The Great Springfield Frink-Out (aka This Is Not A Warning - This Is The Announcement of Certainty)

I've been talking a lot recently about other possible Simpsons universes, and the probability that the Simpsons universe with which we're familiar being the result of something being fundamentally out of whack within the cosmos, an issue that gained particular salience with the introduction of Mindy in "The Last Temptation of Homer". I probably should acknowledge the fact that there was an issue of Simpsons Comics set in an alternate Simpsons universe where Homer never met Marge and did indeed marry Mindy. The comic in question was called "The Great Springfield Frink-Out" (or, in longer form, "Milhouse The Man, Krusty in The Can & The Great Springfield Frink-Out"), and it appeared in issue #33, which was published in October 1997. So, in this timeline Homer married Mindy and, rather than pursuing a clean and wholesome career in nuclear engineering, has fallen in with the Springfield Mafia. Marge, meanwhile, stuck with her old high school beau Artie Ziff, and did not become President, as was divined in Angel-Klink's vision, but instead peaked a little lower down the government food chain as Mayor of Springfield (while Artie became state attorney general). By the time our story begins, both marriages have broken down, and neither Mindy or Artie appear in the comic in person.

The context to this particular slice of Springfieldian life gone awry is that Professor Frink, in an effort to bring stability to what he sees as an inherently chaotic cosmos, concocts the Electramatic Frinkodyne 3000, a device intended to perpetually synchronise the internal clocks of all of the VCRs in the Springfield municipal area (too bad for Frink that fickle consumers would be abandoning their VCRs in six months time for those horrible shiny disc thingys). Frink, however, is clearly so preoccupied with whether or not he could that he hasn't stopped to think if he should, and a quick mishap involving microwaved enchiladas wrapped in tinfoil is all it takes to completely eviscerate the space-time continuum. Patrolling the streets of Springfield, Frink is horrified to discover that everything therein has been warped beyond recognition. Or is it as fundamentally altered as he assumes?

Before I go any further, I probably should shed some light on where I stand with the comics in general. I can't speak for other Simpsons fans, but for me the Simpsons Comics have always been this peripheral part of the franchise that's just kind of there. There was a time in the late 1990s when I made an honest effort to get into them, and to collect them every month, but I'm not convinced I wasn't doing this purely out of brand loyalty than whatever standalone merits the comics might have. Often, the personal anecdotes told by Matt Groening in the "Bongo Beat" feature were more interesting than the comics themselves, and I was seldom wild about how they characterised Sideshow Bob, who plays simultaneously like a more evil and strangely neutered version of his animated self (but then he inevitably loses a great chunk of his Bob-ness without Kelsey's vocals to really bring him to life), although occasionally they could churn out genuinely interesting and creative ideas such as this one. I'll say this much, however - under no circumstances are they to be regarded as canon. Case in point, one of the comics (#23) gave Bob a nephew named Neil, whose existence is not supported by anything in the series proper. The comic in question was published in August 1996, a number of months ahead of the initial airing of "Brother From Another Series". Before then, we knew basically nothing about Bob's life before he became Krusty's sidekick (other than that he attended Yale University) and certainly nothing about his family, so at the time this would have been considered a perfectly open pool to swim around in, albeit not for long. The introduction of Cecil Terwilliger put paid to any possible intersection of Neil with the series' canon, for Cecil appears to be Bob's only sibling (a hypothesis reinforced by the fact that their relationship is based on that of Frasier and Niles Crane) and Cecil sure as heck isn't Neil's father. It's also not as if the comic did anything remotely interesting with Neil as a character; he was a plot device and nothing more, so I can't say that I weep terribly at his discounting.

Now, let's look at some of the miscellaneous workings of the alternate Simpsons universe depicted in the "The Great Spring-field Freak-Out":

• Before we get on to the Frink-Out itself, I should say that by far the strangest thing about this story has nothing to do with the complete and total rearrangement of the Simpsons universe, but rather a story detail that's established before we event get to the central calamity. Here, Frink has been given a sidekick who accompanies him on his adventure. His name is Balthazar and he is...a hyper-intelligent lab monkey who is fully articulate and has freakish mutant wings protruding from his back. I'm going to assume that this character was concocted exclusively by the comic writers, because something like that is way too outlandish for the series proper. I guess the comics really did play fast and loose with the rules of the Simpsons universe. Forget Neil Terwilliger, he was merely the tip of the iceberg.
• It's never explained how Marge's marriage to Artie broke down. Mindy...left Homer for Jacques. Hahaha! (Or, whoever has Jacques' niche in this particular universe.) As much as that tickles me, I think that if Homer had married Mindy, they would be pretty much a dead cert for pairing for life. I mean, the two of them were blatantly made for one another. Marge and Artie...yeah, them I could see divorcing several years down the line (but then I'd say the same about Marge and Homer).
• Homer's marriage to Mindy produced two children, Bart and Maggie, while Marge and Artie had one child, Lisa. This is probably the biggest stretch of logic within the story, because if Homer had married Mindy and Marge married Artie, then Bart, Lisa and Maggie would flat-out not have existed. A different combination of genetics would give you two completely different sets of children. This, honestly, undermines any sense that we're looking at an alternate universe that could have existed, had the characters made different choices at critical moments in life, or their circumstances been slightly altered, and instead makes it into a straightforward shake-up, with characters recast in other characters' roles on a far more arbitrary basis. So, Bart and Maggie are now Mindy's kids and Lisa is Artie's daughter, biologically impossible though that may be.
• Having said that, I like the fact that Lisa, in this universe, is only of average intelligence. It was suggested in the Season 7 episode "Mother Simpson" that she inherited her booksmarts from her paternal grandmother Mona, so with that connection gone, it figures that there would be some kind of knock-on effect for Lisa. Somewhat poignantly, Mr Bergstrom is now her regular class teacher, only he and Lisa don't have such a tight bond here.
• Now for the really juicy bit - Sideshow Bob never went into showbiz and instead pursued a career in education. Accordingly, he's not "Sideshow Bob" in this universe but just plain old Robert Terwilliger (or Terwilly the Lilly, as Bart calls him, albeit not to his face), and he now has Seymour Skinner's niche as principal of Springfield Elementary. I enjoy this aspect of the story a lot, because not only is it an alternate career path in which I could conceivably see Bob taking an interest, there's a pretty slick underlying gag in that he's basically swapped out one position of enmity with his 10-year-old nemesis for another - the twist being that his 10-year-old nemesis has also changed and is now none other than Milhouse Van Houten.
• Milhouse really hit the jackpot in this timeline, acquiring the choicest characteristics of both Bart and Lisa - he's a Grade A student with an insatiable appetite for challenging authority in all its forms. He's also quite clearly the "star" of this particular universe, since he's the one to whom all the really exciting stuff has happened in the past, be it foiling the Springfield Mafia in its various nefarious schemes or discovering his own comet. Bart, meanwhile, regards Milhouse with admiring eyes and dreams of the day when he too can be such a hotshot. Also, Lisa appears to be the same age as Bart and Milhouse; they're all in the same grade at any rate.
• Krusty has Sideshow Bob's niche, in that he's now the alienated TV sidekick turned master criminal, although he never elaborates on the specifics of his crimes. There's also no hint of any enmity between Krusty and Milhouse; if Krusty does harbour any kind of murderous ill-will toward this universe's Shamus in short pants, then he'd have to get in line, because the Springfield Mafia are feeling pretty sore about those aforementioned defeats, and also have a hankering for Milhouse's blood.
• If Bob's a principal and Krusty's a master criminal, then that raises an obvious question as to who's top clown in this universe. The answer is a character who, in the regular Simpsons universe, had his career ambitions of being a clown thwarted and instead settled for a job in hydraulic engineering. I speak of course of Bob's brother Cecil; here, it seems that the stars were aligned more heavily in his favour, for not only did he live the dream, he clawed his way to the peak of the clowning food chain and made Krusty his sidekick. I'd be happy for Cecil, except that he's even more of an odious corporate shill than Krusty, and much of his celebrity seems to pivot around the promotion of one of the most evil products of them all, ie: tobacco. To be fair to Cecil, he doesn't appear to be targeting his product at children (a print ad for one of his upcoming public appearances says "Hey Adults!", making me wonder who Cecil's key target audience is in this universe), but cancer sticks are cancer sticks all the same. His sidekick is presumably Chief Wiggum, who is never seen, but at one point Cecil refers to an off-panel "Sideshow Clancy".
• Bob and Cecil are estranged in this universe, as they were at one point in the regular Simpsons timeline. It's never made clear why they fell out here, but I would hazard a guess that it something to do with Bob being embarrassed by his brother's celebrity.
• Lurleen Lumpkin doesn't appear in person, but she has her own restaurant in this universe.
• The majority of adult characters have kept their basic personalities more-or-less intact - Krusty's still surly and blasé, Bob's still a supercilious drama queen, Marge is still firm but nurturing, etc. The point, evidently, is to illustrate that they would be essentially all the same no matter where they wound up in life, and no character bears this out more than Burnsie. Here, he is but a humble convenience store clerk with an ostensible penchant for charitable deeds, but deep down inside there beats unmistakably the heart of a tyrannical mogul, and he has his sights on economically conquering Springfield in his old age. He still has Smithers by his side, only here Smithers is Burns' literal lapdog...which I realise puts paid to my efforts to interpret this as a possible alternative timeline that the characters could feasibly have accessed, had things gone differently. Swapping out a child's biological parents is already enough of a stretch, but I think we have to throw our hands up at the point that a character has had their species changed.
• One of the few adult characters who hasn't quite kept their defining traits intact is Ned. He's now a shock jock.
• Moe is...actually, I won't spoil this one. It's a punchline to which I couldn't possibly do justice with my puny words. I'm sure you can get hold of a copy of "The Great Springfield Frink-Out" easily enough if you care.
• Here, Bob describes his hair as "involuntarily kinky". I'm making note of that because, yes, that's something he said.

