The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #59: Britain's Bipping Hyena Problem

 

It's no secret that hyenas get a bad rap. Much has been made about what appalling PR Disney's The Lion King was for their kind. Beside the magnificent lions they made for gruesome little characters - scrawny, sleazy, slavering and perpetually cackling - but it goes deeper than them not being what you'd describe as conventional lookers. There is something the film finds innately cursed about the hyena, casting them as the very antithesis of the values signified by the Circle of Life (this is in spite of the repeated emphasis throughout on the connectedness of all beings, which should very logically include the hyenas), so much so that their mere presence in the Pridelands must not be tolerated, lest it lead to the order breaking down (there's even a dubious attempt at coding them as Nazis, by having them goose step through Scar's big musical sequence). Simba learns early on that one of his key responsibilities as monarch will be to keep the hyenas in their miserable little ghetto and outside of his kingdom; Scar's downfall, meanwhile, comes in allowing them to enter in and have free rein. I don't for a second believe that Disney did this because they thought that real hyenas were bad and wanted to convey that message - rather, they just needed an animal that fit certain archetypes and symbols in terms of the story they wanted to tell. But we all know that Disney has a lot to answer for in terms of colouring the public's perception of particular animal types (they made Dalmatians a beloved breed, while Siamese cats have conversely never quite shaken the stink that Lady and The Tramp left on them). Their hyena negativity wasn't exactly an isolated instance in popular culture either. In Yann Martel's 2001 novel Life of Pi, there is a section where the narrator says something along the lines of, "I am not one to harbour prejudices against entire species of animal, BUT..." and proceeds to rant on for about two pages or so about what an exceptionally grotesque creature the hyena is, to the extent that even an animal enthusiast couldn't extend them much love (it's been a long time since I read Martel's book, but at that point I remember rolling my eyes so far back that I may have glimpsed the insides of my skull). Once again, the hyena is contrasted unfavourably with a type of big cat. The tiger, Richard Parker, is every bit as much a dangerous predator, but his deadliness is offset by how beautiful he is to look at, whereas the hyena (or else Frenchman) represents survival at its most monstrously brutal - there is no nobleness or majesty in his case, just killing and the crunching of bones (he is effectively a metaphor for death without hope of spiritual deliverance).

I have precious little time for Martel's flowery posturing, but I can say this much in Disney's defence - contrary to popular assumption about its impact on the hyena's reputation, The Lion King made me vehemently pro-hyena. To me, Shenzi, Banzai and Ed were by far the most sympathetic characters in the picture. They were born into a world where the status quo did not favour them, and where survival was patently a lot harder for them than it was for the lions. Even as a child, I picked up on the contradictions in Mufasa's teachings about the Circles of Life, between what it meant in theory and what it meant in practice, and that struck me as terribly unfair (with hindsight, it was probably even more unfair to the antelope, who were expected to venerate the very creatures that were violently murdering them, but the movie downplayed that by not giving them personalities). As for the entire plot point of the hyenas running riot throughout the Pridelands and destroying it all (implied but not actually shown), I wondered if perhaps they wouldn't have gotten so carried away if the lions had been willing to share with them from the beginning. I felt that there had to be some kind of middle ground, a means for both species to find a balance and to coexist, but alas, the movie was uninterested in exploring such a notion. A year after The Lion King came the movie Babe, which had a message that appealed to me a lot more. There, I detected the faintest echo of Mufasa in the character of Rex, who was insistent on each creature remaining in its proper place, accepting what it was and being thankful for it. Which is all very well when the status quo does favour you. Coincidentally, Babe contains a throwaway line in which it's suggested that allowing a pig to challenge the sheepdogs at their game will lead to other radicalities like "a laughing hyena doing showjumping", and in my head I constructed that as a winking bit of affinity - Babe, a representative of one maligned species, was breaking down barriers so that other outcasts and misfits could have their own turn in the sun.

