Isn't it always terrible when the two greatest loves of your life go to war with one another?
Something I've tried long and hard to repress about The Simpsons is that they once put out a video game where the main objective was to kill rats. By that, I don't mean a game in which a couple of levels entailed mowing down a few enemy sprites in the shape of rats as part of a grander adventure. Killing rats was actually the be all and end all of the game. Your pest control services were required in Springfield because Krusty the Clown was having a few rodent troubles, so splat every last one of 'em and go out for frosty chocolate milkshakes. And if you know me, you know why a game of that premise isn't very likely to worm its way into my affections. (If not - long and short of it, I'm a rat fancier and have a great amount of affection for the Rattus Norvegicus, so it all cuts a little too close to home.)
The game was called Krusty's Fun House and was released in 1992 for the NES, Amiga, Sega Master System and various other platforms (note: when it was released in 16-bit form for the Super SNES it was retitled Krusty's Super Fun House). Like all Simpsons games from that era, it was a meticulously crafted experience that perfectly captured the tone, heart and humour that the viewers the world over so loved and admired about the series. You remember that Simpsons episode where Krusty acquires a "fun house" (whatever that is) and a swarm of rats move in, so he and Bart must unite to exterminate the rats as well as all the snakes, flying pigs and laser gun-wielding cats that have snuck in along with them. What a classic. Right up there with that episode where Bart saves Earth from alien invasion by spray painting everything red and Smithers kidnaps baby Maggie. No, like most Simpsons games, it was a case of a lot of random shit happening that had very little to do with the series itself, because why the hell not? At the time, the initial wave of Simpson-mania was still in full swing, and I presume we were supposed to get off on the meagre thrill of getting to control a sprite in the shape of Bart Simpson (or one of his associates) and to not ask questions.
Here is the game synopsis, according to the blurb on the back of the box:
"Hey kids! Give a hoot! Help out your old pal Krusty the Clown! My official Krusty's Fun House is infested with rats! There are over 60 levels in this game, and they're all crawling with the little varmints! I've got my loyal cadets, Bart and Homer Simpson, Sideshow Mel and Corporal Punishment to guard the rat traps, but I need you to lead the filthy rodents into those traps! Then we blow 'em up! We incinerate 'em! We laser-blast 'em! We electrocute 'em! We Krusterize the little stinkers!!! Hoo boy!
Did I mention the snakes, aliens and flying pigs? Well, watch out for those riffraff! If you can't Krusterize 'em, at least avoid 'em...they're worse than the #@!*%! rats! Making Krusty's house vermin-free is not a pretty task, kiddy cadets - but someone's gotta do it!"
My god, what a barbaric universe we live in.
I never played this game as a child, but I do have memories of being taunted about its existence by another kid in my class who was aware of my murine sympathies. Back then, I was nowhere near as well-versed in The Simpsons as I am now, but I'd seen enough that the synopsis, as he explained it, struck me as being somehow very un-Simpsonsesque, so I was quite comfortable in dismissing that kid as a filthy attention-seeker. I clean forgot about it for many years, and it was only much later, when I was leafing through Robert W Getz's Unauthorised Guide To The Simpsons Collectables, that I got confirmation that it was more than just the depraved fantasy of a pimply schoolkid looking to undermine a rat-loving peer. D'oh! I decided that the best that I could do was simply turn a blind eye and try to suppress all knowledge that The Simpsons had made a game that went so flagrantly against my personal sensibilities.
It was then that I noticed Sideshow Bob on the cover, and with that my perception of the game changed completely. For a game boasting Krusty as the hero, Bob would indeed be the logical character to have featured as the main antagonist. So, is he responsible for this rat infestation? In which case, how so? Is he Willard? Does he have some kind of uncanny knack for getting rats to obey him and tear his enemies to shreds? I suddenly went from wanting to bury all conscious thought of this game to wanting to know every last detail about it. Because a game that sees the character for whom I feel the greatest affinity join forces with the animal for which I feel the greatest affinity is a game that I can absolutely get behind. I wouldn't have thought there was anything Bob could do to make himself any more endearing to me than he already is (except possibly account for his baffling behaviour in "Black Widower"), but the revelation that he's a rat fancier (even in a non-canonical video game) would certainly score him a whole mass of additional bonus points. Did I say that the two greatest loves of my life had gone to war with one another? Apparently not - Robert Terwilliger and murid kind were Together At Last, teaming up to fight low culture and plebeianism wherever it manifested. Get into that clown's fun house and rip 'em up.
