Treehouse of Horror '98: Hell Toupee (aka Union of The Snake)

For as down as I tend to be on The Simpsons' tenth season, and on Mike Scully's whole era as showrunner, I'll admit that their Halloween offering for 1998, "Treehouse of Horror IX" (AABF01), doesn't hold up too badly. The first two segments, "Hell Toupee" and "Terror of Tiny Toon", are solid pieces that reap ample pleasures from the kinds of macabre "What if?" scenarios that only the Halloween episodes could allow. What if Homer's yearning for a full head of hair caused him to become possessed by a vengeful villain serial killing from beyond the grave? What if Bart and Lisa were placed in the same reality as Itchy and Scratchy and had to contend with being on the receiving end of their cartoon brutality? The third segment, "Starship Poopers" (what if the Simpsons and the Rigellians were competing for custody of Maggie and went on The Jerry Springer Show?), holds up less well than the others, being the one that most screams "product of its time", but Kodos and Kang are at least on typically strong form. What is largely absent, and very much missed, is the genuine spookiness that characterised many of those earlier installments, when a trip inside the Treehouse of Horror meant getting to revel in Simpsons uncanniness as its own art form. This is something that peaked around "Treehouse of Horror VI"; after that, it seemed that the Halloween episodes were putting emphasis on being funny and outlandish but not necessarily creepy. The only part of "IX" to really embrace that former ideal is the opening sequence, which takes us through the familiar intro, but with everything going morbidly wrong. As they touch down on the driveway, Bart and Lisa each trip and suffer neck-breaking injuries, while Homer fails to outrun a conspicuously crazed Marge as she pulls into the garage. It's such an obvious way to open a Halloween installment that it seems strange that it took them until the ninth attempt to make it happen, but is definitely all the more impactful for having taken that long to brew. The family rushing home to watch themselves (I guess?) on television is a sequence we'd seen play out for almost a decade and knew beat for beat; the image of Marge nearly running Homer down week after week had come to feel safe, warm and familiar. To see it take such a twisted turn after all this time is one heck of a jarring experience - particularly the misplaced shot of Marge and Maggie doing their synchronised horn beep, normally a tender moment of bonding between parent and child, here recontextualised to make it plain that their ramming of Homer is no accident. The cherry on top is in cutting to the couch to find it occupied by Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees (the former voiced by Robert Englund), baffled by the family's failure to appear. Best Halloween couch gag ever - not least because, at the time, Freddy vs. Jason was still five years away, so this might have been the closest the world had gotten yet to the epic crossover promised at the end of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (not actually the final Friday).

The episode itself is never quite able to live up to the glory of that opening sequence, but you do see momentary flickers of that sublime eeriness skulking in its deepest nooks and crannies. In "Hell Toupee", some of the most unsettling moments occur at the lowest possible key. A Krusty doll (presumably not set to Evil) makes an appearance as Bart is in danger of being bludgeoned with a mallet, offering both sympathy and mockery with its cry of: "Stop it, you're killing me!" Wiggum berates Lou for not alerting him sooner to Apu's mangled remains inside the Squishee Machine he's already dispensed and sampled a beverage from, only to continue slurping nonchalantly at his straw, a gag that's a lot more disturbing than first meets the eye. On the surface it plays like a gag about a typically lackadaisical Wiggum, but it also evokes an idea central to the "Nightmare Cafeteria" segment from "Treehouse of Horror V", regarding the supposedly addictive nature of cannibalism.

According to the episode's Wikipedia page, "Hell Toupee" is a parody of an episode of Amazing Stories from 1986, which was also called "Hell Toupee", and also about a malevolent toupee that transforms anyone who dons it into a relentless killer. This, though, isn't exactly supported by the DVD commentary, which gives conflicting testimony on the consciousness of the allusion. David X Cohen, who wrote the "Starship Poopers" segment, claims that "Hell Toupee" was initially conceived as a placeholder title, and that he was surprised that it wasn't changed, on the basis that Amazing Stories had long beaten them to the punch. Ron Hauge, who worked as an executive producer on the episode, disputes Cohen's account, stating that the original title was "A High Price Toupee", that Cohen was actually very enthusiastic about the change to "Hell Toupee" and that nobody was thinking about Amazing Stories at the time: "Someone pointed out later, after it aired, that it had been the name of something, but that's not where we got it." While it's possible that Hauge is being deliberately disingenuous for legal reasons, straight-up copying the title of whatever they're spoofing does seem like an uncharacteristically lazy move for The Simpsons; you can usually count on them to come up with some sort of sly twist, even if it's as simple as tacking on an extra letter, eg: "The Shinning" or "Cape Feare". Maybe it's a case of "Hell Toupee" being such an irresistibly delicious pun that popular culture is going to keep recycling it over and over, with nobody having any particular claim to it (case in point - only last month we had it crop up as the name of a song in the new Spinal Tap movie). Besides, having watched the Amazing Stories episode...it really does strike me as the kind of thing that is beyond all parody. Although it shares its central conceit with the Simpsons segment, the two offer very different takes on the same idea. For one, in Amazing Stories the bald man possessed by the psychopathic hairpiece is only a minor character; we open with the critical murders (all lawyers) having already occurred, and the focus is on the attorney hired to defend him (played by Tony Kientz). It's also a far lighter, goofier and all-around more ridiculous affair than the Simpsons segment (yes, exactly). A condemned offender is once again the source of the cursed hair, which she'd sold to a wig-maker to fund her (ineffective) legal defence, but she herself is not a character - the villain, for all intents and purposes, is the toupee, which spends much of the narrative crawling about in search of its next victim like some form of demonic guinea pig. By contrast, the Simpsons' take is darker and grungier, more closely parodying the schlocky thrillers about supernatural serial killers that might have haunted your late night cable viewings back in the day - something along the lines of The First Power (1990), Ghost In The Machine (1993) or Hideaway (1995). 

It's also a scenario that feels perfectly suited to The Simpsons. We'd already observed in "Simpson and Delilah" the difference that a full head of hair can make for Homer's self-perception. What if, instead of giving him the confidence to scale the top of the power plant ladder, his new look brought out some very dark urges inside him indeed, effectively transforming him into a different person? In this case, the hair comes from a less reputable source than Dimoxinil - Snake, who is arrested for smoking inside the Kwik-E-Mart and sentenced to the electric chair under the three strikes law. Before his (televised) execution, he vows revenge on the three witnesses to whom Chief Wiggum attributes the open-and-shut conviction: Apu, Moe and Bart. And then when Homer inherits the deceased Snake's hair via a transplant procedure, the witnesses start being offed in a series of gruesome and mysterious murders, until Bart is the last one standing and deduces that he's next. 

"Hell Toupee" does not, admittedly, have the most novel of premises. Bart squirming in terror at the prospect of a pathologically vindictive criminal being on his tail is not something you had to wait until the Halloween specials to see. And even then, we were only three years removed from a Treehouse of Horror segment about another Springfieldian embarking on an undead killing spree as revenge for mistreatment, with Bart as one of his targets. What differentiates "Hell Toupee" from "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" is that the emphasis here is not on Bart's quest for survival, but on Homer's unwitting alliance with the malign force that threatens his son. That too was a major theme of "Nightmare", where you didn't have to squint terribly hard to see the adults as the story's real evil, ignoring Willie in his moment of need and addressing the problem of their children being violently slaughtered in their sleep by pretending that it wasn't happening. There was the sense that (as in the slasher picture it was homaging) the negligence of the parents and the monstrousness of the killer were really two sides of the same coin. "Toupee" has a similar idea, but with Homer taking an active role in the carnage, so that the would-be protector and ruthless persecutor become physically one and the same. The alliance is similar to that proposed by Freddy Krueger to Jesse Walsh in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) - Homer has the body and Snake has the brain. Or the hair, as it were. Its influence becomes so pervasive that even when Homer's actions are not being directly dictated by Snake's hair he still ends up doing Snake's bidding, barricading himself inside Bart's bedroom with his son and a murder weapon to hand.

Like many fictional serial killers, supernatural or otherwise, Snake bumps off his victims according to a specific order (in this case, the order in which Wiggum identified them as suspects) and a certain sardonic methodology (Apu and Moe both die in ways pertaining to their trade, with Apu being fed into the aforementioned Squishee machine and Moe's heart being removed with a corkscrew; with Bart I guess Snake was running low on inspiration and settled for simply going at him with a mallet). What makes the trajectory unsettling is the knowledge that, as we watch the threat get progressively closer to Bart, the malign force itself has spent much of the segment right next to him, on the head of someone he trusts. Compared to "Nightmare", where the viewer's understanding of the situation was in sync with Bart and Lisa's, "Toupee" leans heavily on dramatic irony, with the viewer knowing what's going on long before the characters have figured it out. The script's wittiest moment occurs toward the end, when Lisa is about to verbalise that Snake's hair must be controlling Homer, only for Marge to abruptly cut her off and point out that the exposition dump is redundant. 

Those 90s supernatural killer pictures were certainly ripe for parody, and "Hell Toupee" does a decent job in nailing the obligatory dingy tone, although I do have this one lingering doubt - was Snake really the best character to use as the villain? No duh, you might be thinking, for on the one hand, Snake would appear to have it all - the checkered history, the luxuriant head of hair, the California Surfer Dude accent that exudes the kind of swagger and attitude that oughtn't come naturally to Homer. But looking at some of the other regular characters who were successfully recast as Halloween villains, I can't help but feel that he lacks that extra mind-blowing factor that makes you feel like you're seeing those familiar faces in a whole new, entirely valid light. Such castings were never arbitrary. Willie as Freddy Krueger? Shockingly good. On the whole, Willie's a benign character who takes more abuse than he dishes out, but he's got that distinctly uncouth, grimy nature that translates perfectly into Freddy's brand of monstrous sleaze. Krusty as Chucky/Talky Tina? Oh heck yeah. What's creepier than a clown doll with a gaping, vacant smile, the soul of a scuzzbag and the voice of a chain-smoker? Burns as Dracula? He's practically inhuman, why not go all the way with that idea? Ned Flanders as the Devil? A no-brainer. Not only is it a total subversion of who he is in the series proper (as Ned drolly puts it, "It's always the one you least suspect"), there's something enormously hilarious, sinister and convincing about the Devil using Ned's gentle, polite tones to conceal his nefarious agenda. With Snake, though, the gap between who he is in the series proper and who he is in this segment feels a whole lot thinner. He comes off less as assuming a role that serves as a playful extension of his regular self than as a version of his regular self played curiously straight. This is Snake if he was capable of acting on his character's threatening overtones - if, instead of holding Springfieldians at gun point, he killed them without inhibition, remorse or indeed humor. The correct tonal balance isn't struck.