 This is indeed a disturbing universe.

We have various story threads intersecting throughout. Frink is attempting to get the universe restored to normal by reconnecting the Electramatic Frinkodyne 3000 to an area with a continuous electromagnetic field, and enlists the help of Krusty, who having been dealt a sore hand in this particular timeline, has little to lose in going along with what everyone else is quick to discard as the ravings of a madman. Meanwhile, Milhouse, Bart and Lisa skip a school assignment at the Retirement Castle to attend a public appearance by Cecil, and are pursued by Bob, Marge and Homer, who each have their own respective dogs in this fight. All of them are entirely oblivious to Burns' gestating scheme to seize control of their dismal town.

Things may be slightly off-kilter, but the final takeaway of this adventure is that there is a basic underlying logic to the Simpsons universe that cannot be offset. There is a sense throughout that Frink's efforts are possibly redundant, for the universe appears to be "correcting" itself, at least to a point. Frink comes to this very conclusion on the final page of the comic, when he concludes that:

"Science is a powerful force in this universe. But will the world allow science to completely screw it up with the messing and the reorganising and letting things happen that simply cannot occur? In a word, no. Science may do a little pushing, but my oh my, how the world pushes back." 

Frink asserts that there is an "intrinsic pattern" to which the universe inevitably gravitates - he refers, of course, to that bugbear known as the status quo, and not for nothing is this particular panel accompanied by an image of Homer and Marge wrapped together inside a hammock. The nexus of the Simpsons universe, as we all know, is the Simpsons' unity as a family, so all that it needs to do to create some semblance of restoration is to bring Homer and Marge together. Marge feels this imperativeness during the scene where she and Homer cross paths for the first-time, and she makes this internal observation of Homer: "You know, he's grossly overweight, a bit unkempt, and he smells strange, but there's something about this man...I can't take my eyes off him!" It's around this point that other aspects of the familiar universe begin to re-emerge - as Homer is wandering into the same vicinity as Marge, Burns suddenly has a brainwave and realises that the key to conquering a city is by controlling its power supply. Meanwhile, Bart discovers what a capacity he has he has for pranking and, having received Milhouse's validation, vows to finally come out of his shell and be the rabble-rousing punk he's always dreamed of being. The Bart we all know is reasserting his existence, but it's not so clear if anything similar has happened with Lisa. Her resourceful thinking gets the kids out of a tight spot with Bob, but Milhouse specifically praises her for her ability to "stick it to the man", not any potentially untapped intelligence she might have. Obviously, there are limitations as to how far the corrupted universe can actually go in realigning itself with the familiar - Bart and Lisa will still not be biologically related, and Smithers will still be a dog - and yet the implication appears to be that, so long as a few fundamental elements are in place, the rest of it is more-or-less interchangeable. Once the titular family unit is just that then we have something vaguely recognisable, and that may well be enough to get by. This is before Krusty gives the universe a final boost, by wrapping his enchiladas in tinfoil and sticking them in a microwave, with the Electramatic Frinkodyne 3000 not far from hand, causing the universe to revert to its previous state.

Naturally, "The Great Springfield Frink-Out" operates on the assumption that the default setting for the Simpsons universe is the intrinsically "correct" one, which makes sense from the perspective that the preservation of the status quo is necessary for the series' continuation. But how does it stand with regard to my hypothesis on "The Last Temptation of Homer", about the default Simpsons universe being born out of error, because the universe failed to follow its intended course, hence why it pushes so relentlessly for Homer to end up with Mindy (who inadvertently exposes the sham)? Here, a prospective union between Homer and Mindy is presented as a painful little deviation from which the universe is actively pulling Homer away, as opposed to a legitimate outcome that could have been under alternate circumstances. In "The Last Temptation of Homer", the magnetism between Homer and Mindy presented a paradox, because the kismet willing them together was undeniable, but it would also have guaranteed the destruction of everything propping up their universe. I am inclined to see the set-up of "The Great Springfield Frink-Out" as representative of a Simpsons universe in which such destruction has already occurred, and which the universe is attempting to rewind from the point of obliteration, so that we work backwards from the end to where we begun. Homer's arc opens with him mourning an apocalypse that has already happened - tellingly, his boss (Comic Book Guy, here in the place of Fat Tony) accuses him of behaving as if it's the end of the world - but by the end of the comic he finds renewal in moving away from the black hole of the unknown and reaffirming what is instinctively familiar to him. There is the sense of a cosmos attempting to rebuild itself from the fragments of what it vaguely remembers, which is why everything is more-or-less correct despite being so flagrantly wrong, and why the characters, one some level, are able to unconsciously recall memories of their former lives (Marge, for example, makes the mistake of calling Homer "Homey", before immediately correcting herself).

The final panel shows a disturbing contradiction to Frink's assumptions that everything is perfectly restored to how it was, and that the universe may only follow a set pattern. Balthazar is horrified to discover that Frink actually has an additional face peering out from the back of his head - a reminder that, whatever path we find ourselves traversing in life, there's always a road not taken beckoning us in the opposite direction, stoking our curiosity and regret. We are slow walkers, and we certainly look back.

Finally, I will credit the Simpsons Comics with this much - unlike the TV series, which largely forgot about Cecil after "Brother From Another Series" (he appeared in two more episodes, one of them a non-speaking cameo, which I suppose is better than nothing), they actually gave him a fairly decent afterlife. The introduction of Cecil in Season 8 did more than just facilitate a few clever in-jokes capitalising on Grammer's other signature role - it fundamentally changed Bob, and he never felt like quite the same master criminal again, now that we finally had insight into who he was before those unfortunate events went down. Cecil added a whole new dimension to Bob's character, so it seemed wrong to me that most subsequent Bob episodes tend to ignore Cecil's existence altogether. I appreciate that in the comics, he made several more appearances, and essentially became, if not Bob's sidekick, then his consort (although obviously, they had it easier, as they didn't have to go through the complications of re-enlisting David Hyde Pierce every time). There was even one comic, "Simpson/Sideshow Sibling Smackdown", which cast Cecil as a kind of anti-hero and explored a hypothetical rivalry between himself and Lisa. I like the idea...however, I find myself stopping short of wholeheartedly liking the comic because, once again, I have issues with how Bob was characterised. But that for a whole other occasion.