For myself, the hyena was cemented as the ultimate underdog (although not actually a dog), and I did have Disney to thank for that. It displaced the predominant image I'd previously had of the hyena, which is that they had this tendency to hang around car parks and do damage to vehicles while their owners were out watching Basic Instinct at the Odeon. For that particular bizarre notion I can thank the Central Office of Information, who'd put out a series of public information films in the early 1990s that showed hyenas breaking into cars, and for a while that was my primary exposure to the animal. The PIFs were part of a crime prevention campaign designed to alert motorists to the importance of properly securing their vehicles, with the hyenas themselves being stand-ins for thieves on the prowl for raidable targets, but as a small child I was way too literal-minded to take it that way. Honest to god, I thought this was a campaign about actual hyenas and the damage they would do to your car if you didn't hyena-proof it. At some point or other, I must have figured out that a hyena was not a creature you should expect to encounter roaming around Britain, in multi-storey car parks or otherwise, but for all I knew these were general warnings being issued to people who were going on holiday to places where they had hyenas. For their part, COI certainly seemed to be treating the symbol a bit too literally - for a while they were so intent on making the hyena the face of British car crime that you'd get these signs showing crossed out hyenas displayed in car parks and in car dealerships. After The Lion King came along and made me reconsider the species, seeing those signs made me feel so sad, since I was beginning to get the impression that the hyena had perhaps been falsely accused. I'd been inspired to do my own research on the animal, and I had yet to come across any reference to their alleged car cracking practices. What if this idea that they were car vandals was all just a gigantic misconception, along with the similarly erroneous ideas that they are dogs and hermaphrodites? 

This wasn't the first occasion on which COI had made a PIF representing criminal types as animals. We looked previously at "Magpies: Home" from 1984, in which a group of the titular corvids were shown raiding a bedroom, making an stomach-churning mess of the place and flying out with all of the lacy undergarments they could carry. That PIF had also traded on negative associations with the featured birds (the idea that they steal shiny things, the many superstitions surrounding them, etc), but it didn't feel anywhere near as defamatory. "Magpies" was happy to let the metaphor speak for itself, and didn't feel the need to explain to us how much actual magpies suck in order to drag the thieves down with them. It helped that it was a homage to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, so there was a degree of knowing fantasy in its scenario. The photography of the magpies was also splendid - there was a level on which it worked as a covert celebration of the birds - whereas in "Hyenas" the beasts are restricted mainly to the shadows, with close-up shots depicting them with creepy glowing eyes. Moreover, in "Hyenas" we get a monologue openly stressing the characteristics that (in COI's eyes) make car criminals comparable to hyenas. And honestly, it's pretty messed up. Hyenas are bad because they show no compassion toward their prey? Well neither do lions or tigers. But of course they're majestic big cats, so when they show no compassion it's sexy. Use of the word "victims" in place of "prey" is likewise a highly emotive choice, which suits the particular narrative the PIF is seeking to tell about car crime, but makes the hyena's actions appear more malevolent than they should.

A word that doesn't come up in COI's campaign, but is key to understanding the hyena's negative reputation, and why they would have been singled out as a metaphor for criminality when there were so many other big scary predators to choose from, is "cowardly". COI were inspired to cast hyenas as the villains because of market research indicating that hyenas were unpopular with the public, who associated them with cowardice, and they were looking to paint car criminals in the same light. I must say that I find that to be a strange notion. Cowardice, as a concept, is heavily rooted in ideas of human morality; applying it to the animal kingdom, where creatures are merely doing whatever it is they need to survive, seems futile. What is it, exactly, about the hyena that should make it a coward? All of the negative characteristics listed in the PIF itself are things that you would reasonably expect to associate with any predator. I would hazard a guess that it's because hyenas are seen as predominantly scavengers and, as a rule, animals associated with scavenging tend not to have the best of reputations (the terms "vulture" and "jackal" have negative connotations of their own). People see them as sleazy opportunists, seeking out the fallen and mortally wounded and feasting off of their misery, while stealing from other, more "worthy" predators like lions and leopards, which are capable of doing their own dirty work. That is indeed the narrative COI is wanting to convey of the car criminal, depicted as a skulking beast roaming the shadows of car parks, searching for vehicles that haven't been adequately secured and won't give them much hassle. There is perhaps an implicit suggestion that such criminals are to be seen as more dishonorable than other brands of thief, since they don't have the guts to pull off a more ambitious raid, and want only the easiest of pickings.

Does the PIF mischaracterise the hyena by depicting it as a scavenger? Yes and no. The animals featured in COI's campaign are actually striped hyenas, which are not the most famous kind. They are smaller and have a slightly more wolf-like appearance than the spotted hyena, which is what most people think of when they picture a hyena, and the species represented in The Lion King. The campaign does, however, conflate the two - the animal seen in the logo at the end (and on car park signage) appears to have been modelled on a spotted hyena, and what's more, the audio heard throughout the PIF was taken from recordings of spotted hyenas. Striped hyenas are less vocal than their spotted cousins, and they don't make the infamous laughing noise that COI uses as the basis of their punchline: "Leave it unlocked, and they're laughing." Which is the other reason why hyenas were likely chosen as our metaphorical criminals - it's not hard to construe that noise as mockery, and as the car thieves revelling in their own sneakiness and how easy unwary motorists make it for them. The notion that hyenas are predominantly scavengers would be false in the case of spotted hyenas, which are efficient pack hunters and often have their kills stolen from them by the supposedly virtuous lions, but true in the case of the striped hyena (which is a far less social being). But what COI definitely does mischaracterise is the very process of scavenging, with its insinuation that it's a revolting or dishonorable means for a creature to sustain itself, when in reality scavengers play a vital role in removing rotting carcasses from environments and preventing the spread of disease. We might think them macabre, but they're really our benefactors.

