$pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)

For this one review, I guess I should forgo my usual practice of complementing the official Simpsons episode titles with an awkward alternate title of my own. On this occasion, it feels as though the actual title already did the job for me, and is consequently enough of a mouthful without me adding to it. Instead, let's consider what episode 1F08, which first aired on December 13 1993 as part of the show's fifth season, gains through its quirk of boasting two proposed titles, one concise, the other more deliberately unwieldy. "$pringfield", with the "S" stylised in a manner that I presume was intended to pay homage to the 1978 Michael Mann-created private detective series Vega$, is the less interesting of the two, although it neatly establishes that a) the episode is going to be more focussed on the character of the town at large and not specifically the Simpsons, and b) for those who get the reference, there is going to be a strong Las Vegas theming. It would have sufficed as a title on its own, yet they insisted on adding that extra layer, transmuting it into a parody of Dr Strangelove (or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb), for reasons that feel less inexplicable once you've absorbed the implications. You've got to love the subtlety with which legalised gambling is equated with the atomic bomb, with the implicit suggestion that the outcomes of embracing it might be similarly apocalyptic. The double title becomes a sly joke in itself, in which the glitz and decadence promised by that alluring dollar sign is counterbalanced by the threat of where this could potentially all be headed. The consequences of Springfield legalising gambling and erecting a glamorous casino upon its waterfront do indeed prove nigh-apocalyptic, for it ends up attacking the most fundamental tie that binds, jeopardising the Simpson unit by prompting Marge to turn her back on her responsibilities. We have another scenario in which Marge's devotions to her family are tested by the arrival of a seductive new presence, one that has no corporeality but does eventually gain a name, thanks to Homer: Gamblor, the neon-clawed entity who wills that Marge's fingers are never far from the slot machine lever.

On that note, we might also want to consider to whom the "I" in the secondary title actually refers. In the case of the Stanley Kubrick film it's homaging, it was intended to sound humorously reminiscent of the titling conventions of self-help manuals, and perhaps there is no deeper significance here. It would, nonetheless, be a natural assumption to suppose that it refers to Marge, who succumbs the hardest to gambling fever despite her strong set of established values, yet it doesn't quite match with how her arc plays out. For one, Marge does not seem particularly worried about the introduction of gambling to Springfield - at the town meeting where the motion is approved, she shocks everyone by offering no opposition (a callback to the events of the previous season's "Marge vs. The Monorail", in which she was the lone opponent of an idea that had everyone else unreasonably excited). It would likewise be a stretch to suggest that Marge ever grows to "love" legalised gambling - the really chilling thing about how her gambling addiction is depicted is that it doesn't seem to bring her much in the way of exhilaration. We see only momentary flickers of a buzz - she gives a joyful little murmur when she first uses the slot machine on a whim and scores some extra change, and later reports with pride to Homer that she won sixty dollars in a single night. But, for the most part, Gamblor ensnares her by making her totally impassive, shutting down her awareness of anything unfolding around her and cancelling out whatever drive or emotion she might have outside of the mindless compulsion to keep pulling at that lever ad infinitum.

Marge being occupied elsewhere, for whatever reason, leaving the rest of the family to come apart at the seams without the benefit of her emotional adhesive was by now a familiar Simpsons scenario, one that we'd seen play out on at least three prior occasions. "$pringfield" might honestly be the most down to earth variation we'd had since "Life on The Fast Lane" - an observation that frankly seems strange to make about an episode that is, in most other regards, an absolute fever dream. But if we focus strictly on what happens within the Marge story, it is a lot less outlandish than the competition. "Homer Alone" eventually transforms into rather an unlikely little caper, with Maggie slipping from Homer's oversight and going for a wander downtown, while "Marge in Chains" doesn't treat the matter anywhere near as seriously as it should (and has the problem of running out of time before anything truly unique can be done with it). Notably, "$pringfield" was written by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who had previously penned the latter episode, and feels like a second, more sincere attempt at getting the formula right. The impact on the family is fairly low-key, with dishes going unwashed and food supplies depleting. In "Life on The Fast Lane", Homer was at least capable of feeding the family in Marge's absence by ordering take-out, a survival skill that seems to have waned here - he becomes willing to confront his family's problem only after a failed attempt to subsist on a diet of frozen pie crusts, Tom Collins mix and cloves. The stakes here are lower than those of "Life on The Fast Lane" (there's no hint that Marge's gambling addiction might imperil her marriage to Homer) but still feel as real and as startling. Marge had promised to help Lisa make a costume for her school's upcoming geography pageant, at which she's planning to represent the state of Florida, but the clock is ticking, and as Marge gets increasingly lured in by Gamblor's lustre, it becomes all but inevitable that she will let her daughter down. This is an outcome practically unheard of in Simpsons lore, in which the one person on whom Lisa (or anybody) can surely always depend is Marge.

 

It is, admittedly, a very barebones treatment of the scenario, sharp and punchy enough to work as the emotional nexus to which the episode keeps returning, but not developed into anything more substantial than a synopsis. Marge promises she'll spend less time at the casino, only to swiftly break that promise, prompting Homer to eventually intervene, and that's about it. The Simpsons' story isn't given a whole lot of room to grow because there is so much else going on the episode (and yet so little), which has a unique conundrum in that Oakley and Weinstein's script can't sit still for a minute. In spite of its deceptively familiar set-up, "$pringfield" is a deeply confounding experience, emerging as not only one of the strangest entries of Season 5 (a season that was unafraid to go to some pretty weird places), but the classic era as a whole. For better or for worse, there isn't another Simpsons episode quite like it. Tonally, it feels so out of place within the series, and I've spent a long time puzzling over that, trying to put my finger on exactly what makes it such an oddity. Some years back, I wrote a piece entitled "The World's Strangest and Most Unsettling Simpsons Endings", where I described it as the Simpsons episode to most closely resemble an episode of The Critic. Which was obviously enormously silly of me. The Simpsons episode that most resembles The Critic is very blatantly going to be one overseen by Al Jean and Mike Reiss - y'know, the actual creators of The Critic ("Marge Gets A Job" would, in all seriousness, be a much better contender for that title). What I was getting at is that "$pringfield" has an extremely threadbare story held together by a steady stream of random and disconnected jokes, though in truth I think the jokes in "$pringfield" are even more random and disconnected than you would expect to find in The Critic. As Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood observe in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, it all amounts to "a series of bizarre moments rather than a story". What we get is a rather baffling collection of vignettes that shifts continually across the townspeople, seemingly to showcase how the seedy psyche of the title community is further warped by the coming of the Burns Casino, yet doesn't compare to "22 Short Films About Springfield", which feels considerably more structured. There is a certain flow and rhythm in how that episode flits from one segment to the next, whereas "$pringfield" lurches about all over the place, having its action unfold in bitty little chunks. A morsel happening over here, a tidbit going on over there. It is, I would say, the most staccato episode of The Simpsons. You get the distinct impression that Oakley and Weinstein pitched the idea of Springfield legalising gambling and becoming a miniature Las Vegas (reportedly inspired by an article they'd read about a town in Mississippi that had recently legalised riverboat gambling), and brainstormed a bunch of ideas about where this could potentially go, writing various short pieces involving multiple characters. Then, when it came to narrowing down the strongest ideas and developing those into a fuller narrative, they found that they couldn't bear to cut any of their material, so they strung all of their pieces together and called it a day.

I'm not saying that "$pringfield" particularly suffers for these choices, mind. I actually like how strange and unique the episode is. And, in fairness, some of the best gags are among the most disconnected from the main narrative. The entire stand-alone skit with Krusty's attempt at blue humor could have been easily ditched on the cutting room floor, but it's hilarious. All of that early stuff with Homer finding Henry Kissinger's glasses in the power plant toilet and adopting them as his shiny new plaything goes basically nowhere and is completely forgotten once the casino story gets underway, but it results in Kissinger being hospitalised after walking into a lamppost, and who doesn't enjoy a cathartic giggle at that man's expense? Professional boxer Gerry Cooney makes a guest appearance just so that he can be knocked out in a single blow by Otto, allowing the show to make good on a gag they had previously aspired to do with Joe Frazier in "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?", but were there denied. Flamboyant magicians Gunter and Ernst are inserted primarily for a thinly-veiled jab at Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, the Vegas-based entertainment duo famed for their acts involving large leucistic cats. On this particular night, their performing tiger Anastasia realises how greatly she resents being abducted from her natural habitat and forced to ride a unicycle under hot stage lights, causing her to savagely turn on her handlers, just shy of a decade before Horn was critically injured by one of his own tigers. (In recent years, there's been a lot of hoopla about the so-called clairvoyance of The Simpsons, but as the production crew themselves point out on the DVD commentary, you get no points for predicting that making dangerous wild animals perform unnatural stunts before a Vegas audience would one day take a spectacularly ugly turn.) Anastasia later has a smidgen more relevance to the overarching story, in a troubling sequence that illustrates how far into Gamblor's clutches Marge has sunken, when she shows only passing concern for a neglected Maggie almost becoming tiger chow. Gunter and Ernst also reappear, none the worse for their brutal lacerating, so that we might have an allusion to the sexuality of their real-life counterparts through their exchanging of covert pick-up chat with a casino patron.

