VHS Verve: Meet The Feebles (1989)

Long before he took the world by storm with his Lord of the Rings trilogy and made epic cinema big and sexy again, Kiwi director Peter Jackson specialised in decidedly oddball pictures geared heavily toward grossing his audiences out, and none of his films accomplished this with quite as much perverse panache as Meet The Feebles, a savagely affectionate (or affectionately savage) pastiche of Jim Henson's The Muppets. Alas, Meet The Feebles is also one of Jackson's lesser-known films - it bombed on release in 1989 and only gained a halfway substantial amount of attention after Lord of The Rings made Jackson a household name - which maybe isn't so surprising given how unashamedly esoteric it is. Whether or not you enjoy this film might depend on how much tolerance you have for seeing puppet animals barf and take big heavy leaks on one another, how open-minded you are toward interspecies sex (an element which is suggested wholesale by the Muppets themselves, mind) or how much of a masochistic sicko you are in general. If you pass that test, then it's a must-see.

The first thing to note is that Meet The Feebles is nothing like Avenue Q, a Broadway musical which also functioned as an adult-orientated pastiche on Henson, more specifically Sesame Street. For all its sauciness, Avenue Q was imbued with a warmth and tenderness toward its characters which Meet The Feebles goes well out of its way to avoid. Instead, Meet The Feebles uses the inhuman, otherworldly qualities of the Muppets as the stuff of horror, making you feel as if you're watching an alien race put on a play about humankind's very worst vices - there is something slickly Aesopian about the entire affair, with the sheer, unabashed ugliness of the puppetry giving physical form to that depravity. That's how I see it, anyway. Speaking as someone who was raised on Henson properties but also saw something weirdly grotesque and threatening in their fuzzy felt faces as a child, I have a boundless appreciation for Jackson's demented vision. Meet The Feebles is a film which speaks to the little kid in me who was once too scared to watch Fraggle Rock because the bit in the opening sequence where Junior Gorg seizes Gobo was hella spine-chilling (nowadays, I love Fraggle Rock and the deep irony is that Junior Gorg is my favourite character) and who was deathly afraid of anything involving Miss Piggy for not knowing when her violent temper might erupt. I can only assume that Jackson felt an inkling of that fear himself, and yearned to create a picture that carried that Muppety uncanniness out to its absolute extreme. All in all, I see the film less as the darkly gruesome black comedy it's typically pegged for, and more as the most disorientating, doggedly grotesque of horror films. I don't think I'm alone on that, for Halliwell's Film Guide has it listed a "semi-pornographic horror with Muppet-like creatures that is determined to offend." (Not so sure about the "semi-pornographic" angle, though - yes, there's a truck-load of fairly graphic sight gags involving interspecies bonking, but it's no more pornographic in practice than was Ralph Bakshi's Fritz The Cat. As for the film's potential to offend, ironically I'd say that the most offensive thing happens essentially by accident and involves the two characters we're supposed to see as the most wholesome).

Meet The Feebles is an absolute freak show of a flick that sets out to immerse the viewer in as intensely uncomfortable an experience as possible. The close-up shots of those mangy, moth-eaten puppets are so frightfully, monstrously surreal that it transcends into the kind of nightmarish fever dream territory that has you wailing out in disbelief at what you're seeing. It's such a bizarrely unique piece of film-making that a number of critics were left stumped by it - the Time Out review gave props to the obvious craft that went into the puppetry and song-writing but questioned if it was worth the effort when it was ultimately in service of "a string of gags about vomiting, pissing, shitting, jissom pressure, bunnilingus, and knicker-sniffing anteaters?" Meet The Feebles revels in everything that's gross and nasty about the human condition, including its assorted bodily functions, and inevitably that's going to alienate a few people. In many respects I think that Meet The Feebles was a bit ahead of its time - in a post-South Park world its combination of absurdity and extreme gross-out vulgarity doesn't seem quite so out there, but then film's unapologetic commitment to its own hypnotic ugliness takes it down an altogether darker, creepier path than Parker and Stone's infamous creation. Meet The Feebles was never destined to be anything other than fringe viewing, and it's essential that you approach it with an already very twisted demeanor.

Meet The Feebles follows the assorted exploits of a troupe of sleazy animal performers as they prepare to put on a big variety show in the hopes of landing a syndicated television series. Their two biggest draws are Harry (Ross Jolly), a sexually promiscuous leporine, and hippopotamus diva Heidi (voiced by Mark Hadlow, with Danny Mulheron providing her physical movements), who's instantly recognisable as the troupe's answer to Miss Piggy. If you thought that Kermit and Piggy's relationship seemed a bit rocky at times, that's nothing compared to the emotionally tortured nightmare that is Heidi's partnership with her boss and lover Mr. Bletch (Peter Vere-Jones), the villainous walrus manager of the club (funnily enough my VHS copy of the film identifies him as an otter, but no, I'd say those tusks are a dead giveaway). While the Feebles are rehearsing their big opening number, Bletch is in his office aggressively banging his feline mistress Samantha (Donna Akersten). Words cannot describe just how eye-poppingly bizarre it is seeing this big hefty walrus going at it with this tiny, fragile-looking cat (I'm not sure, but I think this may have been the original Hot Skitty on Wailord Action). Bletch has secretly lost whatever pull he once felt toward Heidi but is reluctant to drop her altogether due to her importance to the show. Samantha tires of Bletch's stalling and tries to undo Heidi herself with some backstage cattiness that has Heidi retreating to her dressing room in a cake-binging dejection. Her despair eventually transforms into a Miss Piggy-style rage that reaches breathtakingly murderous heights. In the meantime, Bletch has his flippers tied with other concerns, such a shady drugs deal with a golf-playing pig (Stuart Devenie), and producing the underground porn films directed by his best mate Trevor the rat (Brian Sergent), which feature a cow with oversized udders indulging in S&M activities with a whip-wielding weta. I did tell you this thing was offbeat.

