friendly advice on how to acquire an RV of his own through credit. And when Homer later shows up with the only RV his own spotty credit history would allow, a dented hunk of used junk with no satellite dish, Ned's very polite about it, wishing Homer well and betraying not even the faintest inkling of derision or snobbery. Homer's begrudging of Ned, while nowhere near as bitterly expressed as in "Roasting", is also a whole lot pettier. There's no reason why he shouldn't want his own RV, especially after learning how it could be within his means, but he seeks out the biggest and most extravagant model on the market, with the explicit intention of rubbing it in Ned's face. Unlike "Roasting", where his motivations were rooted in giving his family the best possible Christmas, here pretty much he sets himself up for a fall from the outset.

The RV shopping excursion is the most unassuming segment of the story, but arguably also the most momentous, marking the first occasion on which Albert Brooks would lend his vocal talents and ad libbing prowess to the series, kicking off one of its longest and richest of guest shot legacies (one that only Kelsey Grammer, Joe Mantegna and Phil Hartman could feasibly rival), although in the beginning he was somewhat coy about getting on board the Simpsons train. At this point the show still had everything to prove as a lowly cartoon attempting to cut it in an adult domain. Animation in the 1980s was widely regarded as an inferior diversion for undemanding kiddies, and Brooks wasn't certain if he wanted to risk bringing that kind of stigma upon his name, so he chose to be credited as A. Brooks instead. It's a movie that has always amused me. He wasn't the only early guest to have those misgivings - Dustin Hoffman also declined an overt credit for his contribution to "Lisa's Substitute", but Hoffman went with a more thorough disguise, using an entirely fabricated moniker with a hidden pun that hinted playfully at the artifice. In Brooks' case, I kinda feel that this is the equivalent of that Pokémon episode where Team Rocket attempt to hoodwink Ash and co by slipping on green jackets over their regular attire. James L. Brooks and Albert Brooks (no relation) were known best buds who frequently appeared in one another's projects (James was in Albert's Real Life and Modern Romance, and Albert in James' Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News), so I doubt that anybody who paid attention to the credits would have been doing a whole lot of head scratching as to who this mysterious A. Brooks might have been. Whatever trepidation Brooks might once have felt for his Simpsons association has naturally long since dissipated, although A. Brooks has remained his traditional credit, a throwback to the days when this was all radically new territory and the show's breakout success had seemed like the longest of long shots.

The first of Brooks' Simpsons incarnations is an RV salesman named Bob who hides his grasping intentions behind the glad handing persona of a cowboy whose pearly whites are on constant display. He might actually be the least iconic of Brooks' roles (of the classic era anyhow), which I'm inclined to put down to his being upstaged by not just one but two characters within the space of a few episodes - an infinitely more memorable character voiced by A. Brooks and an infinitely more memorable character named Bob. Granted, I've a strong bias in favour of both of those guys in general, but I doubt that I'm saying anything particularly out of line here. Comparing them seems almost unfair - Jacques and Sideshow Bob are major presences in their respective outings, being the actual driving forces behind their pivotal conflicts, whereas Cowboy Bob has a far more modest part, appearing only for a few minutes near the start and bowing out before the first act is even through. That puts him at another disadvantage, since by the time the episode's over, so much else has happened that an RV salesman who talks and dresses like a cowboy no longer feels like the strangest thing about it and he isn't so fresh on your mind. Even so, Brooks' performance is an absolute blast, and you can tell he's having a great deal of fun in that recording booth, replicating every oily dealer who tried to fling a dubious deal his way. Bob certainly knows how to work Homer like a sucker, smothering him with praise and affability while intermittently hinting at his fishier agenda ("I don't own this place, even though my name's up there....long story, but that doesn't matter"). Occasionally, Bob is even taken back by the extent of Homer's naivety; "Ever known a siren to be good?" he murmurs in disbelief, when Homer asks if the wailing signals emitted by the computer reviewing his credit history mean that he's been approved. Having exposed Homer's underlying sheepishness, he goes in mercilessly for the kill ("You're never going to own a better RV...This is it for you, you know? It's this or a wagon.") Significantly, when he shows Homer the beat-up RV and goads him into committing to buy without consulting his family (having detected that Marge isn't keen on making an impulse purchase, and certainly not on that RV), he tells him that "If you have to talk with those humans out there, there's something wrong with all of us." Within context, he's alluding to his earlier attempt to butter Homer up by comparing him to the Greek god Zeus, but he also foreshadows how the story will eventually unfold, with Homer being cast out of the human race (and not because he's mistaken for anything more elevated). Having dared to dream that he might be destined for a more esteemed standard of living, he's about to take one heck of a sharp plummet downward. Being forced to settle for something much less than the Behemoth was only the beginning.

Still, he's invested in his scrappy little clunker (to the chagrin of his family) and is determined to make the most of it, proudly displaying it to Ned and indulging in the play pretence that he's made his perpetually sunny neighbour squirm with jealousy. Taking his reluctant family on a camping trip in the woods is an extension of that same posturing - having acquired an RV, he needs to be seen to use it, and to throw its weight around. It becomes swiftly apparent that he's no idea what he's doing, however. First he endangers his family by making the rash decision to drive off road and into a river, insisting that the RV is equipped for any terrain (all while whistling the tune to "The Happy Wanderer"). Then, in a wonderfully executed sequence (one that genuinely made me gasp on my first viewing), he comes to a random standstill, only for it to be revealed that he's driven right up to the edge of a cliff, and the RV is now teetering dangerously into the drop. The family are able to vacate in the nick of time (in an emphatic rejection of Homer's authority, they don't even wait for him to give the signal to clamber out), but alas, there's no saving the vehicle itself. The poor RV doesn't even make it to the second act, and through no fault of whatever deficiencies it had before ending up in Homer's hands.

Needless to say, we don't hold quite the same degree of sympathy for Homer as we did in "Roasting". Both episodes are littered with examples of the universe being seemingly out to get him, but he gets into this predicament as a result of his own recklessness and disregard for his family's wishes. We can see that he's ripe for a royal humbling. He is nevertheless the character with whom we most closely identify without the adventure, and the script does a nice job of treading that middle ground with him, exposing him as fundamentally foolish at every turning, but also painfully aware of his failings and desperately wanting to do better. It's not just his pride that's under constant attack, but also his attempts to put on a brave face for the rest of his family to disguise the perilousness of their situation, now that they're stranded out in the wilderness with no idea how far they are from the nearest port of call. They are repeatedly reassured that Homer is "an experienced woodsman", but we're given no context for that statement. What experience does he have exactly? Possibly none at all. There's a particularly neat sequence where he wanders away to lament in private how he's doomed them all, only to be done in by his own echo, which not only makes his despair entirely audible to his family, but becomes the taunting voice of self-admonishment. Unfortunately for Homer, "Call" is no redemptive story where he can go off into the woods and discover himself. Or rather, he does discover himself, and what is fundamentally in his nature, but not through his mastery of the wilderness; instead, the wilderness beats him down and claims him as its own.

The middle act sees the family dividing off in various splinter groups, with Homer and Bart venturing out to find help while Marge and Lisa stay put and await rescue. Nobody makes the horrifying realisation that Maggie is on her own in the woods since they all assume she's with the other party (with Lisa being the only one who expresses any doubt about the situation). But not to worry. In the most bizarre narrative development of not only the episode but also the entire season, she falls in with a family of grizzlies and gets to spend a day or two living the life of a feral child.

Of the three narrative strands, my favourite is the one that receives the least amount of screentime, that being the subplot about Marge and Lisa, and the blissfully untroubled time they have of it compared to the Simpson men. It was actually the subject of a little bit of a mystery, when the first edition of The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family was published in 1997 and included a snippet of dialogue between Marge and Lisa that was nowhere in the finished episode (and which was removed from subsequent editions). Somehow or other they've gotten onto the subject of where babies come from, with Lisa admitting that she doesn't know, but that she once heard a disturbing story about it in the school yard, and Marge responding, "Well, it's true, I'm afraid." For the longest time, I'd wondered if something had been cut from the version we'd had on tape, and was relieved when I learned that the entire fandom was as baffled by its inclusion in A Complete Guide. On the DVD commentary it is mentioned that there was originally more to the Marge-Lisa story, but that it was largely trimmed to accommodate for as much of A. Brooks' ad libbing as possible. Among the excised material were homages to Swiss Family Robinson and an extended version of the nocturnal sequence where Marge and Lisa are bedding down beside their fire, in which they had an entire discussion about boys and, one would presume, the facts of life. As brilliant as Brooks' contribution was, I can't help but feel a little mournful for that additional Marge-Lisa rapport we were denied. Even that tiny tidbit that somehow wormed its way into the official reference guide drips with irresistible emotional honesty. Arguably, it is a stretch that a girl as precocious as Lisa wouldn't already have some understanding of how reproduction works, but Marge's response is pure gold, and I'd have loved to have seen it within its proper context. Between this, the central conflict in "Moaning Lisa" and the small scene they had together in "Some Enchanted Evening", the connection between Marge and Lisa felt like the most wholesome and earnest of the family relationships in the show's early days, making it a shame that it wouldn't get so much exploration going forward.