 

From this grab bag of giddy diversions and offbeat side attractions, two subplots eventually take shape. One revolves around Burns' venturing into the casino business, in an effort to (in his own words) tighten his stranglehold upon the dismal town. He brands the casino in his own monstrous image, having not being sold on the merits of a Woodstock or British-themed establishment (as a Brit, I will make the most predictable nitpick I possibly can and point out that the waitress allegedly fresh from the streets of Sussex doesn't speak with a Sussex accent), and marvels as it proves ostensibly to be the perfect gravy train ("People swarm in, empty their pockets and scuttle off!"). The second sees Bart opening his own casino in his treehouse, at the taunting suggestion of the Squeaky-Voiced Teen, so that Springfield's younger population need not miss out on the joys of blown pocket change or magic acts that result in someone being violently mauled (in this case, Milhouse getting repeatedly clawed by a couple of house cats). The two subplots play off and echo one another more than they do the main conflict, culminating in an inspired development where Bart breezily pilfers the entertainment gig secured by Burns from singer Robert Goulet, the second guest star of the episode, by greeting Goulet at the airport and misdirecting him to his treehouse. Goulet has some misgivings about the situation, but is only too happy to adjust his repertoire for his unlikely young admirers, gaining a more appreciative reaction to his lounge rendition of the subversive schoolyard favourite "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells" than he presumably would have for a straight gig at Burns' casino. Bart is the one character who's able to thrive as the town lies deep within the belly of Gamblor, with its gambling fixation teasing out his latent entrepreneur. Burns, by contrast, is unprepared for where his supposed mastery of the community's wallets will take him, discovering that, having reached the top, he now has nowhere to go but into the dark maelstrom of paranoia.

The script even crams in a loose sort of D-story, with Homer landing a job as a blackjack dealer, a thread that's mainly there to set up for Marge's fateful entry into the casino, but also enables him to deal hands to a few familiar faces from popular culture. An encounter with Bond and Blofeld in which Homer might have doomed the entire free world was excised from the final edit, but later surfaced as part of "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular". Rain Man, though, was still fresh enough on people's minds to make a shout-out obligatory (another reason why I might subconsciously have associated this episode with The Critic, which treated Tom Cruise as though he were attached at the hip to Dustin Hoffman). Nowadays, this whole sequence feels maybe a little iffy, given that it involves Homer triggering an autistic meltdown in Hoffman's character, who in turn triggers a similar reaction in Homer. Obviously a parallel is being drawn between Homer and the Rain Man, but the script's intentions are not 100% clear. Is the insinuation that Homer might also be autistic...because he's a socially inept simpleton and, thanks to Rain Man, this is what the public thought autism looked like in 1993? Or are we to assume that Homer is merely mimicking Raymond, because he's taking Raymond's meltdown as a cue for how to respond in this situation? Either way, I can see why this moment might leave a slightly sour taste in some viewers' mouths, since it is difficult to interpret it in a way that doesn't leave the meltdown the butt of the joke. Elsewhere we get a similarly cartoonish depiction of obsessive-compulsive disorder via Burns' intense phobia of microscopic germs (and free masons), although this much is coded to specifically be an allusion to Howard Hughes, the aerospace engineer and Hollywood producer who devoted his later career to the development of Las Vegas and became notoriously reclusive in the process (his life was depicted in Martin Scorsese's 2004 film The Aviator). Hughes' case history, via Burns, is presented as the twisted but logical outcome of an overabundance of success, his wealth and influence having elevated him to such dizzying heights above his fellow man that he has nothing to fill the void but his own febrile delusions. 

A key reason why "$pringfield" succeeds, in spite of its feverishly meandering format, is in how gleefully it commits to the path of total disconcertment. It is nothing if not an unsettling episode, in which you almost feel as dazed as the characters by the brightness of the casino lights, and as overwhelmed by how this garish building comes, for this one installment, to dominate the lives of everyone around it. A number of the jokes have a deliberately unnerving flavour that leaves the viewer slightly confounded over what to make of them. Take the gag where Burns relives a cherished childhood memory of maiming an Irish-accented handyman by ramming him repeatedly with a bumper car, then laughs uproariously about his evil deed across a prolonged montage. The entire sequence drags on long enough to make you feel really uneasy, but also long enough that you practically surrender to the delirium and start snickering yourself, right before Burns rounds it off with a bitter reminder of the source of all this mirth: "What was I laughing at? Oh yes, that crippled Irishman." (They basically replicated this same joke six years down the line in "Take My Wife, Sleaze" of Season 11, with Bart laughing at Homer's professed inability to ride a bicycle, only minus that same discomforting element, so it comes off as a very neutered remake.) Then there's Homer's reaction when Lisa tries to share with him a nightmare she's just had where the bogeyman was on her trail; rather than offering the sensible parental reassurance she craves, he runs around getting the entire household worked up at the possibility that multiple bogeymen might have infiltrated their walls. As Lisa points out, that notion is absurd. Homer immediately understands how silly he's been when Marge returns to the property after a night of protracted gambling, insisting that it wouldn't have happened had she been there to keep him in check. It goes without saying that there were never any bogeymen inside the house. And yet, the frenzy with which Homer awakens Bart and has him shrieking at the prospect is contagious. For a moment, you really do have chills going down your spine. Chills that aren't entirely unwarranted, for while there might not be a bogeyman at Evergreen Terrace, there is clearly something very wrong with what we see within - a shot of Marge's vacated pillow, juxtaposed with Lisa crying out for the mother who isn't there.

The main conflict is able to keep itself fresh by using a tone that none of those prior absent Marge episodes had ever attempted, which it to say full-on eeriness. There is some pathos in the mix, thanks to the plight of Lisa and her Florida costume, but the scenes detailing how Marge succumbs to her gambling addiction, appearing to cast off all free will and awareness, feel more spooky than anything else. The psychology of addiction is not explored; it's just something that happens because Marge gives in to temptation just once, instead of following her higher judgement to turn that dropped quarter into the casino's lost and found, the pseudo-cheerful carnival music that accompanies her early win being the malevolent fanfare that welcomes her to Hell. This emphasis on Twilight Zone uncanniness has the brevity of the story, which might have been a problem in other scripts, actually playing to its advantage. The way in which Marge finally lets Lisa down doesn't come with any visible struggle or moral dilemma. We don't see her grappling with the knowledge that she's made a commitment to her daughter while her compulsion to gamble gradually chips away at her better intentions. She simply promises Lisa that she'll help with the costume, and then when we next see her she's right back at the slot machine as though nothing happened. It feels like a narrative shortcut, but it deftly gets across the corruptive, all-consuming nature of Marge's addiction. Whatever good things she might set out to do, whenever she's stepped away from the slot machine for long enough to regain her clarity, are rendered null and void the instant the casino beckons.

 

It's a formidable cycle that refuses to be broken..until Homer finally gets the resolve to confront Marge and tell her upfront of her addiction, spurred on by the tears of a distraught Lisa resigned to attending the pageant in the misshapen strips of foam rubber he'd duct-taped together at the eleventh hour when Marge failed to deliver. It's an outcome that puts Homer in the rather novel position of having made a correct moral choice where Marge has not, and you can bet he's going to make the most of it. The episode ends with them exiting the casino and Homer reminding a remorseful Marge of a selection of the idiotic stuff he's done over the years and how it all pales beside her gambling problem. Although Marge is initially willing to accept the criticism, she eventually tires of it and reminds Homer that once you've forgiven someone's transgressions, you can't keep rubbing their noses in it. This terrible ordeal in their lives is thus reduced to a quirky routine about the dos and don'ts within a relationship. Which leads us in to quite possibly the most fiendish thing about "$pringfield" - it lacks any kind of firmly redemptive resolution, although it certainly does endeavor to give the impression otherwise. The closing image is nice and uplifting, yet a gambling addiction isn't the kind of problem that's going to be remedied with a kiss and a picturesque stroll into the sunset. The episode itself is fully aware of this, judging by the glib solution proposed by Homer - when Marge suggests that she might do well to get professional help, he rebuts, "No, no, that's too expensive. Just don't do it any more!" Having set up such a complex issue, Oakley and Weinstein are faced with the quandary of how to resolve it in the allotted 22 minutes, and they all but admit that it isn't happening. The best they can do is put a pretty little bow on it, in the form of that kiss, and that sunset, and allow the fade-out to signal that the characters will all have moved on by the following week. For now, there is little in the way of a happy ending for Lisa. She gets a consolation prize at the pageant, for showing up in a costume so glaringly homespun it's presumed she received no help whatsoever from her parents. But if this was intended to take the sting off her humiliation, it doesn't succeed - having to share that honor with Ralph Wiggum, representing the state of Idaho by affixing a piece of paper reading "Idaho" to his chest (what are the odds that Chief Wiggum actually did help him with that?), renders it a patently hollow victory.

Burns' arc resolves with the most explicit promise of a restoration of the status quo, with him choosing to abandon the casino for the plant on the realisation that he prefers his old establishment. He also has Homer restored to his former position, after being perturbed by his erratic display while searching for Marge, and agreeing that such an unpredictable lunatic would be better suited to a nuclear setting. Even then, Burns is last seen holding Smithers at gunpoint for his concerns about the practicalities of flying to the plant inside the Spruce Moose (an allusion to Hughes' Spruce Goose), the titchy model aircraft he'd devised to transport passengers from New York's Idlewild Airport to the Belgian Congo in 17 minutes. Burns' insanity has not subsided, and we are left feeling a little worried there for Smithers, but with sufficient reassurance that the universe is shifting its way back to normalcy, the casino's reign of terror essentially nothing more than a crazy nightmare from which it will awaken shortly. Just like something from a dream, the Burns Casino seems to evaporate instantly, as though it never were a part of the town, and this comes as no surprise. Burns' sudden lost interest in the venue is a tip-off to the viewer that its narrative purpose has expired and that they too should prepare to leave it behind, a temporary fascination to be discarded as Homer (presumably) has Kissinger's glasses. It would eventually come up again in the Season 10 episode "Viva Ned Flanders", where they went to the trouble of having it demolished onscreen, so as to justify Homer and Ned then having to go to the actual Vegas so the latter could master gambling. There, Marge ruminates on the fate of the casino with the kind of ultra on-the-nose self-awareness that was rampant during Scully's era ("Remember how excited we were when this place opened? Then a week later we just forgot about it..."), but given how "$pringfield" ended I find it more baffling that the casino's ongoing existence should retroactively be treated this seriously (besides, if you want to get hung up on continuity, I'm pretty sure the subplot of "My Sister, My Sitter" took place on that same waterfront, and the casino was already gone by then).