The other major story thread involves the troupe's newcomer, a chivalrous but naive and painfully shy hedgehog named Robert (Hadlow) whose excitement at the mere prospect of being featured in the Feebles line up soon begins to grate on the rest of the crew, particularly the pretentious vulpine director Sebastian (Devenie). Fortunately, Robert finds a friendly mentor in theatre veteran Arthur the worm (Vere-Jones) and a potential love interest in pretty chorus girl poodle Lucille (Akersten). Robert's innocence and playful enthusiasm stand in direct contrast to the sheer depravity unfolding all around him and is presumably intended to provide the film with some form of emotional catharsis - a small dash of earnestness so that not even a world as mangy and flea-bitten as the Feebles' is entirely devoid of sunshine. After all, the film clearly intends for the viewer to sympathise with Robert and root for his sweet sincerity to win the day (even when it also expects us to laugh at his speech impediment). Unfortunately, Robert's so-called virtue also winds up yielding the film's most problematic element - the cute little hedgehog turns out to be frankly a bit of a judgemental twat, as evidenced when he catches Trevor in the process of drugging and raping Lucille (hoping to lure her into his underground porn ring) and is swift to blame and shame the victim. Underneath all that cat-banging, drugs running and underpants-sniffing, Meet The Feebles is actually a surprisingly black-and-white morality story, so searingly condemning in its exploration of human vice that it again feels like the work of an alien race passing a very harsh judgement on the failings of humanity; among them, its weakness for a little tipple. Lucille gets raped by Trevor and rebuffed by Robert because she loosens her morals just enough to accept a glass of champagne from the former, and regrettably the film seems to regard the outcome as nothing less than her inevitable comeuppance for giving in to the devil's drink (and the lure of potential celebrity) in the first place. Later, when she tries to explain the situation to Robert, he dismisses her for her wine-drinking every bit as much as her ostensible promiscuity. "You dwink", he sneers, and refuses to hear her out. Even the love-conquers-all direction their arc finally takes doesn't quite offset the sourness of this plot point. It's a sourness of a different, entirely less delectable ilk to the pickled-in-piss ugliness that dominates the rest of the film.

There are a handful of smaller story strands, including one involving Harry contracting a mysterious, potentially fatal venereal disease and attempting to fend off an intrusive paparazzi housefly (Sergent) with an insatiable taste for dirt (figuratively and literally - the fly provides the film with possibly its most revolting visual joke, and that's certainly saying something). In another subplot clearly inspired by Gonzo and Camilla from The Muppets, we have a chicken named Sandy (Devenie) attempting to slap Sid the elephant (Mark Wright) with a paternity suit because he refuses to acknowledge their freakish chimera offspring as his own. This is interspersed with Sebastian's efforts to direct the all-important show, which keeps threatening to fall apart due to the cast's tendency to kill, injure or otherwise incapacitate themselves.

The narrative zips continuously from one demented escapade to another, its twisted energy deriving from how consistently the tone threatens to tip over from the crass and menacing into the outright bone-chilling. A prime example would be during the scene where Madame Bovine, the porn star cow, accidentally kills her weta co-star by sitting on him. Trevor shrugs it off, suggesting they can sell the footage as a snuff film, then proceeds to feed the crushed weta carcass to a monstrous, tremor-like lifeform that just so happens to be lurking down in the theatre basement (like, what the hell is that thing?! Are you going to explain it to me, movie?). Special acknowledgement goes to Peter Dasent's low-key score, which really emphasises the sinister, uneasy undercurrent that permeates the film. The puppetry is obviously cruder and more limited than what a Jim Henson production could have accomplished, but it's still pulled off with a remarkable slickness and incorporates some joyously mind-bending set-pieces, one of the high points being a sequence in which Bletch and Trevor face off against a giant spider (which is way cooler than when Sean Astin did it in Return of The King) and then take on a cetacean crime boss by driving their vehicle directly through his viscera. Whether or not you're won over by the film's warped sense of humor, it's hard to not come away with an overwhelming sense of admiration for just how determinedly different it is, how thoroughly it believes in its own nauseating vision, in going all-out to milk as much devilish lunacy as it possibly can within its technical limitations, and how little it evidently cared about delivering a commercial product. It's that real sense of love and commitment toward its vulgar craft that gives Feebles its heart and soul, and enables it to endure as such a wicked curiosity, one that's aged more gracefully than Bakshi's Fritz The Cat, and certainly has more to recommend it than that one-joke wonder Sausage Party. It's the kind of malfunctioning fairground ride that might have you up-chucking every bit as violently as Harry does during one of the musical numbers, but by god, you can't help but marvel at its moxie.

The film's underpinnings as a pitiless morality story come to a head at the climax where - spoilers - Heidi loses every last shred of self-restraint and resorts to machine-gunning the rest of the troupe in a murderous rampage. She comes down on them like the belated judgement of a higher power that's grown weary of their antics and has resorted to pulverizing their vice-ridden hides in a bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions, and it's surely not a coincidence that it's mainly the "nicer" Feebles who are spared her wrath - Robert, Lucille, Arthur, Sid (who does the right thing eventually) and Sebastian (a bit of an anomaly, but then he's not quite as horrible as some of the others). Above all, Feebles is keen to emphasise the importance of living cleanly and not succumbing to the temptations of hedonism, addictive substances and empty celebrity, lest you get done in by a machine gun-wielding hippopotamus. An appropriately maniacal finale to this most singular of pictures or a heavy-handed betrayal of the film's anarchic, free-wheeling spirit? Frankly I'm left too scarred for life to give a damn.