The subplot with Maggie and her ursine foster family is also a highlight, peppering the episode with a few quirky intervals of non-verbal storytelling. Groening's aversion to the use of anthropomorphism within The Simpsons is well-documented, and there are certainly instances of that in here (one of the bears makes the "stop" gesture by holding up its paw), but overall this thread is intrinsically too weird to feel excessively Disneyesque - not least because it's suggested that Maggie is able to subdue the voracious predators through the power of her pacifier. Again, this is in stark contrast to the reception Homer gets from the animal kingdom; his attempts to hunt for rabbits leave him not only with an empty belly, but in possible need of a rabies shot, when he ventures into the bushes and gets attacked by a rabbit, a raccoon, a snake and a chipmunk in unison. (It's interesting how much more cartoony the designs for Simpsons animals were in the beginning; the bears here don't look significantly different to the one we'd later see in "Much Apu About Nothing" of Season 7, but the rabbits more closely resemble the characters from Groening's Life In Hell than the more naturalistic bunny Lisa pursues at the start of "Lisa's Wedding"). A repeated theme is Homer's posturing being cut down whenever he advocates conquering the wilderness through traditionally masculine methods (hunting, showing no fear, etc), all while the Simpson women have more luck using approaches that are more genteel (Marge and Lisa are effectively able to transform the woodland floor into their personal living room, while Maggie finds kinship with a grizzly by introducing it to her personal mechanism for relieving her oral fixation). As Marge, Lisa and Maggie are able to make the wilds around them a little more civil, Homer becomes progressively less civilised, first losing his clothing after falling into a river, then his power of intelligible communication after impulsively stuffing the contents of a beehive into his mouth, and finally becoming so drenched in sludge that a nearby camper with a videocam no longer recognises him as human, but as the legendary ape-man Bigfoot. In no time, the footage he filmed is all over the media, and people are flocking to the woods in the hopes of bagging the creature for a substantial reward.

One of the quirks of being set mostly outside of Springfield is that "Call' features very little world-building among the show's supporting cast, with Ned, Todd Flanders and Dr Marvin Monroe being the only recurring regulars to appear, and all of them in minimal roles. Of note is a news anchor who could be described as a proto Kent Brockman, although he wouldn't be formally introduced until "Krusty Gets Busted". There's also an entire scene with an anonymous couple voiced by Hank Azaria and Maggie Roswell, who unlike the Simpsons are disappointed with just how tedious their camp-out in the wilderness is proving (unaware that the bears are looting their supplies to provide for Maggie). The generic designs chosen suggest to me that they were never intended to be anything other than one-scene wonders, but the performances and chemistry from Azaria and Roswell are so sparkling that I wouldn't have been averse to seeing more from these characters. If the episode were made in one of the later seasons, their roles would no doubt have been fulfilled by more established Springfieldians, although it's hard to envision who exactly would have taken their place. Kirk and Luann Van Houten could have worked, in terms of the couple's tetchy dynamic, although they'd needed to have had a baby with them (Milhouse's demeanour can be on the infantile side at times, but surely he doesn't require a bottle?). 

In its third act, "Call" becomes particularly uproarious, for it's here that The Simpsons takes its first big shot at skewering that most evergreen of topics, media sensationalism and the subsequent mass hysteria.  Already it's something that the series handles with so much sharpness and panache (the Bigfoot newsflash upstaging a presidential address, followed by the array of side-splitting tabloid headlines when Marge, having been located by the park rangers, attempts to explain that "Bigfoot" is really her husband Homer, only for her pleas to be misconstrued by reporters as indicators of a scandalous interspecies relationship). The eventual outcome, which sees Homer and Bart trekking their way into the Bigfoot hunters' base (having bumped into Maggie along the way, necessitating a surprisingly poignant farewell scene between the babe and her adopted family), where Homer is still mistaken for the cryptid and taken out with a tranquilliser dart, is naturally very silly (he doesn't even get to go down with dignity, urging Bart to avenge his death before snoring up a storm). After being beaten into submission by the wilderness, he finds that reintegrating back into civilisation won't be as easy as all that. Civilisation now lives in fear of him, regarding him as the "missing link" that stands halfway between both worlds, a grotesque reminder of the bestial side of human nature that has always been at home in the woods. His wild exterior no doubt provides a perfect mirror to their own mindless frenzy on being confronted with the purportedly inexplicable. It is ironic that he should inspire so much awe and terror, since Homer is obviously low on the evolutionary ladder within both settings - he couldn't outdo Ned as a suburban consumer, and outdoors he got his butt kicked by an assortment of fluffy woodland critters. 

Even after a week under observation in a laboratory, he hasn't completely dispelled the comical misunderstanding. The authorities have evidently decided that to keep him any longer would amount to false imprisonment, but the scientific community is still on the fence, with Dr Marvin Monroe (who before the introduction of Professor Frink was the show's go-to scientific representative, whether it made sense or not) and a panel of supposed experts (one German, one French and one British) continuing to butt heads over the question of Homer's humanity. They can agree that he is, at best, a below average man or, at worst, a brilliant beast, or should that be the other way around? The closing sequence establishes that life is returning to normal for Homer, in spite of his absurdest of ordeals - no matter what these scientists have to say on the matter, the only real consequence to him, in practice, is the prospect of having to go back to work and face a ribbing from his colleagues. Marge consoles him by suggesting that he take pride in being a "brilliant beast", a statement that, in this bedroom-bound context, carries possible sexual undertones (the fade-out with Marge switching out the light puts me warily in mind of the ending to "Lisa's Substitute"), but mostly highlights the value in not necessarily conforming to society's expectations, but being a survivor nevertheless.

Nowadays, the thing that most sticks out about "The Call of The Simpsons" is how it takes the cake for having probably the highest proportion of truly morbid jokes of any Season 1 entry (the nocturnal rock walk in "Homer's Odyssey" would be its chief competition). Bart's reaction to Homer's efforts to create a makeshift snare from a contorted tree branch - "What are we gonna do? Hang ourselves?" - is hilariously bleak. There's also the gruesome thud made by the hapless rabbit that gets flung halfway across the forest by the aforementioned trap (it's too over the top to be anywhere near as traumatic as the allotted fate of the control hamster in "Bart The Genius", but still somewhat troubling in the moment), the buzzards circling around the family on their entry into the wilds, and this low-key exchange between Bart and Homer: "Are we ever gonna be there?" "How would I know?!" It's rough out there, so come prepared.

Door (End of Snivvelyzashuns)

End of world narratives were to be David Anderson's speciality during his time creating experimental animations for Channel 4. Starting with 1986's Dreamless Sleep, his contribution to David Hopkins' Sweet Disaster series, he showed a flair for conveying the disquietude of a hauntingly fragile reality on the brink of unravelling. In the dwindling stages of the decade he teamed up with American author Russell Hoban, and a brace of five minute pieces was formed under the banner of Deadtime Stories For Big Folk. The first of these was Deadsy from 1989, which went on to inspire the "Mark" entry of the "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" series of PIFs. The second was Door from 1990, a grisly tale of ill-advised choices that is, for me, as perfect an animated short as they come. The busy, overstuffed and wildly abstract nature of the visuals (created through a combination of stop motion animation and pixelation) keeps us swamped in a nightmarish mix of stimuli, yet it never detracts from the elegant and poetic simplicity of the narrative. The agitated atmosphere gets increasingly sinister as it goes, culminating in the kind of ghoulish punchline that could only work in animation, and which has really stuck with me over the years.