Snake's an interesting case, because although he was introduced way back in the Season 2 episode "The War of The Simpsons" (as Otto's funky friend), the writers hadn't started to use him as a major villain until relatively recently. If you look at the kinds of roles he played in the earlier seasons, he very rarely had much to do with the Simpsons themselves. Sure, you had episodes like "Separate Vocations" and "The Springfield Connection" where he was used as a momentary threat, but he was predominantly more of a joke character than anything. His purpose was to be a humorous representative of Springfield's criminal element, showing up wherever gags were required about crime sprees and jailbreaks, with Apu and Chief Wiggum as his recurring nemeses. I'm not 100% sure, but I think "Realty Bites" of Season 9 might have been the first instance of him coming into any kind of sustained conflict with a Simpson. Even then, they kept his antagonism light - though he beat the shit out of Homer in "Realty Bites" he was unable to do any actual damage, while in "All Singing, All Dancing" he was only ever a fake-out threat. There is, I think, a telling tidbit about Snake shared on the commentary to the Season 5 episode "Homer and Apu", which climaxes with Apu being shot saving James Woods from an armed robber who is bizarrely not our hero. David Mirkin queries why they bothered with this nondescript robber when they had an established character who should have worked perfectly aptly in the role. The answer given is that some of the writers took issue with the idea of Snake seriously hurting anyone, so they brought in a one-off rando to do the dirty deed in his place. They laugh at the absurdity of wanting to maintain purity in a character like Snake and comment that they probably wouldn't worry about that so much now, presumably alluding to the more imposing turn he'd taken during Scully's era. Nevertheless, they capture how there was traditionally always an element of play pretence to Snake's villainy. He was a caricature of a habitual criminal, and there was something almost endearing about his lawlessness, and how, as Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood deftly sum it up in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, he appeared to be his own "one-man crime wave". You might argue that removing that safety barrier and allowing Snake to kill and not merely threaten was a logical means of expanding on his menace in a Halloween show, much like how removing the safety barrier that made Marge nearly running Homer over week after week seem cute and comical and depicting its more horrific implications made for an inspired opening sequence. To actually give the characters' actions consequences - because, of course, there are none in a Halloween show. There's merit to the idea, but it's hampered by a fundamental lack of twisted joy. Take the scene where Snake-Homer kills Apu. Sure, it's followed up by that beautifully disturbing moment with Wiggum sipping at the carcass-infused Squishee, but the killing itself is disconcertingly joke-free. On the one hand, I like the intensity of the sequence, and how legitimately threatening Snake becomes, but he could have afforded to ham it up a notch. Moe's murder goes down a little better, but there the gags come squarely from Moe's obtuseness, not from Snake himself. 

You know which character I think would have been really fun to have as a serial killer in a Treehouse of Horror segment? Hans Moleman. We already saw him sentenced to the chair in "The Springfield Connection", so why not revisit that here and make more of a thing of it? The man must have a tremendous axe to grind with countless Springfieldians, so imagine him getting to go absolutely rampant with his vengeance for seven minutes. The possibilities are endless! Except he doesn't have hair, does he? So maybe Snake was the most viable choice for this particular narrative. I just wish they'd allowed him to take a bit more glee in the part. The only point where he does get to realise a few of the comic possibilities is at the end, when Homer and Snake get into a back-and-forth over Bart's fate. ("I love my son!" "More than a lush head of hair?")

Truth be told, I actually feel a smidgeon of sympathy for Snake in this segment. Was he a monster before he became a supernatural killer? We know that he was certainly no angel - while he gets executed for something as ridiculous as lighting up in a no-smoking building, there is clearly meant to be some irony in this outcome when his two prior convictions were for torching an orphanage and blowing up a bus full of nuns. Still, we could give him the benefit of the doubt on both of those. Arson is no petty crime, but we don't know for a fact that there were any orphans inside the orphanage when he torched it. As for that bus full of nuns, he claims it was in self-defence, and perhaps it was. Either way, it's fair to say he's not an innocent - the innocents, in this particular story, are Apu, Moe and Bart (yes, even Moe; having syphilis is not an automatic disqualification). Someone who is also decidedly not an innocent is Homer, even before he acquires Snake's hair. Neither is Wiggum, nor Barney, Lenny, Carl, the Old Sea Captain - really, all of the rest of Springfield. "Toupee" is filled with social critiques about the US justice system, via its jokes about the three strikes law and capital punishment, but what happens to Snake at the start of the story feels positively dystopian, like a glimpse into some horrifying future society where you can be sentenced to death for the smallest of offences, barbecued for public entertainment on World's Deadliest Executions^[1], then have your body carved up and your organs distributed among the very plebs who were getting off on your televised demise. Obviously, we only have seven minutes to tell a story, so some details must be expedited, but there's no indication that Snake was given a fair trial, or even a trial at all. We don't see Apu, Moe or Bart testify against him, nor are we given the impression that they would want to. Wiggum alone acted as judge, jury and executioner. Forget the supernatural slaughter-fest, that scenario is a big enough nightmare in itself. I can't really blame Snake for being pissed off and for aspiring to distribute some bad karma via those ill-gotten organs, though he takes it out on the wrong targets - the reluctant witnesses who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Still, the character whom Snake most forces to reckon with consequence is ultimately Homer. Where "Toupee" gets particularly clever is in its subtext about a society that brutalizes offenders inevitably becoming the very thing it sees itself as opposing, with innocence, as represented by Apu, Moe and Bart, doomed to be completely snuffed out. Homer is complicit in the grotesque execution ceremony, watching it from his living room and objecting only to the fact that crucifixions are reserved for sweeps; he later benefits from the process by taking Snake's hair and turning it into an extension of himself. It is this callousness and his willingness to get in on the exploitation that leads to his complicity in Snake's killing spree, degenerating him to the point that he almost bludgeons his own son, and is threatened with murder charges for two of his friends (although Wiggum agrees to drop one of those charges when it becomes too much of an effort to pronounce Nahasapeemapetilon). Homer realises that the only way to set himself free, and to save his son, is to sever himself from the hair, the token of his own capacity for callousness.

With the hair and Homer finally separated, "Toupee" mines a twist from the concept that was the big stupid hook of the Amazing Stories episode - the hairpiece becomes animate and lunges at Bart, but is ultimately destroyed by police gunfire. The segment ends with a variation on a stock Simpsons conclusion, where the characters downplay the uncomfortable reality of the matter by laughing uncontrollably at some idiotic joke, specifically at Wiggum's action hero quip of "Now that's what I call a bad hair day!". In this instance, Marge verbalises why the laughter is appropriate, pointing out that "two people are dead" (count again, Marge, three characters died in this segment), only for the pun to suddenly dawn on her and for her to agree that it's hilarious after all. And so the survivors laugh long and hard into the night. I'm not convinced that Snake has really been vanquished, however. A thought that keeps dancing away at the back of my head (and I am surprised that this wasn't brought up at the end) is that Snake's hair wasn't the only body part to be distributed among the townspeople. We don't know how far the man's malignant tissue has managed to spread. It was implied that Barney would get the liver, so does that mean Snake could strike again by taking control of him via that organ? Does it specifically need to enter into the brain, as the hair roots did, or could it find some other way to dictate influence eg: by altering the body chemistry? Treehouse of Horror segments tend to be entirely self-contained affairs and to not get follow-ups (seriously, has that ever happened?), but in this case the sequelisation practically writes itself. Clearly, there is an awful lot of Snake within this town; they won't be purged of his persisting presence with a bad pun and a belly laugh.

 

[1] You've probably heard the story about the lost Troy McClure cameo that would have been Phil Hartman's last, as the host of World's Deadliest Executions, but which was deemed inappropriate following Hartman's tragic death a few months prior and swapped out for a guest spot from Ed McMahon. It sounds convincing enough, only they don't bring it up on the DVD commentary, and Wikipedia has removed all reference to it, making me wonder if it was ever substantiated. The Simpsons Wiki still says it's true, but doesn't cite a source. A reviewer on The Simpsons Archive refers to a "wasted" final rendition from Hartman, but with no further context, and has Lionel Hutz down as the excised character (maybe they were familiar with the Amazing Stories episode and expected something closer to its plot). I'm not saying it's necessarily untrue, but I would like to see a more reliable source on the matter.

TACtics: Fireball (Country Roads)

"Fireball" from 1994 has always struck me as being the wilder, more flamboyant cousin of "Darren" , one of the earliest TAC campaigns in which we got to witness the horrors of a crash first hand. In just three years, you can see how emboldened TAC had become in their approach to onscreen carnage. Everything that "Darren" did, "Fireball" more-or-less replicates, but to a greater extreme. The set-up and structure feel markedly familiar, with four teens driving along a rural road, enjoying a moment of deceptive bliss, before calamity strikes, leaving no survivors, and the relatives of one of the dead are seen receiving the terrible news in an equally dramatic epilogue. On this occasion, rather than hitting the incoming vehicle, the car swerves and tumbles down a steep slope, doing a complete barrel roll before coming to a standstill. We think we might have settled on our big harrowing consequence, when the driver, Mark, asks if everyone is okay, and we're shown a close-up of his unresponsive girlfriend, with blood trickling from her head, heavily insinuating that she was killed during the impact. This is a particularly tragic outcome, given that right before the crash they were kissing and expressing their desire to not be separated. But as it turns out, the girlfriend was the lucky one; in an even grislier twist of events, the car suddenly combusts, incinerating its screaming occupants. It might be one of the most jaw-dropping spectacles I've ever seen in any campaign of its ilk. Honestly, it's a great ad, but it's also a shining example of TAC at their most deliriously excessive. "Darren" was fairly moderate it how it presented its pivotal accident, showing the moment of impact but immediately cutting away and leaving our imaginations to fill in the very worst blanks; the amount of dead, eerie space in which we were taunted with the knowledge that something terrible had transpired, but couldn't get quite close enough to see it for ourselves made for chilling viewing. "Fireball", on the other hand, gives us such an abundance of ghoulish imagery (stopping short at least of showing us the burning victims from inside the vehicle) that it ends up playing like more of a dark comedy. I don't think it was wholly unintentional either - as we observed in "Bush Telegraph", by the mid-1990s a hint of D&DWL-esque sardonicism was discernible in the TAC mix.