The whole point, of course, was to make car thieves sound nefarious as hell, and like a threat you absolutely should be taking all of the necessary steps to safeguard yourself against. Much like Disney, I don't believe that COI made this campaign because they had it on their agenda to increase hatred toward real hyenas (Yann Martel's intentions I'm less sure about), but they were certainly looking to exploit certain prejudices already harboured against them, and to seemingly affirm these.

It goes without saying that I disapprove of the tone of the campaign, and of the tactic of explicitly villainising the hyena to suit COI's narrative ends, but that doesn't mean I'm all negative about it. On a strictly atmospheric level, I find these PIFs to be pretty unknockable. I dig the dingy, sleazy aura of the car park; multi-storey car parks are spooky venues to have to navigate at the best of times, and "Hyenas" really nails that, depicting them as murky concrete wildernesses where all manner of hidden menaces could conceivably be lurking in the shadows. It's a setting that feels alarming, dangerous and alive. In fact, it always put me heavily mind of the panther sequence from the extended video to Michael Jackson's "Black or White" - with their similar juxtaposition of ill-lit streets, car vandalism and prowling predators, I had wondered if Jackson's video might even have been an influence on COI's campaign, although I suspect that the timing doesn't line up. As for how it uses its questionable anthropomorphisms outside of its slanderous voice-over, I'd rate it as more endearingly comical than the equivalent "Magpies" PIF. You don't get the same sense of the uncanny from these shady hyenas as you do those conniving birds - rather, it treads a wobbly line between the sinister and the just plain silly. When, in the main PIF, one hyena is shown in silhouette, with its teeth (and ambitions) bared at the unsecured vehicle, it is genuinely intimidating. When seen from a different angle, with the hyena poking its face through the open car window, apparently gawking at all the goodies to be pilfered, the tone shifts to something a little more cartoonish. And you do have to love how unashamedly goofy it gets in its final moments, when we have the ridiculous sight of the hyena strolling away with a car radio in its jaws. What does a hyena want with a car radio anyway? At least a magpie could use stolen lingerie for nesting material.

Their star turn as sordid car vandals might have been jolly good acting on their part, although sadly we do have it on record that the specific hyenas used in this campaign were not good parents. Two of the hyenas were a mated pair, and they had a cub that they rejected. We know this because the rejected cub, who was instead hand-reared, was featured in a segment on the CITV show Animal Crazy, presented by Neil Buchanan and Jenny Powell, in 1994. Which is, incidentally, where I first learned that hyenas are not dogs. Even within the context of them rejecting their offspring, there was something "humanising" (for lack of a better term) about the supposed car criminals being described as a mother and father and not simply the villains in a public information film. Buchanan mentioned something about how, due to the unpredictable nature of the hyenas, the set of the PIF had to be constructed inside a cage in order to protect the film crew - which does make me hungry for further behind the scenes information about how the hyenas were trained and the PIFs were filmed. There have got to be some fascinating tidbits to be shared.

In the meantime, we're still waiting for that showjumping hyena to come along and prove he's as elegant as any pony. 

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #58: Magpie Marauders (Crime Prevention)

In 1984, the Central Office of Information put out a public information film highlighting the omnipresent evil lurking in your neighbourhood and how the slightest instance of haphazard security could tip the balance from order into all-out devastation. Owing an obvious debt to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (clearly a very en vogue influence on advertising throughout the 80s),  it depicts a mob of magpies launching what appears to be a coordinated attack on a suburban bedroom, having spied a window of opportunity. The human-level cognition with which they seemingly operate is counterweighed by the intense focus on their distinctly inhuman features - their pointed, elongated beaks, their chilly white eyelids, their ominous silhouettes slicing through the sky. We watch as they infiltrate the unsecured room and ransack its contents to a barrage of Psycho-esque strings, picking their way through a jewellery box and reducing a defenceless piggy bank to a pile of rubble - is it just me, however, or do they seem to making off with mostly lingerie? Pervy little bastards. 

