Homer The Vigilante (aka Would You Say It's Time For Everyone To Panic?)

 

It goes without saying that The Simpsons is one of those shows that only gets better as you get older. So much of its wizardry lies within its finer details, and in the subtle humor, cultural references and character nuances that are largely unattainable to a child, but will hit you with a spanking new resonance when adulthood sets in. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for watching the series through the eyes of an unworldly nipper and having no choice but to go along with the flow, to wherever it might lead you. In those days, when you had no real frame of reference for a good percentage of what was going on, the world of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie always seemed so much more random and mysterious. Remember, for instance, what it was like to be 10 years old and experiencing "Homer The Vigilante" (1F09) for the very first time, never having heard of Stanley Kramer's 1963 marathon-lengthed farce It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and having no idea how you were even expected to process the direction in which the narrative eventually heads? In those final two and a half minutes, we witness the populace of Springfield losing its collective mind over an elusive fortune reported to be concealed in the outskirts of town beneath a "Big T", an audaciously dizzying swing with which to see out a story that had already seemed to have reached its quota for over the topness. It was almost as though the episode had tumbled down some wild and wonderful rabbit hole - which, for all intents and purposes, it basically had. 

Being in on the joke is great, but not being in on the joke can be a tremendously thrilling experience too. As a child, I became fascinated with that entire ending sequence, and with what I was potentially missing. It felt like the ultimate Simpsons enigma, a great unknown lingering just outside of my understanding, waiting to be discovered and unpicked. I'd quickly deduced that was most likely an elaborate reference to a movie I hadn't seen, for there were two major giveaways. The soundtrack was doing something interesting and unconventional, a tip-off that it was borrowing from an outside source (in this case, Ernest Gold's Academy Award-nominated score), and a bunch of new and distinct faces who were not part of the regular Springfield mob had gotten in on the money-hungry frenzy, the most prominent of which was a semi-coherent man in glasses and a fedora who had apparently been tricked by Bart into driving into a river. He is of course a parody of Phil Silvers' character from It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and the scene with him being hoodwinked by a wily child into an ill-advised aquatic diversion is transplanted pretty much wholesale from the film. And then at the Big T itself (an unusually-shaped palm tree, just like the film's own Big W, which can also be glimpsed in the mise en scene) there are figures modelled on Buddy Hackett and Milton Berle. 1997 saw the publication of a couple of Simpsons reference guides, the official A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family and the unofficial one by Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, both of which pointed me to Kramer's film, and thus began a whole new phase in my cultural education, in which the media I consumed was predominantly dictated by my need to comprehend certain jokes on The Simpsons (I also watched 2001: A Space Odyssey purely to understand the closing sequence of "Deep Space Homer", but it frankly left even more baffled than when I'd come in). Back then, if I wanted to see an older movie it typically meant having to wait for it to show up on television, which could be a slow and frustrating process, but in 1999 my patience paid off. The film left a strong enough impression that, some years later, I unsuccessfully campaigned to get it screened at my university's student cinema (I was thwarted less by a lack of interest than by the impracticalities of getting hold of a 35mm copy), but the most important thing is that I was finally up to speed on the secrets of "Homer The Vigilante". Still the overarching enigma of that closing sequence refused to fade, even with the necessary research now behind me. The individual choices all made perfect sense, but as a whole it remained such a confounding way of signing off a Simpsons story. There is something about that it seems downright hallucinatory, even within context. 

"Homer The Vigilante" debuted on January 6th 1994 as part of the show's fifth season, and I don't think it's acknowledged enough what a uniquely strange time in the series' life that quinary year was. While nowhere near as darkly cynical or openly portentous as Season 8, the overall tone feels weirdly unsettled. There's a sense that the very fabric of the Simpsons universe is perpetually on the verge of unravelling, whether that's a result of the basic rules and underpinnings being challenged within an episode's conflict (see "The Last Temptation of Homer" and "Homer Loves Flanders"), or just a random tangent it goes off on at the end (see "Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood"). It was also an era when the writers seemed to be getting particularly dependent on doing elaborate parodies of popular movies, occasionally to the point that it formed the basis of the entire plot. Some of these parodies were relatively unintrusive, serving more as platforms on which to examine existing character dynamics -  we all know that "Marge on The Lam" is one big homage to Thelma & Louise, but it ties in logically enough with Marge's characterisation that it's a functional story on its own merits, one that fits in comfortably with the internal grounding of the series. With other parodies, you get the impression that the show's entire universe is bending in order to accommodate the demands of what it's spoofing, with the It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World homage in "Vigilante" belonging in that second camp. The story gets so intensely frenetic in those final moments, with so much going on and so many outside elements at play (the soundtrack, the appearance from Phil Silvers), that it has the effect of suggesting a heightened reality, one that's strayed drastically far from the show's regular wheelhouse. By the end, the characters aren't in Kansas (or indeed Springfield) any more, but have gone to some whole other plane of existence in which the worlds of The Simpsons and Stanley Kramer have mysteriously converged (in a way that's not altogether different from the moment in "Selma's Choice" where Marge's memories become fused with images from The Prince of Tides). The entire set-up, and not just Malloy's promise of hidden loot, becomes an extravagant mirage. There's that off-kilter shot where Silvers' grinning mug is inserted among a group of Springfieldians looking downward, as if he were just one of the guys. The angelic choir music that plays as the assorted treasure hunters pull out their shovels and tunnel deep into the earth beneath the Big T might have been pilfered wholesale from the movie, but the ethereal aura it creates causes the moment to feel particularly illusory. It is both a false promise of salvation, foreshadowing the eventual reveal that there is no buried fortune, and a tip-off that things in general have gone very deeply haywire for Homer and co.

Or it might just be that the entirety of "Vigilante" is an illusion. It opens in the early hours, with the family all sleeping, and I'm half-tempted to propose a fan theory that the ensuing events are nothing more than a colourful dream that one of the household is having (presumably Homer or Lisa, given that they're most at the forefront). Even before we get to that overblown ending, "Vigilante" is a peculiar little beast. Penned by John Swartzwelder, this might just be the most surreal non-Halloween entry of the season - impressive, when you consider that it arrived hot on the heels of "$pringfield (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)", an episode with a particularly baffling structure and execution that evoked a collection of miniature fever dreams sewn together. As a story, "Vigilante" flows much more fluidly and coherently than "$pringfield" (helped along by the fact that there are no subplots it has to juggle), but it somehow feels even more unreal. It's not that the events of "Vigilante" are especially far-fetched - this was the same season where Homer went into space and Bart was keeping a full-grown African elephant in the backyard, and the premise of an artful burglar who's capable of swiping anything in Springfield that isn't nailed down feels positively modest and down to earth by comparison. It's more that this burglar goes about his swiping to a leitmotif modelled on Henry Mancini's theme for The Pink Panther (a reference that was never lost on me, even as a child), which puts his thieving antics in conspicuous quotation marks. Again, it's the movie allusions that take the story to a whole other realm, where everything is all very knowing and caricatured. The Cat Burglar is a cartoon creation by even The Simpsons' standards, at once too farcical to be taken overly seriously as a threat and a way more formidable foe than anyone in Springfield can conceivably handle. (He certainly isn't challenged by the town's approach to security. One of my favourite gags occurs right at the start when we see the burglar's infiltration of the Simpsons' household from his perspective. He gets his tools out, ready to break open the lock on their front door, and does a double take when he finds Homer's keys dangling there, ready for him to turn.)

The absurdity streak continues during a later scene where Homer looks to up his game against the burglar by shopping for weapons at Herman's military antiques store, and is taken out back for a glimpse at the hottest, most clandestine merchandise on offer - a miniature version of the A-bomb, which Homer fantasies about dropping on a gathering of unsuspecting beat poets. This sequence is clearly framed as an idle daydream in context (so a dream within a dream?), but it's still such a digression, in that it's basically an excuse to recreate that iconic shot from Dr Strangelove (or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb) where Slim Pickens goes out on the ultimate adrenalin rush, riding the titular bomb to the doomed Earth below. But then the real punchline occurs when Homer is forced to return to reality, where we see that he's gotten as far as actually mounting the bomb. Herman indignantly gestures to a sign right next to it explicitly forbidding such behaviour. Apparently it's the standard reaction of everybody who sees the bomb to get high on a Pickens-inspired power trip, to the point that would necessitate the installation of a sign. Which really sums up the spirit of the entire episode. It's a cautionary tale about the dumb stuff that happens when people inevitably get drunk on their own bravado.