Finally, I couldn't close this review without drawing attention to one of the episode's greatest background gags. Toward the start, as Abe and Jasper are walking past the porno theatre, if you look closely you'll see that the two titles playing are both parodies of James L. Brooks films - Sperms of Endearment (Terms of Endearment) and I'll Do Anyone (I'll Do Anything). Speaking of I'll Do Anything, it has been a long time since I last talked about that film, and since then there have been some really exciting developments. No, we still don't have the uncut version with the musical numbers intact, and I'm not optimistic that it's ever coming. But someone was nice enough to put up a bunch of the excised musical sequences on YouTube, including the one where A. Brooks tap dances. So I technically did find my grail. Huzzah!

SuperTed vs Earth Traffic (aka Not Behind The Bus, Spotty!)

In the mid-1980s, the Central Office of Information were in search of a new trusted figure to educate children on the importance of keeping their wits about them when crossing the road. They settled on SuperTed, eponymous star of a popular Welsh cartoon about a defective teddy bear who became the galaxy's saviour thanks to the interventions of a spotted extra terrestrial and a personified Mother Nature. The upshot was that Ted received his own public information film, "Super Safe With SuperTed", in which he took a break from battling power-hungry Texans and effeminate skeletons to take on something more nefarious - Earth traffic (identified by Ted as being the worst in the galaxy), which he must teach his absent-minded sidekick Spotty how to navigate, following a narrowly-averted disaster on the Planet Spot.

SuperTed started life as a series of books written by Mike Young (inspired by a bedtime story he'd devised to help his son overcome his fear of the dark), before an animated adaptation was commissioned in 1982 by budding Welsh-language public broadcast channel S4C (Warner Brothers were also apparently interested in acquiring the film rights, but Young preferred that his intellectual property remained in Welsh hands). The series was produced by the Cardiff-based Siriol Productions (founded by Young with his wife Liz) and proved such a hit in its native Wales that an English-language dub was created and aired on the BBC in 1983 to similar success. It followed the heroic exploits of a teddy bear (voiced by Geraint Jarman in the Welsh original and Derek Griffiths in the English dub) who was discarded by the human world but found valuable allies elsewhere, being granted life by way of the cosmic dust of an alien named Spotty (Martin Griffiths/John Pertwee) and special superpowers courtesy of Mother Nature (Valmai Jones/Sheila Steafel). Whenever trouble reared its head, SuperTed would activate those powers by whispering his secret magic word (which he never confided with anybody, so it can be as filthy or outlandish as your imagination wants it to be), typically to fend off his recurring nemesis, the conniving cowboy Texas Pete (Gari Williams/Victor Spinetti), and his bungling henchmen Skeleton (Emyr Young/Melvin Hayes) and Bulk (Huw Ceredig/Roy Kinnear). The premise of a crime-fighting teddy bear might have been goofy as hell, but the characters were colourful, the tone was earnest and legions of hearts had warmed to the plucky ursine as the hero the 1980s urgently needed. People so looked up to SuperTed that they manufactured a line of children's vitamin supplements in his image. A turn in a public information film was all but inevitable.

For myself, the secret ingredient to the show's success, and the element that continues to make it such an enduring classic, is the touch of melancholy that was often so palpable throughout. The opening sequence is one of those early television memories that's always haunted me - the coldness of Ted's abandonment (emphasised by the bombast of Peter Hawkins' narration), followed by the vividness of the unlikely solidarity that came with Spotty's appearance. Equally stirring was the closing theme that signed off each adventure, with its awe-struck yearning for a hero with "A scarlet suit, a flowing cape, a magic word, a super change." The music, composed by Chris Stuart and Mike Townend, was totally captivating. The English dub is the version I grew up with, so I can't attest to Jarman's characterisation in the Welsh original, but there was something so endearingly poignant about Griffiths' performance as SuperTed. He sounded honest, stout-hearted and resolute (all of the nice characteristics you would expect from a heroic teddy) but also kind of mournful. His was a voice that conveyed the sadness of the universe, as if he'd never quite gotten over the horror of being thrown away like a piece of rubbish into that old dark storeroom. That same melancholy was successfully captured in the public information film, which rounds out with SuperTed making about the glummest observation possible, particularly in light of the fact that it effectively functioned as the series finale. It wasn't the last we'd be seeing of Ted and Spotty - Hanna Barbera would revive the franchise three years later with a sequel series, The Further Adventures of SuperTed - but this is where the original Made in Wales era wrapped, and what an engagingly solemn note to conclude on.

"Super Safe With SuperTed" was initially presented as a five and a half minute short, though this included the usual opening and closing titles; the PIF itself amounted to three minutes and forty seconds. It was broadcast on BBC One on 26th March 1986, before receiving a home video release on the Children's Video Library VHS The Magic of SuperTed (and later on the 1994 Tempo release The Biggest Ever SuperTed Video). In it, SuperTed discovers that Spotty's comprehension of road safety is not up to snuff, and with help from Spotty's sister Blotch (Wendy Padbury), takes him to Earth (specifically to Cardiff) for a demonstration of the proper crossing procedure. A shorter edit, clocking at a minute and twenty-two seconds, subsequently did the rounds as an ad break filler; this focussed on the later portion of the story, with Ted, Spotty and Blotch safely traversing the roads of Cardiff. Excised was the narrative build-up, in which Spotty first demonstrates his crippling lack of road sense via a computer simulation, and then nearly gets himself mowed down by an alien motorist, prompting SuperTed to activate his powers and pull off a dramatic rescue.

The short opens on the Planet Spot, where Spotty is playing a characteristically 1980s-looking video game that involves guiding a pixilated chicken across a road. Alas, Spotty has no natural flair for chicken protection, and we see him guide the sprite directly into the path of a car and to an instant Game Over. Ted helps Spotty get a better hang of the game by explaining the rules of road crossing - find a safe place to cross where you can see clearly both ways, don't stand too close to the road, look and listen carefully, then cross while it's all clear, while still remaining alert to any incoming traffic. Using these principles, Spotty is able to lead the chicken to safety and earn his first victory screen after 503 occasions of being bested by SuperTed. He is, however, unable to apply those same principles to real life, when he and Ted are out roaming the Planet Spot and notice Blotch waving to them from the other side of a road. Spotty rushes out to greet her without looking and finds a Spotty Rocket hurtling in his direction; thankfully, SuperTed is able to speak his secret magic world and save his friend in the nick of time. In spite of all his prior training with the video chicken, Spotty remains confused about road safety, and gets offended when Ted suggests he look for a zebra crossing, possessing an automatic disdain for things with stripes (is that a by-product of coming from a spot-orientated culture?). Ted hits upon the idea of taking a trip to Earth to give Spotty a full-on demonstration with that infamously awful Earth traffic; Spotty reveals himself to be just as disdainful of Earth's residents (whom he identifies as the worst in the galaxy), but he complies. With prompting from Ted and Blotch, Spotty becomes a proficient road crosser, even while inclined to make every mistake in the book (crossing out from behind a bus, standing right at the edge of the kerb, running across the road instead of walking calmly).

Although the sequence in Cardiff seems gentle and non-threatening (compared to the drama of that prior sequence on Planet Spot where Spotty nearly becomes road pizza), hawk-eyed viewers might notice that two of Ted's enemies, Texas Pete and Bulk, make stealthy cameos as motorists. There's nothing to indicate that either is up to anything malevolent, but it adds a suggestion of hidden danger, as though the potential for calamity is always there, lurking below the seemingly untroubled surface, even if it can't be immediately perceived. The real kicker, though, comes at the end, when SuperTed's kindly reassurance that, "If you remember these rules, you will be safe crossing the road anywhere in the universe", is immediately followed up with the sombre reminder that, "I can't be there to save you...especially on the planet Earth." As noted, these were Ted's parting words to his fans, as he finished up his original run, and they took the form of a haunting allusion to his own unreality. A world in which an animate teddy bear could become a superhero and save you from all potential harm made for a delightful fantasy, but a fantasy was all that it was. The viewer now had to wake up and acknowledge that they lived on Earth, where such things did not happen, but where danger and terrible outcomes were very real possibilities. Ultimately, the viewer was on their own, their survival dependent on the honing of their own wits and judgement. It adds an extra sting to Spotty's prior remark about Earth having the worst people in the galaxy, if this innately hostile world is the one we have to figure out how to live in.

Even so, there's the lingering prospect that SuperTed hasn't left us for good, and might one day return to share his wisdom with the 21st century. What with the current cultural obsession with superheroes and nostalgic reboots, there has been intermittent talk of bringing the series back for a new generation. This is something Young has been endeavouring toward since the 2010s, and every now and then we get word that progress has been made, although the end-product has yet to materialise. Young has indicated that we shouldn't expect it to return in quite the same form, and that the villains in particular would have to undergo an extensive retooling; he noted in a Radio Times interview given in 2014 that, “In SuperTed, we had a gun-slinging cowboy, a flamboyantly gay skeleton and a fat guy who had jokes made about his weight and all these things you just wouldn’t do today,” Okay, I get why the guns and fat jokes wouldn't be on the table nowadays, but what was wrong with the flamboyantly gay skeleton? Don't you think that Skeleton was an icon? Kudos to Young for giving us official confirmation of his sexuality, though.