The Greatest Simpsons DVD Commentary of All-Time (aka My Brother, My Browbeater)

If you've ever listened to the DVD commentary for the Simpsons Season 8 episode "My Sister, My Sitter" (4F13) you'll know that it's a highly unusual one for a simple reason - showrunner Josh Weinstein brought his kids, Molly and Simon, into the recording booth. Which, needless to say, significantly alters the nature of the commentary (in the best of ways, as I intend to demonstrate). I can only assume that Weinstein had promised them the opportunity to appear in a DVD commentary as a special treat (that, or he couldn't find a babysitter himself on that particular day) and chose this episode because it's one of the more kid-orientated of the season. It deals extensively with the relationship dynamics between Lisa and Bart, and doesn't concern itself with any problems that are obviously adult in nature (unless you count Homer's momentary crisis of being trapped in a water fountain). The only other episode within the same season that fits the same bill would be the season finale, "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson", which is honestly a more cordial episode in terms of what its reveals about Bart and Lisa as siblings, but far more conventional as a story. In a way, it's strange that he opted for this one, because despite being so heavily focused on the younger family members, it doesn't exactly make for feel-good viewing. It takes those kids to some ghastly places, and when it escalates, it escalates quickly. (Please also note that Molly and Simon were clearly both very young at the time of recording, and from just their voices I have trouble deciphering which is the boy and which is the girl, so excuse my inability to attribute which snippets of dialogue to which child. I'm going to do the non-committal thing and refer to them individually as "one kid".)

"My Sister, My Sitter" is an oddity of an episode. In that regard, it fits in perfectly with the rest of Season 8, which is a wonderfully-written season on the whole, but a bizarre one to revisit, given how obsessed the show had then become with what it evidently saw as its own impending demise. It was also by far the darkest season to date - there is this strangely unsettling tone that pervades much of Season 8, a festering malaise that manifests in surprisingly bitter guises, of which purpose-made one-off characters largely seem to bear the brunt, and which comes to a particularly infamous head around the end of the season, when Frank Grimes puts in an appearance (Grimes is the most notorious example of a character who was introduced in a Season 8 episode only to be killed off in an arbitrary and entirely emotionless fashion by the end, but he was by no means the first, as Shary Bobbins, Frank Ormand and Poochie can all attest*). "My Sister, My Sitter" is odd and unsettling, but in ways that set it apart from the rest of Season 8 - what makes it such a strange episode, in part, is that it's a deceptive one. Ostensibly, it's one of the smaller, more down-to-earth stories of the season, built around a fairly standard sitcom scenario - Lisa struggling to manage her siblings while Homer and Marge are out spending an evening at an adult function. It starts off in a gentle, sanguine place, with Lisa developing a sincere interest in becoming a babysitter after reading a series of books about the Babysitter Twins (a pastiche of The Baby-Sitters Club, a popular series of children's novels by Ann M Martin), but first having to prove herself to the townspeople and break past their (understandable) misgivings about hiring an eight-year-old to watch their children. Episodes focusing on how Springfield functions as a community tend, inevitably, to end up showcasing just how deeply unpleasant they are en bloc, and "My Sister, My Sitter" is ultimately no exception, but for now it's nice to have a scenario in which you can't really begrudge the community for their indifference, even as you feel Lisa's frustrations - the townspeople aren't being mean, they're just not hot on the idea of tasking someone so young with such a big responsibility (although the irony of the following Marge line does not escape me: "Parents need to be sure their sitter can handle anything that might happen; that's why they hire teenagers").

Lisa finally gets a foot in the door when Ned lands in a tight enough jam that he allows her to watch Rod and Todd (the episode is still comfortably in sanguine, down-to-earth mode at this point, although there is apparently a traumatic story going on in the backdrop involving Maude and her mother being taken hostage in Lebanon, which Ned somehow manages to present here as a mild inconvenience - "the embassy says it's just a routine hostage-taking, but I have to drive to Capital City, fill out some form to get them out..."). Lisa does such a sterling job that Ned recommends her to the entire town, and it isn't long before she's inundated with requests from trusting parents. Then comes the fateful evening when Marge (who previously had reservations about Lisa's suitability for the job) tasks Lisa with watching Bart and Maggie while she and Homer attend a trendy new shopping renovation at the Springfield waterfront, a prospect to which Bart doesn't take kindly. He sets out to make the evening as difficult as possible for Lisa, initially in entirely mundane, everyday kinds of ways, although things get crazier when Bart places a barrage of increasingly improbable prank calls, bringing all manner of unwanted attention to the family's doorstep. Finally, when Bart takes a tumble down the stairs and endures a couple of gruesome-looking injuries, the episode finds itself veering off into dark territory indeed. Lisa struggles to get medical attention for an unconscious Bart, and ends up wandering down quite the rabbit's hole of chaos and desperation. By the end of the episode, we're into full-blown nightmare mode (a point that Lisa herself even makes explicit). There is an epilogue in which Bart and Lisa patch things up and the negativity of the night before seems to have completely dissipated, but I'm not convinced that it quite takes the sting off, in light of the desolate journey we've just undertaken. This may be an episode about the kids - kid concerns and kid relationships - but in its way, it's every bit as twisted and fucked up as any other episode of Season 8.

"My Sister, My Sitter" is also nothing if not a divisive episode - some viewers really dislike how Bart behaves therein, since he grows intent on sabotaging Lisa's reputation as a babysitter for entirely petty reasons, while others defend Bart's behaviour on the grounds that he's ten years old, and most ten-year-olds would probably react in a similarly belligerent manner if they had to take orders from someone two years younger than them. In the latter camp is Mike Amato of Me Blog Write Good, who has this to say on the matter: "I read some people thought his behavior to be cruel and malicious, but I think they’re off base. They also probably don’t have siblings." I have a counterargument to make to that - perhaps they do have siblings and recognise all too well just how searingly realistic this episode is in its portrayal of sibling relations, and aren't wild about the episode for precisely those reasons. It's here that my own personal biases inevitably come into play, since I'm a younger sibling myself and am no stranger to the casual cruelty of older brothers, so it's a given that my sympathies are wholly with Lisa. The most reckless and unpleasant thing Bart does in this episode - bang his wounded head against the door in an effort to make the evidence of the injury that happened on Lisa's watch all the more damning - definitely has the ring of authenticity, from my perspective. To those who view this kind of sibling interplay as little more that innocent roughhousing that inevitably passes with age, I would add that in the season running order, "My Sister, My Sitter" follows on directly after "Brother From Another Series", another episode about sibling relations gone sour, in which we have the cautionary example of Bob and Cecil Terwilliger to remind us that sibling rivalries aren't all innocent japery, and sometimes this contention does go on to form of the basis of troubled relationships well into adulthood.

 You the man, Herb.

Bart's behaviour may be realistic in terms of how siblings revel in one-upping one another, but that doesn't necessarily make it entirely in-character for him either. Certainly, Bart has an established history of making things difficult for any babysitter unfortunate enough to be saddled with him (Laura Powers excepted), but he's not ordinarily this malevolent toward his own sister. They have their moments, but when the chips are down Bart does tend to be very helpful and supportive of Lisa, and vice versa. Episodes where they find themselves at extreme loggerheads (such as "Lisa on Ice") don't treat the rift half as casually as it's depicted here. And Bart must appreciate that there is far more at stake for Lisa in this particular scenario than her simply disappointing Marge and Homer.