South Park: Hell on Earth 2006 (aka That Darned Dahmer)

With the US release of My Friend Dahmer just days away and with Halloween just around the corner, now seems like the perfect time to take a look at the Milwaukee cannibal's "guest" appearance in the  South Park episode "Hell on Earth 2006", which first aired on 25th October 2006 as part of the series' tenth season.

"Hell on Earth 2006" is what I would describe as a "busy" episode, in that it has at least four different story strands going on at once, none of which are especially well-developed. Ultimately it plays more like a series of vignettes, loosely connected around the overarching theme that Satan is planning to throw a big Halloween bash up on Earth and grows increasingly petulant when things don't go his way. This is a parody of the MTV reality series My Super Sweet 16, with Satan ultimately concluding that he's above the depravity of the spoiled divas featured on that show. There's also some stuff about the Catholic Church attempting to crash Satan's party and Butters using a mirror to summon the ghost of Biggie Smalls, but none of that's particularly important.

In the strand we're focusing on, Jeffrey Dahmer is released from Hell, along with fellow deceased serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, to pick up a Ferrari cake for Satan's party. Naturally, they fail to accomplish this ostensibly simple task when their urge to kill gets in the way, and the whole thing swiftly transforms into a dark pastiche of The Three Stooges, with Bundy assuming the role of Moe, Dahmer of Larry and Gacy of Curly. The three killers do what they can to salvage the increasingly grisly situation, but darn it, those danged murderous urges just won't stay in check. If the whole set-up sounds incredibly distasteful, remember that we're in South Park country, baby. Actually, this episode is probably best-known for the controversy it provoked on its initial airing, due to its flippant depiction of the death of Australian TV star Steve Irwin less than two months after he died (he shows up as a guest at Satan's party, complete with a string ray sticking out of his heart), which many viewers condemned as "too soon" (the Irwin moment does explicitly comment on the issue of mocking something too soon after the event, although you can very well argue that Trey and Matt were looking to have their cake and eat it). There's a line in the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors proposing that "Comedy is tragedy plus time" (which was presumably reworked from the Karl Marx quote, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce"), and I guess that Trey Parker and Matt Stone were able to bear that out with this considerably less controversial story arc casting three historic serial killers in a Three Stooges style caper. The whole thing is a drawn-out exercise in pushing the boundaries of bad taste, but there is something weirdly beguiling about the sheer insanity of it all.

The big question, or at least the one I'm the most preoccupied with, is how accurate this episode's depiction of Jeffrey Dahmer is to the facts about the man himself, and that's what I'm going to examine in the space below. I could talk about Bundy and Gacy too, but I'm not nearly as well-versed on those guys.

First off, a disclaimer, just to make it totally clear that I'm well aware that South Park wasn't striving for accuracy and that everything that happens in this episode does so purely in the interests of humour. The fact that it involves three dead serial killers going to collect a giant cake shaped like an automobile is a pretty big tip-off. But does anyone really mind if I nitpick it anyway?

Here, Dahmer is voiced by Matt Stone and - surprise! - he sounds nothing like the actual Jeffrey Dahmer. Mind you, I think that Stone was looking less to emulate Dahmer's real voice than he was Larry from The Three Stooges. To be fair to Stone, his efforts are still infinitely less weird than what Trey Parker calls a Jeffrey Dahmer impression.

The three killers first enter the scene about eight minutes into the episode, when Satan decides that he wants a Ferrari cake at his party and his assistant Azazel calls forth "Hell's most evil souls" to go up to the Bakery Napoleon on Earth to retrieve it and deliver it to the party. As each killer steps forward, a newspaper headline flashes onscreen, giving the viewer some vague insight into his own particular misdeeds.

When Dahmer appears, his newspaper headline reads "17 bodies found in...". Straight off the bat, we have our first inaccuracy, for Dahmer's list of victims did indeed number at seventeen, but not all of their bodies were found (particularly as Dahmer didn't immediately take to his practice of hoarding preserved body parts). Notably, the remains of Steven Tuomi, Dahmer's second victim, have never been found to this day, and Dahmer was not charged with his death due to the lack of concrete evidence - even Dahmer's own confession on the matter was considered shaky. (Incidentally, if you think that seventeen is a shocking figure, Dahmer actually had the lowest kill count out of this particular trio of killers.)

So, Dahmer, Bundy and Gacy head up to Earth to retrieve that Ferrari cake, and I've got to say, I'm not sure exactly how this supposed to work, even in context. Are they returning to Earth as ghosts or have they been given brand new corporeal bodies? I'm assuming the latter, given that their ability to interact with the material world doesn't seem at all impaired or out of the ordinary. They go to the Bakery Napoleon, but things immediately take a nasty turn when Gacy and Dahmer impulsively stab the staff at the bakery, leaving the three killers with no one to help them load the Ferrari cake onto their pick-up vehicle, and some Three Stooges-esque scuffling ensues.