Not that the spectacle isn't also a sad one. Compared to "Darren", the participants in this particular doomed vehicle have a more pronounced sense of youthful innocence, opening the ad with some playful banter about not liking the taste of parsley, before discussing their future plans, both immediate and in the longer-term. One of the backseat passengers asks Mark if he's going help with the fence tomorrow morning, and Mark replies that he's already promised to help his grandad with the sheep. "Give my regards to Jack, then", his friend retorts (put a pin in that name, it'll come up again later). Mark's girlfriend confirms that she has decided to decline a job offer in Melbourne, as she's not cut out for city life and would rather stay with him. As they kiss to affirm their commitment, Mark nearly drives straight into another vehicle, only to swerve and go down that treacherous hillside. Once again, distracted driving is the ill that sends our young protagonists hurtling to their fiery demise, but "Fireball" is not explicitly a warning against the perils of not keeping your eyes on the road. The closing duplet of taglines ("7 out of 10 people who die on country roads live in the country" and "Country people die on country roads") indicate that the campaign was rather designed to tackle a misconception among Australian rural communities that the vast majority of accidents on country roads are caused by city folk who were unfamiliar with the terrain. The characters' dialogue at the start of the ad (sans the parsley discussion) is geared toward establishing that these kids are well at home in the country, while also laying the ground for an additional twist that comes with the epilogue. In contrast to "Tracy" and "Darren", which were nominally about speeding and distracted driving but seemed to be making more general statements about the vulnerabilities of younger drivers, "Fireball" is more like "Bush Telegraph", in that what's ultimately implicated is the culture of a wider community. The assumptions of the older generation are taken down along with the brash carelessness of the young.

The ad's single most diabolical move comes with the transition from that horrifying crash sequence into our deceptively peaceful epilogue; as we fade to black, the sounds of burning are colligated with the sounds of incongruously buoyant whistling, a fiendish juxtaposition reminiscent of the uncanny cackling at the end of D&DWL's "Pudding" in how it appears to mock the calamity. Here, in a direct inversion on the dissonance in "Darren", the the accident takes place in darkness, while the epilogue happens in the broad light of day, suggesting a cheerful obliviousness to the blazing apocalypse that played out the night before. We find ourselves in the company of two farmers; they, much like the teens in that car, have no idea what's coming their way. One of them brings up a neighbour named Fred, who's had the CFA (Country Fire Authority) on his front paddock all morning due to a fire caused by a car accident. The occupants of the vehicle, four young kids, are all dead. His companion thinks he already knows the whole story. "That's city kids, I bet. See, they don't know the country road." Until suddenly his wife appears on the porch, tearfully calling his name. "Jack!" Uh-oh. He is indeed the grandad that Mark had mentioned earlier. It's a powerful moment, although admittedly high on the melodrama - the final shot of Jack comforting his sobbing wife is touching, but I fear that her closing whimper of "Why us?" threatens to push us back into the arena of dark comedy.

Still, it's a question that TAC invites us to ponder. While "Darren" centred on the rupturing of young ingenuousness - though we heard the mother screaming, the focus of that closing shot was on the grieving sister - the final emphasis of "Fireball" is on the older generation and its having to reckon with its own misguided perspective. Unlike the father in "Bush Telegraph", who was inducting his son into a culture that promoted drink driving, Jack's outlook is not linked in any obvious way to the fate of Mark and friends. There's nothing to suggest that he'd personally encouraged his grandson to think that nothing bad could ever happen to him on the country road. His only sin was in being quick to jump to conclusions. A parallel is, nonetheless, being drawn between Mark's unwariness on the road and Jack's complacency in assuming that nobody from his community could make the blunders that might be expected of a visitor from the city, hinting that both are the products of a culture that overestimates its own immunity. At the same time, the grandmother's cry of "Why us?" points to the cruel arbitrariness of fate, and in that regard "Fireball" offers a message for more than just country dwellers. Don't assume that it cannot happen to anyone. For as long as such incidents are at a comfortable enough distance, as items on the news or gossip on the grapevine, then it's easy to dismiss them as the type of misfortune that only ever befalls other people. Until the day when it falls terribly close to home.

TACtics: Darren (Concentrate or Die)

"Darren" (alternatively known as "Country Kids") from 1991 is the short where you can see the infamous TAC formula really starting to come together. A dramatic shift from the likes of "Girlfriend", "Beach Road" and "Tracy", which gave us the sensation of having stumbled upon the scene of a gruesome accident in its immediate aftermath, "Darren" takes us significantly closer to the lurid action, by recreating the experience of actually being inside the vehicle at the moment the crash occurs. In negotiating the balance between the two different spectacles on display - the physical carnage of the accident itself and the emotional wreckage that inevitably follows - "Darren" ends up being a film of two distinct halves. Each is a minute in length, boasting its own grisly payoff and working as a self-contained set-piece, to the extent that it's not hard to envision the two segments airing as stand-alone ads. In that regard, it is comparable to "Glasses", another TAC creation that plays like a conspicuous Frankenstein mishmash between independent premises, but the disconnect works a lot more favourably in this case. The sequences contrast with each other, both tonally and stylistically, in a way that builds on and complements one another. The cohesive detail cementing them as a singular narrative is the repeated utterance of the title character's name, to signal the advent of all-out devastation.

"Darren" is a cautionary piece on the dangers of distracted driving - the closing slogan advising us to "Concentrate or Kill" makes that clear - although, much like in "Tracy", a myriad of ill-judged decisions on the part of its callow cast have combined to create a perfect storm of a collision. As the ad opens, Darren is admonished by one of his passengers for driving too fast, a criticism he does not take particularly seriously.  None of the car's occupants are wearing seatbelts. (Meanwhile, the alternate title evokes another topic that would come up in other TAC campaigns, regarding the risks to rural drivers.) We sense that there was perhaps a broader intention to remind younger drivers, still caught up in the excitement of being behind the wheel, of their vulnerability. Darren is not the only dysfunctional element within the vehicle, but as driver he is the party on whom the bulk of responsibility ultimately falls. Despite his lax attitude toward speeding, he seems to realise that his unbelted friends' attempts to engage in a physical scuffle over his shoulder are not a good idea, and is momentarily forced into the position of the level-headed adult in a car full of screaming infants. After one of his friends comes dangerously close to knocking him and causing him to lose control of the wheel he insists that they all settle down. But of course, he too is just an immature pup, and the lure of that backseat squabble proves irresistible even to him. Darren takes his eyes off the road for just a second, to participate in a round of catcalling, blundering into an intersection and straight into the path of an incoming car. The passenger who'd earlier advised Darren to slow down tries to alert him, but too late, and we see the moment of impact as it occurs from Darren's perspective.

While "Darren" definitely upped the level of spectacle in comparison to earlier TAC installments, it doesn't lean quite so heavily into overstatement as some of the campaigns to follow. The horror happens in stark but essentially short flashes, with most of the really gut-churning material being left to our imaginations. The shot showing the immediate aftermath of the accident does not foreground the wreckage, instead focusing on Darren's bloodied, inert body as he lies sprawled across the tarmac, having been thrown from the car. In the background, we can make out the crumbled second vehicle, but Darren's own car is barely visible behind a smoking inferno (the fate of the other driver is left up in the air, but we are given little doubt that Darren's passengers have not survived). The only sound audible besides the burning of wreckage is the cawing of a crow, evoking both the mortality of the characters and an eerie feeling of stillness that has much the same effect as the incongruously peaceful ambience that accompanies the crash at the end of "Nightshift".  

The ad already feels complete, but we fade out and emerge in a very different world, an ominously ill-lit hospital corridor where the silhouettes of two medics are seen approaching from afar, in an uncomfortably protracted shot. Dark, clinical and enclosed, it is a marked contrast to the colour and freedom of that open road we had the buzz of traversing earlier. It feels immediately surreal and nightmarish - with their features indiscernible, the silhouettes become threatening shapes on the horizon, calling to mind the intermittently inhuman appearances of the medics in the Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives PIF "Mates". For the purposes of this film, they are messengers of death; as we drift further down the corridor, we see that they have come to meet Darren's family, who are anxiously awaiting an update on his condition. His parents are led away into a nearby room, while his sister lingers outside. The full horror of the situation is once again kept out of view - we share the sister's perspective, in not witnessing exactly what is revealed to the parents - but the raw, uninhibited grief of the mother, heard screaming out her son's name, leaves us as to no doubt over the final outcome. Juxtaposed with her harrowing cries is a haunting display of humanity, as the nurse seated to the right of the sister rises to her feet and embraces her. Although she offers comfort in the darkest of hours, her fidgety movements in the build-up to the mother's scream betray that she'd known what was coming and was biding her time before her cue; the grim implication is that she (much like Ken Stott's first responder in "Fireman's Story") is no stranger to this routine, which she's seen play out on countless prior instances with other families. Meanwhile, the hospital is now deserted, with no further extras seen wandering in backdrop, accentuating the desolation of the characters. This entire sequence is expertly staged and directed, one of the most indelible in TAC's library.

Perhaps the most disquieting quality in this latter set-piece is how, having experienced the intimacy of being inside the doomed vehicle and up close with its rowdy occupants, we find that we are not participants in this ensuing scenario, but passive observers. This is conveyed through the continuing movement of the camera, as it drifts ever further away from the grieving family, enforcing a sense of detachment. Though we might sympathise with their plight, we are denied that feeling of closeness to them, unable to embrace the sister as the nurse does. It is almost as if the camera has assumed the perspective of Darren's ghost - if not literally, then figuratively - bearing witness to the ongoing impact of his lapse of judgement, as he becomes increasingly removed from the realm of the living. Following on directly from our shot of the unconscious Darren, one possible interpretation is that it represents a vision unfolding in the mind the our dying protagonist as he relinquishes life, and his family. The youthful freedom of the road has led us abruptly into the dark passage of death, with "Darren" capturing not only the moment in which the ordinary becomes the catastrophic, but in which energy and optimism become the materials of despair. No longer moving vigorously forward, we can now gaze only numbly on what we leave behind.