All in all, "My Sister, My Sitter" doesn't exactly register as my favourite episode. And yet it is a fascinating one to watch for how bizarrely, gut-wrenchingly nasty it becomes in the third act. Once Bart has obligingly knocked himself out and obliterated all conscious agency on his part for the near-remainder of the episode, it ceases to be a bitter story of sibling enmity, and instead becomes a harrowing tale about Lisa being all on her own, tasked with more responsibility than she can reasonably handle, and facing an uphill and entirely futile climb in her efforts to put things right. It's a punishing episode for Lisa, and definitely tips over into the mean-spirited vein that was becoming increasingly commonplace throughout Season 8, but it's effective in that you really get a sense of just how little and vulnerable Lisa is throughout. She might be extremely mature for her age, but when all is said and done she is still only a child, and this episode examines what happens when she ends up in a real pressure cooker of a situation, one which she doesn't have the experience or worldly-wisdom to deal with. (Note: "Lost Our Lisa" of Season 9 is basically a diurnal version of this very scenario, only minus the added detail about Lisa having to wheel around her brother's unconscious body and her caged baby sister wherever she goes.) When emergency services refuse her plea for help, assuming that this is yet another in a long line of medical hoaxes originating at Evergreen Terrace that evening, Lisa balks and makes a questionable decision - instead of consulting with trusted family physician Dr Hibbert (whom she fears will put the blame on her capabilities as a babysitter, leading to the annihilation of her business), she decides to pack Bart off to a dubious office run by Dr Nick Riviera, having been reassured by his ad's promises of complete confidentiality, and of offering the same level of service as one would expect from Dr Hibbert. I suspect that Lisa wouldn't be quite so naive if she weren't so desperate, but it's a telling moment, revealing not just how flagrantly out of her depth she is, but also what a tectonic-shifting crisis this constitutes for her personally. She finds herself caught between two impulses which wouldn't ordinarily be so at odds - her desire to do things honestly and by the book, and her aversion to being censured by adult authority for doing things wrong. I said that there was more at stake for Lisa here than merely letting down Marge and Homer, but that probably would be the worst of it for her. The most damning thing to come out of Lisa's fantasy sequence is not Wiggum's hypothetical conclusion that she beat her brother silly with a pack of frozen lima beans, but Marge's echoing proclamation of being "so disappointed."

Meanwhile, as Lisa descends ever-deeper into the maelstrom, Marge and Homer are having a comparatively uneventful time of it down at the waterfront. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide criticise this aspect of "My Sister, My Sitter", calling it "a clever episode, if a little disjointed - the two stories don't gel as well as normal." I can't say that I agree - I think it's more that the subplot involving the adult Simpsons doesn't have that much narrative momentum behind it in itself, and seems to be largely there to give us the occasional breather from Lisa's crisis. Homer and Marge don't have any real arcs or conflicts of their own going on, and for the most part are simply wandering past stores with humorous-sounding names. Perhaps the script could have expanded on their excursion and made, say, the moment where Homer gets trapped in the fountain into more of an actual story thread, but that would likely have detracted from the dementedness of Lisa's arc. The laid-back aura of the waterfront scenes works because it provides such a jarring contrast with what Lisa's up against; not just in the sense in that she's going to pieces and her parents are not, but also because Lisa's journey is leading her directly in the kind of seedy local underbelly that fashionable developments like the waterfront seem purpose-designed to conceal. Springfield may think it's moved to fancy new digs, but the squalid dive is lurking right around the corner, and not far from here we have an eight-year-old wandering the streets and rubbing shoulders with local ne'er-do-wells in a fruitless effort to get her brother restored to consciousness. The narrative threads end up intersecting in the penultimate scene, when Lisa and her wheelbarrow of delights blunder into full view of the crowd at the waterfront, and her worst nightmares about being rebuked by adult authority materialise in a histrionic eruption of volcanic proportions. Its a thoroughly unsparing climax, which insists on grabbing Lisa by the scruff and dragging her down to the darkest depths she can possibly envision, enduring the faux hysteria of the townspeople as they willfully misconstrue her situation, re-imagining it as the outcome of an improbable murder plot that winds up being leagues more ridiculous than the worst-case-scenario she'd dreamed up earlier. But then Springfield as we know is a pretty ridiculous place.

Which is where the DVD commentary comes in, and those Weinstein kids. The commentary for "My Sister, My Sister" isn't as chocked with information about the episode's development as some of its brethren, largely because Molly and Simon have a tendency to interrupt such discussions to ask questions about the plot. They're clearly very young children, so it figures that they'd be less interested in the production details than in trying to make sense of what's going on in the episode in front of them. But if you're listening because you hoped to learn as much as possible about the making of the episode, then you might be disappointed. Molly and Simon ask a number of questions that, while they probably seem like entirely pertinent questions to kids of their age, are going to be entirely self-explanatory to older viewers (for example, they want to know why Rod and Todd are afraid of ladybugs, and why Homer is so overdressed for his waterfront visit). I'll confess that I found this a little trying at first, but as the episode goes on and evolves into a creature far redder in tooth and claw, I found myself developing an appreciation for Molly and Simon's perspective on events, and was ultimately glad to have them along for the ride. During the sequence where Lisa is having to contend with a flurry of people showing up at the house, summoned by Bart under phony circumstances, one of the kids asks why this is happening. Ostensibly, this sounds like another kids' question with an obvious answer, but I realised that Molly and Simon were actually tapping into the deeper sense of despair and injustice underpinning this episode - they just wanted to know why Lisa, a good-hearted babysitter who's doing her best to keep atop of an unruly situation, is having to put up with so much misfortune that she blatantly doesn't deserve. The accelerating cruelty of the story was clearly starting to get these kids, and as the commentary continues they acquire a new and very useful niche for themselves, not so much asking obvious questions as calling out the senseless malevolence that characterises the latter half, with the kind of guileless sincerity that only kids their age can exude. This reaches its peak at the point where Bart starts banging his wounded head against the door, and one of the kids, evidently disturbed by Bart's act of self-mortification, asks what he hopes to achieve by doing this. Josh Weinstein explains that he wants to make the wound bigger so that Lisa will get into even more trouble, to which the horrified child responds, "But why? He can die!!" Exactly, Molly (or Simon). Isn't it all so terribly screwed up? A slightly embarrassed Weinstein responds, "Hopefully he won't go far as to die..." (Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa, also highlights, albeit less despairingly, the perverseness of that scene, observing that Bart seems awfully chipper when he must be in excruciating pain). Almost as cathartic is a moment at the climax of the episode, when Dr Hibbert points at Lisa and proclaims, "My diagnosis - bad babysitting!", and one of the kids actually cries out in protest, "BUT SHE'S A VERY GOOD BABYSITTER!" Molly and Simon Weinstein are alright by me.

Elsewhere in the commentary, we also hear that they were going for a noir type feel for this episode, which definitely comes across during the sequence where the kids finally reach Dr Nick's office, only to discover that, due to the high number of outlandish maladies that have befallen Springfield's seedier night owls, they have zero chance of being seen before the dawn (if indeed the dawn ever comes). This moment plays like the seamy nocturnal cousin to that sequence from "Homer's Triple Bypass" in which Homer is rushed to hospital and we get a glimpse into the vast array of stupid and embarrassing injuries which have half of Springfield congregating in the emergency room on a typical day (so, Akira has his hand lodged in a karate board, Jacques has his fingers stuck in a bowling ball, Chief Wiggum was taking a bite from a sandwich and his jaw locked...). When the lights go out, Springfield's more unsavoury element comes out to play, but they too seem fated to blunder into predicaments that are every bit as pitiful, whether they be criminal in nature (Snake), kinky (Smithers...if you're wondering just what he's so eager to have taken care of, it was the 90s, and people were still pretty hot on that story about Richard Gere) or crushingly banal (Comic Book Guy, who's learned the hard way that loneliness and cheeseburgers don't mix). It's troubling but also very revealing that no one bats an eyelid when Lisa walks in from her own private hell - you would think that most people, even the kind of sleazy clientele that Dr Nick is wont to attract, would be more concerned if a sleep-deprived eight-year-old wandered in in the dead of night with only her unconscious sibling and a baby in a cat carrier for company, but it seems that everyone is too absorbed in their own individual problems to care. I am reminded of the closing line to Jules Dassin's 1948 film noir, The Naked City: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." At this place and time, Lisa, Bart and Maggie aren't three unaccompanied children in dire need of assistance; rather, they're but another sorry story in a city that already has hundreds, and as such they're instructed to take their place within the wheelbarrow line.