The massive inaccuracy the entire "Three Murderers" story arc hinges on is the whole idea that they can't accomplish simple tasks because they're compelled to gruesomely butcher every person they encounter on sight. In reality, all three men operated according to strict MOs and did not kill this indiscriminately - if Dahmer, Bundy and Gacy had gone around stabbing people willy-nilly, as is depicted here, they would have each been caught very quickly. All three killers were methodical enough to conceal their murderous activities within the context of their ostensibly ordinary lives - indeed, a crucial part of what defines a serial killer is that "cool off" period that occurs between each murder, in which the killer goes back to their "normal" life before the urge to kill resurfaces. Certainly, stabbing random strangers on the spot was not Dahmer's style. He was very selective in the victims he targeted (young males with a physique that appealed to him), and his preferred method was to lure them back to Apartment 213, drug them and then strangle them in their sleep. Dahmer also did not kill because he enjoyed the act of killing, but because he wanted complete control over his victims and to do what he willed with their bodies. Something that's also not represented here is how entwined Dahmer's activities were with his alcoholism.

Later, when the three killers are attempting to load the cake onto the vehicle themselves, a random stranger offers them his assistance and gets gorily stabbed by Gacy for his trouble. When Bundy berates Gacy for this, he states that he did it for Dahmer, because "he likes havin' sex with dead bodies". Bundy then turns around and notices Dahmer getting duly intimate with the dead man's digestive system.

Bundy: Dahmer! Stop having sex with them intestines!

Dahmer: What good are intestines if you can't have sex with them?

Okay, that part is 100% true. Dahmer did have a morbid fascination with the viscera in particular, and he got up to some really gruesome things with his victims' guts. Although I doubt that the man in question would have been Dahmer's type.

Bundy points out that they now have a dead body to dispose of, lest they attract unwanted attention. As they tend to the body, Dahmer gets hold of a severed hand and begins to nibble at it compulsively, much to Bundy's annoyance - this is a reference to Dahmer's true-life cannibalism, although again this was a bit more methodical than Dahmer simply being compelled to nibble away at any loose bit of human flesh he got hold of (Dahmer ate the body parts of some of his victims as a means of furthering his sense of intimacy with them - he also cooked it in advance). Unfortunately for the three killers, they're so engrossed in the task at hand (or rather, in physically pounding one another when it doesn't go so well) they forget that they never finished loading the Ferrari cake onto the truck and it winds up getting splattered over Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy in a glorious mess. Bundy berates Gacy when he cheerfully samples the ruined cake, as Dahmer laments what deep trouble they're now in.

 

In their final skit, Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are in the bakery kitchen, having resolved to create a new Ferrari cake entirely from scratch within the twenty minutes they have remaining. Dahmer quips that he knows he's up to the task because he once enrolled in an Italian cookery class, but ultimately quit because, "There weren't enough Italians to eat!" Something tells me that the real Dahmer would have been way too introverted to have participated in an Italian cookery class, even if he'd had the opportunity (there's also the implication here that his cannibalism was driven by a simple taste for human flesh rather than his ritualistic behaviours), but then he's clearly joking and some sources indicate that Dahmer did have a very weird sense of humour (though he wasn't exactly what you'd call a jolly soul), so I'll give "Hell on Earth 2006" this one. (Actually, the real reason why Dahmer might have been handy in the production of confectionery is because he worked in a chocolate factory.)

The gruesome finale sees the three killers ultimately turning their murderous compulsions on one another. When Gacy refuses to get 10,000 eggs for the Ferrari cake, Bundy finally tires of his clowning and rips his eyeballs from their sockets. This angers Dahmer, who stabs Bundy in the gut with a kitchen blade and blows a raspberry at him. Bundy retaliates by cutting off Dahmer's exposed tongue, but Dahmer manages to take Bundy out by stabbing him upwards through the jaw. Meanwhile Gacy, who can't see what's going on, starts swinging a rolling pin blindly and ends up brutally bludgeoning Dahmer. This is no doubt an intentional reference to how Dahmer died in real life; he was bludgeoned by another prison inmate and succumbed to his injuries before he could receive medical attention. Here, I'm not sure quite what the deal is, because all three men are technically already dead, but it's the last we see of them in this episode. In the end Satan decides that he doesn't need anything as ridiculously decadent as a Ferrari cake to have an enjoyable Halloween party, and the other story strands do converge in the final scene, but the "Three Murderers" arc ends with Dahmer and Bundy in crumpled, bloodied heaps with Gacy still waving that rolling pin blindly. Too bad they couldn't make the party.

Logo Case Study: Children's Video Library

In my last entry, I brought up the Children's Video Library, a sub-label of 1980s home video distributors Vestron Video dedicated exclusively to their kid-friendly titles. It's a name you're likely to be hearing a lot more of on here, as I recently acquired a whole bunch of their releases, so we may as well start by taking a look at their logo.

It's...not exactly the most advanced logo we've seen from this era. Cheap and charming is what they're pretty much going for, with very basic animation on the balloons and titles. The only potentially frightening element here is in the ominous black void from which the balloons materialise (although at least we don't feel as if we're being pulled into it, a la the Mickey sorcerer logo), but that's all negated by the soothing choice of music, defined by the Closing Logos Group wiki as "Irish-sounding". Hmm? It's a flute rendition of "Girls and Boys Come Out To Play", a traditional folk rhyme. All in all I'd describe this as a fairly innocuous logo.

Click here for a (by no means complete) glimpse of the titles the Children's Video Library had to offer. A nice mixture of toyetic specials, storybook adaptations and the occasional title that looks eye-poppingly nightmarish. Some real must-have material, in other words.