Though overtly apocalyptic, Door does not explicitly link its narrative to the topic of nuclear war, giving it a more mystically parabolic flavour next to its predecessors. Dreamless Sleep had centred on a couple who'd awakened shortly before the detonating of a nuclear weapon, sensing that something in their environment is profoundly amiss but being unable to pinpoint the source until the blinding flash of oblivion was upon them; like When The Wind Blows from the same year, it made a harrowing statement by bringing the all-encompassing matter of nuclear war to the personal level, from the perspective of innocents who were powerless to change their fate. Deadsy took a more comprehensively allegorical approach, relating a humorously macabre monologue about a gender-bending personification of death and nuclear proliferation, and their quest to win over the entire world (their grim spectre also haunts the action in Door, where they put in a cameo appearance). In Door the threat of nuclear annihilation exists on an entirely subtextual level. The central characters, an unnamed man and woman, discover a key marked with a tag, "This Is The Wun". After much deliberation on its meaning, the woman suggests that "This Is The Wun" indicates that this is the key to the one door that should never be opened, lest it unleashes something with the power to warp their reality beyond all recognition. Sadly, their inability to agree on how to manage this most gargantuan of responsibilities reaps devastating consequences. You don't have to reach in far to locate the nuclear allegory, although it can be interpreted quite a bit more broadly than that, evoking as it does the stories of Pandora’s box and the Garden of Eden (for a welcome change, it is here the male figure who makes the fatal move and dooms everyone), suggesting that there may be something innate in the human psyche that compels it toward its own destruction. Compared to Deadsy, where vanity and the lust for domination were the driving forces for cataclysm, the snake in this particular Eden (which isn’t exactly a paradise to begin with, mind) is simple curiosity. The risk is in going so far, in our quest to keep pushing ourselves beyond our limits, that we end up crossing a line from which there can be no going back. Door explores the possibility of how a single and all-too human error might seal not only our own undoing, but cast the whole world into ruin along with us - very pertinent in an age where destroying the world had apparently become as straightforward as pressing a button.

As with Deadsy, Hoban himself takes up narration duties in Door, voicing a couple of characters who remain offscreen until the closing moments, one of whom is relating the cautionary tale of the “wun” key you had better not mess with to the other. Our first hint that these are specifically the voices of a post-apocalyptic landscape comes with their speaking in the slurred, degraded dialect that previously appeared in Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker (Hoban reasoned that people would hardly be speaking in BBC English following the collapse of civilisation and another dark age), and which I will state upfront that I will not attempt to accurately transcribe here. Connoisseur Video, the people behind the 1992 VHS release David Anderson: Works On Film, were nice enough to include a full transcript of the Deadsy monologue on the inner sleeve, in Hoban’s degraded survivor tongue, but they didn’t bestow that same honor on Door. The dialogue remains close enough to contemporary English that it is still intelligible, so I will be treating it as though it were more or less the same, but for the two key phrases: “This is the wun”, in relation to that very special key, and “the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit”, the outcome that the characters most fear. We hear the story of the man and the woman (represented by two-dimensional cut out figures), who inhabit a world ("a great big some kind of place") consisting of innumerable doors and have many adventures navigating the surprises they conceal. Even before they discover the key that has the power to dramatically alter their destiny, there is something terrifying and intensely alien about this world, depicted as a sphere covered in a surreal hodgepodge of doors, none of which seem to offer any clear path or exit, only a deepening of chaotic entrapment. It resembles a puzzle box, of the sort that is liable to confound anybody curious or masochistic enough to try engaging with it. At one point a door swings open to reveal a figure positioned within a corridor who is seemingly incapable of doing anything but banging their head interminably against a brick wall, a sign that they've encountered a few dead ends too many. Some of the doors conceal pleasant surprises, which the man and the woman enjoy, while others are direct portals into nightmares ("You opened them, you would just keep falling for a long time"). 

On the making of documentary that appears on the Connoisseur Video release, Anderson shares that he came to the project wanting to explore human relationships and what causes us to self-destruct at an interpersonal level, with Hoban being the one who chose to take that interest in destruction to more cosmic heights. Door actually feels like a perfect amalgamation of their respective fascinations, with the script placing a great deal of emphasis on the interplay between the man and the woman (it's never stated, but we presume that they are a married couple) and their constant bickering, as interminable as anything the maze of doors has to offer. The clue that they are a husband and wife arises from the distinctly humorous nature of their arguing, indicating that they have spent just little too long in one another's company ("Sometimes they would say, why did we ever come here anyhow? Then one of them would say it wasn't my idea, and the other one would say, well it wasn't mine neither, maybe we could go some other place. Only they didn't know any other place."). Their adventures within the world of doors becomes a metaphor for navigating through life within a partnership, with all the highs, lows, surprises and tedium it may bring. As we join them, it isn't exactly trouble in paradise; their relationship doesn't yet feel that it's corrupted, but it has reached a point of stagnation that is wearying, but ultimately survivable. It is the discovery of the wun key that drives an irreparable distance between them, with the woman's cautiousness conflicting with the man's impatience. She suggests that they at least sleep on it before making any decisions, but he is unwilling to do even that and sneaks away with the key, intending to seek out the wun door and uncover the answer by himself. This amounts to an act of infidelity (it isn't a stretch to see the act of inserting a key into a keyhole as a penetrative one), and effectively severs their partnership; his search for the door takes him far away from the woman and they are not reunited. On an allegorical level, their relationship is a reminder that we are all in this wun world together and need to figure out how to make it work; the division over the key indicates the failure of conflicting parties to handle a mutual responsibility that should perhaps never have fallen into the hands of mere mortals to begin with, one that stands between life as we know it and total devastation. Eventually, the man finds a strange rotating door and attempts to get close enough to locate the keyhole - in doing so, the narrator tells us, he ended up getting sucked in by its spinning motion and was dragged into the ground to his demise. A fortunate turn of events, for the woman was right about this being the wun key you had better not mess with, and if the man had gotten any further it would have meant nothing less than "the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit!"

At this point the narrator's companion speaks up, challenging him on whether he's certain that the man didn't get as far as inserting the key into the keyhole. The narrator responds that he doesn't think that he did. His companion then makes the short's most haunting observation - if the man did commit the reckless deed and bring about the end of snivvelyzashuns, they would not be in a position to even know the difference. The final sequence pulls back to show the sphere of doors, now busted and disintegrating, as the narrator and his companion are revealed to be a couple of disembodied, heavily decayed heads drifting through the debris of the ruined world. The narrator reiterates that he doesn't think the man opened the door. "Wow, what a lucky us," says his companion, and the film fades to black.

 

On the VHS documentary, Anderson clarifies that he saw the epilogue as happening several centuries after the events involving the mysterious key, with the talking skulls representing the subsequent generations who've lived with the consequences ever since. Within context, they can hardly be described as survivors, given their advanced state of decay; rather, they are fragments of the damaged landscape that have been floating in infinity for so long that they've lost sight of what that landscape once was. The bitter irony is that the "snivvelyzashuns" in question already ended long ago, and what they now know is barely civilisation at all. Their continued existence speaks not to the resilience of humankind (if these skulls could even be defined as human), but to the elongation of its decline, their inability to distinguish between the so-called snivvelyzashuns of then and now indicating yet another layer of that protracted decay. The legend of the man and the woman with the wun key might be exactly that - a mere legend, now that the world is far-removed enough from whatever events first set it on its course of irreversible deterioration, but its purpose has been subverted, not to preserve the truth but to reassure listeners that the world was actually saved. It becomes a denial of a reality that should perhaps be all too stark, but which is ultimately too bleak to accept. Door closes, then, by presenting us with a paradox, in the contrast between the man's fatal need to know what lurked behind that wun door and the skulls' desperate need to not know the truth of their hopeless situation. Curiosity might be the factor that propels us to our ruination, but having opened those doors that would have been better off remaining closed, to what extent would we sooner remain ignorant of the consequences? Which proclivity is stronger - our need to know, to understand and keep pushing ourselves into unmapped worlds, or the ability to close our eyes when we're on the cusp of uncovering something truly unpalatable? It is also possible to project a degree of conscious irony onto the second skull's closing statement, as though he wishes that the current state of snivvelyzashuns would be brought to an end.