It's fair to say that "Vigilante" is not a particularly character-driven episode. Or rather, it's not particularly driven by the characters as individuals. The participant who gets the most heartfelt treatment is naturally Lisa, whose beloved saxophone is stolen by the Cat Burglar, depriving her of her principal means of self-expression and grounding this otherwise entirely silly story with a firm enough undercurrent of pathos. Despite the amount of screentime he's given, and the personal stakes afforded through the theft of Lisa's saxophone, it is only nominally about Homer. "Vigilante" is best understood as a study of the psychology of Springfield as a collective, and just how badly it can react when faced with a crisis, and in that regard Homer becomes more of a representative of the wrong-headedness of the town. This is the recurring theme we've seen since pretty much the beginning, with community spirit forever giving way mob mentality, and the masses being swayed in whatever arbitrary direction is suggested to them. Neither the media or the law enforcement prove in any way reassuring in their responses to the Cat Burglar - Kent Brockman insists on reporting through the most disastrous lens possible ("When cat burglaries start, can mass murders be far behind?"), and while the police get as far as uncovering a clue in the form of a handkerchief dropped at one of the crime scenes, compromising the evidence comes only too naturally and too moronically to Wiggum. When it falls upon the townspeople to pull together and come up with a solution of their own, Ned has a sensible idea in proposing that they start a Neighbourhood Watch, in which everybody looks out for everybody else. The town seems eager to embrace this initiative, until Ned turns the tide against himself with an ill-judged display of modesty, enabling Homer to rise to the top in his stead - not because he consciously understands how to work the crowd, but because he so perfectly embodies the mindlessness of its ethos ("We don't need a thinker, we need a doer - someone who'll act without considering the consequences!"). Homer, whose personality and antics had already seen a marked broadening throughout the course of Season 5, is as loud and obnoxious as he'd ever been in "Vigilante", although in this context it is justified with the perspective that he's representing something much bigger than himself. It also accounts for how he can be so brazenly dismissive of not only his father, but of the entire older generation, when Abe offers to help with the crusade against the Cat Burglar, but is refused on the grounds that he's an old man, and "old people are useless". Despite the significance of this particular plot point to the eventual resolution, Homer's on the nose stance comes from basically nowhere; there are no establishing moments where he's shown having any kind of personal difficulty with Abe, and "Vigilante" certainly isn't about his relationship with his father. Rather, he's best understood as speaking for a broader societal attitude - the idea that senior citizens are to be cast aside and ignored. He also makes himself ripe for a humbling, for it is this very assumption that fatally wrongfoots his investigation, causing him to underestimate not only what Abe could potentially bring to the table, but who he might be up against.

Homer goes about assembling a ragtag team of non-seniors to patrol the streets of Springfield, looking for any opportunity to hurl their weight around. Again, the particulars of the group's dynamic don't really matter. Moe and Barney are a given, Apu was slowly being cemented as part of Homer's social circle, and we were slap dab in the middle of the era where there was a concerted effort to make Skinner one of the guys (something more or less abandoned with Season 6; the contrast was often hilarious, but it was too insurmountable a stretch that he and Homer would actually choose to hang out together), but none of them get much of a chance to act as individuals. Under Homer's guidance they swiftly devolve into faceless followers with less interest in protecting their community than in fuelling their own thuggish sensation of being at the top of the pile. It's not just the perspective of the elderly that gets discarded amid this alpha-driven arrangement, but that of the younger generation too. The thread with Lisa's saxophone provides a valuable counterpoint to the vulgar tendencies of the group, in that it gives Homer something genuinely righteous to be fighting for. The saxophone is the only stolen item that actually matters (aside from the cubic zirconia that proves crucial in the latter half), because it is the one area in which the Cat Burglar's practices are shown to have caused genuine harm. None of the other thefts are treated with anywhere near as much gravity. Marge's pearl necklace was also stolen, but she has an entire drawer full of them, and while Bart wakes up to find his stamp collection gone, in his case it's all a great joke that he would out himself as partaking in a hobby that nerdy (Lisa's observation that "Bart's pain is funny, but mine isn't" might seem a little mean by her standards, but she is only vocalising the stance being taken by the plot). Lisa has been robbed of her emotional mobility, which Homer promises to restore, only for her voice to become all the more buried beneath his chaotic agenda of harassing buskers, flipping vehicles with people's mouthy grandmas inside upside down, and world domination. Lisa represents the vulnerable youngsters on whose behalf this war is supposedly being waged, so that they might grow up in a safer, more nurturing environment, but who inevitably get pushed aside, or worse still, corrupted by its hopelessly subverted values. There are multiple instances where we see Homer's toxic influence being spread among Springfield's impressionable young minds. Bart is apparently permitted to participate in a chaotic session involving shotguns. The mob happens upon Jimbo (who's possibly been watching too much Dead Poets Society) spraying "Carpe Diem" onto the side of a building, and not only lets him off the hook when his rationale accords with their own ("It makes me feel like a big man!"), they agree to recruit him into their ranks (on the condition that he supplies his own weapon, in the form of a sack filled with doorknobs^[1]). Later, Homer is lured away from his post by the sight of underage kids drinking beer without a permit, only to get in on the beer binge himself and become the very model for belching frat boy behaviour.

As society disintegrates ever further under Homer's watch, the mystery of the Cat Burglar ends up not being much of a mystery at all, although the episode deftly avoids overselling that point. You get no prizes if you figured out long before any of the characters did that the burglar is his fellow retiree Malloy, for who else could it have been? The answer is right under the community's noses the entire time, but nor is it made entirely explicit up until Abe's epiphany. If you were particularly attentive, you might have been able to match the burglar's silhouette in the opening sequence to Malloy's outline when he appears at Abe's bedroom to borrow his ointment. Perhaps you recognised his voice when he calls in during Homer's televised interview with Brockman to publicly announce his plans for pilfering the cubic zirconia from the Springfield Museum (prompting Homer to take his rage out on an innocent stagehand). Odds are that you picked up on how he sticks out like a sore thumb among everyone else in the story - a one-off character who's a blatant outsider to the ethos of community, and clearly being set up for plot significance. By the time he shows up at the threatened museum dressed in black the jig is pretty well up. Malloy is voiced by the late actor Sam Neill, who gives one of the most sublimely underrated guest performances of the series. His cool, collected and impeccably well-mannered affability makes him the very antithesis of a town that spends the entirety of the episode (and most of the series) racing around like headless chickens, and that, more so than his Henry Mancini-inspired leitmotif, is what makes him such a formidable nemesis. Not even the viewer is immune to his offences, for we too end up liking him and wanting him to get away with his crimes. The man is a gentleman through and through (his prior failure to clean off the applicator on Abe's ointment notwithstanding), but there is still a discernable element of amused disdain in how he handles the Springfieldians. At the start, when he prizes a portable television from the sleeping Bart's arms and leaves him with a book entitled Coping With Loss, I can't decide if that's his politeness showing or just his penchant for taunting his victims. It's evident that Malloy is in the burglary game because he enjoys the thrill of infiltration, and of toying with all of these foolish souls, and in a way, good for him - he represents an undervalued class fighting back against a system that's written him off as worthless and expects him to spend his remaining years withering away in a rundown retirement home. He was always above suspicion because nobody imagined that somebody so low down in the social food chain could be such a worthy adversary. In the end he's done in by Abe, who notices that Malloy has the stolen zirconia on his coffee table and finally puts two and two together. Maybe Malloy got a little too cocky, or maybe he expected a little more solidarity from Abe, who is part of that same undervalued class. But then how could Abe resist the opportunity to get back at Homer's earlier slighting by turning up at his door and announcing that he's cracked the mystery? Actually, this is a pretty generous move on Abe's part, demonstrating how much he fundamentally loves his son. If he'd really wanted to show Homer up, he could have gone to the police directly and wallowed in all of the credit, but instead he allows Homer to take the lead and obtain redemption at a time when the entire town was baying for his blood for failing to keep tabs on the zirconia.

Unlike Homer, Malloy clearly does understand how to work the masses. When cornered, he comes very close to wheedling his way out of trouble on the basis of his charisma alone, agreeing to return all of the stolen items (including Lisa's saxophone) and stroking at the townspeople's egos by telling them how much he likes them. Again, just beneath Neill's charming performance you can practically hear him snickering internally at just how easy they are to hoodwink. It is, surprisingly, Wiggum who puts his foot down and reminds everyone that they can't just ignore the fact that Malloy is a highly prolific criminal. But Malloy isn't beaten yet. He still has one further ace up his sleeve, which is what gets us into our It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World pastiche. Malloy makes his ultimate play, laying out a scenario that this malleable town couldn't possibly resist. He claims to have amassed millions of stolen dollars over the years, which he's concealed somewhere in Springfield at a site marked by a Big T. He's so obliging that, rather than send them out on a totally haphazard treasure hunt, he's even willing to supply the precise location - the money is buried at 4723 Maple Valley Road ("You take Highway 201 south for 15 minutes. You take a left - a left!..."). It is of course a grand diversion, designed to take eyes off himself for long enough for him to sneak away. The town feasts on the bait and races off with their shovels in hand, while Malloy escapes and presumably legs it to a new life somewhere in South America.