...or not, because I watched a longplay of this video game on YouTube and the crushing reality is that Bob's not even in it. Or rather, he appears very indirectly as a background detail in one of the later levels, on a poster advertising poetry reading sessions for the incarcerated. While it's nice that he's featured to some capacity, he is not the antagonist, nor does he have any discernible connection to the rat invasion. So why, then, is he featured so prominently on the cover, smiling and rubbing his hands together as if everything is going according to plan? Sod knows. Sideshow Mel does actually feature in the game as one of Krusty's allies, so I could hazard a very generous guess that there was a crossed wire as to which of the Sideshows to include on the box art. But I think it's more likely that the same "anything goes" approach that was applied to the game itself was also extended to the promotional art. Bob is on the cover because why the hell not?
Well, that was a huge letdown. I didn't get my Springfield rat invasion as directed by Sideshow Bob. So many wonderful possibilities flushed down the sewer. But what delights does the game actually have to offer?
I think the important thing to keep in mind about Krusty's Fun House is that it isn't really a Simpsons game. Rather, it's a largely unconnected game that just so happens to have a few Simpsons characters in it. The whole theme of rodent extermination obviously ties in very precariously with those featured characters, and it doesn't help that the rats themselves, while bearing the characteristic Groening trademarks of bug eyes and socking great overbites, blatantly don't belong in the same world as Bart and Krusty. They are purple, bipedal and all-round very anthropomorphic, which makes them distinctively out-of-place in the Simpsons universe, where Groening was always very insistent that animals behave like actual animals. They certainly don't look like any rats we've seen in the series proper. You could argue, of course, that the alien antagonists from Bart vs. the Space Mutants were every bit as fantastical and far-out and, yeah, you would be absolutely right. But they were at least based on something pertaining to the series itself, however loosely, in that the Space Mutants are the villains of a horror sci-fi movie franchise that appears to lend itself to perpetual sequelisation, and with which Bart remains unshakably fascinated (for the first few seasons, anyway - I think the mutants may have dropped off the map as the series went on; if such a game were made today they would probably use Kodos and Kang). Those purple bipedal rats, however - where the hell did they come from? What on earth is there about Krusty's character suggesting that murids would be his natural adversary? Is there any internal logic to be extracted from this befuddling mass of randomness?
As it turns out, yes. Kind of. Krusty's Fun House makes slightly more sense, as a concept, when you realise that it was actually just the repackaged version of an unrelated game, Rat-Trap, which was created for the Commodore Amiga by the British game developers Audiogenic. There, you were playing as a purple-haired kid looking to rid his house of unwanted rodents by guiding them to various extermination devices and avoiding other adversaries, like snakes. Not only where the rats there purple and bipedal, they wore big red shoes, had red, clown-like noses and were pretty wretchedly adorable. How anybody could have relished their inevitable swatting is beyond me. The game was subsequently licensed to the US-based Acclaim Entertaiment, who already had numerous Simpsons titles under their belt (including the aforementioned Bart vs. the Space Mutants) and decided to continue their Springfield streak by giving Rat-Trap a lavish Simpsons make-over. Hence why we got the rather incongruous theme of pest control within a game purporting to be about Bart and co.
The key objectives of Rat-Trap remained intact. You had to navigate your way through various levels, solving mini-puzzles and creating paths that would guide the unwitting rats toward extermination devices operated by one of four Simpsons characters (Bart, Homer, Sideshow Mel and Corporal Punishment). And it has to be said that most of their methods of killing the rats are really, really cruel. As in, there's something very Itchy & Scratchy about it all. Homer has the most humane approach, in that he simply zaps the rats with some kind of laser device, but Bart spaghettifies the rats with a modified sieve, Punishment eats them alive, Mel pumps them up with oxygen until they explode, and JESUS CHRIST, what kind of sick game is this? Putting aside my personal feelings toward the species in question for just a moment, I do think that there's something about a Simpsons game dedicated to witnessing the characters killing animals in a sadistic and over-the-top fashion that seems incredibly out of the spirit of the series. Now, I wholly appreciate that it's only a game and that no rats, snakes or gun-wielding cats (guess those are the aliens) were actually harmed in the process, but this entire concept strikes me as being not at all within the natures of the characters we know and love. I suppose that's the justification for making the rats so anthropomorphic and cartoony - the less they look and act like real animals, the more splapsticky and less barbaric it becomes, at least in theory. In the game's introduction, Krusty gloats that the rats are really dumb and will follow any path that's laid out for them, but doesn't their extreme gullibility merely increase your pity for them?