I honestly don't remember when I first saw Door. I first knowingly came across it in 2012, back when I had started my mission to locate each of the Sweet Disaster series, which led me to check out some of Anderson’s other, less elusive projects, and I found that it had this instant and uncanny sense of familiarity, like the thing had already been haunting me for the better part of my existence. It is possible that I had seen it, or at least an excerpt from it, somewhere before and not quite taken it in (I don’t know if you-know-who would have covered it in his Cartoon Club), but I'd like to think that its freaky ambience just struck a chord with me because it felt so reminiscent of some half-remembered nightmare I'd once had (there is a third option, which is that I’d seen the McEwans lager ad that Anderson later animated using many of the same sets as Door). I do recall becoming utterly obsessed with it then and there in 2012. Not because I was fearing any imminent apocalypse, but because I was, at that point in my life, having a hard time coping with uncertainty in a more generalised sense (in a way that leaves you wide open to intrusive thinking), and I found the ending chilling but also strangely cathartic. I didn’t know if I saw something defiantly reassuring in the concept of being damned and unable to tell the difference, or if that inability represented an entrapment in itself, if you couldn't see beyond it and had no lingering appreciation for what was lost - I just liked that the characters acknowledged that they would have no way of knowing either way. It seemed exonerating, a reminder of how we're all just crumbs of debris floating around in space with only a narrow inkling of the bigger picture (both on a cosmic and on a personal level), and in those circumstances there's not a whole lot we can do other than to learn to trust whatever our own judgement is telling us. What a lucky us indeed.

The Victor (aka I Wondered If That Might Happen...)

The title of Derek Hayes and Phil Austin's 1985 animation The Victor conceals a couple of cunning contradictions. Within context, it is explained in an acronym that is revealed in three separate stages across the narrative, as the action cuts intermittently to a computer screen indicating the successive phases of a sinister experimental procedure - "Violence Induced", "Control Terminated" and finally "Operative Reaction". The last of these phases is followed by a question mark, not present in the title, which plays a vital role in how we are prompted to make sense of the film's macabre developments. The operative reaction is the unknown being tested by the experiment, but the question ultimately raised has to do with who really wins in the end. Is there a victor to be had at all in this scenario? 

Mixed in with the bitter irony is an incongruous dash of loving affection, for the title is also a reference to a British comic from Hayes and Austin's youth, renowned for its "boys' own adventure" type narratives, the art style of which their film was intended to evoke. The Victor is suffused with a warm undercurrent of boyhood nostalgia, which feels paradoxical, given the dystopian forces that prove as prevalent, lingering on the sidelines and pulling the strings from above. 

The protagonist of The Victor is identified, via a montage of computer images shown in the opening sequence, as Jimmy Mullen, a pacifist who resisted conscription into the military and attempted to go AWOL. Now, he finds himself undertaking a mind-bending journey, from the shadows of a seedy bar-room and into a distorted mirror version of the promenade at Brighton, guided by a mysterious rectangular light and bombarded with a flurry of nightmarish stimuli that repeatedly challenge his inclination toward non-violence. When his resistances are shut down, Jimmy discovers that he's capable of unleashing quite a devastating rage upon anybody who threatens him. By the end, it's revealed that Jimmy was the subject of a horrifying military program designed to convert the pacifistic into brutally efficient killing machines, by loading them with doses of violence-inducing drugs. The rectangular light he's been responding to all this while was the window from which his captors were observing as he made his way around the testing field. The adversaries he's been fighting and destroying one by one were none other than his fellow soldiers, including his best friend Vince, who meets a bloody demise when Jimmy momentarily fails to recognise him and hurls a pool ball at his temple.

The Victor was the second film created by Hayes and Austin's company Animation City (the first being the wordless fantasy short Skywhales from 1983). Commissioned by Channel 4 as part of its early commitment to giving the UK animation industry a much-needed shot in the arm, the film took inspiration from a 1970s World In Action documentary about the testing of the drug BZ on US soldiers (in that regard it has thematic parallels with the 1990 Tim Robbins thriller Jacob's Ladder), but also a personal anecdote concerning a friend's recent experiences in combining two lots of prescription drugs, which resulted in hallucinations. The prescribing doctor's response - "I wondered if that might happen...I haven't used those two drugs together before" - became dialogue inserted verbatim into the mouths of one of the characters, revealing as it does authority at its most offhandedly slapdash. At just shy of 15 minutes in length, the project was an ambitious one and faced some budgetary hurdles, but paid off handsomely when the completed film proved popular in the festival circuit and received a theatrical run at the Scala cinema in London, attached to the comic horror feature The Return of The Living Dead. Its Channel 4 debut was highly belated (Clare Kitson, in her 2008 book British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, speculates that the film was initially withheld on account of its theatrical release, after which it just had trouble securing a suitable timeslot), but finally saw the light of day - or, more accurately, the dimness of night - in 1989, going out at a 23:30 airing when few children were likely to be watching. 

Jimmy's backstory is laid out in the beginning through a series of predominantly still images, offering glimpses into his life pre-conscription and establishing not only his ordinarily peaceful nature (he is seen sporting a shirt with the peace symbol and bearing an anti-war placard) but also that he was a highly sociable being, constantly surrounded by companions. Close scrutiny of these images is required to appreciate that the friends from his past are the same figures who'll be turned against him in his drug-induced nightmares; in the meantime, the synthesising of Jimmy's likeness with computer data foreshadows his impending degradation to the status of a machine. The blurring of fantasy and reality brings an uncanny element of déjà vu to the proceedings, a memory that feels ready-made and ready-distorted, and is as troubling for us to pin down as it is for Jimmy. In the film's strangest running gag, Jimmy is harassed by a figure who seems oddly familiar in more ways than one - he bears a striking resemblance to public schoolboy Billy Bunter, a character created for weekly boys' story paper The Magnet in 1908 (his ability to morph into a mutant bat is a total liberty on Hayes and Austin's part), but if we're attentive we'll see that he's actually a monstrous parody of one of Jimmy's former schoolfriends. In spite of the bleak subject matter, there's a playful, anything-goes quality to the fantasy sequences, in which references to British popular culture are abundant (eagle-eyed viewers will notice that Jimmy walks past the TARDIS on the promenade at Brighton, the Fourth Doctor having paid a then-recent visit to the town in the episode "The Leisure Hive"). These references, along with the funfair amusement-style scenarios navigated by Jimmy (a camp haunted house in which the perils become all-too hairy, a dizzying helter skelter and a dodgems track that transforms into a missile-heavy war zone) are suggestive of innocent diversion gone feverishly wrong. The action sequences, meanwhile, are staged with a boldness that evokes the frenetic escapisms of contemporary arcade games (at multiple points, Jimmy decries the inducement to fight as participating in a stupid game), with the consequences proving painfully real even as the details are illusory. 

The surreal visuals and action set-piece might be the most immediately commanding things about The Victor, although for my money its most impactful moments are to be found in its quieter intervals, which convey a sadder and more subdued sense of how Jimmy's once-earnest world has been corrupted and turned against him. The significance of Brighton to Jimmy is not made totally explicit, but we might notice that the steps on which he stands while surveying the deceptively peaceful promenade are the same ones he was glimpsed upon in one of the opening images, where he was seen palling around with Vince and friends in what was evidently a more carefree juncture in their lives. A balloon bearing the RAF roundel floats silently overhead, a signal of the military surveillance that is already omnipresent, as Jimmy muses on the likelihood that Vince (already brutally dispatched) will be in his usual spot, chatting up the waitresses at the local cafe. This was the ground on which he forged his community. It seems as solid as ever, but is only a few movements away from giving way into a pit of hallucinatory carnage, where his erstwhile allies are recast at best as leering bystanders or, at worst, as direct adversaries. Jimmy is plunged into his nightmare with the expressed warning that he is now on his own; the experiment plays out by not merely heightening his inclination to attack, but by eroding his very concept of connection, prompting him to destroy the people he would, under more auspicious circumstances, have greeted as his own. 

Hayes has shared that he approached the film with an interest in exploring what was the more innate human characteristic, aggression or cooperation. Is Jimmy to be seen as a fundamentally peaceful individual whose nature has been forcibly inverted by external forces, or was his pacifism solidified by his sense of social belonging, something that breaks down the instant he loses that camaraderie and has only his primal urges to fall back on? The obliterated of Jimmy's social identity is cited as a necessary factor in his transformation into an ultra-efficient killer, in the joking observations of one of his captors' lackeys that he couldn't expect to find much affinity with the protestors in CND after unleashing such a violent display. Jimmy's repeated howls of disbelief make it plain that he is having difficulty consolidating these conflicting impulses, much to the perturbation of the army general overseeing the procedure. For as futile as Jimmy's objections might seem while he's fastened to a gurney and barely lucid, they represent a spanner of unpredictability within the works that his captors have been unable to weed out, troubling to the general because it indicates a battle not yet won. But then some victories have the potential to prove unmitigatedly Pyrrhic.