The It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World parody works as brilliantly as it does because, far from being an arbitrary movie homage, it is but the logical culmination of the episode-long obsession with the townspeople's collective mindlessness. This whole thing started with Malloy, an apparent interloper from another reality, waltzing in and turning Springfield upside down, and it ends with the town disappearing up its own delirium into territory that is hitherto unknown, leaving them ultimately stranded and with no clue how they're going to get back to their normal state of affairs (to the extent that, according to a nondescript professor consulted by Brockman, society is on the brink of collapsing into a state where bludgeoning and cannibalism will become the new order). Its surrealness is by design, to illustrate how the characters are touching such drastic new heights in their susceptibility as to have become completely detached from reality. The frenetic pacing and epic scale of Kramer's picture has been lovingly recreated, somehow managing to condense the plot of the movie (160 minutes long in its standard release) into less than 3 minutes and run through many of the highlights (like Phil Silvers cursing a child for convincing him to drive his car into a river). It helps that the two properties are such a great match tonally, not simply in being ambitiously larger than life comedies, but in sharing the same unrelenting cynicism about human nature, and reaching toward much the same conclusion. People on the whole are a greedy, grubby and pathetic little bunch, but you've got to laugh, haven't you?

It's an ending that lays bare the fundamental lack of community spirit that's been fuelling the mob's actions throughout. We all know that it was never about any desire to protect their neighbourhoods and uphold values, or (despite Marge's musings to the contrary) any shared love for the glittering novelties housed at their local museum. For Springfield, moving with the mob is a simple matter of self-preservation, in that it's preferable to be a faceless shadow in a crowd than to be singled out as an outsider (as Homer learns the hard way when the zirconia is stolen on his watch and he becomes a highly acceptable target on which to vent their malaise). With that final suggestion of hidden riches, things degenerate into a matter of everyone for themselves, with the single interest in filling up their pockets with ill-gotten loot - that the alleged fortune was explicitly made up of stolen money is of no odds to any of them, not even to Wiggum and his underlings. Lisa, who's been the episode's moral centre and is satisfied just having her saxophone back, gets to maintain her dignity and sit the sequence out, but the rest of the town is swept up in the frenzied scramble to be the first at the Big T. Even when they've seemingly united in a team effort to dig up the money, Homer is all poised to snatch whatever they unearth for himself - which unfortunately turns out to be merely briefcase with a missive from Malloy. He apologises for sending them on such a wild goose chase, admitting that there is no hidden money and he was merely buying himself time in which to escape. It is hilarious when you contemplate that Malloy would have needed to have planted that briefcase with the note inside in advance, to fall back on in the event that he was caught, which speaks volumes to the meticulousness of his scheming, and his dual need to be extremely polite to his prey and to taunt them in the same breath. 

Malloy's success represents the triumph of the rational individual over the mindless herd, and I think we the audience are entirely satisfied with that outcome. The Cat Burglar played his hand astutely and earned his getaway. It's a meaning that is, unsurprisingly, lost on the Springfieldians, who persist in digging ever deeper, believing that if they keep going, they'll eventually uncover something. Having tasted such an exhilarating high, they still refuse to be brought back to Earth, and insist instead on going in the opposite direction, by burrowing down ludicrously deep into a tunnel of denial and self-delusion. When, some hours later, it dawns on them that they probably won't be locating any millions and, what's more, they've gone so far down that getting back up to the surface could be a problem (an ironic contrast to Malloy's situation), the solution is once again to keep on digging and see what comes of it. It's not just the moral to which they're left oblivious, but the metaphor too.

BBC2 edit alert!: I don't remember Sky 1 touching anything about this episode when it was part of their rotation, but when the Beeb later got a hold of it, I recall they nixed the precise moment where Bart was revealed to be in on the vigilante group's shotgun party. 

[1] This was a line I misunderstood as a child. Back then I'd assumed that "swing a sack of doorknobs" was some idiom I hadn't previously come across, but I would figure out as I got older, with, with the joke being that the vigilante group were taking it all-too literally. Nowadays I'm pretty confident that no such idiom exists and that this is all just a morsel of self-contained nonsense.

Desserts (Best Served Cold?)

The opening gag of Jeff Stark's 1999 comic horror Desserts is so deliciously subtle that it doesn't even register the first time we see it. The credits promise us "a stark film", a term that obviously denotes its writer-director, but slyly underscores the nature of the experience to follow, when Stark's name turns out to be no misnomer. What is immediately striking about Desserts is its bluntness. At a concise four minutes in length (a good chunk of which is occupied by credits), it presents a scenario that's part unbridled nightmare, part macabre joke, and above all a story of sweet, sweet revenge. Its execution is so unabashedly punchy, in fact, that it's not hard to imagine it being repackaged as a public information film, albeit one of the sicker-minded ones. A man (played by Scottish actor Ewan McGregor and identified in the credits as "Stroller") goes for a ramble on the beach and happens upon an unattended chocolate eclair, possibly left behind by some absent-minded picnicker. Looking around and seeing no one else in sight, he decides that the alluring pastry is up for grabs and stuffs it into his mouth. This, needless to say, turns out to be a huge mistake, and the outcome is swift but brutal. Concealed within that humble eclair is an enlarged fish hook, which pierces straight through Stroller's gob and gets him yanked (by some unseen force operating other end of the line) into the depths of the ocean to his presumed doom. A ghoulish twist that convincingly evokes the heavy-handed visual language of a PIF looking to shock viewers away from any number of situations in which they may be tempted to put something into their bodies that could bring them trouble down the road. The presence of the young McGregor might immediately put us in mind of Trainspotting and heroin addiction (the actor's participation was secured by producer Jill Robertson, who had worked as part of the crew on Trainspotting), but Stroller's demise works just as aptly as a metaphor for the pitfalls of developing too much of an appetite for sugary junk food. Or even a straight-up warning about not eating random food items you find lying around in the middle of nowhere, if you don't know where they've been or who might have tampered with them.

At the same time, there is an obvious an animal rights subtext to the short, one that naturally appeals to my vegan sensibilities while warmly recalling the ending of the "Gone Fishin'" episode of Tales from The Cryptkeeper, the younger-skewing animated spin-off of the HBO series Tales From The Crypt. Adapted from a Vault of Horror comic published in 1951, it concerns a grossly irresponsible fisherman who ultimately falls foul of a race of intelligent piscines that like to hunt for humans, in their case by using money as hooked bait. It was a story that had a very profound effect on me, in that even today, if I see any banknotes lying about on the ground, of any value, I'll walk straight past them. I'd like to say it's because I'm honest and want whoever dropped them to have the chance to get them back, but nope, it's because a cartoon show I watched when I was 10 hard-wired my brain to automatically suspect discarded banknotes of being traps (it made graspingness seem unappealing, and that's no bad thing, surely?). The point is that the twist in Desserts is in no way original (it also shows up in the "A Little Fishy" segment of the 1986 anthology film Escapes, and I'm sure there are other instances still), but that doesn't matter. It is a particularly slick, particularly efficient variation on an old theme about nature turning the tables on humanity by pinpointing our own weaknesses, raising questions about what constitutes a worthy survivor.

In the case of the Tales From The Cryptkeeper installment, the character's fate was clearly karmic - he was a bully who regarded fishing, much like everything else in his life, as an opportunity to revel in power over other living things - although ironically the talking fish that finally snagged him hadn't consciously plotted revenge, with its dialogue indicating that their culture did not tend to look on humans as individuals. Basically they echoed the same perspective the character had applied to them, with the distinguishing virtue that they abhorred wastefulness, leading to this awkward but fabulously morbid bit of wordplay: "A good manner-fish never catches more than he can can!" With Desserts, it's the film's title that carries the most weight in that regard, referring to the pivotal pastry while containing a playful pun that encapsulates the notion of getting what's coming to you. Stroller is, on the surface, an innocent. We see no evidence that he has ever personally wronged a fish, or indeed anybody. Even his name speaks to his guilelessness, suggesting someone who is going about their business in an entirely casual manner, as opposed to actively looking for trouble. And yet the title insinuates that the outcome should be seen as karmic. He is the only human who apparently exists in this time and space (although we do see a shape in the sand that resembles another footprint close to where he finds the eclair, suggesting that the process is potentially cyclic), and as such he becomes an everyman who pays the price for humanity's sins against the ocean. The sins, in this scenario, are not born of wilful malice, but of unwary consumption and the belief that whatever resources he happens across are his for the taking. The rapaciousness that compels him to bite off more than he can chew becomes a shorthand for humankind's reckless plundering of the Earth, something that's shown to be just as mindless as a fish's compulsions to chomp at any bit of bait that's dangled its way, and as likely to drag us toward our own destruction. 