For Lisa, the darkest hour comes when she is forced to confront her very worst fears - being publicly shamed for her failings - and it turns out to be so much worse that she'd ever imagined. Except that the world doesn't end then and there, and we get an epilogue in which the dawn does come, and Lisa discovers that not only is tomorrow another day, but that the experience of being fiercely condemned by adult authority is actually far less of a major deal than she'd always assumed. Because the following morning it's business as usual, with Lisa continuing to get calls from parents who desperately need her to sit their kids. Before that, though, we get a moment of reconciliation between Lisa and Bart, in which the latter apologies for his behaviour the night before. In the commentary, Smith asserts that "My Sister, My Sitter" is ultimately a positive episode in which Bart and Lisa come through for one another, but again, if you want that kind of thing I think you'd be much better off with "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson". Bart does sound sincere at the end, but in light of the sheer magnitude of what Lisa went through his apology still seems kind of perfunctory - in fact, even though it's the inferior episode overall, I think I prefer the equivalent scene in "Lost Our Lisa" where we see Bart traverse the full spectrum of emotions in attempting to apologise to Lisa through her bedroom door, never once twigging that he's talking to an empty room. Lisa assumes that her babysitting business is now dead in the water, and is surprised to discover that her services are still very much in demand. It seems that the town has already forgotten about the events of last night - or, more accurately, the thought does cross their mind and give them momentary pause about the arrangement, but not enough to override their needs in the present - life must go on, and they've got judo classes to attend and kids who need watching. I'm not sure what this ultimately says more about - Springfield's overall indifference as a community, their self-awareness as to the sheer ridiculousness of their own mass hysteria, or the fundamental need of the Simpsons universe just to move on, casting off whatever troubles might still be lingering after twenty-one minutes, so that order can be reestablished and the groundwork laid for another wacky adventure next week. I'm not sure, but I'm happy for Lisa either way. She really is a very good babysitter - most people would have cracked and beaten Bart with a packet of frozen beans long before we got to the stair-toppling incident.

Here are some additional things we glean from elsewhere in the commentary track (when Molly and Simon aren't delivering their increasingly fraught observations):

• During the church scene toward the start of the episode, we see Homer decked out in a blue sweatshirt that I don't think we've seen him wearing at any other point within the series. Episode director Jim Readon momentarily stalls the discussion in an effort to figure out why they bothered with that unusual detail, but to no avail. It's a good question, although a better one would concern just what's up with Skinner's face in the above shot.
• By far the most fascinating production anecdote to come out of this commentary concerns not "My Sister, My Sitter" itself, but a "lost" Simpsons episode that was never produced. Among the trendy developments at the Springfield waterfront is the restaurant Planet Hype, where you can enjoy a menu of foods personally approved by Rainier Wolfcastle's secretary. This is an obvious a swipe at Planet Hollywood, a restaurant chain that opened to a swathe of publicity in the early 90s (but struggled to maintain momentum as the decade wore on), whose big marketing hook was that it was backed by a number of A-list movie stars. Apparently the show's staff were informed that Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger all wanted to guest star in the series, on the condition that it threw in some free publicity for Planet Hollywood. The staff produced an episode script, which had the stars in a Three Stooges dynamic, only to discover that it was all the idea of a Planet Hollywood publicist, who had conveniently neglected to run it past Stallone, Willis and Schwarzenegger in advance, and none of them were interested. I have a sneaking suspicion that that whole anecdote is probably a lot funnier than the episode itself it would have been.

* Hmm, I just realised that two of them even have the same first name. Did someone named Frank do something to piss off one of the show staff? Also, I've seen Rex Banner show up in that list sometimes too, but NO WAY. That would make Wiggum a murderer, wouldn't it? At least the others were predominantly the result of freak accidents.

My All-Time Favourite Movie Trailer (And Why The Movie Itself Is A Sticking Point)

I don't think there's a film that's ever had me feeling quite so conflicted as John Frankenheimer's 1979 eco-shocker Prophecy.*

I first took an interest in the film after reading John Kenneth Muir's Flashbak article, "The Movie Monsters of Summer 1979", in which he examines the film's status as an also-ran in the very same year that the world pissed itself to Ridley Scott's game-changing space horror Alien, the implication being that, had the two flicks' box office fortunes been reversed, then Prophecy, and not Alien, might have set the new template for creature-based scares to come. Instead, Scott's film is now widely-regarded as one of the most iconic entries into the horror canon, while Frankenheimer's film has fallen largely into obscurity, except among genre enthusiasts.

It seems serendipitous that the two films happened to go head to head within the same summer. Ostensibly, Scott and Frankenheimer's films have little in common beyond the rudimentary set-up of "scary monster picks off ignorant and unwary humans one by one". One takes place in deep space and deals with the trepidation that accompanied the early years of space exploration, as man gazed up at the stars and pondered what he might encounter if he were to expand his domain across the cosmos. The other takes place in the wilderness of Maine, and entails a threat of a more familiar nature, whose plight and the implications of which man has long ignored and taken for granted. The one-word titles do a nifty job of encapsulating both milieus. "Alien" is all about confronting the dark unknown, whereas the title "Prophecy" has an air of, "Well shit, we were warned." Both films have a distrust of technology and of corporations, Alien through the character of Ash and the company that declared the human crew expendable, and Prophecy through the paper mill whose irresponsible production practices are creating an environmental catastrophe, although Prophecy is more obviously a polemic than is Alien. Two distinctive films, and yet Muir identifies a fascinating parallel in terms of how the pictures were marketed. Both campaigns hyped up their central creatures by focusing squarely on their antenatal forms, the Alien campaign showing the now-infamous Xenomorph egg, and the Prophecy campaign charting its comparatively obscure beastie at various stages of embryonic development. Both campaigns were deliberately subdued and designed to give away as little as possible about the creature in question, prompting audiences to ponder just what kind of hideous monstrosities mankind would be up against in either case. Both carried a strong sense of impending doom - if the little, unformed monsters were this foreboding, then you sure as heck couldn't envy any character who found themselves facing off against the final adult forms.

But the focus on young, developing monsters has more going on than just the preservation of detail. The strikingly similar campaigns reveal a common preoccupation that ends up making the two pictures feel more alike than first meets the eye - that is, their shared and somewhat gruesome fascination with fertility and gestation. Both films may be leery of technology, but they convey an even greater suspicion of our own bodies and of the messy physical complications that enable the cycle of life to perpetuate. Alien and Prophecy both concern the reproductive process being in some way corrupted or inverted in order to appear monstrous, and the uneasy insinuation that the little spawn we're nurturing inside could well end up being the agents of our own destruction. Alien might deal with the fear of the unknown and Prophecy concerns about environmental damage, but I think it's fair to say that somewhere in all of that are anxieties about parenthood, not altogether dissimilar to those expressed by David Lynch a couple of years prior with Eraserhead. Eraserhead examines those fears from a strictly paternal perspective, of course - the hero did not have to carry that proto-E.T. in his body for nine months, nor did he have to go through the whole traumatic procedure of forcing it out. Alien and Prophecy, by contrast, each have a keen interest in turning the pregnancy process into the basis of their horror. In Alien, the arc of John Hurt's ill-fated character provides us with not-so-subtle analogies for impregnation, gestation and finally the punchline, in which Kane gives birth to his xeno offspring in a screaming, blood-soaked frenzy. In Prophecy, we start out with a character, Maggie (Talia Shire), who is already pregnant and reluctant to share the news with her environmentally-conscious husband Rob (Robert Foxworth), who has previously voiced reservations about bringing another human into a world with a staggering population problem. Already there is a tension established, with Maggie's pregnancy signifying both life renewing and life depleting, a paradox that can only become more tortuous as we move deeper in.

In his article, Muir sees little mystery in why the Alien campaign was able to generate more buzz and excitement among contemporary moviegoers; it was simply snappier. "In space, no one can hear you scream" still ranks as one of the most celebrated promotional taglines of all-time (within the horror genre, it's arguably rivaled by only The Fly, with the similarly concise "Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid"). Heck, I knew the tagline as a child, well in advance of my seeing the movie or even knowing where it came from. By contrast, Prophecy went for the wordier, "She Lives. Don't Move. Don't Breathe. There's Nowhere To Run. She Will Find You." It conveys effectively the same message - your primal human survival mechanisms are futile in the face of such formidable terror - but it's more of a mouthful and lacks the icy elegance of the Alien tagline. Both campaigns are clearly endeavoring to withhold as much information as possible about just what the heck the creatures in question actually are, and yet Alien has so much trust in its entirely minimalist approach that Prophecy, by contrast, appears to give away an awful lot. The above trailer for Prophecy seems talkative and rambling compared to Alien's much-admired teaser, in which we were shown nothing more than intersecting images of an egg and a barren landscape.