The Victor closes by turning the viewer's own perception of violence back on them, with the startling climactic development where Jimmy breaks free of his restraints and his drug-induced demons become solid and real. It amounts to a thorough rejection of the calmer interlude following the experiment, in which rationality appeared to have taken a hold and we were offered a logical explanation for everything Jimmy had been through. Not only do Jimmy's fantasies spill over inexplicably into the external world, his captors' own reality becomes fluid and unstable, with the gun that fails to protect them from Jimmy transforming into what looks like a clew of little pink worms. The barrier between reality and hallucination has been eviscerated, leaving the world to make its inevitable descent into the realm of full-blown nightmares. Given Jimmy's implied destruction of his captors, it might be tempting to read the final outcome through a redemptive lens, with Jimmy rising up against the oppressive forces that had manipulated him into killing his allies - it does, however, come at the expense of his pacifistic nature, which has by now been completely annihilated, to the extent that he no longer expresses resistance or disbelief over his actions. Jimmy has surrendered to his violent impulses, whether induced or innate, and become the ultimate killing machine, so potent that it cannot be contained, with the black abyss that consumes the screen pointing not to triumphant rebellion, but to the impending oblivion. Jimmy's is a battle lost, and it is through an unseen side effect that he takes out everything else along with him. The victor? This is a game that was always fated to have no winners. Jimmy was right to not want to play. 

Weight Gain 4000 (aka Man Say Thing Not)

Who is Kathie Lee Gifford anyway?

That was the question lurking persistently at the back of my mind on a Friday night in the summer of 1998, when I had my first ever South Park experience (the proper old school way, by sneaking into the spare room and keeping the volume down, so that my parents wouldn't figure out what I was watching). The episode I saw was "Weight Gain 4000", then making its UK terrestrial debut on Channel 4, which follows the Colorado mountain community's ill-fated love affair with Kathie Lee Gifford, a celebrity I'm pretty sure no one in the UK had ever heard of before this series came along. At the time she was well-known to Americans as the host of a popular syndicated morning talk show, Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, but as a name she gained absolutely zero traction across the pond. They couldn't have picked an individual to whom the Wickershams and Decklers were more indifferent - so unlike Barbra Streisand, with whom I've since had ample opportunities to get acquainted through countless other media, the send-up she received in early South Park is still what I primarily associate with her. There is exactly one other thing that I know her for, that being her strange guest appearance (alongside her co-host Regis Philbin) in the "Terror of Tiny Toon" segment of The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror IX", in a rare instance of the characters interacting with live action footage - it's a sequence as aesthetically and narratively jarring as you would anticipate, but Gifford herself got a memorable line out of the deal ("I'm going home! Dom DeLuise can interview himself!"). I don't know Kathie Lee and am only vaguely aware of her reputation, but I've never felt that was a particularly insurmountable barrier to appreciating "Weight Gain 4000", since I get the impression that the episode is treating her as something of an arbitrary celebrity anyway. So far as I can tell, the only dialogue taking any kind of really personal jab at Gifford is the observation by one of Mayor McDaniels' aides that she loves children...if they're working in a sweatshop, an allusion to a line of Gifford-branded clothing that became a source of controversy in 1996 when it came to light that sweatshop labour was used in their manufacturing. Otherwise, she could have been swapped out with any number of contemporary celebrities and most of the jokes and plotting would still have made every bit as much sense. The point isn't really Kathie Lee Gifford per se, but what she represents in context, ie: celebrity at its most empty, vapid and disposable. How am I supposed to feel about Gifford? However I want, I suppose. For the purposes of this story, she becomes a total non-entity, a blank slate propped upon a rickety pedestal, onto which the characters can project their adoration and yearning for proximity to that more elevated state of being...or alternatively their self-loathing and feelings of scuppered ambition.

A question that did not play on my mind at all throughout that initial viewing was how I was supposed to feel about Mr Hat, a quirky-looking glove puppet and the South Park resident who is most firmly in the anti-Gifford camp. He and the puppet master, third grade teacher Mr Garrison, have a long-standing grudge against Gifford that dates back to their childhood, when Gifford (then identifying by her birth name, Epstein), snatched a talent show victory from them at the eleventh hour. Her upcoming visit to South Park represents an opportunity to settle the overdue score, and Mr Hat is determined to see that Garrison takes it, and takes it the old-fashioned way, by acquiring a gun and blowing Gifford's brains out. His character I had no difficulty figuring out where I stood on - Gifford might be a non-entity, but I'm positive that Mr Hat isn't. 

Watching "Weight Gain 4000", it never once crossed my mind that Mr Hat was anything other than a living being with a mind of his own. It was extremely easy to buy into his reality, and the show's characteristically flat art style had a significant hand in that, since Mr Hat has the exact same eyes as every other "real" character within the cast. He doesn't emote, and his pupils remain in a mostly fixed position, but he looks no less conscious than anybody else. When I look into the puppet's eyes, I don't see the vacant gaze of an inanimate object, but rather the uncanny intentness of a sapient, if preternatural being that is quietly observing and taking in everything around it. That Mr Hat spends most of his screen time looking directly into the camera doesn't exactly quell my unease. Let's face it, this wouldn't be any stranger or any more absurd than any of the other weekly happenings within this pissant white bread town. If you were on board with the monsters and aliens, the regenerating Kenny, the talking crap as a part of this reality, then why would this living puppet be any more of a stretch? And yet, I remember it coming up in a discussion on South Park back in the day and being mildly perturbed that I was the only one who saw it that way. Everyone else at that table was convinced that Mr Hat was just the alter ego of Garrison and that this was the real joke I wasn't getting. I countered that if you paid close attention to the puppet, his eyes frequently moved. I knew this because whenever Mr Hat was on screen, he was usually what I was focused on. At first I was mainly just guarded against that uncanny stare of his, but I quickly picked up on the fact that the position of his pupils intermittently shifted between shots, in a way that indicated a responsiveness entirely independent of Garrison. It didn't happen in every episode, but it happened enough times to make it worth looking out for. The discussion's response when I cited all of this? "I think you're the loony one in this room." Or something to that effect. I felt like I was being aligned with Garrison, in having some deep-rooted emotional need to see life in the inert puppet. Eh, maybe. It could be that I just have an innate affinity with the delusional. It had never occurred to me that the feral hippo raiding the trash cans in Lily Takes A Walk might be all in Nicky's mind either.

I still believe. I am, however, obliged to reconsider "Weight Gain 4000" from the perspective that it was almost certainly written with the intention that there be some level of ambiguity on this point, and that the average viewer is liable to approach it with the assumption that Mr Hat is just a common or garden puppet and Garrison just very severely disturbed (not an invalid assessment regardless), at least until the end, when the situation is somewhat muddied. After all, this is a familiar trope: the ventriloquist who brings life to an inanimate prop that he subsequently can't control. The implicit question prompted is a fantastically eerie one - who is the real puppet and who is the real puppeteer? It also plays into a very prevalent fear, automatonophobia, the aversion to anything designed to suggest a pseudo-humanity and sapience where none should reasonably exist (puppets, dolls and dummies are among the most common automatonophobic subjects, but it may also apply to statues, mannequins, masks, animatronics and waxworks). It was featured with particular notoriety in the 1945 Ealing anthology Dead of Night, and there are also at least two classic Twilight Zone episodes dealing with this premise (three if we count Talky Tina). The malevolent puppet tale that Garrison's arc in "Weight Gain 4000" most strongly recalls would be Richard Attenborough's underrated 1978 horror Magic, where Anthony Hopkins plays a socially awkward ventriloquist named Corky whose dependence on his dummy Fats takes a deadly turn when the dummy incites him to kill (you'll notice that even their names point to the ominously subverted nature of their dynamic - which of them is flesh and which is wooden?). Mr Hat isn't really like the dummy Fats, however. Fats is a distraction; we spent the whole movie staring at that unnatural little bugger, waiting for the much-anticipated moment where he'd come to life on his own terms (a la the circus doll from Poltergeist), and yet he confounded us by remaining perfectly stationary. This was all our own folly; we were warned from the start, on no uncertain terms, how this was going to work and of the real meaning behind the title: "Magic is misdirection, and misdirection is getting the people to look in the wrong place at the wrong times." Not so with Mr Hat. His is a presence that both demands and rewards close scrutiny. Keep your eyes on him for long enough and he'll move.