It is hard to shake the sense that Stroller has been the victim of a grand conspiracy, as opposed to a random victim unfortunate enough to have stumbled upon the baited eclair. The opening credits show the underwater, distinctly inhuman perspective (its cold eeriness anticipating the alien gaze of Jonathan Glazer's 2013 feature Under The Skin) of our unseen aquatic angler as it identifies its prey approaching along the sands. Notably, it surveys Stroller's form up close (and with the waves visibly behind him), suggesting an omnipresent intimacy that feels at odds with the implied distance between the hunter and the hunted within the body of the short. To me, this indicates it is not vengeful fish per se that have targeted Stroller so much as the collective forces of nature all around him. Desserts imagines a world in which nature successfully eliminates humanity and then begins wiping away all traces of its existence; not content with merely swallowing Stroller whole, the ocean must subsequently wash over his footprints and begin the process of rubbing them out. There is something almost comical about this, as though the tides are consciously removing the evidence from a crime scene. One of the film's most vital ingredients is its puckish sense of humor, which is further accentuated when we fade to black and are greeted by a incongruously buoyant instrumental rendition of the music hall favourite "I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside".

But even if Stroller represents the failings of an inattentive human race, his fate still feels like a paradox. Throughout the short, a great deal of emphasis is placed on his insignificance in relation to his surroundings, with its opening wide shot making us particularly aware of the vastness and seeming infinity of the barren shoreline, against which he initially appears as nothing more than a tiny blot on the horizon. It underscores how nature will always be a fundamentally bigger force than man, but has the effect of making him seem like rather an unimposing entity, and thus a curious target for such a magnificent scheme. It recalls the 1972 Spanish television film La Cabina, with its protagonist who is at once too much of a nondescript everyman to appear in any way important, and yet has clearly been the victim of a plot purposely designed to consign him to oblivion. Stroller is established as a little fish in a big ocean, and we suspect that it is precisely this insignificance that makes him so vulnerable. It's here that we may be able to mine one further pun from the title, playing on our uneasy feeling that the wider world might have deliberately deserted him. Desserts grapples with the issue of mortality, touching on the extent to which humankind is as assailable as the creatures it is accustomed to exploiting, the fine line between life and death, and the helplessness of the individual fated to be removed from the picture sooner or later, only for the picture itself to shrug and carry on as if nothing much occurred. Stroller inhabits a landscape of endless and oppressive emptiness, with the opening illustrating how he is, unbeknownst to himself, already inside the belly of the beast before he's even been dragged into its depths. The barrenness of his space conveys the indifference of his own (non-existent) people, who have effectively abandoned him to his demise - we sense that the lack of anyone in sight who could potentially have deterred him from destruction or assisted him when he became caught on the line was likewise not a matter of mere misfortune, but of nobody caring to intervene. The world reacts to his obliteration with much the same coldness, as the tides wash over his footprints, negating what meagre imprint he might have left behind, and the absence of onlookers means that his vanishing does not even go acknowledged. There is no regard afforded to the little guy, and that might as well be the conspiracy in itself. 

Mr Hat's Second Biggest Mystery (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut)

 

The single biggest mystery surrounding South Park's Mr Hat is obviously how he managed to reach the gas pedal in the episode "Chef Aid" in order to operate a truck and break Mr Garrison and Chef out of jail. That's something that is just flat-out unknowable. It's also not the kind of mystery that I suspect many of us are liable to lose a whole lot of sleep over. The inexplicability of it all is, in part, what makes it so hilarious. More crucially still, this was Mr Hat's finest hour, and the outcome was monumentally awesome. He'd used his preternatural puppet powers for heroic purposes, atoning to Garrison for being a two-timing whore and enabling Chef to attend the benefit concert his friends from the rock business were holding in his honor. The particulars of how he managed to pull this off seem irrelevant when he brought such cheers and lifted spirits all round.

The same cannot be said for Mr Hat's second biggest mystery, which is the one that caused yours truly quite a bit of heartbreak and confusion during the summer of 1999. I speak of the theatrical feature film, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and of the small role he played in its conclusion. Let's take a moment to reflect on how the movie, for all of its merits, has rather a vexing resolution insofar as Mr Hat is concerned, one that appears to leave him and Garrison dangling and gives out contradictory signals regarding which suitor's hand he ends up on. This one gets kind of personal, so buckle up. 

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut climaxes with combat breaking out between American and Canadian forces, and Kyle and Cartman getting caught in the crossfire. While fleeing the ensuing carnage they encounter a mortally wounded Garrison, who pleads with the boys to take Mr Hat with them. They initially attempt to honor his request, but Cartman quickly tires of hanging onto the puppet and discards it. Soon after, Satan arrives on Earth to bring about the apocalypse, accompanied by his manipulative and emotionally abusive lover, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, and trailed by the soul of a damned but determined Kenny McCormick. Satan continues to be subjugated by Saddam, but with the moral support of Kenny he finally summons the resolve to stand up to him. Out of gratitude to Kenny, Satan agrees to grant him one wish (apparently he can do that benignly, not just through Faustian bargains), and Kenny asks for things to go back to the way they were before the war (aware that this would not exempt him from his own dark fate). Satan laments that he seems destined to live forever in solitude, when he notices the discarded Mr Hat and asks if he'd be willing to accompany him back to Hell. Satan throws his voice to supply the puppet's response - "Sure, I bet we could be best friends, Mr Satan" - and in doing so he eerily acquires the accent and effeminate tones of Garrison. This can be interpreted in two different ways. Either Mr Hat is literally speaking through Satan, as he can be perceived as doing with Garrison, and is actively flirting with him (which I guess tracks with his record for being a two-timing whore), OR Satan has officially hit rock bottom in his desperation and risks sinking into Garrison's derangement. (I gave my thoughts on the question of Mr Hat's reality in my coverage of "Weight Gain 4000", and am once again inclined to apply the philosophy that both things can be true.) An uplifted Satan makes his departure, still holding onto Mr Hat, and the bloodshed on Earth is duly undone. Garrison recovers from his injuries and anxiously looks around for his puppet companion, unaware of what transpired. Meanwhile, the entire town joins hands and celebrates its miraculous deliverance with a reprise of the opening number, "Mountain Town".

There is one further twist to this scenario that we'll get to shortly, but let me first be upfront that for my young teenaged self, who had been sitting there lapping up every solitary second of this film until that moment, this aspect of the ending proved to be the humongous fly pissing nosily in the ointment. To say that it sat uneasily with me would be an understatement, since it's all well and good for Satan to want to alleviate his loneliness with an endearingly uncanny puppet, but where exactly would that leave Garrison? I felt so strongly that Satan's happiness should not come at the expense of Garrison's, and that's a sentiment I'll continue to stand by. Because Garrison has feelings too, you know. He might be a royal dickhole in most regards, but the puppet was the one thing he genuinely loved and cared about. At this point in the series he was still very dependent on his relationship with Mr Hat, and we'd already seen in "Summer Sucks" how depressed he became in being separated from him for a prolonged length of time. With the help of Mr Twig, he was able to bluff his way through most of that absence, but he was clearly not a happy bunny deep down. Whenever the children asked him when Mr Hat was coming back (as seen in "Clubhouses" and "Chef Aid") it cut right through his facade like a knife through butter. So the implication that he was about to be subjected to round two of that process seemed really unnecessarily cruel. Not to mention that we, like Garrison's class, had just spent a good chunk of Season 2 waiting for Mr Hat to return (because Mr Twig was blatantly never going to replace him), so were they seriously about to send him packing again, not even nine months after he and Garrison were reconciled in "Chef Aid"? Was this going to be a regular thing with that puppet?

Or was this all in fact a gigantic false alarm, and I was allowing myself to get stupid hung up over absolutely nothing (and not for the first time)? Because there is this one additional detail at the end of the film that I want to call attention to and cannot emphasise enough - Mr Hat is back with Mr Garrison in the final sequence. It isn't explained how, but he is. They appear together in two different shots, the first being the crowd zoom-out during the reprise of "Mountain Town". And then at the very end, Garrison and Mr Hat are among the characters bidding farewell to Kenny as he rises out of Hell and, in recognition of his most noble deed, is welcomed by the angels into Heaven. Garrison is waving, while Mr Hat's gaze is directed upward, indicating that he is very attuned to what is going on. Neither reappearance went unnoticed in the cinema, and they definitely made me feel a whole lot better. In my head, I could rationalise it perfectly. After all, Kenny had wished for everything to be returned to the way it was before the war. He was, in effect, wishing for the restoration of the status quo, so that things could resume as normal and there would be no lasting consequences to have to grapple with in the series (his demise was the only outstanding matter that would explicitly not be remedied by the wish, but we all knew that was automatically being reset). Which ultimately required Mr Hat to go straight back to Garrison, whether Satan was on board with that or not. That might seem like a sorry turn of events for Satan, who would have had his sole consolation stripped away from him offscreen, but the dude can't just be stealing other people's puppet boyfriends. Not to mention, it wouldn't really have been a happy ending for him anyway, if the implication was that he'd have become as mentally damaged as Garrison (so which of them would actually have been taking the other to Hell?). Best just to let this one go, old Nick. You do have your upcoming relationship with Chris the nutritionist to look forward to. (Oh, and maybe give some attention to Damien, ya sodding deadbeat?)