The Furryfolk on Holiday (1967)

Six years before launching his infamous television campaign on the dangers of patronising ice cream vans without adult supervision, Tufty Fluffytail had appeared on the big screen to give similar food for thought to callow holidaymakers. Created for theatrical distribution in 1967 was The Furryfolk on Holiday, a stop motion short starring the road-wary sciurine and his assortment of leporine, talpine and musteline companions, and detailing the various hazards they encounter while convening for a traditional seaside getaway. The erratic British weather doesn't look poised to spoil their holiday revelry, but could any of the children's injudicious actions? (Note that I've no information on what features this short would have been attached to. What would you have taken the kids to see in 1967? You Only Live Twice?)

The Furryfolk on Holiday was presented by leisure camp entrepreneur William Butlin (are we to assume that Tufty and friends are holidaying in one of his camps?), directed by Norman Hemsley and animated by John Hardwick and Bob Bura, the same team that went on to produce the 1970s television fillers. Hardwick and Bura's trademark folksy animation technique is present in both projects, although their execution in other regards could not have been more different. With its 12-minute running time, The Furryfolk on Holiday had the scope to be more narrative-driven than its television counterparts, and was able to recreate some of the dynamics from the Elsie Mills storybooks that weren't so accurately represented in the fillers - in particular, the impulsive Harry Hare being the real risk-taker of the group, with the impressionable Willy Weasel (the preferred punching bag of the fillers) tending to get into trouble wherever Harry had enlisted him as an accomplice. Whereas storytelling in the TV PIFs was heavily dependent on narration by Bernard Cribbins, the theatrical short forwent a third-person narrator altogether and made more extensive use of character dialogue (the animals' mouths also moved, which did not happen in the fillers). Each approach suited their chosen format aptly; Cribbins' narration was engaging and to the point, exactly what was needed for a 45-second teaching, while the wider array of voices and personalities heard throughout Holiday have a livelier flavour more likely to sustain viewer attention for a longer-form narrative. The child characters were all voiced by radio actress Ann Lancaster, who does a delightful job of giving each a distinct vocal identity - Tufty sounds bright and genial, Harry's voice has an appropriately boisterous edge, Willy's tones are comically squeaky, while Bobbie speaks with a West Country accent. Norman Shelley, renowned for his work on Children's Hour and later The Archers, provides the stern but compassionate vocals of Policeman Badger, the resolute authority figure who is always quick to step in wherever the children's judgement has faltered. (A third voice actor, Denise Bryer, is also credited; I'm assuming she voiced Tufty's mother in the final sequence.)

The short opens with the Furryfolk gathering outside their little row of holiday huts, and Tufty emerging from one to deliver an awkward exposition dump: "Smashing weather for the first day of our holiday! Wouldn't it be fun if Mr Policeman Badger was coming? Why, there he is! And he's on holiday too! Just look at his hat!" Indeed, we can tell that Policeman Badger is supposed to be off duty and getting in on the holidaymaking pleasure because we see him putting his helmet aside and donning a sun hat in its place; for the duration of the short he also assumes the identity of "Uncle Badger". As we know, however, accidents don't take a vacation, and Uncle Badger will have his work cut out in continuing to pull these nippers back from the brink of catastrophe. It is certainly fortunate that he's deigned to join them because, to put it bluntly, none of the kids' parents appear terribly fussed about what their offspring is doing. In fact, the only other adult in the short who's not completely useless is the rabbit driving the ice cream van.

The narrative of Holiday can be divided tidily into three separate acts, each dealing with a different consideration for making sensible use of the shores, with Tufty giving a final summary of all the short's teachings in a nocturnal epilogue. The first and most dramatic of these vignettes, which advises against the risks of swimming in the ocean while the tide is out, follows the classic Tufty scenario of Harry doing something reckless, getting into deep trouble (in this case, deep and watery) before getting his bacon saved by Badger. The second, which comments on the dangers presented by discarded litter, offers the equally classic variation with Harry encouraging Willy to do something foolhardy (with the consequences here being more of inconvenience than anything truly dire, although Badger is firm about what more could have gone wrong). The third, which covers Tufty's favoured subject of road safety and entails an appearance from the beguiling nemesis of all small Furryfolk, the ice cream van, involves no wrongdoing from either Harry and Willy. Instead, we get that other scenario that would intermittently recur within the Tufty tales, with Bobbie Brown Rabbit letting his guard down while tasked with watching over his toddler twin sisters, Bessie and Betsie, only for them to immediately go running off into harm's way. (I mentioned in my previous piece on Tufty that Minnie Mole, Tufty's token female friend, was typically sidelined from the action, and that's absolutely the case here. She gets no notable dialogue and no functional role in the narrative, the peak of her participation being her silently emotional reaction to the Punch & Judy show the characters are watching in the middle segment.)

Meanwhile, there is an additional fourth teaching that is implemented more implicitly, one that's less about safety per se than it is being a good friend and team player, and this is where Tufty himself gets to shine. The first activity that Badger has arranged for the children is a sandcastle-building competition, with boxes of candy promised as prizes for the three best entries, and Tufty proposes that they agree in advance that whoever wins will share their candy with the others. His friends have no trouble in agreeing, but Harry gets so fixated on wanting on win that he allows it to spoil his fun, leading to an act of self-sabotage and ultimately prompting him to seek out the hazards of the waves. Disheartened after losing the miniature flags he'd intended to use to decorate his castle, he destroys his entry in a churlish fit, eliminating himself from the competition and from receiving even the participation prize of a smaller bag of toffees. Tufty appears at his side and offers to help him rebuild, but Harry isn't interested; what he wants is to stand out, and if he can't prove himself the best by constructing a winning on his own, he can do so by demonstrating what a proficient swimmer he is. He enters the sea and discovers, too late, that he isn't proficient enough to keep the tide from dragging him ever further away from the shore. Fortunately, Tufty and Willy are able to alert Uncle Badger to Harry's whereabouts, and he wastes little time in rowing out to rescue the bedraggled hare before the waves have completely engulfed him. Harry's competitiveness and desire to outdo everyone else is subtly contrasted with Tufty's concern for supporting his friends and seeing that they all have an enjoyable time, with the message that cooperation is a better path than self-aggrandising. Having returned to dry land, Harry asks who won the sandcastle competition and Badger responds in a hesitant tone that implies he'd never settled on the winners and is listing off three names at random: "Umm...Tufty, Bobbie and Willy!"  (Of course Tufty won! No shit Tufty won! I'm always glad to see a rare victory for Willy, although I would have like Minnie's name to have been mentioned, so that she'd at least get some acknowledgement in this short.) Tufty gives Harry the reassuring reminder that they're going to share their prizes, thus affirming that his destructive competitiveness was always unnecessary.

In the same way, sensible behaviour at the beach isn't merely a matter of looking out for your own welfare, but doing your bit to maintain a safe environment for others. Leaving broken glass on the sand is an inconsiderate thing to do because it could result in the injury of another. Your younger siblings can't be expected to recognise danger all of the time, so they need you to watch their backs. The prevention of accidents is intrinsically a team effort.

Tufty might model the behaviour that the short's target audience is intended to emulate, but the real heart of the story is unquestionably Uncle Badger, whose kindly nature is not obscured by his stern demeanour. His use of the word "stupid" to describe some of the children's behaviours might seem a bit harsh to modern sensibilities, but in most regards he's a sterling authority figure - firm in laying down what is wrong and right, and what could happen if the difference is not appreciated, but also patient, generous, and meeting the children's shortcomings with a desire to nurture rather than to simply reprimand. For example, he offers to help Harry become a more proficient swimmer by agreeing to take him and the others for lessons at the swimming pool the next day. Caring, dependable and always knowing what to do in a crisis, he's able to fill the parental void that is sometimes felt throughout the short. There is, however, one thing that Badger does VERY wrong that I am going to call him out for - when Harry and Willy have led him to the location of the bottle they'd broken and initially tried to cover with sand, he disposes of the glass in a sheet of newspaper and has Harry and Willy pass the fragments up to him? What kind of responsible adult gets small children to handle broken glass? I'm suddenly reminded of the less benevolent Policeman Badger we saw in the "Playing Near The Road" filler who manhandled the injured Willy by shoulders and had him walk to the pavement on his wounded leg.

As for the rest of the so-called responsible adults, there is quite a satisfying moment in the third vignette where the ice cream rabbit chews out Mr Brown Rabbit for failing to keep Bessie and Betsie off the road (the two ankle biters are unharmed, thanks to Mr Bunny Whip's lightning reflexes in applying the brakes), even if it's faltering big brother Bobbie who has to answer for the transgression. Look, I understand why the Tufty stories take the stance that they do. They're all about teaching children that they will need to learn how to use their own judgement, as there are inevitably going to be situations in which they can't depend on adults to do the thinking for them. Children are the target audience, and that's why the child characters are the ones held accountable. Even so, there are a number of points in Holiday where it feels like the problems could have been avoided with a little more adult oversight. Where were all the grown-ups while the children were building their sandcastles? If they'd been properly supervised then maybe someone would have seen Harry going up to the waves and been able to stop him then and there. And why did nobody besides Harry notice Willy tripping over with his glass bottle or show any concern about it? (The contribution of a lack of parental oversight to hazardous situations is not something that went totally unacknowledged in Mills' stories, where I seem to recall there was a running theme of Harry's father being fixated on his career and having little time for his son.)