The Canine Mutiny (aka I'm Not Saying It's Gonna Be A Dance Around The Maypole...)

We've reached the last Santa's Little Helper episode of The Simpsons' classic era, and do we at least get to end things on a high note? Perhaps...relatively speaking. As with all of the show's dog-centric entries, "The Canine Mutiny" (4F16) and I have something of a rocky history. I remember groaning the first time I saw a promo for it. Did we really need another episode about the relationship between Bart and Santa's Little Helper, particularly when poor neglected Snowball II was still sitting there, waiting for the spotlight that was sadly never coming her way? Heck, by the time it debuted, on April 13th 1997, it honestly felt like Santa's Little Helper had been privileged with more starring roles than Maggie, who is nominally one of the main characters. What the writers were getting out of making these episodes a biennial occurrence was beyond me, but maybe you had to be a dog person to understand. The whole purpose of this mini-retrospective was to go back and see if I could relate to the Santa's Little Helper tales any better now that I am myself a dog owner, yet I'm painfully aware that I have largely been falling back upon the same old criticisms I've always made. "Bart's Dog Gets an F" is slow and uneventful, "Dog of Death" is mirthless and unpleasant, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" is relentlessly dumb, etc. Happy to report, then, that I actually did respond to "The Canine Mutiny" a little differently on my most recent viewing. Not so significantly that it lifts the episode out of the dregs of the era, but enough to give it an edge compared to its predecessors. "The Canine Mutiny" is, if nothing else, the most interesting of the tetrad, by virtue of arising from the show's experimental, notoriously sardonic eighth season. Ron Hauge's script has a little of that characteristic Oakley/Weinstein bite to it, even if the plot itself is really no more compelling than the next Santa's Little Helper outing. And while any further prolonged exploration of the Bart/Santa's Little Helper dynamic feels basically redundant by this stage, for the first two acts or so it benefits by not playing like a total rehash of the things we've seen before. Up until now all of the Santa's Little Helper episodes have involved Homer and Marge butting heads with Bart and Lisa over the fate of the family dog(s), with Bart typically taking an indignant stand where his parents' morals are faltering (except in "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", where Marge and Homer are clearly the ones in the right). So to have a scenario where Bart is effectively the bad guy, betraying Santa's Little Helper under entirely his own steam because he's swayed by the lustre of another dog - well, it's something new at least.

The supplanter in question is a limited edition rough collie from Vermont, trained by the prestigious Major Jonas Fong, A.L.B.D.A., and answering to the name of Laddie - an allusion that's maybe a bit too on the nose, although it might also be a play on the fact that canine superstar Lassie was, across her various incarnations, portrayed exclusively by male dogs (reportedly because female rough collies are more prone to excessive shedding). Bart stumbles across an ad for the collie in a designer catalog, and is enticed by the prospect of owning what's purported to be "quite possibly the world's best dog". Naturally, it turns out to be too good to be true, but it's too good to be true in a subtle way that didn't really resonate with me until I became a dog owner. Now, I feel like I have a better understanding of why Bart doesn't click with Laddie in the long-term, and why he ultimately gravitates back to the chaotic Santa's Little Helper. Guilt and the status quo are obviously huge factors, but there's a little more to it than that. On the surface, Laddie's pedigree credentials are no lie. He'll gather fruit for you, do back flips on demand and water your flower beds (using a hose). But he ends up being not that great of a dog. Because he's really not much of a dog at all. He's more like a human in a dog skin. And would you really want to own a human in a dog skin over an actual dog? If all you were looking for is an impressive specimen you could show off in front of other walkers in the park, then Laddie might suffice, but he lacks the warmth and spontaneity you'd desire from a companion animal. Notice, for example, that while Laddie might be much better than Santa's Little Helper at obeying commands, he doesn't dispense affection anywhere near as freely (the most Bart ever gets is a subdued lick on the hand when he chooses Laddie over Santa's Little Helper). Homer describes him as "snooty", but that barely scratches the surface with Laddie - there's something distant, strange and honestly a little sinister about him (Snowball II certainly knows it). Our suspicions that the collie is not to be warmed to are borne out by the end of the episode, once Bart has decided that Laddie's super-canine talents would be better suited to serving the community and donated him to the Springfield Police department. Then, as a k-9, his big heroic moment comes in busting a blind man for the victimless crime of wanting to get high in the privacy of his own living room. Goddamn. Remember kids, all dogs go to Heaven, except for those class traitors in the Paw Patrol, and that other class traitor from Vermont. (The bad Lassie that bit Timmy gets a pass; I'm sure that was all just a misunderstanding.)

Laddie is the key ingredient that makes this otherwise rather soppy story unmistakably part of the Season 8 crowd (there is one further ingredient that comes up when Laddie has mostly left the picture, but it isn't quite as successful). He is a variation on a theme the show became fascinated with under Oakley and Weinstein, which is the interloper who strolls into the family's lives and fails to integrate themselves into the established chemistry. Before Laddie we'd already witnessed the sorry downfalls of Shary Bobbins and another, iller-fated pup named Poochie. Still to come were Frank Grimes, the replacement Lisa from "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase" and, most controversially of all, Sergeant Skinner (held over until Season 9). Laddie is a much less meta example than the others - the dog switcheroo is played entirely straight, and doesn't openly call attention to itself as a challenge to the very dynamics of the series. The most potentially meta thing about it might well be the title. When you look at it, "The Canine Mutiny" was rather a peculiar choice. Sure, it's an unsubtle nod to Herman Wouk's 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny, and it makes for a cute enough pun, although "mutiny" (a rebellion by subordinates against a figure of authority) isn't really an apt term for describing Bart's betrayal of Santa's Little Helper. Clearly the higher authority being rebelled against isn't Santa's Little Helper himself. It's also presumably not Homer and Marge, who here seem improbably relaxed about whichever dog has taken up residence in their kitchen. No, it makes far more sense to interpret the titular mutiny as one against The Powers That Be, with Bart momentarily deciding that he'd prefer a glamorous wonder dog to the scrawny, dysfunctional couch-chewer the status quo opted to saddle him with back in 1989. Of course, no sooner has Bart made the trade than he realises it was all a big mistake. A dog as perfect and high-flying as Laddie is blatantly not going to gel with the Simpsons for long. As Homer astutely identified on acquiring Santa's Little Helper in "Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire", the dog's status as a perpetual loser is what made him such a shoo-in for the Simpsons clan. And as "Bart's Dog Gets an F" had earlier explored (perhaps not overly adroitly), Bart feels a particular affinity for Santa's Little Helper because he relates to him as an underachieving ruffian.

How Bart is able to obtain a highly-trained rough collie bearing a $1200 price tag (a total that would seriously be a steal for a regular dog in 2025 money) is a matter of simple mail fraud. For its opening third, the episode plays like a limper variation on the previous season's "Bart on The Road", with Bart getting his hands on a shiny new plaything that would ordinarily be off limits to children, opening the door up to all manner of forbidden indulgences. In this case it's a pre-approved credit card he opts to send away for under the pseudonym of Santa's Little Helper, construed in the application process as "Santos L. Halper". Bart applying for the ill-gotten card under his dog's mouthful of a name feels like somewhat of an arbitrary detail (surely it would be more on brand for Bart to come up with a joke name, like he does with Moe?). Its main purpose is seemingly to telegraph Santa's Little Helper's importance to the story before Laddie enters in, although it deftly illustrates Bart's connection to his pet, in implicating the dog as a partner in crime. (It might also be a callback to a reference made by Kent Brockman in "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" to dogs who were mistakenly issued major credit cards, and the others who weren't so lucky.) As with Bart's unlaminated ID in "Bart on The Road", it's a development that requires a lot of suspension of disbelief on the viewer's part, with the adults once again being ridiculously accepting of a situation that ought to arouse immediate suspicion. Well, most of them - here, Comic Book Guy at least is savvy enough to recognise that Bart's credit card has to be a scam, but when Bart takes to ordering copious luxury items from the Covet House catalog, Homer and Marge seem only too willing to let it slide. Whatever misgivings the Simpson parents might have had are swiftly placated by gifts of personalised golf shirts and Vancouver salmon (it certainly was sweet of Bart to be thinking about treating his family in all of this, assuming it wasn't part of a deliberate ploy to keep them mollified and off the trail) and they spend the rest of the episode being weirdly nonchalant about whatever their son is up to. Even when Bart's masses of unpaid bills finally catch up with him and his extravagant purchases are repossessed, there are apparently no questions or repercussions from their end. Homer and Marge are conveniently out of the house when the repossession occurs (Lisa's explanation that they've gone for a walk with the Flanders is one of those small, random lines that totally cracks me up - it's such a mundane alibi, yet it raises more than enough questions in itself), but didn't Marge ever wonder where her swanky new frying pan radio had disappeared to? I get that sometimes you've got to make concessions to keep a story flowing, it's just funny how Homer and Marge have gone from ruthlessly laying down the law in these dog episodes to having next to no clue what's even happening.

Anyway, you've got to love the decadent lifestyle Bart starts living by way of the credit card, right down to answering the door to Laddie in a monogrammed dressing gown. This also made conscious of the fact that his initials are BS, which is a fitting little summary of the situation we're in. 

Homer and Marge being this indifferent is kind of a stretch, but it would be truly out of character for Lisa to say nothing. She's certainly aware that something is up, getting to fill her usual role as the voice of impending consequence when she challenges Bart on where his fancy halogen lamps have come from (only to get sidetracked by her own pep pill addiction, the remnants of an excised subplot). But even she seems more resigned on this occasion. By the time Bart turns up with Laddie in tow, claiming to have won the magnificent collie in a church carnival "two towns over", she's practically made peace with her brother's nonsense, asking Bart if he won the dog in a truth-telling contest but pursuing the matter no further. Later, Lisa is the only family member who even notices when Santa's Little Helper goes AWOL, but other than asking where he is she keeps her nose out. Clearly, the thinking was for this story to be reflective of Bart's personal conflict, and for the rest of the family to get too involved would only stand in the way of that. Meanwhile, it helps with the other narrative Hauge's script is looking to push, which is that Bart was the only family member upon whom Santa's Little Helper could truly depend. At one point, Bart comes to the explicit epiphany that "I was the only one who loved him". We know from the prior Santa's Little Helper installments that this isn't exactly true - though Bart, certainly, is the family member who's most inclined to fight for the dog, when all is said and done the others do love him - but the hyperbole makes his betrayal here all the better to wrench the viewers' hearts. The repo man notes that a $1200 dog is on his list of things to reclaim, but doesn't actually know what kind of dog he's looking for, so when he sees Santa's Little Helper he makes the conclusion that he's the one and bundles him in the van with the halogens and frying pan radios. Bart, not wanting to lose Laddie, allows it to happen. And if Bart has given up on Santa's Little Helper, you know that poor sighthound hasn't a friend left in the world.