As a concept, Mr Hat didn't come from nowhere. He is thought to have been based on Mr High Hat, a real educational tool designed to help kindergarteners develop language skills (South Park co-creator Trey Parker confirmed that Mr Hat was modelled on a puppet used by one of his own teachers to deliver lessons - the kicker being that, unlike Garrison, she didn't bother to throw her voice and just synced up its movements with a vinyl record - although Garrison himself took inspiration from a fruity literature teacher who'd had some novel opinions on Beowulf). I suspect that the whole Garrison-Hat dynamic originated with the observation that it would be hilarious to see a teacher who used a Mr High Hat puppet getting into a Magic-type scenario with it, and "Weight Gain 4000" is the episode that attempts to mine the most out-and-out spookiness from that prospect. On the automatonophobia scale, Mr Hat occupies a curious middle ground. He's uncanny, but he doesn't take you all the way into the valley. He was based on an actual educational puppet, and as such he was designed to look basically cute and ostensibly innocent, although the beady intentness of his gaze ends up running contrary to that.  It is interesting to note that his original design, as seen in the first episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", didn't have eyes at all. I couldn't tell you if this was revised specifically for the purposes of "Weight Gain 4000" (which was the second episode produced, although "Volcano" aired ahead of it in the US, leaving me a bit unclear on the official ordering), but the addition of eyes completely rewires your perception of the character. As well being more consistent with the design of the original Mr High Hat puppet, it makes him a whole lot more convincing as an antagonist here. The eyes become a window into the puppet's crazed little soul - without them, it becomes harder to suppose that he has one. In "Weight Gain 4000" they are put to particularly sinister use in a sequence where he coerces Garrison by making his pupils glow red and doing an Exorcist-style head spin (for the record, I don't count this among those instances of eye movement suggesting independent responsiveness, since it is framed in such a way that it could be in Garrison's mind; the others are not). Another unsettling touch is that most of Mr Hat's dialogue in this episode is delivered in a voice that is significantly deeper and more threatening than the one Garrison usually gives him, which becomes especially creepy in shots where the focus is on the puppet and you can't actually see Garrison's lips moving (notably, when he retrieves Mr Hat from the dresser drawer), making it easier to buy into the premise of the voice being the puppet's own. Also, while I doubt this allusion was intentional, something that doesn't escape my notice about Garrison is his ambidexterity, with his left hand being his "own" hand and his right hand the one claimed by Mr Hat. Same predicament as Norman Bates, then.

The premise of "Weight Gain 4000" has it that Cartman has been named the winner of a national environmental essay contest, and is due to have his award presented to him by Kathie Lee Gifford in a televised ceremony. Cartman refuses to elaborate on the details of his winning paper, which was reportedly chosen from out of over a million entries, causing his peers to suspect that his victory was not legit - in particular Wendy Testaburger (RIP Mary Kay Bergman), who'd put a lot of work into her own submission, an essay about the plight of bottlenose dolphins, and feels cheated by the outcome. The adult characters, meanwhile, are all too wrapped up in the prospect of Gifford's visit to care. For Mayor McDaniels, this is an opportunity to boost her own profile by showcasing what an efficient and cultured little town she's running, with the hopes that she might be able to ditch all of these stupid hicks and move onto something more glamorous. For Chef (RIP Isaac Hayes), who's been asked by McDaniels to perform a song at the ceremony, it's an opportunity to get his rocks off with a sultry queen of sexual fantasy (his words). And for the town, it's a chance to experience an ephemeral sip of elevation, by basking in the aura of the celebrity passing through and maybe working their way into a fleeting crowd shot on national television. What nobody is talking about (apart from Wendy and Stan) is the dolphins. There are no actual dolphins in the episode, but they represent the real aggrieved party in this scenario - the worthy causes for which the essay contest was presumably designed to promote awareness, but that end up being lost amid what it ultimately becomes, a spectacle of publicity whoring and vacuous celebrity worship. When Cartman dismisses dolphins as "intelligent and friendly on rye bread with some mayonnaise", he does so in explicitly meaner and more forward terms than everyone else, but he sums up the basic indifference of the whole town.

I don't think it's controversial to say that the individual we most care about in all of this is Garrison. Later installments would go to lengths to cement him as a man (or woman, depending on when you were watching) whose unpleasantness and depravity knew no bounds, but for now, we are just two (three?) episodes in and he is by and far the most sympathetic character here. It is difficult not to feel for anyone whose life is as screwed up and vulnerable as his evidently is, but he's also appealing because he is, among the adults, the only dissenter who doesn't accord with the town's mindless worship of Gifford. Which is not to say that he isn't just as warped by the allure of celebrity as the others. His resentment of Gifford stems from her having beaten him in a national talent show as a child, and (as he sees it) costing him his own shot at stardom. The underlying insinuation is that celebrity is interchangeable, and that the media stars we put on pedestals are no better or more deserving than the rest of us, but just had all the lucky breaks. When it comes to Gifford he is both right and wrong. On the one hand, it would be churlish to deny that Kathie won because she was the better ventriloquist, and she clearly stoked young Herbert's feelings of inadequacy in that regard - the thing that upset him the most about young Kathie's performance is that she was able to throw her voice with two puppets at once, something he struggles to do with just one. But then it can't also be denied she had an unfair advantage with all of that luxuriously over the top stage production. As Garrison puts it, "She had choreography. How could we compete with that?!"

Garrison's increasing urge to destroy Gifford is driven by his distorted sense of justice, and by Mr Hat's (blatantly erroneous) assurances that it will make everything better, but initially he sets his sights on merely upstaging her, when McDaniels enlists him to direct the children in a play about the history of South Park as part of the ceremony. He attempts to assert control over Mr Hat by confining him to a dresser drawer, but finds that his disdain for Gifford won't be so easily suppressed; McDaniels sits in on a rehearsal and is naturally horrified to discover that it consists of the children beating one another senseless in a recreation of a historic confrontation between pioneers and the Utes. Garrison's defence is that his play is historically accurate, though we suspect that the violent spectacle stems less from any noble obligation to not whitewash the atrocities committed against the Utes than it does a passive-aggressive expressing of his loathing for Gifford (whether he's conscious of it or not). To give McDaniels her due, she is the closest thing this story has to a semi-sensible adult. She's in it for herself and is explicitly indifferent to the matter of whether Cartman won the contest fairly, but she at least has a decent handle on what is and isn't appropriate for the ceremony (it's just unfortunate that she didn't think to vet the song Chef had prepared as she did Garrison's play). When she challenges Garrison on whether their esteemed guest would actually enjoy seeing children crack each other's heads open, he lets his disdain for Gifford slip, loudly and in front of the entire town, and gets completely ostracised for it. It's for this reason that we don't lose sympathy with Garrison, in spite of his startling aloofness for the injured children, and McDaniels clearly being in the right about the inappropriateness of his play - we can feel the crushing loneliness of where he stands. The residents of South Park, much like the residents of Springfield, are governed by the law of mob mentality, which Garrison has found himself in the dire position of being vocally out of step with. Hence why he goes back to Mr Hat. The puppet is the only ally he has.