Bobbie asserts that Bessie and Betsie had both been educated on the "Kerb Drill" and should have known better than to have run into the road, but Badger counters that very young children are liable to forget such things, particularly when enticed by something as exciting as the ice cream van. We then get a demonstration of the proper road-crossing procedure, with Badger, Tufty, Bobbie, Bessie and Betsie looking right, left and then right again before making their way across - significantly, they do so standing side by side, reaffirming that safety is a group business. The explicit references to the Kerb Drill would rapidly date the short, being a lingering remnant of World War II Britain. It was devised by the National "Safety First" Association (predecessor to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents) in 1942 and was distinctively militaristic in nature; by the time the television fillers started airing it had been phased out in favour of the Green Cross Code, deemed to be a more relatable teaching tool for youngsters in peacetime.

Holiday concludes with an epilogue where Tufty is being tucked into bed by Mrs Fluffytail while musing on the events gone by. He reflects that it was a lovely day and that nobody really ruined it (spoken as if he'd anticipated in advance that someone would, which shows how genre-savvy he is). "Harry and Willy very nearly did," Mrs Fluffytail retorts, which I consider pretty mean of her, particularly since she makes no mention at all of Bobbie's transgression. Tufty lists off the various teachings dispensed by Uncle Badger throughout the day, and observes how good it was that he was always on hand to keep each nascent disaster from materialising. Indeed. Good old Uncle Badger.

We can only speculate on what might go wrong tomorrow during the swimming lessons at the pool. My money's on Harry running around the pool edges and encouraging Willy to jump in at the shallow end. The ominous siren call of the ice cream van is obviously also going to sound at some point. Well, don't answer it Willy, it's a trap!

An upload of The Furryfolk on Holiday is available for viewing (albeit without sound) on the official website of Carey Blyton (nephew of renowned children's author Enid Blyton), who composed the "The Tufty Club Marching Song" heard during the end-credits. It was also included on the BFI DVD release The COI Collection Volume Six: Worth The Risk?

Basil Brush vs Inflatables

Over the years the Central Office of Information (COI) enlisted numerous celebrities to dispense enlightenment to the calamity-baiting masses. Michael Palin warning us about the dangers of driving too close to other vehicles in a downpour. Ernie Wise guiding Glenda Jackson through the process of donating blood. Alvin Stardust, Joe Bugner and others delivering reproving lectures to children reckless enough to disregard the Green Cross Code. Few, though, were hotter than Basil Brush, a felt fox whose distinguishing characteristics included his Terry-Thomas-like vocals, his uproarious laughter (typically at his own jokes) and his signature cry of "Boom! Boom!" At the time Basil landed his own public information film in 1976, he was riding high as one of the elites of UK television, with his variety program, The Basil Brush Show, showing no signs of stopping after eight years. If the public was going to listen to any public figure sound off on the all-important subject of seaside safety, it was the buck-toothed vulpine with the penchant for cheesy puns. He was certainly cooler than Tufty, at any rate.

Basil Brush got his start in 1962, in a television series detailing the struggles of a down-and-out circus troupe, The Three Scampies (I approve of the title), before graduating to being a supporting act for magician David Nixon. The wisecracking fox proved so popular that in 1968 he received his own spin-off. The actor and puppeteer behind the magic was Ivan Owen, a man so committed to preserving the illusion of Basil's reality that he fervently avoided doing any publicity work as himself. The Basil Brush Show had a prosperous run that spanned all of the 1970s, but as the 1980s set in Basil's empire started to crumble and by the end of the decade his relevance had all but receded, giving way to fresher puppet creations like Roland Rat and Gordon the Gopher. I'll confess that he played no part in my own early childhood, with my personal introduction to the character coming via an advert for Angel Delight dessert mix that he'd appeared in in 1995. He would, however, enjoy a major comeback in the 2000s with a retooled version of The Basil Brush Show, which followed the format of a family sitcom and saw Michael Windsor taking over from Owen, who'd passed away in 2000. Throughout his career, Basil worked alongside a lengthy line-up of human second bananas, including Rodney Bewes, Billy Boyle and, in the 2000s series, Christopher Pizzey, with actor Roy North (or Mr Roy, as Basil called him) serving as his sidekick at the time of his foray into PIF territory. 

The two minute short, "Basil Brush and The Airbed", sees Basil and Roy savouring a day of sun and sand when Roy proposes going for a ride out to sea in his inflatable dinghy, followed by a dip in the waters once he's gotten beyond the waves. This causes their jovial banter to shift to the serious topic of inflatables - objects of buoyant holiday fun, or treacherous deathtraps threatening to lure swimmers into a salty blue abyss? Basil gives us the lowdown, and despite a comical misunderstanding over Roy's intentions when he speaks of "blowing up" an inflatable canoe, emerges as the voice of reason. Basil might be a joker, but he's no fool when it comes to respecting the briny.

As public information films go, "Basil Brush and The Airbed" is firmly at the non-traumatising end of the scale. Basil and Roy don't get into any hazardous situations, they simply talk about the various ways in which things could go wrong, and Basil is ultimately at pains to stress that the inflatables themselves are not actually the problem, just people's usage of them and lack of consideration for the precarious nature of the waters. The terrifying scenarios related - being swept away from an inflatable dinghy you have foolishly vacated, or drifting out to sea atop an airbed because you weren't paying attention to where it was headed - are softened by the characters' arsenal of wisecracks (with Basil fiercely jousting to retain sole joking rights), and the agreeable chemistry between Basil and Roy, which has the effect of framing the discussion less as a lecture than as a spot of good-natured sparring between friends. Indeed, the most startling moment might be when Roy abruptly breaks the fourth wall, a minute and forty seconds in, to deliver one warning directly to the viewer, prompting Basil to glance at the camera more reservedly, as if reluctant to outright implicate the lesson's intended recipients. 

The PIF rounds out with a suitably light-hearted moment, with Basil opting to stick to the shallower regions of a nearby paddling pool, but having trouble summoning his rubber duck Horace, who is averse to getting wet under any circumstances. We're a long way from the nightmares of "Lonely Water", even if the threat in question is much the same.

Tufty vs The Ice Cream Van

For a long stretch of the 20th Century, UK road sense was synonymous with a little red rodent with brilliant manners and an impeccable grasp of the kerb drill. 1953 saw the genesis of Tufty Fluffytail, an anthropomorphic squirrel created by Elsie Mills of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) as part of an initiative designed to instil safety awareness in the very young. By 1961, the character had grown sufficiently in stature that a Tufty Club was formed, and would be an educational powerhouse for the ensuing two decades. Tufty's adventures were detailed in a series of stories, written by Mills and illustrated by Kenneth Langstaff, each with an explicit teaching about avoiding some form of calamity. Tufty lived in a community of creatures known as the Furryfolk, and was frequently seen with his friends Bobbie Brown Rabbit, Minnie Mole, Harry Hare and Willy Weasel. Though the campaign was predominantly associated with a common concern facing wildlife and small children - how to avoid becoming road kill in a world increasingly dominated by traffic and tarmac - the Tufty tome dealt with all manner of safety considerations, to hidden hazards around the home to playing safe near water to sensible behaviour at firework displays. Attempting to steer these guileless youngsters in the right direction was an assortment of adult authority figures, including Tufty's parents, the perpetually stern Policeman Badger, schoolteacher Mrs Owl and a hedgehog crossing guard whose moniker eludes me.

I recall Tufty being a pretty ubiquitous part of my early childhood - I had multiple books, an audio cassette and I think even a Tufty board game - so I find it interesting just how few other Millennials I've encountered, even older Millennials, who seem to remember who he was. I've entertained the possibility that he might have faded a bit by the late 1980s and I had all this Tufty stuff due to coming into some 70s kid's unwanted junk through a car boot sale. And yet, as per the timeline on RoSPA's official website, Tufty was still around by the early 1990s, when he was subject to a modern redesign that presumably did not resonate well with the Nintendo generation; from there, things dropped off until 2007, when an appearance on the BBC time travel drama Life on Mars gave him momentary relevance.

Whether you regard Tufty as a beloved childhood icon or an archaic obscurity, I hope it won't go amiss if I confess my deepest darkest secret regarding the bright-eyed blighter - I actually didn't like him that much. Oh, I liked the stories and the Furryfolk in general, but there was something about the lead character that I always resented. My big lingering reservation about Tufty, as a child, was that he always did everything right. And that's terrible.

Far be it from me to question the effectiveness of the Tufty campaign. It ran for four decades, at its peak the Tufty Club boasted over two million members and 25,000 branches, and just a year after the club was launched, the director general of RoSPA, Brigadier R.F.E. Stoney, had already noted a significant reduction in deaths among children under 5. That's all very excellent. Go Tufty! For me, though, there was little appeal in a hero who was so stainless and who made so very few mistakes. I appreciate that Tufty was supposed to be a character who modelled good behaviour and whom kids could look up to, but the trouble is that he wasn't at all relatable. I remember precisely one Tufty tale, from that audio cassette, in which Tufty had his turn at being the fuck-up, and it involved him leaving toys on the stairs and causing his mother to take a tumble. That story was one of my favourites, because it was so satisfying seeing the goody two-shoes be knocked off his high horse for a change. Otherwise, you had your occasional example of Bobbie Brown Rabbit doing things wrong (often relating to his two younger sisters, Bessie and Betsie, whom he was hopeless at looking out for) but duties for modelling bad and unadvisable behaviour typically fell on Harry Hare and Willy Weasel. Harry was basically the anti-Tufty, in that he was a cocky bastard whose understanding of consequence was practically zero, while Willy was a pliable milksop who could be easily led astray with the wrong influence (ie: Harry). Neither character was malicious or actively looking to cause trouble, but they had a heck of a knack for inviting it. The species alignment is unsurprising - squirrels and rabbits are considered cute and innocuous, while hares have an Aesopian association with impulsive bravado and weasels are traditionally depicted as the little seeds of chaos of the animal kingdom (even if, in Willy's case, that chaos has no basis in any predatory instinct). If you're wondering where Minnie Mole fit into the equation, she was the token female friend whom I recall got largely sidelined. Off the top of my head I only remember one story where Minnie was the central character, which involved her getting impatient waiting for her mother to collect her from school and wandering into the street by herself.