"When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?!": The original Poochie cartoon from 1984

If you were a kid in the early 1980s, then perhaps you remember a time when Poochie wasn't this cartoon dog in sunshades who epitomised everything pandering and misguided about committee thinking and was instead a completely different cartoon dog in sunshades designed to entice you into buying dolls, stampers and other similarly gaudy plastic products. The Poochie to whom I refer was a fluffy pink-and-white poodle created by Mattel in the early 80s, whose big shtick seemed to be that she lived the kind of ultra chic lifestyle that preteen girls are encouraged to want to emulate. Poochie's likeness adorned a variety of toys, stationary and vanity products targeted at the aforementioned demographic, some of which can be glimpsed in the commercial below:

As 1980s toy fads go, Poochie has fared less well than many of her contemporaries - unlike My Little Pony, Care Bears and Transformers, there haven't really been any notable attempts to revive the character for subsequent generations. Poochie looks to be permanently consigned to the 80s, along with fellow forgotten fads the Wuzzles, the Glo Friends and the Keypers. I'm not convinced that her staying power was all that hot even in her decade of origin - by the time I'd come along and was actually old enough to have an awareness of contemporary toy trends, in the latter stages of the 80s, it seems that Poochie fervor had already long dissipated. I have no first-hand memories of the character or her products whatsoever (though I remember the Wuzzles, Glo Friends and Keypers vividly enough). I learned of Poochie's existence many years later while browsing through the personal webpages of some 80s toy collectors, and upon first laying eyes on the fluffy pink pup I didn't experience even the slightest jolt of recognition. Clearly I got to the 1980s too late to get acquainted with this flash-in-the-pan fleabag. (Note that while Poochie appears to have achieved only very fleeting success in the US and UK, I'm told that she was a real heavy-hitter in Italy, which is corroborated by the large number of eBay auctions for Poochie merchandise I've seen coming from Italian sellers. I'm curious to know what it was about Poochie that made her resonate so strongly with Italian zeitgeist.)

Poochie's career peaked in the summer of 84 when she received her very own one-off animated television special, courtesy of our good friends at DiC, which was later released on home video as part of the Children's Video Library series. I haven't been able to uncover a huge deal of background information on this special, but the loose story threads and open-ended nature of the ending make it super obvious that this was the pilot for a proposed TV series that wasn't picked up for whatever reason. As with all discarded pilots, there's that big "what if?" question that looms over it and makes it a fascinating oddity in its own right, so let's dig in and get a sense of the Poochie toon that might have been had fortune swung in the pretty pup's favour.

The plot of the special is vaguely similar to Disney's 1977 film The Rescuers, in that it involves Poochie (voiced here by Ellen Gerstell) receiving letters from children in dire situations and setting out on globe-trotting adventures to lend them a paw. If you're wondering how these kids happened to get hold of Poochie's address in the first place, in her regular occupation she's the agony aunt of a popular New York-based magazine, World Now. Poochie got the job because she's the pet of the magazine editor, E.G., a man so reclusive that the rest of the World Now staff have never actually seen his face and just go about their business on the assumption that he's still scribbling dutifully away in his office on the top floor. In actuality, E.G. left a while ago under extremely vague circumstances (we're told that he's off "doing important stuff"), leaving his pet poodle to run the enterprise in his absence (what self-respecting eccentric millionaire would do otherwise?). The World Now staff are also unaware that Poochie is anything other than an ordinary (albeit heavily privileged) canine, as that's all she behaves like in their presence, and just assume that it's really E.G. who answers the letters in the Dear Poochie column. The only beings who know the truth about Poochie are her two artificially intelligent assistants, Hermes (Neil Ross) and Zipcode (Fred Travalena). That's right, Poochie has a couple of robot buddies in this special. How...random? Or how transparently an attempt to ride on the coattails of the Star Wars mania that was still very influential in 1984? Hermes in particular has a strong C-3PO vibe, in that he's a golden humanoid, enormously uptight and tends to look down on the less sophisticated Zipcode. I suspect that these Star Wars-esque robots may have been added in to broaden the appeal of the cartoon somewhat, in hopes of making this brand targeted exclusively toward girls a bit more accessible for boys (I've long assumed that Spike the dragon was conceived for My Little Pony with a similar purpose in mind). For what it's worth, I do like the robots. They definitely feel like a product of their time, but they're a quirky, colourful touch, and Hermes' fussiness provides a nice contrast to Poochie's calmer disposition.

The special opens, in true Rescuers fashion, with our young human waif Danny (Katie Leigh) fleeing from his potential captors through the streets of Cairo, Egypt, and managing to stall them for long enough to drop a stamped addressed envelope into a mailbox. "Help me Poochie, you're the last chance I have," he pleads plaintively as he sends the letter on its way. We get a very clear glimpse of the address on the envelope, so viewers at home could, in theory, have sent their own mail to Poochie. I wonder how many letters with this address were sitting in dead letter offices in the mid-1980s?

We then cut straight to New York, where Poochie is heading up to the top office of the World News building to continue her letter-answering duties. We get some reference to a "Poochie translator", implying that Poochie isn't actually capable of human speech and some babel fish device is translating her yips and growls into a language everyone else can understand. It's never really explained where the vast array of space age technology that Poochie has access to came from, but I guess the implication is that E.G. is some of kind of technical whizz who designed all this stuff in between his regular job of managing a magazine.

Zipcode reads out the first letter of the day, which consists of typical nondescript agony aunt fluff:

"Dear Poochie, I like the boy next to me in class. But he is shy and I am too. How can I start a conversation with him? Signed Susie"

Poochie's advice:

"Dear Susie, write a little note saying something funny and nice to him. Stick it on his locker so he sees it. It will help you both get started. Signed Poochie."