On the subject of how accurately Krusty's Fun House represents its titular character, Sega Retro has this to say:
"Krusty's Fun House was an early Simpsons game, debuting in 1992. As such, the characters had not been fully developed, so at this point Krusty was simply a happy smiling clown rather than a man haunted by addiction and a dark past."
I would dispute that, in that Krusty has never been characterised as a "happy smiling clown". Krusty was one of the very few supporting characters to be introduced during the Simpsons' crudely drawn filler era; he made his first appearance in a short on The Tracey Ullman Show, where it was evident from the get-go that there was this huge discrepancy between his onstage persona and the person lurking beneath all that clown make-up. In his first appearance, the joke was that he was basically a thinly-disguised Homer variation; Bart worshiped him from afar but was disappointed to finally meet Krusty in the flesh and discover that grown-ups are alike all over. "Krusty Gets Busted", the first episode in the series proper to focus extensively on Krusty, moved firmly away from the initial "Krusty is Homer" idea and instead painted Krusty as a self-indulgent sell-out with an assortment of vulgar appetites (in Bob's words), whose debauched personal life was ostensibly at odds with his wholesome, fun-loving TV image...which honestly wasn't that wholesome, given that the physical abuse he inflicted on Bob was entirely genuine. One reason why I think "Krusty Gets Busted" is such a great episode is because it sets up a complex dynamic in which the moral divide between the heroes and villain isn't quite as black and white as one might assume. Krusty may not be a Kwik-E-Mart bandit, but there is nevertheless an obvious disparity between the Krusty whom Bart idolises and the Krusty who actually exists, and who is less interested in inspiring young minds than in conditioning them to be unquestioning consumers and choking their brain cells with senseless violence. Meanwhile Bob, who actually did the dastardly deed, has a sincere interest in providing children with quality, non-pandering entertainment (the sad thing is that it's Bob's genuine compassion for Bart that ends up setting the stage for their long-term enmity - if he hadn't invited him down to that Choices thing...). In fact, for all of my grievances about Krusty's Fun House being very far-removed from the spirit of The Simpsons, there is something eerily on form about having a smiling Krusty front a colourful, ostensibly light-hearted game with such a disturbing premise. One of the game's few authentically Simpsons touches is the array of posters adorning the walls of Krusty's titular fun house, hawking everything from Krusty Brand pacifiers to Ned Flanders' Leftorium (here called the "Left-o-rama"). Here, Duff is identified as a brand of cola (presumably because the presence of alcoholic beverages in a children's game would be a huge no) and for some reason Dimoxinil (the hair growth formula used by Homer in "Simpson and Delilah") is simply "Hair in a Drum". These posters provide charming little Easter eggs for devoted viewers and give the game some semblance of connection to the wider Simpsons universe, but they also feed perfectly into the air of commercial crassness (mixed with horrifying violence) that permeates Krusty's brand of entertainment from head to foot. It merely convinces me all the more that this game missed a serious trick in not having Bob be in cahoots with the rats. As if Bob, who is no stranger to the Krusty's depravities, wouldn't be able to sympathise with the misunderstood vermin his "happy" chum is so ruthlessly pummeling just to prop up his mercenary hellhole.
As for Bart, though, I totally can't see him going for this. Bart may revel in mayhem and destruction, but for the most part the series has wisely shied away from making him actively cruel to animals (which is a major factor separating him from Billy, the sociopathic little shit from Family Dog). And besides, later in the series - in the Season 8 episode "Homer's Enemy", to be more precise - we get a subplot where Bart buys a derelict factory that's infested with rats, and he completely tolerates them. So there.
And that's Krusty's Fun House, a game that seems custom designed so that smart-mouthed schoolkids would have ammunition with which to taunt their rodent-loving classmates, and an all-round confounding and unsettling footnote in history of The Simpsons. Perhaps if you can get past the unapologetically barbaric premise then the game itself is a perfectly fun and addictive one to play, but it's certainly not my cup of tea, nor do I suspect it would be tea for any of the characters with whom I identify. Lisa would hate this game. Willard would really hate this game, and possibly head with Ben and Socrates to rip up Audiogenic. Bob would consider it hopelessly plebeian and go back to his poetry recitals. I'll leave you with this heart-tugging image of Clancy Wiggum and Cinnamon, as a reminder that Springfield as a whole has way more of a murid affinity than Krusty's Fun House lets on.
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