To me, Harry was the most interesting character because he was the most fallible of the bunch. Something about his rebellious spirit, however ill-fated, evoked admiration. His naivety and his difficulty in differentiating right from wrong gave him an endearing vulnerability. He was a character the reader could learn along with, as opposed to having the superiority of an already perfect character rubbed in their faces. I found myself rooting for Harry to come through, however probable it was that he was going to come a cropper. Just as any rare instance of Tufty being humbled was received with great satisfaction, any intermittent yarn where Harry was able to demonstrate sound judgement, or at least not become the cautionary example, was something to be savoured.

With the immense popularity of Tufty tales, it was all but inevitable that animated outings would follow, and these came courtesy of John Hardwick and Bob Bura of Stop Motion, an animation team best known for the "Trumptionshire Trilogy", a series of programs comprised of Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley. Their Tufty collaborations began in 1967 with the 12-minute theatrical short The Furryfolk on Holiday, which dealt with various aspects of safety at the beach. In 1973, a series of television fillers followed, featuring narration by Bernard Cribbins. The most infamous of these among public information film connoisseurs is "Ice Cream Van", which depicts what happens when the titular vehicle stops at Tufty's street and Tufty and Willy each go to get a soft serve. Tufty does the sensible thing and asks his mother to accompany him, whereas Willy heads out without adult supervision, with disastrous results. On this occasion, Willy didn't need the peer pressure of Harry to lure him into taking risks, with the promise of ice cream providing incentive enough.

 

The Tufty fillers were targeted at children under 5, and were accordingly a gentler breed of PIF, steering clear of the muted eeriness of the "Charley Says" series or the nightmarish metaphors of "Lonely Water". There is a warmth and geniality both to the animation and to Cribbins' narration. "Ice Cream Van" does not, nevertheless, soft pedal its message, emphasising the van's deceptive duality as a vendor of exciting treats and a potential deathtrap drawing children to the hazardous roadside. Having collected his ice cream, Willy makes the mistake of crossing out beside the parked van, so that an incoming vehicle does not see him until he's immediately in front of it. The moment of impact is tastefully obscured by the van, though a dull telltale thud is highly audible, making it obvious what kind of grisliness is playing out behind it. The good news is that Willy does not seem too seriously injured - he's last seen sitting upright, fully conscious - although the sight of his inert leg and dropped ice cream make for pitiable signifiers of shattered innocence. Cribbins mournfully observes that, "Willy has been hurt, and all because he didn't ask his mummy to go with him to the ice cream van", before the PIF ends on a moment of comfort, in having Tufty and Mrs Fluffytail walk out and stand compassionately over their wounded compatriot. Significantly, they walk together and retain their tight hold of one another's hands, a wholesome gesture that reinforces the PIF's message whilst underscoring the sorry absence of parental vigilance around our wayward weasel. Cribbins' narration places the blame for the accident squarely on Willy, but maybe the greater onus was on his parents to not allow such a young child to wander the streets unsupervised to begin with (I'm assuming Tufty and his friends aren't meant to be significantly older than the audience they were aimed at). One notably dated component is that Cribbins explicitly identifies it as the mother's role to look out for young children - the notion of the father having caregiving responsibilities is apparently unthinkable. 

A slight quirk of these Tufty fillers is that, for those who know the squirrel primarily as a PIF character and not from the Mills books, it is Willy Weasel who's remembered as the neighbourhood shit-stirrer. By comparison, Harry got off surprisingly lightly in his animated form. He had a somewhat harder time in The Furryfolk on Holiday, when an impromptu swimming session necessitated his being rescued by Policeman Badger. His television presence, however, was restricted to a single filler, where he himself didn't suffer any repercussions for his ill-advised actions, outside of the trauma of witnessing Willy being knocked down by a car...again. Yes, this is by far the grimmest thing about these Tufty animations - they somehow made Willy being hit by traffic and breaking his leg into a running theme. The first time it happens, in "Ice Cream Van", it's stark and upsetting. When it happens a second time, in "Playing Near The Road", it takes on a slightly more unintentionally comedic edge, since you rather get the impression that this whole neighbourhood might have it in for Willy (a suggestion not dispelled by Policeman Badger's total indifference to the motorist who knocked him down, or the distinctly unprofessional manner in which he hauls the injured Willy to his feet and lets him stagger back to the pavement). It casts a darker shade upon the Furryfolk - bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and suspiciously slow to brake for weasels.

Round Springfield (aka Make My Pain The Same As Yours)

The recent passing of Simpsons composer Alf Clausen got me wanting to cover an episode in which music plays a significant part. The most obvious candidate was already taken - and besides, I did ideally want it to be an episode in which music is celebrated as something expressive and transcendent, not one in which we simply have a good giggle about how camp and silly musical storytelling is. So "Round Springfield" (2F32) of Season 6 seemed like the best possible option, with bonus points for the fact that it is a story about bidding farewell to a musical legend who maybe didn't get the full recognition he deserved within his lifetime. Debuting on April 30th 1995, this was a historic episode, marking the first occasion on which one of the show's established characters was killed off. It was not the first episode to deal with the subject of death and bereavement - "Old Money" of Season 2 can claim that honor, although the theme of grief was far less pivotal in that episode, with the narrative focus being primarily on Abe's estrangement from Homer. Here, the issue is all the more stark and hard-hitting for being presented from the perspective of one of the show's younger and more ingenuous characters. Lisa left contemplating matters of life, death and resilience when a chance reunion with her mentor, the enigmatic blues musician Bleeding Gums Murphy (guest voice of Ron Taylor), is cut tragically short by an unspecified terminal illness she did not see coming. 

I confess that I know very little about how "Round Springfield" was marketed in the run-up to its airing. I personally did not get to see the episode until roughly a year after its Sky 1 premiere, and with the internet still being this weird and slightly alien-sounding rumble on the horizon, I had no means of accessing spoilers online. Later instances in which the show pulled this same macabre move tended to be preceded by promotional blitzs designed to drum up suspense about the identity of the condemned character (Maude Flanders and Rabbi Krustofsky spring to mind, although neither example worked out anywhere near as well as the King of The Hill "Propane Boom" cliffhanger). I would hazard a guess that this did NOT happen here, if only because the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter was right around the corner, and why would they risk stealing that publicity stunt's thunder? I do not know if viewers were made aware in advance that a character was going to die, let alone if there was any mystery regarding who it might be. Perhaps the title offered a clue to those hip to the 1986 picture Round Midnight, which follows the final days of a drug-addicted saxophonist (played by jazz legend Dexter Gordan) and his friendship with the fan he encounters after travelling to Paris. All I can say is that, having entered into the episode blind, I can attest that it really is the best way to first experience it, with your perspective actually aligned with Lisa's. There are clues, certainly, that something more troublesome might be unfolding (not least in that Lisa finds Bleeding laid out in a hospital bed) but we are at first inclined to share in her naivety, being too caught up in the joyfulness of the reunion, and the robustness of the characters' rapport. Alarm bells might start to ring should we pick up on the fact that the one thing the characters are emphatically not discussing is the nature of Bleeding's condition, as if it's something that neither party can bring themselves to acknowledge. But Bleeding certainly never presents as a man who is at death's door (to the point that it requires some suspension of disbelief that he'd still be able to belt out such a vigorous jamming session on his saxophone in what transpires to be his last meeting with Lisa). He seems much too alive, still so full of passion for his craft and with warmth and wisdom for Lisa. So when tragedy strikes, it comes with a devastating abruptness that feels all-too real. The line between this world and the next is such a fragile one, something this episode captures so bitterly. One moment he's giving Lisa some pointers and encouragement before she plays in her school recital, the next she's rushing back to tell him how well her performance went, only to discover that he's no longer there.