With the next letter, we go from 0 to 100 real quick:

"Dear Poochie, my dad is an archeologist. We were deep down in a pyramid when all of a sudden my dad disappeared. I searched everywhere for him but he's nowhere. I'm still looking. I don't have money. I'm hungry too. And some strange looking men are chasing me! Please help me! Help me! Signed Danny Evans. Letter postmarked Cairo, Egypt. No return address on envelope."

Poochie suggests that they make an imminent trip to Cairo to look for Danny. Hermes is reluctant, insisting that E.G. is counting on them to run the magazine in his absence. Poochie reminds him of E.G.'s exact instructions by hitting a button and activating a hologram of E.G., announcing that he left Poochie in charge of his business and worldly goods with the expectation that she uses them to help others in need, just as he would do. We learn E.G.'s real name (Edward Gregory Prince) but next to nothing else about him. Note that when I mentioned earlier that there are some loose story threads in this special, the deal with E.G. (or lack of) was more-or-less what I had in mind. In addition to the incredibly vague reasons given for his absence, there's a moment where Poochie asks if there's been any recent communication from E.G. and is informed by Hermes that there hasn't. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I get the impression that we're meant to think there's something amiss there; that something has happened to E.G. and that his whereabouts and reasons for leaving would have been subjects for subsequent episodes. The world will never know.

Poochie and Hermes board a private jet to Cairo, with Hermes disguising himself as a human by pulling a mask over his head (Zipcode has to sit the adventure out, presumably because his non-humanoid design would make him too conspicuous). We also see Hermes tinkering with a dial on his wrist and declaring, "this time I'll use my normal British accent." There's the implication here that Hermes has a diverse range of voices and personas he could switch to any time by modifying his controls, and that we might actually have gotten to see this in action had the pilot been picked up for a series. Too bad. As it happens, the closest we get to seeing Hermes putting his vocal modification powers to use is when he attempts to communicate with a native Egyptian dog about Danny's whereabouts, only his animal translation device is unfortunately set to "cat" and it doesn't go too well for him.

Shortly after arriving in Cairo, they meet up with Poochie's local contact, a scruffy mongrel named Ali. We know he's her Cairo contact because he randomly introduces himself as such to her after Poochie is shown to have gotten fully acquainted with him, giving us the distinctive taste of weird and clunky exposition. Ali states that he'll lead them to the pyramid of Nikniknoton (I really hope they made that name up; otherwise I just butchered the spelling of an actual historical Pharaoh's moniker), uttering cryptically that he hopes it's not too late "to save them from the curse of the Pharaoh". Ali leads them to the pyramid but will go no further - actually, it's never made clear why Ali believes that taking them to the pyramid will help them find Danny (he certainly never said anything about a Nikniknoton in his letter). Poochie and Hermes head inside and find a sarcophagus (which for some reason they insist on calling a "mummy case", presumably on the assumption that the target audience wouldn't know what a sarcophagus was). Hermes picks up a signal indicating that something is hiding inside the "mummy case", which Poochie insists they open. Although Poochie and Hermes have a very amicable relationship for the most part, occasionally Hermes will be reluctant to go along with Poochie and she'll angrily remind him that he's technically her subordinate; this happens when Hermes is nervous about opening the "mummy case" and Poochie tells him it's an order. Inside, they find Danny, who's initially confused that this pink and white poodle and weirdly robotic man happened to be wandering around the pyramid, but quickly deduces who they are.

Danny explains that he was exploring the pyramid with his father and had turned his back for a second while his father was reading some hieroglyphics (thankfully, the special gives its viewers enough credit as to actually use the word "hieroglyphics") only to turn around and find him gone. Hermes twigs that there's a button concealed among the hieroglyphics which activates a revolving door; behind this, they discover a secret passageway leading to the underground city of the Nikites, an ancient civilisation who've dedicated the past few millennia to protecting the Pharaoh and his pyramid. Turns out that they don't take particularly kindly to intruders, as Hermes and Danny discover when they get separated from Poochie and are captured by the Nikites, who confine them to a cell along with Danny's father. Danny has a happy reunion with his pop, informing him that he received help after sending a letter to Dear Poochie, which Mr Evans apparently doesn't see unlikely or bizarre enough to question. Instead, he breaks the really bad news - the Nikites are so dedicated to preserving the tomb of the Pharaoh that all intruders are mercilessly disposed of via sacrificial ceremony.

The Nikites are led by a young high priestess named Koom (Jennifer Darling, whom you might recall was also the voice of Muffin the basset hound in Hound Town) who actually feels bad about killing people and wants to reinstate an old procedure where intruders merely had their memories wiped with a mystical flower. Her council are reluctant, advising her that the flower has not been used for a very long time and bringing it back now would be deemed too risky. Conflicted, Koom turns to a statue of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead, and implores him to show her the way by giving her a sign (actually, in this special, Osiris is incorrectly identified as a goddess for some reason). She sees Poochie gazing down at her from atop the statue of Osiris and is uplifted, thinking that this strange pink and white dog is the sign from Osiris, but when she attempts to point this out to her underlings immediately discovers that the dog has vanished into thin air. They turn and casually walk away like they were listening to the ramblings of a deluded lunatic. Evidently having a sound mind isn't a top requirement in being high priestess of the Nikites.

Hermes, Danny and Mr Evans are brought out for sacrifice and discover that the process involves being mummified and sealed in a tomb in order to join the Pharaoh on his journey through eternity. Here, the mummification process apparently consists of little more than wrapping the subject up in bandages - in real life it was, of course, quite a bit messier, but obviously there are limits as to what you can show in a kids' cartoon (all the same, they missed a great potential scene where the Nikites attempted to remove Hermes' vital organs only to find nothing but gears and circuits). Anyway, long story short, Poochie comes up with a plan to set them free and then has Hermes fire off some lasers from his finger tips, creating an impressive and awe-inspiring light show as she stands atop the Nikites' temple (is that close enough to a fireworks factory for you?). Poochie declares herself to be a messenger of Osiris and proclaims that Osiris wants a stop to the sacrifices and for the Forgotten Flower to be used in their place. Koom, who recognises Poochie as the mysterious dog she saw earlier, is only too happy to oblige.