In the meantime, Cartman faces a quandary of his own, since McDaniels has suggested that he get in shape for his television appearance, but he isn't inclined to break his ingrained habit of sitting on the couch all evening and stuffing his face with Cheesy Poofs. In "Weight Gain 4000", Parker and Stone are clearly making some kind of statement about television culture and the media we're primed to emulate, with the episode title deriving from the dubious nutritional product into which Eric invests all of his hopes and dreams of looking his best for the day of the ceremony. After seeing an ad on TV (and being naturally undeterred by its disclaimer that it might lead to irreversible damage to the liver and kidneys), he's convinced that he can achieve a perfectly toned body through a program of non-stop consumption and parroting of the promotion's inane "Beefcake!" sloganeering. In reality, it proves a fast track to morbid obesity. Although Wendy would appear to be Garrison's obvious parallel, in being similarly aggrieved about losing a contest under circumstances she considers unfair, when you look at it his story actually has more in common with Cartman's. Both are subjugated by a voice that compels them to unquestionably obey. In both cases this voice arises from an object that serves as a substitute for human companionship, and gets to them by playing off of their inadequacies and selling them a facile solution to a problem it will, in actuality, only exacerbate. The television promises Cartman speedy buffness, but causes him to become more overweight than ever. Mr Hat promises Garrison instant healing for his long-term psychological distress, but goads him down a route that can only finish off his already wrecked mental health. There's not such a difference between Cartman's misplaced faith in what his television is telling him to do and Garrison's willingness to go along with what his puppet buddy is asking (outside of Garrison at least having reservations in the beginning). Both are equally insane. At the same time, the whole town buys into a mass delusion regarding the ceremony, a parade of lightweight gestures designed to fuel the sensation of getting their fifteen minutes of fame while nothing of real substance is accomplished, not least as far as those suffering dolphins are concerned (Man say thing not!). Lacking from the occasion is any spotlight on Cartman's paper or on the thoughtful issues he supposedly raised, because that is decidedly not its purpose.

Determined to not lose sight of that point is Wendy, who is the most competent participant in all of this, something that might put her in the loneliest position of all, for competence is not in abundant supply in South Park. Garrison, for his part, is really not adept at this assassination business. Not only does he show up to the ceremony openly brandishing a rifle (which he acquired from Jimbo with minimal questioning), he approaches the last person it is within his interests to be seen by, Officer Barbrady, to ask for pointers on where to get a clear shot view of Gifford. But then neither is Barbrady adept at this policing business, cheerfully directing Garrison to the book depository, so it balances out. Since no one with any authority has had the initiative or curiosity to take a look at Cartman's paper, Wendy chooses to take justice into her own hands, by breaking into the classroom filing cabinet, where she discovers that Cartman's winning paper was nothing other than a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 1854 publication Walden; or, Life In The Woods, a plagiarism so slackly barefaced that all he did was cross out Thoreau's name on the cover and pencil in his own. Even so, her subsequent efforts to expose Cartman's cheating are thwarted by the town's illiterate disinterest, as Wendy realises, despairingly, that they are uniformly lacking in awareness for one of the seminal works of American literature. A pronounced link is drawn between all this mass worship of celebrity and the televisual image and the dumbing down of cultural standards, when Wendy admonishes the town with the rejoinder, "I bet if Walden was a sitcom you'd all know what it is!" And it would be unfair to suggest that this problem is limited to South Park. Whatever screwy virus has infected this town has already spread out far beyond its confines - the fact that Cartman's paper got past every check in a national competition without anybody noticing is pretty fucking telling. To say nothing of the episode's most bizarre gag, when Wendy pulls her own submission from the cabinet to find that the anonymous judges who marked it had the same inexplicable misconception about (and lack of compassion for) dolphins as Cartman, questioning why, if they're so smart, they would live in igloos.^[1] The masses are a mindless bunch. But then the wayward individualism Garrison embodies also gets flipped on its head, once the ceremony is underway and he discovers that, for as isolated as his Kathie Lee hatred has made him in his own community, on a national level he would have to get in line. Gifford is driven into town in a bullet-proof dome (a parody of the popemobile) and it dawns on Garrison that he isn't the first person who's attempted to take a shot at her. Clearly that woman has pissed off a lot of people. But then what celebrity hasn't?

It falls on Wendy to be the moral centre of the episode, when she overhears Garrison discussing the assassination plot with Mr Hat and resolves to put aside her grievances with Cartman until she's ensured Gifford's safety. Which is ironic, in a way, because if we're viewing Season 1 in a vacuum, then I think Wendy ends up being the most profoundly evil South Park resident of them all. At this stage, I'm not even sure that Cartman's got that much on her. His rap sheet within those first 13 episodes is already pretty ugly - he's awful to Pip (but then so is everyone else), he dehumanises Marvin and he takes an unsettling amount of joy in dressing up as Hitler for a Halloween party - but rarely takes him above the level of a particularly mean and ignorant school yard bully. In terms of all-out unbridled malevolence, there's surely nothing that tops Wendy's actions at the end of "Tom's Rhinoplasty". Justice for Ms Ellen, who was perfectly lovely and never did anything to hurt anyone (no, Kenny doesn't count - that was just fate working its usual way with him).

Still, you can't deny the girl's got guts. When Barbrady proves useless in locating and apprehending the armed Garrison (in spite of his having earlier told Garrison where to go), she's prepared to confront him directly, along with Stan, the only one of the central four who could be convinced that saving Gifford was a nobler endeavour than being on television. By now, they're getting to the point in the ceremony where Gifford is about to hand Cartman his award, for which she's presumably going to have to briefly open up her glass bubble, and that's all Garrison needs. Wendy tries to talk him out of it by speaking to him from a position of empathy, insisting that she understands how he feels because she's just been through a similar experience with Cartman. This affinity is something that Garrison wasn't expecting and responds to, leaving the matter teetering on a knife edge as to where it might go. During their confrontation, you'll notice that Mr Hat is only visible in shots where Garrison is leaning toward shooting Gifford; whenever it looks like Wendy might be reaching him, the puppet can't be seen. It's a neat way of illustrating the tug of war between Wendy and Mr Hat for Garrison's senses, showing us which of them has the advantage in that given moment. Wendy finally gets Garrison to lower his gun, making it look as though she might have clinched it, but all hopes of a peaceful resolution are brutally dashed when Stan transpires to be a terrible judge of when to keep his mouth shut. He makes the fatal move of expressing awe for Gifford's ventriloquist mettle, triggering Garrison's feelings of inadequacy and ensuring that Mr Hat gets the final word. The shot is fired, just as the stage cracks under Cartman's immense weight, causing Gifford to be flung from it and Kenny to take the bullet instead, to nobody's real horror. Kyle does his thing and acknowledges Kenny's death in the moment, but otherwise the town moves on almost instantly from what by all rights should have been an appallingly traumatic spectacle, too hung up on the premature departure of Gifford and the TV crew to care. It's almost as if they all know this isn't a consequence that will actually stick.

Indeed, the most troubling aspect of the ending is not Kenny's improbable impaling on the flagpole, but the way Wendy ultimately betrays her own principles. I'm not talking about her attempts to publicly expose Cartman as a cheater, coming after that seemingly heartfelt speech to Garrison about her own experience in learning how to lose gracefully. The script definitely frames her as something of a hypocrite in this regard (Stan: "What about not holding anything against the person who wins?" Wendy: "Well, not if it's Cartman!") but the thing is, she's not wrong. Cartman committed a really audacious act of plagiarism; I don't think it was petty to try to expose him at all. No, I'm talking about how, when she fails to inspire the faintest level of outrage over Cartman's cheating, she gives up and accepts a consolation prize in the form of Stan's offer of a tuna fish sandwich. Tuna fish, you say? From the girl who'd written so passionately about the suffering of bottlenose dolphins? See the incongruity there? I mean, for all we know the tuna Kyle's mom buys is all dolphin-friendly (Shelia Brofloski is nothing if not conscientious, right?), and the script doesn't explicitly call Wendy out on this point, but I find it hard to believe that it wasn't a deliberate choice to specify that the sandwiches would be tuna of all things. It's a contradiction made all the more unsettling for the fact that it passes without comment, with Wendy giving only a resigned "What the hell" and following after Stan. Does it imply that she was never that sincere in her cause, or that she's giving up then and there, having realised the futility of what she's up against? Either way, this shit's bleak.