What fascinates me about "Round Springfield" is that it's an episode that allows itself time to be sad, in a way that was honestly quite unusual for this point in the series. There's comic levity in the subplot, which involves Bart suffering at the hands of yet another shoddy Krusty product (a jagged metal hoop that's inexplicably included as a freebie in his brand of cereal), and in whatever Homer is up to on the sidelines (of note, there's a running gag where a hot dog vendor seems to seek him out in the most inappropriate of places), but the loss of Bleeding and its impact on Lisa are treated with genuine reverence. There are points where it honestly seems reminiscent of the more melancholic tone endemic to the first three seasons of the show; it has a certain moodiness of atmosphere, and an eye for emphasising the loneliness and finer disappointments of the characters' lives in a way that was so central to early installments like "Life on The Fast Lane", "Colonel Homer" and Bleeding Gums' debut episode "Moaning Lisa". I tend to think of this model of Simpsons storytelling as having bowed out with "A Streetcar Named Marge" at the start of Season 4, but with the reappearance of Mr Murphy it momentarily lives again. And this would be the big twist - I'm forever blaming this shift in tone on then-showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss and their preference for sillier, rapid-fire humor over character-driven storytelling, yet they were the minds behind this episode. The script itself was written by Joshua Sternin and Jennifer Ventimilia, but the plot was Jean and Reiss's brainchild, and they receive a story credit. Credits for story alone were unusual on The Simpsons, and it's explained on the DVD commentary that Jean and Reiss requested it on this are occasion because they'd envisioned the episode being a big winner on the awards front and wanted their names attached. (It was all in vain; the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program that year was scooped up by another Lisa-orientated episode, "Lisa's Wedding", which offered something even more novel than the death of a jazz musician - a hair-raising peek into the distant dystopian future of 2010). By Jean and Reiss's standards, "Round Springfield" is a remarkably grounded narrative. Even the lighter touches, such as the hot dog vendor, seem deliberately smaller and more restrained than much of what we'd seen them do throughout Season 4. That is, until we get the ending. With the closing sequence, the episode is suddenly immersed in the signature off-the-wall humor that was all over Jean and Reiss's own series The Critic (a perception bolstered in how it is essentially an extended parody of a popular moment from a contemporary movie). That ending is the key factor that disqualifies it from playing like a total throwback to those earlier seasons. And it is such a deeply bizarre way to conclude this story. I don't even mean that as a criticism. It's weird in ways that are grand, fun and very moving. But if you stop to think about it, what is even going on in that ending? Because surely Bleeding didn't really...well, we'll get to it.

"Round Springfield" is, admittedly, another example of an episode where the optics maybe aren't so great when viewed from a particular angle. I mean, think about this for a moment. They made the bold decision to kill off a (semi) recurring cast member, and they chose one of their few African American characters. In other words, the black guy died first. That had never been done before, right? Adding fuel to the fire is that, when Bleeding Gums Murphy was introduced in "Moaning Lisa", he was a textbook example of the Magical Negro, being a somewhat mysterious black character whose sole function within the story was to make Lisa feel more confident about her place in the world. Now, to an extent, all supporting characters are bound by the law of Simpsons-centrism - the Simpsons ARE the centre of this confounding little universe, and everything the rest of Springfield gets up to must in some way relate back to them and be in service of them. But it's felt particularly strongly with the Elliotts, a group of characters who effectively serve as the family's guardian angels. I went over my reasoning in more detail in my review of "Moaning Lisa", but to recap, "Elliotts" was a term I came up for a foursome of characters from the show's early years (named for the cartoon dragon from Disney's Pete's Dragon), whom I'd clumped into a collective as a sort of counterpoint to the Home-Wreckers - in addition to Bleeding Gums, the others are Karl (from "Simpson and Delilah"), Bergstrom (from "Lisa's Substitute") and Kompowsky (from "Stark Raving Dad"). What they have in common is an uncannily benevolent, otherworldly aura and that they are all, significantly, outsiders to the Simpsons' White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heteronormative domesticity. Bleeding's a Magical Negro, Karl's a Magical Queer, Bergstrom's a Magical Jew, Kompowsky's a...hmm, is the Magical Psychiatric Patient a thing? It could be. The point is that each of the Elliotts represents a marginalised figure within the Springfield community. Their outsider status might have given them a strength and a perspective on life that would otherwise be unknown to the Simpsons, but all that matters is that they're able to share those pearls of wisdom with one or more of the family and go merrily on their way, satisfied that their work is done. They can help to prop up the central dynamic, but they have no business in sticking around to be a part of it. Of the four, Bergstrom is the only one who could be feasibly described as having anything even resembling an agenda of his own (in that he doesn't lose sight of the fact that his time with Lisa is only a short-term job assignment and he'll soon have bigger fish to fry in the projects of Capital City). For clarity, I like the Elliotts and think they're all great and beautifully realised characters, but there's little downplaying that this dubious convention informs a huge part who they are and how the narrative regards them.

Bleeding Gums retains the honor of being the only Elliott to ever be brought back to any significant capacity, even three decades on from the episode's debut, although this wasn't for a lack of interest on the writers' part. (Returns for Karl and Kompowsky were on the cards but fell through. I am not, though, aware of there being any serious motions for a Bergstrom sequel; I suspect that Dustin Hoffman - sorry, Sam Etic - regarded it as a one-and-done gig.) His reappearance in "Round Springfield" might have been an opportunity to expand on his character and have him grow a little outside of his role as a mentor figure to Lisa - but nope, if anything they only doubled down on his Magical Negro credentials, sacrificing him so that Lisa could undergo character growth of her own, before finally depicting him as a literal spirit in the sky, jamming with his newly-enlightened protege to a Carole King tune (like I say, we'll get to that goofy ending in due course). 

None of this was done maliciously, of course. But what is just as telling is how Bleeding Gums was singled out as the kind of perfectly expendable character who could be jettisoned for the feels (and the awards bait). The Season 7 clip show "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular", would infamously mock him (alongside Dr Marvin Monroe) for never having been a popular character, and therefore not one that viewers were presumably expected to care about, although the truth with Bleeding really lands somewhere closer to the middle. On the DVD commentary, Jean does indeed state that they obviously weren't going to kill off a character like Mr Burns whom they'd be wanting to use again, but he also recounts that Bleeding was chosen because he was a character whom people felt warmly toward, in no small way thanks to Taylor's performance. He offered the best of both worlds, in not being integral enough to the core universe that it would be an especially startling development to retire him to the jazz club in the sky, but being sympathetic enough that it would still hurt viewers to see him go. If Reiss had had his way, then the show would have taken a very different path and killed off Marge's mother (a move that Julie Kavner might actually have been fully on board with, as I understand she hated doing Jackie Bouvier's voice), but he concedes that Bleeding turned out to be a better choice. Perhaps bumping off someone within the family, however seldom seen, was deemed too radical. Or maybe it came down to the fact that Bleeding is a fundamentally gentle soul, which Jackie is not. He expresses no outward bitterness or regret for the life that he's led (other than his $1,500 a day Faberge egg habit, which is the closest we get to a heroin allusion), and his legacy is complicated only in the sense that his inherent goodness went under most people's radars. He's a wholly angelic being we're intended to shed a tear for but also conversely write off as a character of no genuine consequence. Outside of what he meant to Lisa, that is.

The Lisa factor is another big reason, I'm sure, why Bleeding was ultimately the one placed on the chopping block. She is such a compelling character around which to craft emotional stories, possessing a wisdom well beyond her years but still having all the vulnerabilities of a child. The loss of a friend like Bleeding would hit her tremendously, even with life already having dealt her so many blows with its cruel impermanences. As Kompowsky's episode made clear, she was very deeply affected by the death of the original Snowball (and her hamster named Snuffy, though he comes up less often). There are also those losses she'd suffered that didn't entail mortality, with her being all but forced to surrender her beloved pony Princess and the man she'd looked up to as a substitute father figure abandoning her for a job in Capital City. In both instances, Lisa's distinctly child-like naivety regarding the impending heartbreak was such a powerful factor. She was so thrilled to have Princess that it seemingly never occurred to her just how difficult and impractical it was for her family to afford such a high maintenance animal. She was so besotted with Bergstrom that she lost sight of the fact that he was never going to be there on a long-term basis. Here, she's so overjoyed to have Bleeding back in her life that she doesn't question what he might be doing in the Springfield Hospital, and it seems that Bleeding doesn't have the heart to outright tell her. Was he himself aware that he wasn't going to make it? Yes, and I think there is a specific moment in the episode where we can pinpoint him making what seems like a conscious farewell to Lisa. It's a scene that hits so hard on repeat viewings, when we know what's coming. As Lisa prepares to go off to her recital, Bleeding hands her his saxophone and tells her to take it with her for luck. While Lisa is honored, she does not grasp the full significance of this gesture, presumably thinking that he's just lending it to her for the recital. With hindsight, it seems obvious that Bleeding gave it to her because he knew he wouldn't be needing it. In addition, by giving her his saxophone he is in effect passing the torch to her to go out and perform great music in his stead. There's a more macabre foreshadowing in his telling Lisa that she's going to "knock 'em dead" (by which he likely to alludes to Lisa's potential to go far in life, not just at this particular recital), followed by an ominous cough, the only symptom of ill-health he's seen to exhibit. Finally, as she leaves his side, there's a lingering emphasis on him waving to her, as if he knows this will be their last goodbye.

What always made the relationship between Lisa and Bleeding so affecting is in how they were ostensibly so mismatched, yet connected so readily as social misfits with a mutual appreciation for jazz and the importance of creative expression. When Lisa first encountered Bleeding back in Season 1, he gave her the much-needed assurance that she was not alone in the world, at a time when she felt that no one understood her. (Perhaps fearing that newer viewers wouldn't know who Bleeding was, the episode incorporates a small clip from "Moaning Lisa", leading to a jarring clash of art styles; I suppose it's not so strange when we consider that for several years the series still felt the need to keep reminding us who Sideshow Bob was every time he showed up.) In "Round Springfield" we see how Lisa is eventually able to return the favour, in demonstrating to Bleeding that his life and music had value, at a time when he seemed destined to die alone and all forgotten. ("You've had some career...although the moral seems to be that a lifetime of jazz leads you sad and lonely." "Well, before you came to visit I would have agreed with you.") Before Lisa, nobody had come to visit Bleeding at the hospital; when she asks about his family, he tells her he doesn't really have one. (In what can only be a deliberate callback to a joke in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", it's heavily hinted that Bleeding and Dr Hibbert are brothers who lost contact a long time ago, although neither party seems to connect the dots. This also means that Bleeding had a second brother he possibly didn't even know about.) The grim reality doesn't fully set in until after his death, when Lisa attends his funeral and discovers that she's the only mourner there; nobody else in town knew who Bleeding was or cares that he's gone. It's a realisation that transforms Lisa's grief into red-hot grit and takes her on her first step toward healing, with the knowledge that responsibility for keeping her friend's memory alive rests solely on her.