As Koom is all poised to use the Forgotten Flower on Danny, he asks, regretfully, if he will lose all memory of her. "Yes", says Koom, sadly, but she assures him that they will see each other again in their dreams. This exchange is a little weird, since it implies that Koom and Danny have formed a kind of emotional connection which is never even hinted at earlier on in the special (outside of Koom expressing particular unease at the thought of sacrificing Danny due to his age). Danny takes a whiff of the flower, which knocks him unconscious, and the Nikites place his motionless body aboard a boat, ready to be cast adrift on a river that will transport them back to the outside world, then do the same with Mr Evans. Hermes reminds Poochie, who has concealed herself aboard the boat, that the memory-erasing gases of the flower will have no effect on him, so she advises him to fake it. Later, Danny and Mr Evans awaken to find that they've washed up on dry land along with Poochie and Hermes. Danny remarks that he had a dream about a girl and discovers that he's wearing a strange pendant with hieroglyphics around his neck; Mr Evans checks it out and translates the message as, "Someone somewhere will remember you forever, signed Koom." Again, there's this emphasis on Koom and Danny having formed this deep and powerful bond which never actually received any onscreen development. Furthermore, Ali's mention of "the curse of the Pharaoh" was never exactly clarified - the threat the Nikites posed didn't actually have anything to do with a curse, so was a reference this some local superstition used to explain why people who entered the pyramid were prone to disappearing? Now that I think about it, there's a lot about Danny and his Egypt adventure that doesn't quite add up...presumably, he'd escaped from the pyramid at the start and the Nikites were chasing him, but how did he then wind up back inside the pyramid and inside the sarcophagus? Did the Nikites catch him and put him there? Did he he purposely go back and hide? And how did Ali know where to find him? I honestly do like this special and think that it has a number of strengths, but airtight plotting definitely isn't one of them.

Their mission completed, Poochie and Hermes head back to New York to answer a whole new batch of letters. Hermes hopes that they won't receive any more urgent ones which require them to head off on another jet-setting adventure, but the gods of agony aunt correspondence don't appear to be looking on him too favourably right now. The special ends, much like The Rescuers, with our heroes receiving yet another plea for help (also like The Rescuers, we never actually learn the details of the second plea) and taking to the skies yet again to aid those in need. Sadly, this was the last the world ever saw of Poochie in animated form (bar maybe a few toy commercials). Maybe she and Hermes didn't make it back this time around.

The Verdict:

So...why the hell wasn't this pilot picked up for a TV series? It's awesome! Okay, the plot has that distinctively 1980s cheese-coated tang about it, in that it's somewhat moldy and riddled with holes (it would've been nice if we'd actually gotten to see Koom and Danny bonding, for example) but if you're willing to leave your brain at the door for twenty-odd minutes then there's a whole bounty of charmingly goofy pleasures to be mined from here, and Poochie and Hermes are surprisingly fun and likeable characters. It frustrates me no end to think that there's a parallel universe somewhere where kids were able to enjoy a full series of weekly adventures with Poochie, Hermes and Zipcode and I'll never be able to get there. Then again, maybe it's the same universe where Hound Town became a long-running series and The Simpsons was immediately cancelled when the producers got a glimpse of how the initial animation for "Some Enchanted Evening" turned out. Sometimes you're better off with what you've got.

"You think they actually filmed this in Atlanta?": The big and chilling truth

In The Simpsons episode "Grade School Confidential" of Season 8, there is a scene where Skinner and Krabappel, who have recently started dating but are looking to keep their relationship under wraps, attend a late night movie screening, only to have their covert date interrupted by Superintendent Chalmers, who has coincidentally shown up at the very same screening. Skinner runs off to pull a pajama-clad Bart Simpson out of bed and have him join them, in the hopes that they can convince Chalmers that they are here on a field trip with a student. Chalmers apparently doesn't find this at all suspicious (somewhat ironically, as the writers apparently regard Chalmers as a precursor to Frank Grimes, in that he was a "normal" character with an inclination toward questioning the mind-blowing lunacy of the Simpsons universe that the rest of the cast took for granted). During the film, Chalmers leans over and asks a frustrated, sleep-deprived Bart, "You think they actually filmed this in Atlanta?" Tetchily, Bart responds, "I don't know! I don't think it's important!" "Yeah," agrees a smiling and satisfied Chalmers, as if Bart has just made some profound comment on the nature of film aesthetics.

For the longest time, that Chalmers-Bart exchange had ranked as one of my all-time favourite Simpsons gags, although bugger me if I could tell you why. There was just something intrinsically hilarious about Chalmers getting hung up on something as banal as whether or not a picture was filmed on location in Atlanta when this absolutely insane scenario was playing out right under his nose. I couldn't have told you if there was any particular significance to that location being Atlanta of all places. Eventually, it occurred to me that perhaps we were expected to suss out exactly which movie the characters were watching - if you listen to the episode's DVD commentary, the production team do give off the distinct impression that there is an in-joke of sorts nestled in here (Josh Weinstein remarks that "It's just that it's the perfect type of movie for...", implying that they did have a specific film in mind). Skinner mentions that it stars Tom Berenger, which narrows down the list of potential titles considerably, and we know that the film is apparently set in Atlanta. I did a google search on "Tom Berenger Atlanta movie" and The Big Chill (1983) popped right up. Well, that was refreshingly straightforward, particularly seeing as how The Simpsons has sent me on some proper wild goose chases in the past. As a kid, I always took it as a given that the piranha movie described by Milhouse in the Season 7 episode "Marge Be Not Proud" was real and was later seriously disappointed to discover it's not (it should be, though).