Even before the mix-up with the repo man, Laddie's coming proves detrimental to Santa's Little Helper, with Bart neglecting him in favour of the new dog. He even allows Laddie to take Santa's Little Helper's place as his partner in crime, taking him out into the wilderness so that they can bury the credit card that's belatedly threatening to get him into a wad of trouble. As far as everyone else goes, it apparently didn't take a handsome usurper for Santa's Little Helper to be pushed unceremoniously into the backdrop. Homer hints that he doesn't even receive regular feedings in the Simpson household, Marge refers to him as "wrecked", and we learn that the family never took him to the local dog park (according to Homer, because of his tendency to fart in public), with Marge indicating that they were always contented to leave him to Bart to take care of. In general, Santa's Little Helper is viewed as a liability, a sentiment that isn't confined to merely the family. Milhouse shows up at the dog park (allowing for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reappearance from the Shih Tzu he was seen with at the end of "Lisa's Date With Density") to bitterly reminisce about the time Santa's Little Helper killed his goldfish and Bart tried to cover it up by gaslighting him into thinking he never had a fish ("But why'd I have the bowl, Bart? Why did I have the bowl?"). This reminder of their mutual ghastliness stokes Bart's protective urges, leading into the episode's most singularly baffling moment, when he entertains the worst case scenario of Santa's Little Helper ending up on an old timey English ship where they shovel live dogs into a furnace to make it go faster ("Nah, that's  not too likely..."). As his guilt intensifies, the less drawn he is to Laddie's eminence, finding his energy and his eagerness to rescue babies from unspecified peril to be more of a nuisance than any of his old friend's foibles, if it means that they can't even go for a casual walk without having to attend a ceremony for the dog's heroism. We're left wondering which quality the meticulously bred collie is really hard-wired for - valor, or simply showing off (we know he's not hard-wired for virtue, given how readily he takes to helping Bart squirrel away evidence of his fraudulent consumerism). Either way, packing him off to retrain as a police dog seems like a logical outro, though it's one that will obviously come back to bite us horribly by the episode's end. 

By now it shouldn't surprise us that the rest of the family, who've spent the entire middle act fawning over Laddie, aren't in the least bit upset or disappointed by Bart's impulse decision to hand the dog over to Chief Wiggum (except for Homer, who a) grumbles that Laddie had better remain quiet to the police about what goes on in the Simpson abode and b) is on principle opposed to giving). Nor, when Bart finally comes clean about the circumstances of Santa's Little Helper's absence (to a point), that they don't get their hands dirty and leave it to Bart to locate their misplaced pet. From a narrative perspective, this was Bart's moral balls-up, so it falls on him to take responsibility. Also for the purposes of this narrative, Bart is the only Simpson motivated enough to search this tirelessly on Santa's Little Helper's behalf, though he at least has his family's blessing in bringing the dog back into the fold. When Bart clarifies that he's going to get the bad dog back, not the good one, Homer responds, "Oh, good", confirming that he understands intuitively that this is the only choice that makes sense.

With Laddie removed, "The Canine Mutiny" loses much of its sharpness, becoming a less interesting, more straightforward quest to restore the status quo. It's in this wonky third act that I'm reminded that, oh yeah, Hauge also wrote "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" of Season 9. I was previously willing to lay most of the blame for that episode's failings at the feet of showrunner Mike Scully, but looking at the two scripts now, it's interesting just how strongly reminiscent "Miracle" is of "Mutiny". Both involve Bart doing something bad and wallowing in a sea of guilt, all while stringing his gullible family along to an absurd degree. Both of them also struggle in figuring out where to take their conflicts in the final act, leading to resolutions that are both hokey and enormously mean-spirited. What "Mutiny" fumbles, "Miracle" handles with even less finesse, but the blueprints are more-or-less the same. Suddenly all of the pieces fit - it was Hauge, and not Scully, whom we should have lambasted for ruining Christmas back in 1997.

Now fair enough, I think the episode's final problem was intended as a conscious inversion on the situation at the end of "Dog of Death". There, we didn't feel in the least bit bad about Bart stealing Santa's Little Helper from Mr Burns because Burns was mistreating him and using him for nefarious purposes. But what if Santa's Little Helper had ended up in the care of someone who genuinely loved him and could probably use his companionship more than Bart? Just how easy would it be to take the dog back then? After making a few inquiries about town, Bart finds Santa's Little Helper living in a suburban home with one Mr Mitchell, who cares deeply for the dog (renamed Sprinkles) and values him as a best friend. Mitchell also happens to be blind and, yeah, this is where "The Canine Mutiny" leaves kind of a bad taste in the mouth. It's best summarised by a statement made on the DVD commentary: "This episode did not win any awards." The premise of Bart having to steal back Santa's Little Helper from a blind man because he's too sheepish to ask upfront seems a flat way to end the story, not helped by the icky and mean-spirited treatment given to Mitchell. Mean-spirited humor was honestly endemic to Season 8; it wasn't a trend that originated with Hauge, not with "My Sister, My Sitter" airing a few weeks ahead of it, and there was certainly far edgier cruelty to come with Frank Grimes. The problem with Mitchell's depiction in "The Canine Mutiny" is that it's mean-spirited on two different levels, only one of which I think is deliberate. Mitchell's disability is presented in a way that's evidently supposed to make him seem sad and pathetic and, on the one hand, the writers must have known how ridiculous they were being in making him so pathetic that he doesn't even realise that his other pet, a parrot, is long deceased. Obviously his blindness should not have prevented him from figuring this out. Here's a big tip-off - if you've got a dead parrot decomposing in your hallway, then your house is going to stink to high heaven. Of course he would know! (Actually, that's another thing the Hauge scripts have in common - an unwillingness to factor the characters' sense of smell into the equation. If you've just had a giant heap of plastic burn down inside your living room, your nostrils should be in for a treat.) The image of that skeletal parrot is one of those knowingly dumb, borderline surreal moments that makes an uncomfortable situation that extra bit more unsettling (particularly with the added absurdity of having the decomposed bird wear a spotless red bow). Where the script feels more thoughtlessly cruel is in its underlying assumption that because Mitchell is blind, his life would naturally be tragic and lonely, devoid of family, friends and a social life. The idea is clearly to make him so flagrantly vulnerable that our sensibilities, in wishing to see the status quo restored, are tested, but it plays like such an unnuanced stereotype. Consider that we only learn Mitchell's name because it's written on the paper Reverend Lovejoy gives to Bart; within the dialogue he's referred to exclusively as "the blind man", including by himself, so that his disability defines him. The one detail about the character that's subversive and humanising - the revelation that Mitchell is partial to a joint - is incorporated purely as the basis of our sour gut-punch ending. You bet your sweet ass you get no awards!

There is one good thing that comes out of this gloomy third act, and I'll consider this atonement for the sins of "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" in saddling Bart with quite possibly his all-time worst line of dialogue ("Hey look, a really small dog just fell out of Santa's girlfriend!"). When Bart is explaining to Lisa his plan to break into Mitchell's yard and take back Santa's Little Helper, she is, unsurprisingly, disgusted by the proposal: "Bart, that is a new low." Responds Bart, "Hey, I'm not saying it's gonna be a dance around the maypole." That might even be one of Bart's best ever lines - it's sassy, highly quotable and can applied to an infinite number of situations. Every time I hear it, I always mean to start using it more in my own life.

A dance around the maypole it definitely isn't, for Bart's attempted burglary goes predictably awry, resulting in him being cornered by Mitchell, who traps him in a closet and telephones the police. Bart decides to be honest about why he's come there, laying the ground for the episode's most mawkish development. With "The Canine Mutiny" so in tune with the sly snarkiness that was Season 8's trademark, it seems an odd choice for it to fall back on the same old tactic favoured by those earlier Santa's Little Helper episodes, which is to take a hackneyed device from the boy-and-his-dog cheat sheet and play it entirely straight. In this case, Mitchell suggests letting Santa's Little Helper decide which of them he would rather be with, by having he and Bart both call to the dog and see who he answers to. On the surface, this should be the lamest of the Santa's Little Helper resolutions, but for the fact that it is genuinely uncomfortable to watch. Not because there's any actual tension as to which side Santa's Little Helper will choose - we all know that Bart has this licked - but because it accentuates how much we potentially don't want to see him go to Bart. It isn't just a matter of Mitchell being lonely and in greater need of companionship than Bart. Let's face it, Mitchell probably would give him a better life than he's going to have with the Simpsons. In this episode alone we've had ample reminders of their negligent approach to pet ownership. Going back to the Simpsons means having to contend with Homer not caring to feed him every day, Marge regarding him as "wrecked", the family never taking him out to the dog park and him being generally ignored. Sometimes the status quo really bites. (Also uncomfortable are Mitchell's repeated cries of, "I'm blind! Come to the blind man!" It's so heavy-handed that there's no way it can't be designed to rub us the wrong way.) What does amuse me about the sequence is the way Santa's Little Helper seems to lose interest in both of them and start chasing his tail. It almost looks to me like he went to Bart because he happened to be facing him when he came to a standstill. You know what? In my head Santa's Little Helper just did the dog equivalent of a coin toss. It's not that Bart has any advantage over Mitchell or that their relationship is any purer, but simply the way fate mercilessly willed it.