It should be noted that this was indeed consistent with the continuity of the series, where Mr Hat was still with Garrison, and there was never any reference to Satan coming between them - although I had to wait a few months to confirm it, as the UK was currently between Seasons 2 and 3, and I didn't really get into using this internet thing until the year 2000 (and even then, mostly to look up fake Pokémon cheats...I never did get that Pikablu after wandering round the Safari Zone for hours).

Technically everything worked out. But I still walked away from the experience with a sour taste in my mouth. Having Mr Hat show up at the end was absolutely better than nothing, but I didn't like the fact that they hadn't addressed it within the narrative, making his final status a little fuzzy. How could I be certain that his reappearance was even intentional and not an animation error? That it happened in two shots and not just one, and that the second reappearance had seemed so prominent gave me some hope that that wasn't the case, but I couldn't say for sure. To this day, I still don't know what the intention was, and it's one of those things where if I dwell on it for more than ten seconds, it will bug the living snot out of me. It's for this reason that I've always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. There's a lot that I can love about it - the soundtrack, the new characters of Gregory and Mole, the interplay between Saddam and Satan, the reveal of Kenny's face and his final redemption (not that Kenny was ever in any serious need of redemption from the viewer's perspective, but he demonstrated what a good kid he is at heart). But the moment where Garrison regains consciousness and asks "Where's Mr Hat?" hurts me too damned much, and since it occurs right at the end, that's the feeling I'm inevitably left with. I just said I liked the soundtrack, but simply hearing that reprise of "Mountain Town" sends instantaneous chills down my spine.

It's also why I'll reflexively grit my teeth whenever I hear anyone suggest that Bigger, Longer and Uncut would have been a really magnificent and logical point on which to have concluded the franchise (a discussion that seemed more pertinent nearer the time, when there were doubts about the series' longevity). I cannot tell you how relieved I am that this wasn't where it ended. If we'd lived in an alternate reality where South Park had been required to bow out early, then I honestly believe that the Season 3 finale, "World Wide Recorder Concert", would have been a much more triumphant curtain call. I've some major biases on that point, since "World Wide Recorder Concert" is my favourite South Park episode, and it's probably not a coincidence that Garrison there gets the last word and it all ends happily for him (well, happily in the sense that what he doesn't know isn't hurting him). The allusion to the ending of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country might not be on quite so epic a scale as Kenny's final ascension in the movie, but in its own quiet way I find it every bit as moving.

One way or another, Mr Hat obviously did ditch Satan and find his way back to Garrison. That much is evident from how the series carried on, even if neither the movie or series cared to explicitly account for it. I'm also aware of how very silly it is to allow a matter this inconsequential to eat any kind of hole in you. So why does it continue to bother me?

 

Everything worked out...with a happy end?

Part of the problem is that it's not altogether clear where precisely in the series' chronology the events of the movie are intended to fall. I'm not sure if Parker and Stone have given any official confirmation on where they see BLaU as occurring, but from what we the viewers have to go on, we just know that it has to be some time between Season 2's "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" (which first set up the Satan-Saddam relationship) and the Season 4 two-parter "Do The Handicapped Go To Hell?" and "Probably" (which picked it up where the movie left off). Bigger, Longer and Uncut hit US theatres on 30th June 1999, as Season 3 was roughly a third of the way through its run, and "Sexual Harassment Panda" was the first episode to air after its debut (on July 7th 1999), but I don't think that automatically makes it BLaU's immediate successor in terms of internal continuity. In my mind, BLaU takes place well before the entirety of Season 3. Sure, there are a handful of moments in Season 3 that were blatantly designed to coincide with BLaU's theatrical presence - "Cat Orgy" contained a shout-out to the film's most prominent box office competitor, the staggeringly brainless Will Smith vehicle Wild Wild West, while "Two Guys Naked In A Hot Tub" had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Mole, a character otherwise exclusive to BLaU. But with regards to the contents of the movie itself, it seems more closely connected to what was going on in the second season, which is when I'm going to hazard a guess that it was scripted. Callbacks to the series are predominantly to Season 2, and to earlier Season 2 installments at that. The revelation from "Ike's Wee Wee" that Kyle's infant brother was Canadian-born proves significant, while Mr Mackey's naive and surface-level understanding of addiction from the same episode comes up again in his showstopper, "It's Easy, Mmmkay". A lot of the supporting kids in the movie are also quite vague and undefined, in a way that I'd associate with the first couple of seasons - Craig and Butters are still background characters, and I don't think Tweek (introduced in the penultimate episode of Season 2) shows up at all. But that's all very tenuous, right? Of course Kyle wasn't going to forget that his brother is Canadian (even if Sheila did), Mackey's well-intentioned condescension has always been one of his defining character traits, and when you've an extensive cast and only 80 minutes to spare, it is inevitable that not everybody is going to have a chance to stand out (heck, not even Pip, who at that point was one of the more established supporting child characters, got to be anything more than an extra in the movie). The essential detail that most firmly aligns BLaU with Season 2 would be the Saddam factor. He was kind of a looming figure in its opening stages, before just going quiet for a bit.

Saddam's appearance at the end of "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" was itself a continuity nod to the Terrance and Phillip special "Not Without My Anus", which had infamously aired in place of "Cartman's Mom Is Still A Dirty Slut", the much-anticipated follow-up to Season 1's closing cliffhanger, as an April Fools prank earlier that spring. (Note that when Sky 1 aired Season 2 in the UK, they did not attempt to replicate the trick and stuck "Not Without My Anus" on the tail-end as a weird little out of context extra, making it random as fuck when Saddam showed up in "Mexican Staring Frog", and with a Canadian accent to boot.) The term "continuity" might need to be applied quite loosely in this scenario, since "Not Without My Anus" was framed as a made-for-TV drama within the context of the South Park universe (albeit one purportedly based on a true story). The means by which Saddam met his demise in "Not Without My Anus" (suffocated by the farts of a stadium of flatulent Canadians) also differed from how he was later reported to have died within the movie (gored by a pack of wild boars), a discrepancy that I'm almost positive was due to them needing a concise explanation for the benefit of movie-goers who hadn't kept up with the series and would otherwise have been confused about why Saddam was in Hell (particularly with his real-life counterpart being alive at the time), and the events of "Not Without My Anus" being too baffling and convoluted to recap at the start of BLaU. The series offers a curious intersection between these disparate continuities - in the episode "Probably", when Satan recounts to God the circumstances under which he met Saddam, he reaffirms the death by wild boars backstory, but also specifies that it happened in April, a nod to the original air date of "Not Without My Anus". It's also notable that in the movie itself, the featured events are explicitly stated to take place six weeks after Saddam's swine-inflicted death, which suggests that they would have fallen some time soon after "Mexican Staring Frog", if Saddam was established to already be dead within the internal timeline.

Now let's consider how Garrison and Mr Hat might specifically fit into this. In the series, Mr Hat was with Garrison from the very beginning up until the Season 6 episode "The Death Camp of Tolerance" when Garrison decided to officially retire him (sob). The only exception in between would be that aforementioned arc in the middle of Season 2 where he went AWOL for a few episodes and was temporarily replaced by Mr Twig. So...if you're determined to tie Mr Hat's supposed disappearance at the end of the movie with the continuity of the series, that's the only window you have. But is that even doable? Could this actually be the origin of that whole bizarre love triangle arc in Season 2, rather than merely a harrowing echo of it? Perhaps. There is a fan theory proposing that "Summer Sucks" should be seen as the direct successor to the events of BLaU, as awkward as it would seem to have to retroactively factor in the movie before an episode that debuted a whole year ahead of it. After all, that installment opens with Mr Hat having already absconded, and Garrison struggling to comprehend what's become of him. It would also be consistent with what the movie indicates about Saddam and where he goes within the series' timeline, with bonus points for the fact that if his death occurred in April, six weeks along would certainly be taking us into the run-up into summer. The obvious bugbear of this theory, from my perspective, is that it requires you to overlook Mr Hat's reappearance with Garrison at the end of BLaU, which I am loath to do, but I think it's an intriguing notion nevertheless that merits consideration.