And yet, I won't lie. Alien might have had the slicker campaign, but if I had been around in 1979 and was attentive to such things then I suspect that I personally would have been way more hyped for Prophecy. At the very least, it's the campaign that strikes more of a chord with me now. I'll acknowledge that it could just as easily be that the Alien promotion is now so iconic and well-known that sheer familiarity has robbed it of all of its intrigue, whereas Prophecy, having remained such an obscurity all these years, offered something relatively new and mysterious. Confronted with that monstrous "she" as she gradually accumulates each one of her terrible features against an ominous black void, I found myself feeling equal measures intimidation and curiosity, which is precisely what an effective horror campaign should do - ideally, you should go in dreading exactly what you're going to encounter, while being pushed along by the insatiable urge that you HAVE TO KNOW what's out there. The trailer builds the momentum by simulating the sounds of a heartbeat throughout, once again creating a paradox between the development of new life and impending destruction; the heartbeat tells us that the creature lives, but could just as easily represent the fear of its prospective victims. I can only imagine the effect this would have had on me if I had seen it in a darkened auditorium as part of an actual theatrical package.

So, how is the movie itself?

Well, here's where it gets slightly awkward and we have to address the elephant in the room. Or the raccoon in the log cabin, as it were.

See, all the while that I was reading Muir's piece and my interest in Prophecy growing, my curiosity was tempered by the nagging suspicion that I had encountered this movie before in some other, less than palatable context. Some deeper gut feeling was warning me that I perhaps shouldn't get too close to this thing, not simply because Muir doesn't exactly talk the film up toward the end of his article, but because there was some finer detail about the film's production that I really wouldn't like. As it turned out, my gut was onto something. Remember this piece I wrote last year in appreciation of Harry, the Jekyll/Hyde dog who nearly made mincemeat of William Hurt's character in Eyewitness? There, I mentioned a Canadian documentary from the early 1980s, Cruel Camera, which examined Hollywood's sometimes troubling regard for the animals used in its productions, following on from recent controversies surrounding the treatment of horses on Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980). Harry was documented as a positive example of an animal working in the industry, a non-aggressive dog who'd been trained to simulate aggressive behaviour. For negative examples, they covered Heaven's Gate, Disney's infamous lemming massacre, and an incident from this very picture. Unfortunately, it appears that an animal was harmed in the making of Prophecy. There is a scene where Rob and Maggie, who have recently taken up residence in the wilderness for the purposes of the former's environmental research, are attacked in their cabin by a vicious, ostensibly rabid raccoon, which Rob fends off with a wooden panel and ultimately vanquishes by hurling into the fire place. For this sequence, it seems that Frankenheimer really did have Foxworth beat a raccoon with a wooden paddle (although the fireplace moment was thankfully simulated), and an American Humane Association officer had to intervene in order to put a stop to it. Here's what's reported of the incident on the American Humane Association's website. From this account, Frankenheimer doesn't come off at all well, although it seems that Foxworth was unhappy about the situation:

"A crew member called AHA's Hollywood office to report that a raccoon was in danger of being beaten to death for a scene. Humane Officer Gordon Jones raced to the studio and stopped the action. "The actor had had enough of hitting the raccoon, and he was trying to go easy and fake it, but the director was screaming for him to keep going and hit it harder," Jones said. He further added, "I asked them to stop, and they did. In the movie, the raccoon is thrown into a fire, but I made sure they used a dummy." Nonetheless, AHA rated the film Unacceptable for the animal abuse that occurred."

According to Cruel Camera, the scene in question was cut from the film's UK release by the British Board of Film Classification (then the British Board of Film Censors) due to excessive cruelty. The entry for the film on the official BBFC website would appear to back this up, indicating that the film was cut by eight seconds, although it does not go into the details. The only UK VHS release I have been able to get hold of is the pre-certificate version released by CIC, which includes the offending scene (prior to the 1984 Video Recordings Act, UK video releases were allowed to circumvent the regulations of the BBFC). I will say that from what's actually included in the original cut, we don't ever see the paddle make obviously violent or forceful contact with the raccoon. However, the screeching noises and cowering motions made by the raccoon throughout this sequence are deeply unpleasant - it sounds and acts exactly as you would expect an animal to when in a serious state of distress, and to know that that distress was genuine does really bother me. I don't even want to know how they got the raccoon to produce those harrowing convulsing movements right before it lunges at Rob.

The business with the raccoon is, unfortunately, a deal-breaker for me, and why I feel I cannot, in good conscience, recommend the film. To top it off, the sequence is fairly gratuitous in narrative terms. It's only very circumstantially connected to the central plot involving the creature on the poster, and the story could easily have functioned without it. It's basically there for the purposes of giving the viewer a sudden, early scare before we move into the deeper business with the critter that we all came here to see. Obviously, cruelty is cruelty regardless of whether or not it furthers the plot, but the overall superfluousness of it all merely adds to my list of frustrations regarding the high number of questionable decisions made throughout this production. It's a shame, because if not for the raccoon, I would probably be able to enjoy the film a lot more as a bit of schlocky B-movie fun, even if it doesn't exactly live up to the dizzying terror promised by its inspired promotional campaign. Frankenheimer's questionable production techniques aside, I'm compelled to rate Prophecy as a first-class example of a horror in which the promotional material is genuinely more arresting than the feature itself, in part because the central critter, when it finally shows its malformed face, bears little resemblance to the fetal monstrosity shown gestating in the trailer - which, to be honest, isn't exactly uncommon for a creature feature. I remember when a friend slipped me a copy of Larry Cohen's Q: The Winged Serpent, pointed at the sensational-looking dragon on the cover and said, "By the way, don't expect anything nearly as impressive as that in the film itself." He explained that all-too often, the poster art is the place to conceptualise the movie as it could have been, if only it weren't constrained by the technical and budgetary limitations of the production. (Note: I actually thought that Q: The Winged Serpent was well-done.)

What really vexes me about the slavering eco-nightmare at the centre of Prophecy, however, is that not only does it look like an entirely different species to the creature shown across the promotional imagery, it doesn't seem to accurately match up with how the characters within the film describe it. Be warned that I am here going to start getting into spoiler territory - the monster in question is affectionately dubbed by the locals as the "Katahdin", so-called because of its resemblance to a being from Native American lore, said to combine characteristics of every creature in existence. In actuality, the monster is a freak of nature, brought about when mercury contamination within the local water supply caused a bear fetus to undergo some spectacular mutations within the womb, pulling its bodily features in a host of different evolutionary directions. It has the physical form of an enormous grizzly bear, but it walks upright like a human, has webbed feet and gills like an aquatic creature and, as we are told multiple times by the characters within the film, has large, piercing eyes like a cat. Only, when we actually see the Katahdin, those cat-like peepers really don't come through; in fact, the creature looks less like an ungodly mishmash of various different species than it does a regular old bear with a grotesque collection of facial tumors. Not exactly a pretty sight, nor something you want to run into when you're camping out in the wilderness, but it means that the mystery and intrigue surrounding this formidable being is ultimately weighed down by an air of banality. Because really, it's just a big old ugly bear we're up against, and that's still scary, but it's scariness of a more familiar kind. It doesn't help that, by 1979, the psycho-bear pic was already fairly well-trodden ground, with Grizzly (1976) and Claws (1977) both hurling themselves onto the "nightmares of nature" bandwagon that had gotten rolling with the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975).