Which does leave Mitchell in rather a sorry position. The alternative solution, to pair him up with Laddie, is suggested but emphatically doesn't work out, since Laddie's only interest in Mitchell is in sniffing out the spliff inside his pocket. But actually, that's okay. Mitchell deserves better than Laddie, whom as we've discussed is really not that great a dog. After the viciousness of that rug pull, the episode seems to realise that it's going a little too far with its meanness, and that surely, after watching him be deprived of his beloved companion, the last thing the viewer wants is for Mitchell to face arrest for such a petty infraction. Instead, it leaves ambiguity as to what becomes of him, fading out with an extravagant display of police corruption, as more officers show up at the house to make use of Mitchell's supply of cannabis (are we to presume that Mitchell found kinship after all, then?), and Wiggum makes a terribly unconvincing effort to vibe along to Bob Marley. Meanwhile, the boy and his dog slip away and back to Evergreen Terrace, with Bart announcing an immediate renewal of their partnership as agents of chaos. He's already singled out a prime first target for their mischief: "That cat's been strutting around like she owns the place." Oh yeah, I thought we'd gone a little too long without some kind of jab at the inoffensive Snowball II. Should Mitchell desire a cat, I know a particularly disrespected one going begging.

Bundles of Joyce: Meet The Robinsons (aka And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird)

Disney's 2007 offering Meet The Robinsons in some respects represents the studio at its most downtrodden. It is certainly telling that it resorts to a device rarely seen in the studio's canon, which is to end with a quote from Walt Disney himself: "Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." Shorn from this quote is the additional information clarifying that Walt was specifically talking about the approach at WED Enterprises. Retained is that rather awkward "however", making it clear that this was part of some wider conversation that we are not here privy to. Instead, there is the implicit invitation to attach our own meaning to "however", and to what wider conversation the minds behind Meet The Robinsons might themselves have been responding to. It's no secret that the 2000s were not auspicious years for Disney. The Renaissance of the 1990s had given way into the Dork Age, with most of their animated features either outright flopping or earning only modest totals. Meanwhile, the box office was dominated by a new breed of animated feature; the age of 3D animation had arrived in full force, with it being largely a two horse race between Pixar and DreamWorks for dominion of the industry. Disney, who for decades had had the luxury of being effectively the only game in town when it came to big league Hollywood animation (Don Bluth's 1980s challenge notwithstanding), were suddenly finding themselves left in the dust. Having made the controversial decision to ditch hand-drawn animation altogether and to pivot to 3D, they'd done little restore their credibility when the first product of this bid for renewed relevance was the ghastly Chicken Little (2005) - a modest success that instantly cemented its reputation as one of the most loathed entries in the Disney canon. Meet The Robinsons knew that it faced an uphill battle when it came to both winning over the general public and convincing the Disney enthusiasts that the old magic hadn't gone away, and as such that closing nugget of Walt wisdom could be seen as an earnest plea for audiences to bear with the studio as it sought to regain its footing in a changing industry. Alternatively, it could have been interpreted as a massive middle finger to the devotees who favoured traditional animation and were disappointed at how quick Disney were to write off their legacy and jump on the 3D bandwagon. In light of everything that was happening at the time, I can see why that final title might have rubbed some people the wrong way, if it came across as taking Walt's words out of context to support their new computer-animated agenda. Not to mention that Disney could hardly take credit for "opening new up doors" when they were simply stumbling down a trail that Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky had already blazed. They weren't exactly selling us on the notion that this was the best possible future.

Personally, I am not so cynical as to suppose that this was the intention. I don't believe that the quote in question was meant as a commentary (at least, not a conscious one) on the studio's abandonment of 2D animation. Nevertheless, its inclusion does betray a fundamental lack of confidence on the film-makers' part - an admission that, yes we know that we're asking our audiences to go along with a lot, but look, this is exactly in the spirit of the old Disney. It is meant to convey a sense of playful optimism, but there is a distinct whiff of scepticism about it, a feeling that the film couldn't be left to speak for itself and needed the pseudo-endorsement of Walt to lend it authenticity. I would rather that it wasn't there at all. Because Meet The Robinsons shouldn't have doubted itself. It's no masterpiece, but it holds up remarkably strongly for a film that emerged from such a shaky and uncertain time in the studio's history. I speak as someone who was so dismayed by the direction Disney was taking in the 2000s that I chose to sit out the theatrical run of Meet The Robinsons altogether. It certainly had a lot to bounce back from. Brother Bear (2003) and Home on The Range (2004) were the products of palpably low morale, while Chicken Little was a gruesomely misguided attempt to ape the lucrative DreamWorks model. I wasn't expecting Meet The Robinsons to break the streak; based on word of its troubled production, and on its madcap trailer, I'd envisioned it being something of a mess. And, in a manner of speaking, it was. But it was a mess in the best possible way, one fully in keeping with a philosophy expressed in the film: "From failing you learn; from success, not so much." Meet The Robinsons might not be top tier, but it feels more authentic than other Disney products of its era, being willing to experiment and to go to more offbeat places in order to find new direction. It is a greatly more idiosyncratic piece than the succeeding Bolt (2008), a film structurally more polished but also doggedly averse to anything resembling risk or originality. I will be clear that I remain, above all, a 2D animation devotee, and think that Disney's treatment of it was lamentable. Nevertheless, I now have little trouble in declaring Meet The Robinsons to be the studio's second best entry of the decade, topped only by The Emperor's New Groove (seeing how Lilo & Stitch has so lethally debased itself, as of 2025).

The quality I can most admire about Meet The Robinsons is the sizeable extent to which it actually feels like something of a personal project. There is a real beating heart to the picture in a way not seen at Disney since the debased Lilo & Stitch. Somebody cared about getting this particular story told. I'm not sure that it was necessarily William Joyce's story, as related in his 1990 publication A Day with Wilbur Robinson, that they were particularly passionate about bringing to an audience. But they cared about what they had in Meet The Robinsons.

For an idea of how challenging and drawn out this film's development was, plans for a big screen version of A Day with Wilbur Robinson had been gestating at Disney since before the book itself was even commercially available. Film producer Bill Borden, a personal friend of Joyce, was given access to a proof copy and suggested that Disney might be interested in optioning it for a feature adaptation. Joyce wrote a treatment and pitched it, with the intention that it be adapted as a live action film and that it stay true to the book's timescale of taking place within a single day. He then set about drafting several different scripts while a variety of big name directors were courted - Joyce's top picks were Steven Spielberg and George Miller, with Peter Jackson, Francis Ford Coppola and Diane Keaton also being considered, but all to no avail. According to Borden, there was a prevailing sentiment that a live action children's film involving singing frogs and flying saucers was too costly and impractical for the era. The project stalled and languished in Development Hell for several years, until Disney executive Leo Chu managed to revitalise it by re-envisioning it as an animated production. From there, Joyce and Borden's input lessened, with Dorothy McKim taking over as producer, Jon Bernstein being assigned to write a brand new script and Stephen Anderson, a story supervisor on Brother Bear, coming in to helm the project in his directorial debut. In their hands, the plot underwent some drastic changes, with the Robinsons becoming a retro futuristic family in the vein of The Jetsons, and the pivotal conflict switching to an orphan's quest to find his place in the world. The latter development especially resonated with Anderson, who was himself adopted as a child and felt an affinity with the young protagonist Lewis.

Even with the project finally off of the ground, its path to completion remained a rocky one. When Pixar's chief creative officer John Lasseter was appointed to power at Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2006 he was infamously dissatisfied with how the feature was shaping up and ordered a major overhaul. It's reported that, under Lasseter's guidance, 60% of the film was scrapped and reworked (although Joyce disputes this). I previously prodded Blue Sky's Epic for having five credited writers, a sign of a torturous number of rewrites, but Meet The Robinsons has seven. As a knock-on effect of the protracted production schedule, Lewis wound up being voiced by two separate young actors, with the initial choice, Daniel Hansen, having already hit puberty by the time Lasseter's revisions were required. A sound-alike was located in Jordan Fry, a name that sounds oddly familiar to me for some reason. Great Caesar's ghost, could it be? Actually, I'd known at the time that Lewis was to be voiced by the same young actor who'd played a note-perfect Mike Teavee in the then-recent Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, and I did consider seeing the film at least out of support for Fry, but in the end my Disney fatigue was just too insurmountable. I consider it a really neat bit of career progression, because in some respects Lewis's story plays like a warmer variation on that of Mike as portrayed by Fry. There is quite a bit of thematic overlap between the two characters. Both are highly precocious children whose talents go unappreciated by the adults around them, but the role of Mike Teavee obviously requires that to be played with an angrier edge, and the story doesn't favour him. With Lewis the prospect of being young, intelligent and out of step is framed more positively, and he finds the connection and understanding that Mike was ultimately denied (Mike, though, remains the juicier character). 

Time has not been especially kind to Meet The Robinsons, in spite of its merits. Heck, 2007 was not overly kind to it. Critical reception was lukewarm, and its box office intake was substantially weaker than that of Chicken Little (a film that, while it outgrossed most of their recent 2D output, didn't meet Disney's expectations as a Pixar killer). On the plus side, it didn't amass anywhere near the level of disdain that its predecessor did, but then my mind inevitably goes to that immortal line from The Picture of Dorian Gray: "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." As it stands, Meet The Robinsons is one of those Disney films with something of a non-reputation, along with most of the package features, Fantasia 2000 and my dear sweet Oliver & Company. People rarely acknowledge its existence at all - not least Disney themselves, who didn't even include the film as part of a retrospective in the closing credits of their 2023 feature Wish. It sort of fell through the cracks where zeitgeist was concerned. I'm sure I wasn't the only person experiencing Disney fatigue at the time. Maybe people were reluctant to embrace Disney's new direction, particularly after Chicken Little. Maybe the glut of CG animated product across the decade meant that the technique's novelty was waning and that audiences were getting choosier about which features they gave their money to. Or maybe the marketing was simply too cluttered (that girl from the science fair who is a blatant bootleg of Wednesday Addams isn't a major character or one of the Robinsons, so what was she doing on the poster?), too confusing or else just too unimaginative.

This particular piece of marketing was inspired though.

It's important to keep in mind that Meet The Robinsons represented something of a learning curve for Disney. They were adjusting to the process of computer animation and trying to find a new identity post-Renaissance, and were lagging behind some of their contemporaries in both regards. Tonally and aesthetically, Meet The Robinsons is a lot less sophisticated than Pixar's Ratatouille; when you compare the two, it's a little startling to contemplate that they even came out within the same year, Pixar's film is so many leaps and bounds ahead. I doubt it would be at all controversial if I called Meet The Robinsons the worst-looking of the three major Joyce adaptations. It is a rough, rough little picture. But it's also the Joyce adaptation for which I feel the greatest personal affection. It's a film about finding the value in imperfection, a point it makes so convincingly that its lack of polish becomes a part of its appeal. 