The trouble is that the background information regarding Saddam might ultimately hold more water with this reading than what happens with Garrison and Hat in "Summer Sucks". There are certain narrative details it seems somewhat of a stretch to have to line up with the movie (notably, that in "Summer Sucks" Mr Hat specifically goes missing on the last day of school), but it's more of a tonal mismatch that I'm feeling. The circumstances behind Mr Hat's mysterious disappearance in "Summer Sucks" are implied to be quieter and more mundane (relatively speaking) than the high-stakes drama of the movie's climax. Garrison spends the episode grappling with a low-key but intensely personal crisis that, so far as he's concerned, completely overshadows the town's apocalypse of the week, an out-of-control black snake firework destroying everything in its path. His immediate assumption is that one of the children has stolen the puppet as a prank, though he later reflects, during his psychiatry session with Dr Katz, that Mr Hat might have walked out because of a disagreement they'd had earlier that morning. What they disagreed about is anybody's guess (and Garrison presumably attached less significance to it than did Mr Hat, if it was really that much of an afterthought to him), and I'd argue that the story works as well as it does because it keeps the details to such a vague and understated level (making it the perfect companion to the wilder, more overblown A-story about the snake). We learn few of the particulars, like what inspired Mr Hat to go or how he was able to leg it in the absence of legs, a choice that accentuates the absurdity of the situation, but also the pathos. Garrison's loneliness becomes twofold. Not only has he been unceremoniously ditched by his emotional support puppet, the rest of the town takes little to no interest in his plight and can't even begin to understand what he's going through. Even the viewer isn't totally sure on where to stand, with Katz's assessment suggesting that his testimony should be seen as unreliable, although toward the end we get a teasing glimpse into Mr Hat's side of the story, which corroborates at least some of what Garrison was saying. The puppet is revealed to have travelled to Green Bay, Wisconsin, apparently to live out his sexual fantasies involving Brett Favre (odds are that he succeeded, given that Favre seemed to return his interest). So if this does take place right after BLaU, then presumably he's already dumped Satan and is weighing up his options before going back to Garrison.

I do find it basically plausible that Parker and Stone might well have conceived the movie's conclusion first and then been inspired by that to do the whole arc in Season 2 where Garrison and Mr Hat spend several episodes separated. On a conceptual level it certainly feels as though there could be some intersection, particularly since they didn't land that far apart, all things considered. At any rate, it's an idea they did better justice to in the series, where they had a lot more time to explore its implications. And since Season 2 saw the light of day first, it makes the ending of BLaU feel kind of redundant as well as mean. Whatever Garrison did prior to "Summer Sucks" to drive Mr Hat away, he had suffered enough for it, and my feeling is that he'd earned the right to keep the puppet at his side uninterrupted for a few more seasons. So yes, I definitely understand the appeal of the theory. It takes what amounted to a joke and a loose end in the movie and allows it to have meaningful follow-up with a clear resolution in the series, in a way that doesn't feel as if it's rolling back on any prior development. I'm not sure that I buy the two premises as totally compatible, however. At most, I can see one idea giving rise to the other, but I'm not really sensing that they are one and the same. I don't subscribe to the theory, but I will make this one further observation about it. When Mr Hat finally returns to Garrison in "Chef Aid", Garrison is initially reluctant to take him back and throws him out the door, telling him to go to Hell. That's standard retaliation from Garrison (he said the same thing to Mackey in "Summer Sucks"), but it gives it a little extra resonance when you're watching it through the lens of Mr Hat having potentially already been there.

As I say, I'd rather not ignore the fact that Mr Hat IS with Garrison during the final sequence of BLaU. That is what my heart and my gut tell me to look toward, even if my brain is inevitably going to get in the way by asking questions. We've already discussed how the nature of Kenny's wish might potentially account for Mr Hat's return within the narrative, but since it's not acknowledged we can't be certain what was actually supposed to be going on, and that keeps me in such a queasy state of limbo when processing this ending. For that much I will forever curse South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, even as the "Uncle Fucka" sequence retains its devilish power to have me collapsing into fits of giggles. It is what it is nonetheless, and do we have any means of making sense of why the sequence plays out as it does? I suspect that I've given the matter more thought than anybody else on Earth, and as I see it there are three different possibilities we have to choose from.

The first is that Mr Hat's reappearance is indicative of something being cut from the final sequence (in spite of the film's innuendo-laden title). It's entirely possible that the epilogue was running on a little too long and needed to be trimmed down, and the solutions to Stan and Kyle's respective arcs would naturally take priority. In which case they might have taken out a follow-up moment with Mr Hat and Garrison and hoped that audiences would just roll with it. Irritating shortcuts will sometimes be taken (Pixar's Soul, for example, was meant to incorporate a sequence explaining Mr Mittens' survival that was ultimately excised, although they showed Mittens alive and well anyway, to the relief but also confusion of cat-loving audiences all over). Back in 1999, this is what I'd desperately hoped would turn out to be the case, but I don't think it ever went anywhere.

The second is that Mr Hat being with Garrison in those two closing shots was an animation error that was somehow made twice over. This is by and far my least favourite possibility, since it makes that final glimmer of comfort a total fluke and suggests that the intentions of the film were a whole lot meaner, although it isn't completely unsalvageable, by virtue of the fact that it still happened. I'm of the opinion that there can be happy accidents. Just look to the ending of "World Wide Recorder Concert". When Garrison boards the bus in the final scene and gives his directions to Ms Crabtree, you might notice that Kenny is alive and seated in the background, despite having already been killed during the disastrous brown noise incident. It wasn't entirely out of the question for Kenny to die and be immediately resurrected (it happened earlier that season as part of a meta joke in "Succubus"), but my intuition here is that Kenny's return was indeed a mistake. It happens from time to time. But you know what, I'm glad that he's there. I think that closing Undiscovered Country allusion is simply wonderful, and it strikes me as only right and proper that even Kenny was allowed to be a part of it. We can apply that same logic to BLaU. If nothing else, those shots give the appearance of Garrison not being left alone at the end or excluded from the celebration, and that too seems only right and proper. If it was an honest error, then all I can say is, bless the inattentive animators who were responsible. Whatever they were paying you was not enough.

The third possibility is the one that I tend to lean toward nowadays, which is that Parker and Stone were straight-up trolling us. They worked that interaction between Satan and Mr Hat into the resolution because it amused them, but at this stage weren't actually looking to mess with the status quo and just stuck Mr Hat back with Garrison anyway, in stark defiance of any and all prospects of there being genuine consequence. The question of where precisely the movie is supposed to fall within with the series' timeline becomes irrelevant, because everything is reset at the end, the situation with Garrison and Mr Hat included. If anybody cared enough to get their knickers in a twist about the lack of explanation, then that would be hilarious, wouldn't it? I, unfortunately, was the easiest victim in the world. But hey, at least the outcome actually went in my favour, in terms of what I'd wanted to see happen. And the following year they gave us "World Wide Recorder Concert", which I wholeheartedly adore and see as compensating for any callous disregard Garrison might have received at the end of the movie, so it's all good.

Besides which, I've made the point twice already that a number of Mr Hat's most memorable moments were rooted in a degree of inexplicability. As is befitting a character who is a puppet of ambiguous autonomy. The question of how he managed to ditch Satan and get back to Garrison's hand at the end of BLaU will just have to be added to that same list. We all know that it wouldn't have worked out between Mr Hat and Satan anyway, in the same way that it ultimately didn't work out between him and Brett Favre. Mr Hat is a flirtatious son of a bitch, but Satan is so touchy-feely, and I could see that pissing Mr Hat off before long. Maybe his last-minute u-turn was entirely unrelated to Kenny's wish, and he just realised then and there that Satan really wasn't as hot as all that and he was getting out of the arrangement through his own volition. You underestimate those preternatural puppet powers at your own peril (unless of course you're Kathie Lee).

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #57: Canada's House Hippo Problem

In 1999 Canadians received notice of a peculiar home invader who was taking over their kitchens whenever they'd switched off their lights and retired for the evening. Meet the North American House Hippo, a small hippopotamid (roughly the size of a rat) that is indigenous to Canada and to regions of the eastern United States, where it's carved out quite the ecological niche, feeding off discarded crumbs by night and nesting in shoe cupboards by day. Wherever there are opened bags of potato chips and unattended slices of toast with peanut butter, these resourceful hippos thrive, yet they are highly elusive creatures, and little was known about their habits until a short documentary was cobbled together and extensively televised at the end of the millennium. The minute-long piece showed us the nightly routine of one such hippo, as it emerged to forage for its preferred foods, and to annoy Jake the cat by flashing its (tiny, but still intimidating) tusks his way before going for a dip in his water bowl, all while voice actor Len Carlson (known for his work on The Raccoons and Care Bears) provided genial commentary. With that, a magical new world was revealed, sparking the imaginations of young Canucks all over as to what weird and wonderful delights could be lurking within the nooks and crannies of their humble households. 