Still, the real horror of the PIF has less to do with what the birds take than the absolute chaos they leave in their wake, the bedroom being plunged into a state of upheaval that goes well beyond what a cluster of birds could conceivably do - a tip-off (before the narration confirms it) that this is not to be taken as a literal warning about the perils of letting wildlife get a little too close for comfort around your dwellings, but as a metaphor for something leagues more nefarious. The pillaging magpies are a stand-in for the threat of criminal intrusion, with its gleaming eyes forever fixed on your ostensible place of safety, looking to exploit whatever weaknesses can be picked out, however miniscule, and to hustle its way in. It isn't much of a mystery why the piebald corvids, of all birds, would be singled out - their reputation for thievery and alleged attraction to all that glitters (which might not be rooted in any kind of biological reality, mind) makes for straightforward enough symbolism, while historically they've been associated with a heap of superstitions, adding to their overall uncanny aura. There's also the implication that thieves, much like birds, have a particularly expansive perspective of the residences they're scoping; absolutely all angles will be considered, even the parts that you consider invisible to outsiders, so no aspect of your home security can be taken for granted.

The tactic of depicting the criminal intruders as animals, in addition to representing crime as something innately inhuman, conveys the implicit narrative that the war on crime is a war between the propriety within and the savagery beyond. To be complacent, or to turn a blind eye, is a matter of letting the wilderness in. The Hitchcock allusions mean that there is a ready-made familiarity in its images of avian marauders, a classic cinematic nightmare brought a little closer to home. Despite its foreboding nature, the PIF's message is ultimately one of empowerment - that, despite our vulnerability, we are not powerless against such devastation, so long as we're able to match those gleaming magpie eyes by being just as omnipresent, a force of surveillance every bit as formidably attuned. In the second half, the birds descend on another neighbourhood where the pickings are by no means as easy, due to the houses having locks and alarms fitted, their property being postcoded, and there being neighbourhood watch signs and stickers displayed prominently all over. Curiously, we see very little in the way of direct human presence throughout the PIF, the residents' only corporeality coming in faintest flicker of a hand as we see picking  up a telephone to dial through to whoever it is you contact about the suspicious-looking birds hovering in the trees outside your home. It's an interesting approach that presents the forces of civility as the more stealthy and furtive of the two; it seems significant that they remain shielded in the shadows, while we get to hang out on intimate terms and in broad daylight with the thieving corvids. There's an unnerving duality in which the viewer experiences the sensation of being simultaneously the invader and the invaded, accompanying the magpies as they descend deep into an absent stranger's domain, and watching helplessly as a space nondescript enough to be their own gets ripped apart and turned upside down. Similarly, during the second sequence we're afforded the security of being indoors and on the right side of those correctly fastened windows, before finding ourselves cast outside with the birds, experiencing the intimidation of having met our match in such a watchful and prepared community. The voyeurism of the viewer becomes aligned with that of the magpies, and is ultimately thwarted by the impenetrability of the residents' privacy.

It gets a bit repetitive in its second act (the same shot of the magpies flying upwards, supposedly in retreat, is played four times), but "Magpies: Home" remains a punchy and well-assembled PIF that soars along on its genuinely menacing, moderately surreal edge - the culmination of which is the final sequence where the magpies, now in animated form, take to the skies as their silhouettes morph into the slogan, "Don't Let Them Get Away With It" (compared to the more neutral "Together We'll Crack It", this one emphasised civilian passivity and indifference as the biggest obstacle in combatting crime). And even though they're depicted as the villains of the piece, I can even detect a little earnest affection for the magpies themselves at its centre. It won't be doing anything to soothe the nerves of ornithophobes, but there is a certain level on which the viewer is invited to marvel at the splendour of its close-up bird photography, and at how well-trained these particular specimens are. At any rate, the magpies got off leniently. The COI would return to the criminals-are-animals well in the early 90s, with a somewhat more infamous campaign that focussed specifically on car crime and used a certain predatory scavenger as its pivotal symbol. The results there were nowhere near as doting.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] This was a line I misunderstood as a child. Back then I'd assumed that "swing a sack of doorknobs" was some idiom I hadn't previously come across, but I would figure out as I got older, with, with the joke being that the vigilante group were taking it all-too literally. Nowadays I'm pretty confident that no such idiom exists and this is all just a morsel of self-contained nonsense. Oh, and when a disillusioned Jimbo later tells Homer that he's going to law school, I originally misheard that as "Laura's school", thinking it was a continuity nod to "New Kid on The Block".

Desserts (Best Served Cold?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Everything worked out...with a happy end?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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