What is A Day with Wilbur Robinson about? 

A Day with Wilbur Robinson is narrated in the first-person, from the perspective of an unnamed child who goes to spend a day (and a night) at the house of his friend Wilbur Robinson. He is greeted at the door by Wilbur and the family's butler Lefty (an octopus), and taken out into the garden, where they encounter Wilbur's parents scanning the lawn with a matter detector, helped by their robot assistant Carl. Mr Robinson explains that they are searching for Grandfather's false teeth, which have gone missing...and, come to think of it, they're not too sure where Grandfather is either. The narrator and Wilbur join in the search, exploring the vast, slightly surreal halls of the Robinson abode and encountering eccentric relative after eccentric relative. Aunt Billie plays with life-sized trains, Cousin Pete keeps pet tigers, Uncle Judlow uses a brain augmentor to boost his thought processes, Cousin Laszlo floats around by means of an anti-gravity device, Uncle Art travels in a flying saucer, etc. Eventually Grandfather is located in his science lab, training his band of musically-inclined frogs with the help of his friends, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, but the whereabouts of his teeth remain a mystery. Come evening the family sits down to each a spaghetti dinner, with Uncle Gaston, the cannon enthusiast, firing meatballs out of his miniature cannon. Soon after, Grandfather's false teeth are located in the mouth of one of the frogs. The family celebrate with a pillow fight, before Uncle Art regales them with stories of his adventures in outer space, and the frogs serenade them to sleep with violins. The following morning, the narrator bids the Robinsons farewell and goes his own way. Looking back over his shoulder, he sees Wilbur shooting himself out of Uncle Gaston's cannon, holding up a sign that reads: "See Ya Later, Pal."

The story is related in a comically deadpan fashion, with the Robinsons' eccentricities often understated within the text. For example, Billie is simply described as "playing with her train set" and Pete as "walking the cats", with the illustrations filling in the more unusual details of the trains being life-sized and the cats in question being tigers. Lefty, likewise, is not identified as an octopus, and when Art arrives in his flying saucer, we are told that he has come in from abroad. Uncles Spike and Dmitri, who first greet the narrator at the door, are actually hiding out in a couple of plant pots, a detail the narrator similarly takes in his stride.

 

How much of this is in Meet The Robinsons? 

Meet The Robinsons is a more faithful adaptation of its source book than is Epic of The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs...in the sense that it's actually about the same characters that were in the book. A bunch of them, at any rate. One member of the Robinson clan who is conspicuously absent from Disney's take is Mr Robinson - he's been replaced by another character, for the sake of accommodating a brand new plot twist. Also excised are Uncle Pete and his tigers (what? why wouldn't you want to include the tigers?) and Uncle Judlow and his brain augmentor. Wilbur's older sisters, Tallulah and Blanche, have been combined into a single character, named Tallulah, who is now Wilbur's cousin (the new plot twist becomes a whole lot simpler if Wilbur is an only child). Some new additions include Uncle Fritz and Aunt Petunia (the latter of whom is actually a puppet operated by the former), Uncle Joe, who never leaves his easy chair and gets no discernible dialogue, and Wilbur's grandmother Lucille. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong do not appear.

It's probably fair to say that the film plays homage to the book more than it does outright adapt it, with certain details being implemented as quick nods to Joyce's creation before moving swiftly along. For example, the search for Grandfather Robinson's teeth still occupies a chunk of the middle act, and is resolved in the same manner, with the teeth showing up in one of the singing frogs (trained by Mrs Robinson in this version), but is here a minor distraction rather than a major plot motivator. A Day with Wilbur Robinson is not a rousing adventure story like The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs, but a slice of life yarn about a remarkable family who do not see themselves as so remarkable, and who enjoy spending time together. It has no villain and the main source of conflict (those misplaced teeth) is a totally benign one. In expanding it to feature length, the nature of Joyce's story has been changed fundamentally, transforming it into an altogether busier narrative about time travel and space age technology, with the Robinson family being recontextualised as a futuristic family from the year 2037 (a year that, eep, doesn't seem anywhere near as distant now as it did back in 2007). We thus get an implicit explanation for the family's singularities - they are simply from another time, and what's normal to them would naturally bamboozle someone from the dawn of the century.

Something Meet The Robinsons is not able to carry across is the big running gag of Joyce's book, where Wilbur will intermittently acknowledge that the narrator has happened to stop by on an unusually boring day at the Robinson household, sparking the reader's imagination as to what life for this family could possibly look like on an exciting day. Lewis's reactions are also a lot less deadpan; in the book, it was clear that the narrator was a regular guest at the Robinson abode, and as such was unfazed by what he found within, but his film counterpart is required to find it freaky and unfamiliar. Hence, he's terrified to be greeted by Lefty at the door, and he explicitly questions if Billie's trains are really toys. In an illuminating interview with Slash Film, Joyce admitted that he missed this aspect in Disney's film, noting that in his story it was a matter of, "this is how they live, this is what they do. They were much more like the family in "The Philadelphia Story," Katharine Hepburn's family. Just breezy and sophisticated and unflappable. And the Robinsons in the animated film are a little more goofy." The script still is, nevertheless, able to slip in the odd concession to the idea that the Robinsons don't perceive themselves as being terribly strange. The film's equivalent of the spaghetti dinner sequence (where Gaston still fires meatballs from his cannon, only here it plays out as a pastiche of the chopsocky cinema that Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill had recently brought into the mainstream), is followed by Lewis asking Art if dinners with the Robinsons are always like this. Art calmly responds, "No, yesterday we had meatloaf." 

 

So what is Meet The Robinsons about?

Meet The Robinsons tells the story of Lewis (Hansen/Fry), a twelve-year-old orphan who as a baby was abandoned by his mother on the steps of a children's home (a moody opening sequence that recalls the low-key sombreness of the similarly orphaned Penny in the prelude to The Rescuers). Precocious and with a flair for devising radical (albeit malfunctioning) inventions, Lewis has a hard time endearing himself to potential adoptive parents, and believes that his only hope of finding a family would be to locate and reconnect with his biological mother. He comes up with his most ambitious creation to date, a machine that scans a subject's brain and extracts information from their subconscious memories, with the intention of using it to remember what his mother looked like. While presenting the invention at his school's science fair, he is approached my a mysterious boy named Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), who claims to have waltzed in from the future to warn him of an impending ambush from a sinister figure identified as the "Bowler Hat Guy" (director Steve Anderson). When Lewis's memory scanner spectacularly malfunctions (owing to the covert interventions of the Bowler Hat Guy), Lewis loses all confidence in himself, but is enticed by Wilbur into taking a trip in a time machine to the year 2037, so he can prove that he is who he says he is and convince Lewis to return to the fair and fix his scanner. Lewis, though, is far less interested in Wilbur's agenda than he is in using the time machine to head to the past and intervene in his mother's abandonment of him; they get into an argument and break the time machine, leaving Lewis stranded in the future, where he has little choice but to acclimatise to life with Wilbur's oddball family while endeavouring to repair the machine. In the meantime, the Bowler Hat Guy has followed them into the future, intending to abduct Lewis and find out how the memory scanner works so that he might pass the invention off as his own.

It is revealing that the film's middle act, which is the part that's most like Joyce's book, ends up being its weakest. Anderson was clearly nowhere near as invested in bringing Joyce's characters to the screen as he was in telling the new story that had been crafted around Lewis, chiefly because it was Anderson's story, more or less. Growing up as an adopted child, Anderson had eagerly awaited the day he turned 18, so that he could access his birth records and discover who his biological family were. Then, when he'd reached his mid-20s, it crossed his mind that he'd never gotten round to it, and he reflected on what had changed his priorities. In part, it was because he was happy with the family he had, but also because he was now more focussed on where he was going than where he had come from, and the future we was building at Disney animation. I do not know if Anderson ever did look up the details of his birth parents or make contact with them, but it hadn't proved as integral to his sense of identity or belonging as he'd long assumed. Lewis's journey to that same realisation feels authentic and heartfelt, since there clearly was a passion and conviction behind it stemming from Anderson's experience. By contrast, the movie comes to a near-total standstill when we get to the part where we're obligated to spend time with the Robinsons. It becomes no longer a matter of hanging out with the Robinsons for the joy of hanging out's sake, but an awkward road stop in between a story that feels bigger and more urgent. It doesn't help that the majority of the household are narrative dead weight. As a collective, they might embody the lively, jostling family atmosphere that's missing in Lewis's life, but the only ones who really matter, in story terms, are Wilbur, Mrs Robinson, the grandparents and Carl the robot.

The film's most successful character is the one who was apparently the greatest source of contention when Lasseter entered the picture, which is the Bowler Hat Guy. Lasseter thought him too much of a wimp to convince as the antagonist, and suggested making him a more serious threat. Anderson was resistant to the idea, but a compromise was eventually reached whereby the hat itself (artificially intelligent and named Doris) was revealed to be the nefarious brains behind the operation, with Bowler Hat Guy becoming more of a comic foil. He remains a very non-traditional Disney villain, with a lot more of Team Rocket in him than Jafar or Lady Tremaine. The most comparable rogue in Disney's own gallery would be Edgar from The Aristocats, a character who always felt weirdly shoehorned into the part. I suppose I can't blame Lasseter for having misgivings about any villain who might seem redolent of Edgar. And yet, Bowler Hat Guys works rather wonderfully, compensating for what he lacks in genuine menace with exquisite comic timing (Jim Carrey was at one point attached to the role but pulled out to star in Joel Schmaucher's The Number 23, leaving Anderson himself to fill in with a quasi-Carrey impression that still delivers) and a meaningful thematic backbone. The decision made late in the game that really holds the final character together, more so than having him be the minion of a robotic hat, was to make him the future adult version of Mike "Goob" Yagoobian, Lewis's sleep-deprived roommate (voiced in his child form by Matthew Josten), originally scripted as an entirely separate character. As a twist, it's frankly both a bit of a cheat (since Bowler Hat Guy bears not even the vaguest physical resemblance to Goob) and a little too transparent (it's clearly telegraphed in a scene where Bowler Hat Guy and Goob encounter one another, and the former seems inordinately invested in the latter). But it works. I totally buy into it. I can't even fathom how the story was ever supposed to get by without it.