Fortunately the ending is a little less unhappy in other regards. The only character who's left with no form of consolation (besides Kenny) is McDaniels, last seen lamenting her thwarted ambitions of escaping the town and inadvertently insulting its populace before a microphone. Garrison gets hauled off to the nearest psychiatric hospital, which in theory should mean that he'll get the help he needs, although when Stan and Kyle later pay him a visit he indicates that Mr Hat is the actual target of the psychiatric intervention. Misdirection, or does the puppet's psychosis indeed put Garrison's in the shade? In either case, the extensive therapy Mr Hat went through evidently got results; as far as I'm aware, he never expressed any further desire to kill Kathie Lee Gifford. Actively pushing Garrison into doing bad or questionable things also wasn't his raison d'etre going forward, at least not in this way. Elsewhere, Cartman's blind adherence to Weight Gain 4000 has paid off, in the sense that he gets to be on television after all, in an interview with Geraldo Rivera (ah, now this is a US talk show host I am familiar with - the Al Capone's vault guy, yes?), having become so morbidly obese that he can't leave his house. Despite the distinctly derogatory nature of the feature, Cartman proclaims himself to be living proof that a person can attain their dreams. Judging by his continued spewing of that "Beefcake!" nonsense, he's still entrenched in the delusion that he's achieved optimum buffness, although maybe that's of no odds. After all, it got him on the receiving end of national media attention, however dubious and however transitory, and that's all the affirmation he needs. And at the very end we see that Chef also achieved his short-term goal of getting Gifford to sleep with him, in spite of how mightily perturbed she'd looked at the time by his public serenade about hummingbird sex (a simile Chef went even harder with in the version appearing on the Chef Aid album, where he sings about the male hummingbird letting his humming gravy fly all over the nest, or somesuch). Unfortunately, she might even be too much of a rabid sex maniac for him to handle.

There is a certain bitter irony in the episode's final arrangement with Garrison and Mr Hat (both are confined, but the latter is much more heavily restrained), given the way their characterisation would subsequently go. "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride" would drop the first all-important hint that Garrison's mental health issues were further compounded by his being a self-hating gay who was terrified to leave the closet. It also came to light that Mr Hat was enjoying a freedom that Garrison had adamantly denied himself, in that he was more at ease with his sexuality and routinely fantasising about being in a sauna with pro-footballer Brett Favre and a bottle of thousand island dressing, a pleasure that Garrison could only experience vicariously, via his connection with Mr Hat. Mr Hat was so much more liberated in fact that in "Summer Sucks" of Season 2 he was able to temporarily abandon Garrison to pursue his kinky fantasies for real, driving Garrison to attempt to replicate their relationship with a vaguely human-shaped twig that, most tellingly, wore a pink triangle on its shirt. I will say that if Mr Hat is nothing more than Garrison's alter ego, then I'd be considerably less disturbed and confounded by the events of "Weight Gain 4000" than by whatever is meant to be going on with that bizarre love triangle with Mr Garrison, Mr Hat and Mr Twig. The Gifford murder plot would at least be comprehensible.

Actually, the Garrison-Hat interaction that gives me the most pause is a fairly low-key one, from the Season 1 finale "Cartman's Mom Is A Dirty Slut". We find the two at a bar, with Garrison wanting to go home for the night and Mr Hat insisting on "just one more cosmopolitan". Garrison tells the puppet it has a drinking problem it needs to admit to, but wilfully orders the requested beverage. The implications of this exchange are quite a bit more unsettling than first meets the eye. From Mr Hat's words, it isn't clear if the craving for cosmopolitans is his own, or if he's enticing Garrison to keep drinking (thus becoming the devil on his shoulder yet again, albeit less dramatically than in "Weight Gain 4000") - Garrison's response indicates the former, although in practice it might make little difference. It's safe to say that, either way, Garrison will be the one physically drinking that cosmopolitan, even if it is to accommodate an alcohol dependency originating with his other half. If it's not his problem, then he's obliged to make it his own. Their partnership hinges on a shared energy, an uncanny interrelation of both form and personality. Garrison relies on Mr Hat to articulate the forbidden regions of his psyche that he's too terrified to face alone, while Mr Hat relies on Garrison to articulate him. That is the nature of their symbiosis - they are both each other's voice.

So is Mr Hat real? That is a silly question. Of course he is. You only have to pay attention to him across enough episodes and I promise you'll see the evidence.

Look, to play devil's advocate for just a moment, the most compelling case against Mr Hat's reality is that characters who attempt to come at Garrison's relationship with the puppet from a rational standpoint often end up sounding pretty danged convincing. In particular, the psychiatrist Garrison sought out in "Summer Sucks" whilst pining for the absent Mr Hat (actually the titular character of another contemporary Comedy Central series, Dr Katz, Professional Therapist) really did seem like he had Garrison's number: "I think Mr Hat was actually your gay side trying to come out. It's you who is gay, but you're in denial, so you act out your gay persona with a homosexual puppet." It makes sense as he says it. But then Katz never met Mr Hat in person. And in the same episode we also get what also seems like irrefutable proof of Mr Hat's reality, when we go inside Brett Favre's sauna to find him in the company of the stray puppet. Favre greets him cordially and there's a close-up of Mr Hat blinking and returning his gaze. The puppet blinked on screen, and the puppet master wasn't anywhere in sight. What more proof do you need, people? A similar situation occurs in "World Wide Recorder Concert", when school counsellor Mr Mackey attempts to talk to Garrison about his daddy issues (they are a doozy, I can tell ya) but is blocked by an aggressively protective Mr Hat. Mackey offers the rational explanation, that Garrison has switched personalities to Mr Hat as a coping mechanism for his traumas. Mr Hat does not himself disagree with this assessment ("Good one, Sherlock. You figure that out all by yourself?") but goes on to wipe the floor with Mackey in a round of fisticuffs, during which he is removed from Garrison's hand, and the children who witness the incident independently acknowledge that it is indeed Hat and Mackey doing the fighting. Clearly the show liked to mess with us by suggesting both possibilities within the same breath. And here's the beauty of it - they don't actually contradict one another. There's no reason why Mr Hat can't be alive and a figure onto which Garrison projects all of his insecurities, hostilities and latent desires. Both things can be true. The real ambiguity might lie with where one stops and the other starts.

Sometimes the puppet's actions defy any and all rationalisation, as seen in "Chef Aid" of Season 2. Mr Twig, then making his sixth appearance with Garrison, becomes the target of a series of strange attacks by an unseen assailant who obviously has access to Garrison's residence. Garrison sets up a camera and summons Barbrady the instant the photos arrive from the developing lab, hoping he'll arrest the culprit, but instead gets branded a "weirdo" by Barbrady and discovers the pathologically jealous Mr Hat lurking inside his closet (ho, could there be a clearer metaphor?). Crucially, the viewer never sees what the pictures actually show, taunting us with the possibility that Garrison might have captured his own unconscious rejection of the twig (and whatever he sees, he has to concede that he's wasted Barbrady's time). This is what Chef presumes to be going on; when he and Garrison later cross paths in police custody (Chef having been arrested for non-payment of a fine and Garrison for his increasingly erratic public behaviour), he offers the diagnosis (less sensitive than Mackey's) that Garrison has "split personality schizophrenic jeebies." And then Mr Hat, determined to get back into Garrison's good graces, shows up and is able to bust them out by using a vehicle to break down the cell wall. Chef is witness to this occurrence, confirming that it isn't just in Garrison's head. By the end of the episode, Chef is a believer. When asked how he escaped, he has to credit the jailbreak to Mr Hat, even though he has lingering questions about how the puppet managed to reach the gas pedal.

Is Mr Twig real? Sure, why not? Given enough time I've a feeling he could have gone full Otesánek.

Finally, while Mr Hat is typically perceived as a reflection of all of the most awkward, problematic and messed up traits in Garrison (we haven't even touched on his role in "Chef Goes Nanners"), it is only fair to acknowledge that there are occasions where he's conversely been the voice of reason in their dynamic. In the Season 3 episode "Succubus", he (rightly) advised Garrison that his "poontang" facade was pulling the wool over nobody's eyes. A more subtle instance of Mr. Hat being able to claim the moral high ground over Garrison occurs in another Season 3 episode, "Jakovasaurs", when McDaniels reminds Garrison of a sorry incident where he was entrusted with caring for a wounded pigeon with which he supposedly attempted to copulate. Garrison tries to blame the pigeon, insisting that it was promiscuous and asking the townspeople to raise their hands if they can honestly say that they've never slept with it. A split second later and everyone except Garrison has their hands confidently in the air - and if you look at Mr Hat, you can see that his hand is also directed visibly upward. Apparently even he considered that pigeon a low point for Garrison.

 

[1] A lot of people assume it was Garrison himself who wrote that, since it came from his filing cabinet, but he didn't judge this contest and the official script (which differs slightly from the finished product, mind) does indeed specify that it was written by the judges. I'll admit that it's not particularly clear, however. The implications of the people who ran this national context being just as churlish and ill-informed on these issues as Cartman are definitely a whole lot wilder.