Previously, I was aware of The Big Chill, but chiefly for that hilariously cruel piece of trivia regarding the then-up-and-coming Kevin Costner, who was all set to make his big screen breakout in this film (following a bit part in the 1982 film Night Shift) but wound up having most of his scenes scrapped in post-production; in the final cut, his character survives - ironically - as a faceless corpse who's being dressed up by a mortician during the opening montage (director Lawrence Kasdan apparently felt guilty about sabotaging Costner's prospective big break and guaranteed him a part in his next film, Silverado, by way of apology). The actual plot of The Big Chill - a bunch of old college friends reunite after so many years and reflect on the disappointments of post-campus life - had never really interested me; I'd written it off as a more glamorous, star-studded recycling of John Sayles' pioneering indie Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980). Now, though, I was suddenly compelled to get hold of a copy and watch it, if only in the obsessive interests of seeing if Superintendent Chalmers' question about Atlanta takes on any additional resonance if you're familiar with the film he's (hypothetically) watching.

Here's the kicker - most of The Big Chill does not take place in Atlanta, Georgia. In fact, hardly any of it does. The bulk of the story, which concerns a group of thirtysomethings reuniting for the funeral of their old college chum Alex (the role intended for Costner, who was originally going to be resurrected in flashback sequences), happens over the course of a single weekend in Beaufort, South Carolina. Turns out, the scenes set in Atlanta were mainly the ones involving Costner's character. D'oh! Much like Costner himself, the only glimpse we get Atlanta at all occurs in the opening montage, when Mary Kay Place's character wanders across her office and puffs a cigarette while gazing out from a window overlooking the city. Oh, so is that it? Is that what Chalmers was actually supposed to be talking about? If so then I guess he asks a reasonable enough question - that backdrop we see could very well be fake. (It's not the joke I was expecting, though. I thought that The Big Chill might be one of those talk-orientated films that takes place entirely in one interior setting, in which case getting hung up whether or not it was filmed on location would seem kind of absurd.)

The film itself? Well, my initial instinct turned out to be pretty much on the money, in that it is a more glamorous, star-studded recycling of Return of the Secaucus 7, with the added bugbear that it's blatantly trying to sell you a bunch of music on the side. The soundtrack, which consists largely of 1960s Motown favourites, is one of the film's most flagrant pieces of nostalgia bait and was apparently very successful, spawning no less than two tie-in LPs (note that the dreamy score music overheard during the indirect allusion on The Simpsons does not correspond with anything in the film itself). There's something about how overbearingly reliant the film is on its soundtrack to convey that sense of yearning for a bygone era that seriously rubbed me the wrong way, to the extent that the whole thing frequently played like a 100 minute commercial for a compilation album of 1960s hits. God knows, the characters themselves aren't astoundingly likeable or engaging, which may well have been the entire point. The film's title supposedly contains a double meaning, referring simultaneously to the relaxed get-together the characters have following Alex's funeral and the kind of emotional chill Kasdan would personally experience when contemplating how thoroughly his generation had traded in the ideals of its youth for a place in the establishment. Maybe we're not expected to feel terribly inspired by this particular group of characters, or to relish exactly what kind of future lies ahead of them, but very little of the talk in The Big Chill manages to be more than remotely interesting, the concerns and nuances of the cast being all-too-often overshadowed by the slickness of the production.

Amid all this, the absent friend Alex becomes the film's greatest enigma, a spectre whose memory hangs uneasily over the proceedings and goes largely unacknowledged, beyond the small smattering of awkward moments in which one of the party gingerly attempts to raise the subject. I believe that the original idea was to have Alex appear in flashback sequences in order to create a discrepancy in terms of the person he was and how his friends remembered him, but Kasdan clearly decided somewhere along the line that the story would have more impact if we never actually meet Alex firsthand, hence the near-total excision of all of Costner's scenes from the finished picture. This included the film's original ending, a flashback to a Thanksgiving dinner in which all of the friends, Alex included, were present, which might account for why the ending we get arrives so glibly and abruptly. What does intrigue me is just how committed Kasdan has remained to preserving Alex's enigma in the years following The Big Chill, to the point that none of his deleted scenes have ever been released to the public. On finishing the film, my very first instinct was to head straight to the deleted scenes under the Special Features tab (I had purposely chosen to track down a DVD copy with deleted scenes on the naive assumption that it would contain Alex's material), only to find it as every bit as Costner-less as the film itself. To date, Alex remains one of cinema's most mysterious off-screen characters. We know there's footage of him in existence, but unless Kasdan has a change of heart, we won't be getting to meet him any time soon.

Can we at least answer Chalmers' question as to whether the film was shot on location in Atlanta or not? Well, according to the end-credits:

FILMED ENTIRELY ON LOCATION IN BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA AND ATLANTA, GEORGIA

There's that mystery solved, then. Next I'm going to move on to pondering just what film, if any, The Stockholm Affair (the "taut political thriller" watched by Homer and Marge in "Colonel Homer" of Season 3) was parodying. Oh, and will somebody hurry up and give us Milhouse's piranha movie, please? We've been waiting for nearly twenty-two years.