The underwhelming execution is really too bad, because the basic concept of the Katahdin is a genuinely unnerving one - all of nature combining forces into a singular entity to unleash a terrible vengeance upon the humans who wronged it, including mankind itself. It seems important from a thematic standpoint that the Katahdin has human characteristics, as it signifies the next generation whose future has been stifled by the current generation's poor treatment of the planet's natural resources, an analogy that gets increasingly salient when Maggie's pregnancy intersects with the whole mercury-induced catastrophe. It's here that the film's most intriguing (and sadly underused) plot element comes into play, and Prophecy edges toward territory which Alien, by its very nature, was doggedly determined to avoid - that is, anything that might engender sympathy for its central beastie. In Alien, the invading xenomorph was simply a borderline-unknowable threat to be feared, and nothing more. Prophecy, on the other hand, forges more of an obvious parallel between the Katahdin and its prospective human victims, chiefly in the motherhood theme that, in the Alien franchise, would not be evoked prominently until the 1986 sequel Aliens. Keep in mind that the tagline for Prophecy makes a point of specifying that the monster in question is female, a detail that becomes significant in the latter half of the film, when we discover that the Katahdin is nursing a pair of equally malformed offspring. One youngster perishes in a river, while the other falls into the hands of Rob and his team, who intend to bring the creature back alive to civilisation as proof of the disastrous toll that human consumption is having on the local environs. The climax of the film involves the characters trying to make their way across the wilderness with the Katahdin hot on their trail, the implication being that the creature is compelled to pursue them so relentlessly because they've taken her baby. Thus, we see a paradox taking hold with regards to our perception of the Katahdin - she may be a mindless, merciless machine of destruction, but one cannot deny that she is one heck of a dedicated parent. Our protagonists likewise get a personal emotional stake in the ecological catastrophe, once Rob deduces that the Katahdin's existence was brought about through fetal abnormalities caused by mercury contamination within the local food chain, prompting Maggie to consider that she too has been living off a diet of fish sourced from the local river, and leading to the horrifying realisation that she might now be carrying a Katahdin of her very own. The purpose of this particular thread, obviously, is to illustrate how humankind's careless devastation of the very resources on which it depends will inevitably result in its own ruination. On a poetic level, it reinforces the culpability of man in this appalling equation, as his offspring, corrupted by his own wastefulness and indifference, now threaten to become reflections of what he essentially already is - that is, insatiable agents of wanton destruction. From an immediate narrative angle, it also takes Maggie's arc in a fascinating and somewhat unexpected direction, as her fears for the prospective monster gestating within her womb manifest as a kind of empathy for the Katahdin, with whom she now feels a common sense of fate.

Maggie's empathy is reflected in her nurturing attitude toward the abducted baby Katahdin, which she takes charge of and takes to carrying around in her arms as if she were cradling a human infant. Maggie seems painfully aware that she might be looking at her own future child in this pint-sized freak of nature, and seems prepared to accept that the future of nature and the human race alike could well be hideous mutations, as her maternal instinct overrides her revulsion. The sight of her cradling the young Katahdin is bizarre and yet entirely satisfying on an emotional gut level. Fact is, your heart truly bleeds for the twisted little monstrosity, it being so wretchedly helpless and pathetic, and I think it's fair to say that you end caring about the fate of the infant Katahdin more than you do any of the human participants, except possibly Maggie. It's an investing story thread, but sadly one that the movie itself ultimately doesn't know what to do with. The young Katahdin comes to an abrupt end when it bites Maggie in the neck and Rob proceeds to drown it, prompting the question as to why he went to such great lengths to keep it alive (incurring the wrath of the adult Katahdin) if he was willing to off it so casually. It could be a deliberate tactic on the part of the film, to caution us about the dangers of getting too romantic in our view of the natural world, but I very much doubt it. It comes across as bad writing more than anything. The film, simply put, is not interested in Maggie's pregnancy arc, or in her anxieties about parenthood, issues which feel as if they should be treated with far more dramatic importance. Not only does her relationship with her adopted baby receive no pay-off, but her dilemma regarding her own unborn monstrosity is left dangling, without resolution. Now that I think about it, I recall that The Fly did something very similar. I wonder why multiple monster movies from this era were so eager to tip-toe up to the well of the corrupted pregnancy but unwilling to actually dunk themselves into it.

The appearance of the young Katahdin does does raise an obvious question - if the Katahdin is reproducing, then just what the hell impregnated her? Where is Papa Bear in all of this? I remember thinking, "Oh god, that's how this movie's going to end, isn't it? He's going to show up at the last minute as our sequel hook." And what do you know? I was 100% right - in literally the last few seconds of the film, just as we're being lured into a false sense of security, the male Katahdin suddenly rears his head into view and roars, a moment I'll profess to finding unintentionally hilarious because of the striking resemblance he bears to Scuzzy Scavenger, a puppet character from the French-Canadian children's TV series The Adventures of Grady Greenspace. (Also, there was no sequel. The male Katahdin too is left dangling.)

It's because of the raccoon that I feel the need to ensure that whatever praise I'm compelled to extend to certain elements of Prophecy must be accompanied by a disclaimer. But even without it I suspect that I would still find myself getting endlessly frustrated with it, a film that simultaneously fascinates and repels me (inevitably, the term "love/hate relationship" raises its head). I think what mithers most me about Prophecy as a whole is that the potential was clearly there for this to have been a really great film, one which might even have devoured the mighty Alien for breakfast (although I suspect that Scott's film would always have done better at the box office regardless; it was the late 1970s, and the public's appetite for science fiction was high thanks to the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of The Third Kind). The pieces are certainly all there. The central monster is conceptually very interesting and frightening, the ecological themes, while handled in an obviously schlocky manner, do have potency, and the character thread involving Talia Shire and her reluctant adoptee could have provided the basis for a powerful emotional catharsis, had the film only developed it further and had been prepared to settle for a less conventional ending. And many of the scenic shots around the Maine wilderness are stunningly beautiful. There was a truly masterful work of horror to be had out of Prophecy for certain, but we didn't quite get it in this particular timeline.

My Larry Cohen-loving friend was correct. Sometimes the promotional material just has to stand as its own work of art, and as a testament to what might have been.


* Apart from Twilight Zone: The Movie, of course. Due to the anthological nature of that film, however, it's easier for me to separate out what I like and don't like about that one.

The Last Temptation of Homer: Nam Myoho Renge Kyo

There is a moment from "The Last Temptation of Homer" that I probably should have taken into account when I covered the episode last month. This is the moment where Homer, realising that his requited attraction to Mindy is on the brink of dragging them down a very dangerous direction, has composed a carefully-constructed message for Mindy on the palm of his hand, suggesting that from now on they attempt to stay well away from one another. But obviously kismet isn't having that. Homer gets so nervous around Mindy that, in his own words, he ends up sweating like Roger Ebert (did he have a reputation for perspiring a lot? I guess he must have), causing the ink to smudge and rendering his missive illegible. Homer soldiers on regardless, hoping to still eke some sense out of the dissipating letters, but ends up spewing out a mouthful of mostly unintelligible nonsense. At one point, however, Homer produces the words, "Nam Myoho Renge Kyo". Well, what are the odds?
Is it by sheer fluke that Homer happens to recite the central mantra of Nichiren Buddhism, or is he revealing some deep hidden layers within his own psyche (albeit almost certainly on a subconscious level)? Colonel Klink might have forsaken Homer, but it seems that his own internal Buddha hasn't.

"Nam Myoho Renge Kyo", which, translates roughly to "Dedication to The Mystic Law of The Lotus Sutra", is a chant espoused by the 13th century Buddhist monk Nichiren, its purpose being to evoke the chanter's own oneness with the universal law of life that governs everything in existence. Nichiren's teachings were based on the (at the time, fairly radical) idea that the Buddha, or awakened one, and the ordinary deluded human are a part of this oneness, and therefore the ordinary person has it within them to attain the wisdom and enlightenment of the Buddha and apply it to any given situation. This differs from other schools of Buddhism, which teach that Buddhahood must be accumulated over multiple lifetimes; by contrast, Nichiren teaches that all humans are capable of reaching their peak in the here and now, if they are able to unlock that capability. Central to Nichiren's mantra is the metaphor of the lotus flower (or "renge"), which blooms and bears fruit at the same time, thus signifying the "simultaneity of cause and effect" - that is, the practice applied in order to attain the enlightenment of the Buddha, and the actual attaining of that enlightenment. The lotus symbolises this fundamental oneness. In addition, the lotus flower's ability to bloom in muddy waters is a reminder that wisdom and enlightenment can be achieved even amid the swamp of human misery and attachment.