Goob's motivation for turning to villainy is a deliberately silly one, but also poignant and a little startling. An avid young baseball player who was kept awake one night too many by Lewis's tireless inventing, his drowsiness caused him to miss a catch and cost his team an important game. For this he bore a grudge against Lewis that eventually consumed him, leaving him so bitter and angry that he drove away all prospective friends and adopters. It is a dark parallel to the story's other major revelation, that the adult Lewis (Tom Selleck) is none other than the Robinson patriarch (hence the excision of the book's Mr Robinson), now a world-renowned inventor living in a future that represents the best he can possibly be. His path to success was strewn with innumerable mistakes, but each mistake was an opportunity for learning, and each played a vital role into shaping him into the person he has become. The tension between the past and the future is embodied in the conflict between Goob and the Robinsons. Goob, who aspires to get revenge on Lewis by sabotaging his future and becoming a famous inventor in his place, has remained permanently frozen in that moment of childhood failure, emotionally stunted and fixated on lost opportunities, to the point that he has squandered his own future. Rather than learning or growing from his personal setback, he has allowed that setback to define him. He is, for all intents and purposes, a small child inhabiting a gangly adult body (to the extent that he still wears the young Goob's baseball uniform under his black garments), and he serves as a living rebuttal to Lewis's assumption that his salvation lies within the past. Lewis's desire to go back in time and prevent his mother from abandoning him is rooted in the perception that the trajectory he's been on since has been one of non-stop failure, and that his only remedy is to hit the reset button and reclaim the life he feels should have been his. Like Goob, he finds a false refuge in the past, and in the idea of correcting historic wrongs that inhibits his ability to embrace the challenges that could move him to more positive pastures. His former friend, now twisted and malformed beyond all recognition, becomes a grotesque, cautionary reflection of Lewis's skewed priorities, and of the other path he could potentially take if he does not take advantage of what is in front of him - one defined by bitterness and regret.

The nefarious hat Doris, meanwhile, becomes a clever metaphor for Lewis's self-doubt and how it threatens to destroy the many good things he still has every chance of creating if he perseveres. An embodiment of his personal failings, she is a creation of his that did not run according to plan; having taken on a life and a will of her own, she has returned to haunt him, seeking to disrupt his future by eliminating his self-confidence (unlike Goob she has greater ambitions in doing so than mere vengeance). Throughout the film, there is a running theme whereby hats are associated with the suppression of identity - during the portion where Lewis is accommodated by the Robinsons, Wilbur gets him to conceal his distinctive spiky hair by donning varying headgear, so the rest of the family doesn't cotton on to who he really is. Doris is likewise a consumer of selfhood, latching onto Goob because of his low self-worth and subsuming his identity, so that he becomes outwardly recognised as the Bowler Hat Guy. As an offensive weapon, she attacks her victims from the head down, scrambling their thought processes and causing them to lose their sense of purpose. Goob uses a smaller version of the hat (dubbed "Little Doris") to mind control animals into doing his bidding (first one of Mrs Robinson's frogs and then a T Rex), before an entire legion of hats in Doris's likeness are unleashed during the climax and enslave humanity, in a corrupted timeline where Lewis was never able to realise his dreams. Doris recreates this alternate dystopian future in her own image, with hat-shaped monuments dominating the darkened landscape as omnipresent symbols of his crushed potential. Lewis ultimately defeats Doris by asserting his ownership of her, vowing to her that he will never create her and thus willing her out of existence. He overcomes the adversity she presents with the realisation that his self-doubt is his own creation, and that he can take charge of it by not giving it the final say. The resolution is a straightforward triumph of positive thinking over negative thinking, with Goob coming to understand that his mistake was in believing that the latter would protect him. "Doris...I thought she was my friend", he murmurs sadly, echoing the misguided teachings he had earlier dispensed to his younger self, in advising him to let hate be his ally. 

The moral of Meet The Robinsons might be "keep moving forward", with the past being regarded potentially destructive to anyone too fixated on it, but it also presents something of a paradox (one that those inclined to interpret it as an allegory for the demise of traditional animation might want to keep in mind), in that it is a profoundly nostalgic film. Its approach to that all-important future can be described as very backwards-looking and yearnful. The Robinsons are a decidedly old-fashioned futuristic family, the 2037 they inhabit being informed by the kinds of mid-20th century futurist visions that gave us The Jetsons and, more pertinently, the Disney parks' Tomorrowland and Walt's blueprints for Epcot at Walt Disney World. (This is the sense in which Meet The Robinsons is most characteristically a Disney film - its vision of a utopian community is essentially Disneyland, and not light on corporate propaganda.) It may well have been factor in why the film didn't set the world alight upon release, as its relentlessly cheerful, euphoric depictions of the future* might have seemed a notch too quaint to resonate with where we were at in 2007. But then Meet The Robinsons is nothing if not a deeply personal story, and its futuristic visions best appreciated as a reflection of its protagonist's journey, and his progression from forlornness to genuinely relishing where his own potential could take him.

* (The Robinsons' future is optimistic...to a point. It seems that the Canucks have gotten rather a raw deal in 2037, with the country formerly known as Canada now being the US state of North Montana. I'm not sure that I want to know what happened there.) 

How much of the spirit of Joyce's book is retained in Meet The Robinsons?

If Meet The Robinsons is about the tension between past and future, what could have been versus what could be, then A Day with Wilbur Robinson is more concerned with the present moment. It is a book with a distinctly Carpe diem philosophy. The only point in which the future is anticipated is in the closing illustration, where Wilbur bids his friend farewell by holding up the sign: "See Ya Later, Pal." In the context of the book, this affirms that the narrator will return to the Robinson abode and that many more wonderful days with Wilbur Robinson lie ahead. It is also an implicit invitation to the reader to return to the book and to relive the adventure at a later date. The film plays homage to this illustration toward the end, when Wilbur returns Lewis to the year 2007 and bids him farewell by writing "See Ya Later Dad" in the clouds with the time machine. The nature of the relationship has obviously changed, and so has the meaning behind the message. Wilbur promises Lewis that they will meet again, but when they do it will not be as straightforward as simply popping round to a best friend's house for a fun-filled day. In order to reunite with Wilbur, Lewis will have to go through the whole process of growing up, courting the future Mrs Robinson, siring Wilbur and raising him as a child. The Robinsons might represent the end goal, but the real adventure, as Lewis is about to discover, is in the getting there.

On the film's Blu ray commentary, Anderson mentions that Rob Thomas wrote the theme song, "Little Wonders", without having seen the film, and that it was instead informed by the content of Joyce's book. He comments on how remarkable it was that the song opens with the lyrics, "Let it go", which just so perfectly happened to tie in with one of the film's major themes (obviously this commentary was recorded years before a certain other Disney picture completely commandeered the phrase "Let it go" in popular consciousness). Lewis's big moment of letting go, in the film, arrives when he is taken by Wilbur to the point in time where his mother abandoned him, so that he might have the chance to intervene, or at least to gain some understanding of the woman who has long been such a source of fascination to him. To Wilbur's surprise, Lewis approaches her but holds back and avoids interaction. Instead, he confirms his allegiance to his life he has been leading by knocking on the orphanage door and allowing it to play out on its current course (in the opening sequence we'd likely assumed that it was his mother who did the knocking, but it transpires to be the time-travelling Lewis). His closure comes in the realisation that he can leave the question of where he came from unanswered and still have a firm sense of his place in the world. As he tells Wilbur, he already has a family in the Robinsons. Of course, "let it go" is a phrase that can be taken both ways, and on the surface the film's forward-looking approach could be seen as somewhat contrary to the Carpe diem values of the book - in order to make the most of the present moment, the ability to let go of the future can be as valuable as letting go of the past. Yet this is the lesson Lewis that ultimately learns - how to cope with the unknown and to utilise what's on his immediate horizon. Crucially, although his trip to 2037 has given him reassurance of his potential, it does not give him reassurance of certainty. His future with the Robinsons is only a possible future, and nothing is guaranteed him. His adult self is clear that in order to become him, he will have to make the right choices in life. Indeed, the real thrill comes in not knowing exactly what lies ahead, and having a blank slate upon which to make all of the vital discoveries for yourself. This much is also suggested to Lewis by the adult Goob in his final appearance. Lewis requests that the Robinsons forgive Goob and allow him to join the family, but Goob chooses to go his own way before the offer can be extended to him. He leaves Lewis the unicorn filofax in which he was previously seen filling out his checklist of villainous deeds. The old checklist has been scribbled out, and beneath it he has supplied a new checkbox, beside a question mark.

The film ends with Lewis returning to the present day, where he does indeed seem to be making all of the right choices that will get him onto that more auspicious path. He heads back to the science fair, where his newly-restored brain scanner proves a smashing success, attracting the attentions of two prospective adopters who are revealed to be the middle-aged Robinson grandparents. Naturally, they hit it off with Lewis, and before long he's moving out of the orphanage and into his brand new home. He also remembers to attend the young Goob's baseball game and to wake him up at the critical moment, enabling him to make the catch and giving him the possibility of a brighter future. The final shot shows Lewis hard at work at his inventor's desk, enthusiastically sketching out new ideas (including a prototypical Carl), the crumpled bits of paper all around him indicators of the failures that are an inevitable part of the learning process.

Popular perception - if it acknowledges the film at all - has judged Meet The Robinsons as one such failure on Disney's own journey back into relevance, at a time when it was making numerous false or at least questionable new starts. Chicken Little had suggested a bleak, bleak future for Disney (seriously, I would consider Doris's dystopian future over whatever further horrors we might have gotten in a timeline where that abomination had grossed as much as Finding Nemo), while Bolt pointed to a future that was safe, sanitised and frightfully derivative. The Princess and The Frog (2009) gave us a tantalising glimpse into the best future of all, one in which an undervalued art form was given a brand new lease of life, but sadly it was not to be. It was only with Tangled (2010), followed by Wreck It Ralph (2012) that Disney settled into the groove that would work for them for a while, a re-embracing of their traditional fairy tale formula (Frozen, Moana) alternated with attempts at trendier modern stories (Big Hero 6, Zootopia). Maybe Meet The Robinsons was always a little too singular and unconventional to have represented a viable future for Disney. It's a picture that feels perpetually out of time. But it certainly is a joy to experience in the moment.