It all sounds just a tad fanciful, right? Anybody with their thinking cap on would have hopefully deduced that no such creature really existed, and that was precisely the point of the short. The fictitious hippo was created by visual effects team Spin Productions on behalf of Concerned Children's Advertisers, a Toronto-based organisation who specialised in producing public service announcements for young audiences on a variety of topics, including substance abuse, physical fitness, self-esteem and personal safety. "House Hippo" was conceived as a way of introducing children to the issue of media literacy, and why they couldn't automatically trust everything they see on television, no matter how accustomed they might be to regarding it as a form of authority. A hippo was chosen as the unlikely house pest because as a concept it seemed so irresistibly hilarious, but also so oddly convincing in its miniaturised form. A moose and a giraffe were considered, but in their case the artifice was just too apparent. This was a unique kind of movie magic that only the hippo could provide. Meanwhile, the format of the PSA was designed to recall a familiar staple of Canadian culture, the Hinterland Who's Who vignettes of the 1960s and 70s, a series of charming micro-documentaries commissioned by the Canadian Wildlife Service to provide introductory portraits of the country's fauna. Here's an example, focussing on one of my favourite animals:

The music of "House Hippo" differs substantially to the John Cacavas-composed flute leitmotif that accompanied Hinterland Who's Who, hinting at its more whimsical intentions, although Carlson's voiceover was intended to evoke John Livington's, giving the PSA an air of pseudo-authority that's ultimately counteracted by its epilogue. A second narrator speaks up, openly acknowledging the pretence and prompting the viewer to consider how they processed the bogus information they'd just received: "That looked really...real?! But you knew it couldn't be true, didn't you? That's why it's good to think about what you're watching on TV and ask questions, kind of like you just did." The hippo reappears on a television screen, now full-sized and restored to its natural habitat in sub-Saharan Africa, and we can see that it never actually left. The final image hints at the trickery behind the fake documentary - the hippos we were shown were indeed real, but they were extracted from stock footage, with painstaking technical wizardry employed to create the illusion that they were wandering through a nondescript kitchen and interacting with the objects therein. The intentions of the film were clearly expressed, and yet anecdotal reports abound that a lot of kids tuned out during that all-important denouement, either because they weren't fully receptive to the concept of media literacy in the first place, or because they were too enchanted by the notion of there being tiny hippos in their closets and wanted to preserve that fantasy. Concerned Children's Advertisers had already sold them on the premise, and they weren't going to negate that by suggesting that they be boring and sensible about it at the end. As such, "House Hippo" is often cited as an example of an advertising campaign that humorously backfired, spreading misinformation when it was intended to do the exact opposite. Harmless misinformation, I suppose (well, maybe not to those kids who were inspired to leave plates peanut buttered toast on their kitchen floors and ended up attracting flies and roaches), and the PSA certainly won a lot of hearts amid all the confusion it created. It is remembered today with tremendous affection, immortalising the misplaced hippo as a Canadian icon, a monument to an alternate reality that seemed so much more enticing than the one we were stuck with. You could argue that it did in fact make its point with more potency than its creators had originally anticipated, by boring its way into the hearts and souls of its viewers in order to demonstrate what a frightfully appealing beast misinformation can be. In the end it became more of a slow-burn message - one that, rather than giving its young audience a life-changing education in 60 seconds, required them to grow up and gain a little extra wisdom and perspective on the case of the house hippo and its impact on their perception.

"House Hippo" strikes me as being a more benign cousin to those Hula Hoops Shoks ads about the electric eels purportedly loose in Britain's water supply that had enough kids convinced that their bathrooms had become a no-go area in the Y2K. There was something eerily authoritative about that campaign to the youngsters who hadn't yet developed the ability to discern absurdist irony, and certainly nothing joyous about the thought of being zapped by a confused and disorientated knifefish the instant you turned on your taps. Whereas "House Hippo" warmly evokes the hidden magic and wonder that might be stirring in the most ostensibly banal of environments, "Shoks" gives off a distinctly grimy despair that has the world you inhabit seeming a whole lot more malevolent (as noted in my coverage of the campaign, it ultimately speaks more to the nightmarish prospect of dying alone in a 1970s high-rise apartment than being fried by an eel). But you know kids, maybe it's a good thing that those shrunken hippos weren't actually in your kitchens; in a way, they had the potential to be just as big a menace as those electric eels. If you stop to think about it, would you really want one of those things nesting around your footwear? It all ties in with the bigger picture of how we tend to perceive hippos, which constitutes a serious bit of misrepresentation in itself. In media, hippos are typically depicted as loveable softies (think George from Rainbow and Peter Potamus), and small wonder, when they look like big squishy bath toys. In actuality, they're noted for being violent and territorial creatures, of the sort you don't mess with if you're interested in keeping all your body parts in place. These hippos might be small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, but it's evident that their aggressive nature is still intact, with Jake the cat making what is plainly the right call in backing down from a confrontation. Now imagine if one of these little chonks had made a nest inside your shoe, and you put your foot in without checking it first. I think there's a very good prospect of you losing some of your toes in that scenario. If they were inside your house, then your parents would have been laying traps for them like nobody's business, and that wouldn't have been very fun.

The house hippo didn't just stick to his allotted range of Canada and the eastern United States. We were also alerted to his (non) existence in the UK, when local company Media Smart got their hands on the ad in the mid-00s. In addition to using their own logo at the end, their version also ran about 20 seconds shorter, removing the references to the hippo being a native of North America (in accordance with his expanded territory) and shaving off a few of the specifics, such as his weaknesses for peanut butter and pieces of string. I have memories of an even shorter version still, which dispensed with the faux documentary aspect altogether and just had the hippo roaring at Jake, with the commentary that if you see something on TV that looks real but you know it can't be, then you can consider yourself media smart.

I hadn't thought about the house hippo for years, but was recently reminded of it while watching Sophy Romvari's remarkable feature Blue Heron, which prominently incorporates the original PSA (partly to evoke the time period in which the film takes place, but also to foreshadow its own uses of non-literal storytelling). It got me pondering the unique appeal of the hippo, and that beguiling middle ground he occupies between cozy familiarity and all-out insanity. It's no surprise that he made the cultural splash that he did, for it is an immensely charming PSA, and so lovingly made. We can suspend our disbelief and buy into the internal narrative that there are tiny hippos in our households, such a joy is it to see this most preposterous of creatures blend in so convincingly with this most mundane of environs. The fusion of humdrum nocturnal setting and improbable imagery evokes a lovely intersection of a dreamed state and waking reality. At the same time, we shouldn't overlook that the house hippo is a metaphor for something deeply insidious, and a problem that has merely intensified with the rise of digital media, deepfakes and AI. We live in a world where the house hippos have taken over. They seemed like a cute thing to have around at the dawn of the millennium, but now you can't put your foot in any direction without having your toes messily savaged. One way or another, Canada and everywhere else has a troubling house hippo problem, and the string-stealing kitchen invader has accordingly received a brand new lease of life in the fake news era. Concerned Children's Advertisers are sadly no longer with us, having become Companies Committed To Kids in 2014 before closing down in 2017. But the legacy of the house hippo lives on, with the premise being resurrected in more recent PSAs by the Ottawa-based MediaSmarts (not to be confused with the aforementioned UK-based Media Smart), encouraging children to "Break The Fake" by developing their critical thinking skills and taking the time to research what's real and what isn't. It's us against the hippos, so be careful to give your metaphorical shoe a good shake before you put your foot in it.

On the subject of hippo misconceptions, I once saw a movie where it was claimed that they fart out of their mouths, but I don't think that's actually true, is it? Mind you, the same movie gave Michael Douglas kind of a silly haircut, and that can do a lot to undermine your credibility.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #56: Good Hedgehog, Evil Hedgehog (Sonic Adventure 2)

I'd have thought it would be common wisdom that all hedgehogs are good hedgehogs. Regions of the world where they'd be considered invasives notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine a creature more endearingly innocuous. Erinaceids are insanely adorable, and unless you happen to be an egg or a mollusc, essentially harmless. And yet there was apparently this guy named Shadow who let the side down back in 2001. My experience in playing the Sonic The Hedgehog games was limited to just the first three releases, so the narrative happenings of Sonic Adventure 2 remain a mystery to me. I couldn't tell you anything about Shadow himself and how he fits in with the broader Sonic lore. The game's promotional campaigning indicates that he was an exceptionally evil hedgehog and out to conquer the world right as Sonic was attempting to save it, but for all I know their rivalry could've turned out to be a giant misunderstanding, as it did with Knuckles in Sonic 3. In any event, this 30-second ad was happy to take that premise at face value and get a twisted little kick from imagining what it would look like if it were translated into real hedgehog biology. Take two hedgehogs, distil their respective natures to the very essences of good and evil, and what wonders might science behold?