Before then, we get a series of short scenes that feel reminiscent of "Moaning Lisa", with the family all showing awareness of Lisa's suffering and doing their bit to try and help, even if they don't necessarily have the kinds of answers she's seeking. Homer looks as though he might have a sensible response, in reminding Lisa of how she coped when Snowball died, but ends up reaching the most inappropriate possible conclusion from that train of thought: "All we have to do is go down to the pound and get a new jazzman." Maggie attempts to soothe Lisa's aching soul the only way she knows how, by offering Lisa her pacifier (it doesn't help Lisa, but the tactic later proves effective on Homer, who is rattled by his own failure to say the right thing). Bart shares with her his belief in reincarnation - specifically, that when you die you can come back in a form of your own choosing. He's intent on being a butterfly in his next life, because as he sees it he'll be able to commit acts of arson and be totally above suspicion. (Something I find particularly disturbing about Bart's butterfly fantasy is the fact that everyone else in it - Skinner, Wiggum, Lou and Eddie - are all the same age they are in the present, so is Bart banking on dying imminently?). Deciding that she needs to consult someone with a little more experience and wisdom, Lisa turns to Abe, who seems to think he's in a Final Destination scenario, with Death conspiring against him at every turning. (Really, the guises in which he sees Death manifesting aren't that far off. Maggie? Well, she'd make an attempt on Burns' life soon enough. Snowball II? As Homer alluded to above, she's a walking reminder of the grisly fate that befell the original Snowball. The bird bath? Odd are that something drowned in there at some time or other.) Marge, who nearly sent Lisa down a terribly destructive path in "Moaning Lisa", here gets to be the voice of reason, assuring her daughter that the sadness she feels is normal and making the practical suggestion that she might honor Bleeding's memory by asking the local jazz station to do a tribute to him. Lisa immediately runs into a roadblock - K-Jazz is happy to fulfil her request, but they don't have Bleeding's sole album, Sax on The Beach, in their library, and copies are hard to come by. As luck would have it, Comic Book Guy has one for sale in his store, but it comes with a hefty $250 price tag, which is increased to $500 when Comic Book Guy learns that the artist in question is dead. Knowing she could never afford it, Lisa sinks back into despair, only for help to arrive from the aspiring lepidopteran arsonist, whose recent traumatic experience with that piece of jagged metal has brought him a cash settlement of precisely $500.

 

Bart's subplot, which involves him falling ill after unwittingly ingesting the cereal prize from Hell and requiring emergency surgery, is (in spite of its gruesome premise) predominantly there to bring comic balance to a more sombre than usual A-story. It is, though, no arbitrary joke-fest, with the resolutions to these respective stories dovetailing in a way that is meaningful and rewarding. As fate would have it, Bart's swallowing of the metal hoop occurs on a morning before a history test that he's ill-prepared for; when he starts to complain of intense pains in his stomach, Marge and Homer, wary that he's pulled this exact shit to get out of a test before, pack him off to school, although Lisa voices the opinion that his illness might be genuine this time. This in itself feels like a nice callback to the events of "Bart Gets an F", where Lisa was the only character who knew that Bart was faking his amoria phlebitis; it speaks volumes to their sibling connection that she's consistently able to tell the difference. When Bart finally receives a settlement from Krusty (lawyer Lionel Hutz has actually scammed him out of a much more substantial sum, but $500 seems like a huge amount to the trusting eyes of impressible youth), he's all prepared to blow it on the most frivolous purchase imaginable - a limited edition pog (remember those?) with Steve Allen's face on - but his conscience prevails and he instead buys Lisa the elusive album (the sequence detailing Bart's dilemma, which repeatedly shifts between three different leitmotifs, is in itself such a wonderful testament to Clausen's composing talents). He explains to Lisa that he felt he owed it to her for being the only person to take his side when he got sick. It's a lovely gesture that upholds my personal view of Bart and Lisa having the strongest bond out of all of the Simpsons, but it has deeper significance still, as a final affirmation to Lisa that, even with her soulmate sadly departed, she does not have to worry about being alone in the world. No matter what, she can always count on her family to come through for her.

At last the time has come to dig into that bizarro finale. Even with that copy of Sax on The Beach safely within her mits, Lisa's tribute seems doomed to fall at the second hurdle, that being K-jazz's ridiculously weak broadcast range; even when standing immediately outside the station with a portable radio, she is unable to pick up their transmission of Bleeding's music. That is until a thunder cloud appears in the sky, and a bolt of lightning strikes the K-Jazz antenna, making it so powerful that the broadcast is heard and enjoyed all over Springfield. The Deus ex Thunder Cloud subsequently assumes the form of none other than Bleeding himself, assuring Lisa that her actions made him happy. This much is a parody of the sequence from Disney's The Lion King in which the deceased Mufasa appears amid the night sky and urges the emotionally lost Simba to remember who he really is - a point made salient in having the ghost of Mufasa appear right next to Bleeding, with a message for Simba...or does he mean Kimba? (On the DVD commentary, Jean and Reiss fret that this is a jab that nobody would have gotten after the 90s, but they'd no need to fear - as long as there are animation buffs in this world, that line will always be hilarious and relevant.) They are then joined by the ghost of Darth Vader, making his shocking declaration of kinship with Luke, and then finally...James Earl Jones, giving an announcement on behalf of CNN? This elaborate and totally nonsensical gag is nothing less than a loving tribute to the vocal talents of Jones, who voiced Mufasa and Darth Vader and recorded announcements for CNN. (Jones was imitated here by Harry Shearer, although he had previously guest starred in the Halloween episodes "Treehouse of Horror" and more recently "Treehouse of Horror V". Somewhere out there there's also a parallel universe in which he got to voice Sideshow Bob.) It's a sequence that would seem perfectly suited to the looser, cinema-fixated reality of The Critic, but if feels just a whisker out of place in The Simpsons, no? Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of Bleeding, Mufasa, Darth Vader and James Earl Jones all being besties in the afterlife (Jones himself was very much alive when "Round Springfield" initially aired, but now in 2025 his placement alongside these deceased characters seems less absurd). But what exactly are we to make of this sequence within the context of this otherwise relatively grounded story about grappling with bereavement? Surely Mufasa, Darth and then-still-with-us Jones didn't literally manifest in the clouds above Lisa? Surely not even Bleeding was really there, jamming with Lisa to a "Jazzman" reprise? I recall that Groening made a big thing about that catfish who winked at the camera in "The War of The Simpsons", but that all seems very sensible and subdued compared to the borderline fever dream unfolding here.

"Round Springfield" leaves us with a head-scratcher - have the skies above Springfield really become host to this odd assortment of spectres (most of them culled from popular culture), or is the entire sequence nothing more than a weird and protracted bit of symbolism? Arguably, there was precedent for it in "Old Money", which included a scene in which the ghost of Bea Simmons appears to Abe on a roller-coaster, though its strangeness was of a somewhat lower-key variety and was easy enough to rationalise as representing some kind of internal monologue on the part of Abe. It should also be noted that the Disney moment it's parodying is up for a similar kind of interpretation - Rafiki makes a remark about the weather, leaving some ambiguity as to whether Mufusa's manifestation really occurred, but I suspect that most adult viewers would be inclined to read it as symbolising the soul-searching Simba undertakes in trying to understand what Rafiki means by "He lives in you." It's possible that this too is taking place inside of Lisa's head, but it goes so far with some of its concepts and gags that I fear this would make Lisa look just a little unhinged.

It is, though, a magnificent ending - triumphant, redemptive, uplifting and poignant. Perhaps it doesn't matter how well it meshes with the series' reality or what sense we make of it, so long as we gather that Lisa has reached the light at the end of the grieving tunnel and realised that she retains her connection to Bleeding Gums and everything that he taught her. I would argue that the intention here is nothing more complicated than to leave us on a spectacular emotional high following such a downbeat experience - it's the episode's markedly eccentric way of letting us know that everything is going to be okay. It helps that Lisa and Bleeding's recurring performance of "Jazzman" is allowed to be a thing of beauty in itself, tussling only with the "Oh Streetcar!" material from "A Streetcar Named Marge" for my favourite musical sequence of all the series (bless the person who compiled the Songs in The Key of Springfield album for putting those tracks right next to each other, so I could listen to them over and over in easy succession). Perhaps it ought to lose the edge for not being an original song, but that seriously doesn't matter. They imbued it with a heart and an aching all of its own. I love Carole King's original 1974 rendition too, but thanks to The Simpsons I will forever interpret it as being about Lisa's yearning to become one with her idol, both before and after his passing.

Cheers to Yeardley Smith, to Ron Taylor and not least to Alf Clausen for making this episode such a transcendent voyage. Jeers to Disney, for a whole multitude of reasons, but on this day for the downright galling manner in which, while watching this episode on Disney+, they always seemed to want to take out midway through the credits and directly into "The Springfield Connection", rather than encouraging me to enjoy the whole dazzling performance of "Jazzman" as the Simpsons gods intended. If Disney had their way, nobody would stick around for the punchline that rounds off the story: "Oh come on, Lisa, I've got a date with Billie Holiday!" Bleeding's parting words, and they couldn't give a mouse's hickey if you hear them. The sacrilege astounds.