Part of a series of ads from the early 00s that used footage of real hedgehogs to create a humorous contrast between Sonic's super-erinaceid abilities and his meeker real-world counterparts, this was less mean-spirited than those baffling Sonic 2 ads the UK got in 1992, at least on the hedgehogs' side of things. A cow meets a gruesome end, in a sequence that pays homage to the velociraptor feeding scene from Jurassic Park, but the carnage is handled with a heaping spoonful of absurdity that has it going down a whole lot easier. We all know that a hedgehog couldn't really do that to a cow, no matter much malevolent energy its deceptively small form might conceal (I'll also hazard a guess that the devouring of helpless cattle was not an accurate representation of how Shadow expresses his purported evil in the gameplay itself). There is likewise an intrinsic hilarity in seeing the ickle, distinctly non-threatening looking creature scurry around while the words "Evil Hedgehog" are displayed beneath it in big bold lettering. So what distinctive traits separate the good hogs from the truly rotten apples, according to the ad's internal narrative? A good hedgehog is a friendly little soul, docile enough to let you handle it and to feed genteelly from your palm, while an evil hedgehog must be safely contained behind a steel door, and its shockingly vicious appetite can only be appeased by feeding it live prey several times its size. This being a campaign that was fundamentally geared toward children, efforts were clearly made to restrict the resulting splatter to a tasteful minium, but you see enough to know that that cow did not exactly go out humanely. At the very end, the second hedgehog reaffirms its uncouth nature by belching, confirming itself as such an unrelenting revel that it hasn't even mastered civilised table manners.

The most flavoursome twist on offer was the decision to present this grisly scenario in the musty, washed-out aesthetic of an old-school educational reel, taking the absurdity to a degree that extends a little beyond the basic contrast between a good hog who eats politely and a bad hog who guzzles whole cows. The thing that most captivates me about this ad (besides the hedgehogs themselves) is the slight resemblance it bears to the cult BBC series Look Around You, a spoof of 1970s era science-focussed programming. It has the same cursed vintage tones and the same eye for understated detail that feeds into a bigger picture of omnipresent chaos. We might notice, for example, that the scientist tending to the evil hedgehog is missing an arm (if you look closely, you can make out the telltale bulge protruding from his chest where his arm has evidently been hidden away, but I think we can all suspend our disbelief for the sake of a morbid joke), indicating that live cattle aren't the only things the little pin cushion has a taste for. An even more macabre touch is the drain in the floor of the evil hedgehog's enclosure, hinting at the extreme amount of bovine blood these men anticipate being spilled. As with Look Around You, it plays like an artefact from a vividly uncanny bygone world, in which the rules of the universe appear significantly more unstable and the voice of authority becomes all the more suspect. Is this a window into an alternate reality where it's a fact of nature that hedgehogs can be divided into the conflicting camps of good and evil, and you have to know which one you're dealing with in order to live a long and healthy life? Or is the implication that these scientists actually created these little freaks of nature right there inside their labs (a line of thinking that is certainly invited by the Jurassic Park allusion) - an exceptionally good hedgehog designed to be the perfect pet, and an exceptionally evil hedgehog that's most likely in the running to join some kind of biological weapons program? Something tells me this won't end well for humanity.

The question of how the two opposing erinaceids would react if confronted with each other is not addressed here, but was answered by another installment within the same campaign, featuring two similar-looking hedgehogs, as well as an off-screen director engaged in the evil practice of inciting them to go head to head in the hedgehog equivalent of cock fighting. Once again, it was explicitly identified as a conflict between good and evil, yet despite being polar opposites on the moral spectrum, it would appear that they did not actually harbour any animosity toward each other - as soon they were set loose, they exercised their mutual pacifism by turning their pudgy round butts toward the screen.  Sometimes it's only proper that adorability wins out.

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 able to stand by one another) in a host of directions, delving into each character's unique perspective within that 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 as though they came from entirely disparate universes? Of the original 13 installments (and arguably beyond), "Call" is the one that most revels 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 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 always going to be more relatable as a child (even if that hamster joke caught me way off guard), 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. Watching it now, it practically becomes a joke within itself. Judging by the level of inconsistency the first season had with implementing the opening titles, it took the producers a while to settle into a rhythm that pleased them; a handful of episodes forewent the standard sequence altogether, and the seventh installment seems a random place to be inserting the "default" version with no additional mayhem (surely it would have made more sense to have started with that one and let the couch gags get progressively wilder as they went along?). Of all the episodes they could have stuck it in front of, this one feels like by and 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 a lot going for it, but also a conspicuous amount of padding. The plotting of "Call" still isn't the tightest, particularly in the middle act when the family gets lost in the wilderness and the script does a wad 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 he's to be classified as an underachieving human 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 all know that there's a little bit of Homer in all of us.

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 going feral and learning 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 dumb antics of a troop of monkeys who bear an uncanny resemblance to themselves. The gag was in how the Simpsons already evoked the most primitive, crude and grotesque aspects of human nature, to the extent that they barely seemed any more evolved than their simian counterparts (and that one of the monkeys was able to trade places with Bart and make it all the way to the backseat of the family's car without them noticing). The barrier between society and zoo exhibit is really that thin. Above all, "Call" strikes me as being 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, on this occasion denying him the triumph of a sweetly redemptive ending (while allowing him to salvage a small 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 Flanderseseses, with the entire conflict being set into motion by Ned's acquisition of a swanky new RV. This was only Ned's second appearance, and while he would become a far more rounded character with the following season's "Dead Putting Society", for now his raison d'etre remains 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 toward the Simpsons' financial struggles. Here he gives Homer friendly advice on how to acquire an RV of his own via credit. And when Homer later shows up with the only RV his spotty credit history would allow, a dented hunk of used junk with no satellite dish, Ned is nothing but 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 he pretty much 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. It marks 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, Jon Lovitz, 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 frankly 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 over his Simpsons associations 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'd ever flung 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 this story will eventually unfold, with Homer being cast out from the human race (and not because he's mistaken for something 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 incongruously 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. There's no dispute that he's ripe for a royal humbling. He's nevertheless the character with whom we most closely identify throughout 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 prior experience does he have exactly? Possibly none at all (the only thing he's able to accomplish with any proficiency is to apply mud and leaves to his waist to cover up his nakedness). There's a particularly slick 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's lurking fundamentally within his nature, but not through his mastery of the wilderness; instead, this is a tale of how 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 strangest of narrative developments (of not only this episode but quite possibly 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 more of A. Brooks' ad libbing. 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 campfire, in which they had an entire discussion about boys and, one would presume, the facts of life. As indispensable as Brooks' contribution was, I can't help but feel a little mournful for the additional Marge-Lisa rapport we were denied. Even that tiny tidbit that somehow wormed its way into the official reference guide drips with an irresistible emotional honesty. Arguably, it is a stretch that a girl as precocious as Lisa (even one with the relative innocence of a child) 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 in "Some Enchanted Evening", Marge and Lisa felt like they had the most wholesome and earnest of the early family connections, making it a shame that their relationship wouldn't get so much focussed exploration going forward.

The subplot with Maggie and her ursine foster family is also a real highlight, peppering the episode with quirky intervals of non-verbal storytelling. Groening's aversion to the presence 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 cartoonier the designs for Simpsons animals were in the beginning; the bears don't look significantly different to the one we'd later see in "Much Apu About Nothing" of Season 7, but the rabbits here 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), while the Simpson women have better luck using approaches that are more genteel (Marge and Lisa are able to transform the woodland floor into their personal living room, while Maggie finds affinity with a grizzly by introducing it to her personal mechanism for relieving 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 being carried down 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 how tedious their camp-out in the wilderness is proving (unaware that the bears are looting their supplies to provide for Maggie). Their generic designs suggest 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 any of the later seasons, their roles would undoubtedly have been filled 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 nailing of the couple's tetchy dynamic, though they'd have needed to somehow have a baby with them (Milhouse's demeanour can be on the infantile side at times, but he surely doesn't still 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 declaration of a scandalous interspecies relationship). The eventual outcome sees Homer and Bart trekking their way into the Bigfoot hunters' base (having bumped into Maggie along the way, necessitating a genuinely poignant farewell scene between the babe and her adopted family), where Homer continues to be mistaken for the cryptid and is taken out with a tranquilliser dart (and he doesn't even get to go down with dignity, urging Bart to avenge his death right before snoring up a storm). Having been 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 wilds; his untamed exterior no doubt holds up a perfect mirror to their own mindless frenzy on being confronted with the seemingly inexplicable. It is ironic that Homer should inspire so much awe and terror, as he clearly ranks quite 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? Naturally, it is enormously silly that these esteemed eggheads can't all crack the obvious truth that Homer isn't Bigfoot, but it builds into a subtler gag about life returning to normal for Homer, in spite of his absurdest of ordeals - no matter what the 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 leerily in mind of the ending to "Lisa's Substitute"), but mainly accentuates the value in not necessarily conforming to society's expectations while being a survivor nevertheless. Homer might have been looked down upon by man and nature alike, but he's met their respective challenges by simply getting by.

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" being its only serious competition). Bart's reaction to Homer's efforts to construct a makeshift snare from a contorted tree branch - "What are we gonna do? Hang ourselves?" - is still so hilariously startling. There's also the gruesome thud made by the hapless rabbit that gets flung halfway across the forest by the aforementioned trap (which is 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.