Followers of Nichiren Buddhism use the mantra "Nam Myoho Renge Kyo" as a means of overcoming adversity, so it seems only appropriate that Homer would be compelled to recite it right at the point where his marriage is facing its greatest ever crisis. As his own physical form fails him, and engulfs his prepared method of defence in an Ebert-esque deluge of sweat, Homer cries out in an effort to align himself with the fundamental law of the universe and to attain the enlightenment to see his way through the problem. Paradoxically, the fundamental energy he hopes to tap into comes from a universe itself in a terminal state of disarray; the universe not only feels the full extent of Homer's crisis, but is compelled to exacerbate it, putting everything into place so that Homer and Mindy will ultimately have no choice but to give in to their throbbing biological urges. This is because the destiny underpinning Homer and Mindy's impending coupling is undeniable, thus undermining the fundamental nexus of the Simpsons universe - the union between Marge and Homer, and the Simpsons' basic inseparability as a family unit. Realising that the very basis for its being was founded on a gargantuan error, the universe is in the process of winding down, hoping to redress this mistake and sweep itself quietly under the rug. The haphazardness of the universe is something that Homer must slowly come to terms with over the course of the episode - initially, he takes Barney's advice and attempts to reassure himself that his infatuation with Mindy is based solely on physical attraction, but quickly discovers that he and Mindy are soulmates to an almost uncanny extreme. Later, Angel-Klink appears to Homer in a vision, ostensibly to show him that the current state of affairs is the only way that things could be, but in actuality Klink ends up confirming Homer's darkest suspicions, by revealing that if Homer had married Mindy instead of Marge, then things would be immeasurably better for all three parties. In other words, the here and now is a grotesque aberration. Thus, Homer's chant of "Nam Myoho Renge Kyo" is a shriek of desperation amid an existence that seems increasingly incapable of justifying itself.

But Homer does more than simply wail out in anguish. By chanting this mantra, he is, in effect, expressing his allegiance to the here and now. The metaphor of the lotus flower is an assertion that he is complete as he is and has the ability to reach his full potential within this lifetime. The universe he is stuck with may be a malodorous swamp, founded on a series of accidents and filled with all kinds of unpalatable detail, but lotus flowers may bloom atop it just the same, and Homer's subconscious acknowledgement as such foreshadows his willingness to embrace the messy imperfections of the life that is. What could have been or should have been becomes irrelevant, as Homer express his oneness with the Homer he intrinsically is, under any and all possible circumstances. Fueling Homer's adherence is the unconscious understanding that the universe remains bound by the same fundamental energy, regardless of whether things went according to plan or not, and the accidental existence is every bit as valuable as the predetermined. Homer's awakening to this, and to the realisation that want he truly wants, more than anything, is to continue his present life with Marge, is what finally brings stability to the cosmos and enables the world around to settle. The Simpsons universe survives, then, by upholding its fundamental oneness with Homer.

Logo Case Study: Sit Ubu Sit

Fear works in mysterious ways, and some instances of logo-induced cold sweats are somewhat easier to rationalise than others. If you squint, then it isn't hard to suppose why The S From Hell, the fiendish combination of abstract, alien animation and the screechiest, tinniest synths around should have inspired such unbridled terror among a young generation of unsuspecting Monkees viewers. But how about a logo pivoting around a tender moment of heartfelt bonding between an endearing pet and their doting owner? Can that too be transformed into the building blocks of a few extraordinarily uncanny nightmares? Oh, logophobia finds a way. Here we have the case of Ubu, the frisbee-toting Francophile labrador. Our ears told us that he was a good dog, but our eyes sure as heck didn't see the evidence.

Ubu Roi the dog (so named for the Alfred Jarry play Ubu Roi) was the beloved companion of television producer Gary David Goldberg, whose credits include such series as Family Ties, Brooklyn Bridge and Spin City. In 1982, Goldberg formed his own production company, Ubu Productions, named in honor of his faithful pooch, and Ubu's likeness graced the ending of all associated programs. The image, which showed Ubu standing in a park with a frisbee clasped between his jaws, was taken at the Tuileries Garden, near the Louvre Museum in Paris, while Goldberg was embarking on an extended hitch-hiking trip across Europe with Ubu and wife Diana, a journey detailed by Goldberg in his 2008 autobiography Sit Ubu Sit: How I Went From Brooklyn To Hollywood With The Same Woman, The Same Dog And A Lot Less Hair. The Goldbergs, both card-carrying members of the 1960s hippie movement, had set out on the trip when Richard Nixon's being voted into office left them feeling alienated by the shifting cultural mood of the US, a disillusionment which Gary was later able to convert into prime-time mirth when he returned and created Family Ties, the early 1980s sitcom that gave a pre-Back To The Future Michael J Fox his big break. Apart from those select European motorists who had the privilege of having Ubu ride upfront with them back during the Goldbergs' days of wanderlusting, the world knew the dog as only a static image that appeared at the end of Family Ties and successive productions, accompanied by a disembodied voice (courtesy of Goldberg himself) commanding the dog to sit, and subsequently praising him just before the dog barked in affirmation. In an interview given by Goldberg in 2007, he explained what the image of the frisbee-gnawing Ubu, by now a familiar icon to anyone who paid heed to the chattering cyclops over the past two and a half decades, had always signified to him personally:

"We were hitchhiking up to Brussels and Diana had snapped that picture. I just thought, you know, I want very little distance between who I was that day and who I am now. I just don’t want a lot of distance there. So it was really nice to have that logo to always remind you who you are."

No doubt that there is an awful lot of love in that logo. And in theory it's all very charming. The man was so infatuated with his dog that he not only named his production company after him, he immortalised him in a logo in which he informed the world what a great dog he was. In practice...it's a little spooky. I think the eeriness of the logo is rooted in the disconnect between what we hear and what we see. Ubu is depicted as a motionless image; ergo he does not actually obey the commands of the offscreen Goldberg (who praises him regardless). The sounds suggest life, motion and interaction, but the visuals give us only inertia, and that leaves us with this unsettling, almost sickly sensation. Ubu's apparent disobedience has provided inspiration for parodies, including an episode of Robot Chicken in which an offscreen Seth Green loses his cool with the unresponsive dog and puts a bullet in him, followed by the sounds of a dog whimpering.

It will not surprise you to learn that Ubu is by now long dead, having passed away in 1984. He enjoyed an enviable afterlife in this production logo, but perhaps there is something vaguely haunting about it too. Much like Sassy the cat, doomed to hang in there in her nightmarish struggle against gravity for all eternity, Ubu remains suspended his is state of inertia, and by extension disobedience, subject to the commands of his master but unable to act on them. We have only the image of a deceased dog, so stiff and stationary that he might as well be a work of taxidermy, and the sounds of a loving moment of interaction between master and pet that once might have been. There is no starker reminder that Ubu is gone and haunted images are all that remain. Time has distilled Ubu, the dog who once hitch-hiked across Europe and played frisbee outside the Louvre, to a flat image and robbed him of his ability to demonstrate that he is indeed a good dog. But maybe there's something heartening about it too. After all, the disembodied voice of Goldberg doesn't care whether or not Ubu can actually make good on his commands to sit. He loves him regardless. Ubu is a dog with absolutely nothing that he needs to prove.

Goldberg himself passed away in 2013, aged 69. So this truly is a haunted logo. We have an image from a bygone era, set to the sounds of two departed souls interacting as they would have done some time long ago. Goldberg said that he set out to preserve a sense of who he was on the day that picture was taken and to stay connected to it no matter where he ended up in all subsequent chapters of his life, and that moment continues to echo within the collective psyche of a generation of TV viewers. But of course, we're only onlookers. We can't actively participate in the moment. All we can do is filter it through our own (slightly nonplussed) cultural memories, and bask in the uncanny knowledge that, for decades, our prime-time viewing habits were haunted by the lingering presence of a spectral labrador with the unsettling inability to ever lower his behind.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #17: This Little Piggy Went To Market (featuring Samuel L Jackson)

The "Tale" installment of Barclays' "Fluent In Finance" campaign of the early 00s presented us with an enticing marketing hook; a sort of demented take on Jackanory, as delivered by a lone Samuel L Jackson wandering through a snow-covered woodland. Jackson regaled us with a cautionary fable about a guileless pig who meets his match in a legion of ravenous bears, albeit one comprised so heavily of idioms and analogies as to seem borderline unintelligible. Jackson's story gets pretty bizarre, so let's try and decipher it as we go along.

"This little piggy went to market..."

The opening to a traditional children's nursery rhyme, in which each line is counted out upon an infant's toes, and each toe linked to one of five corresponding pigs who each met various fates. Of course, the notion of a pig going to market is in itself kind of sinister, as it's a scenario that seldom bodes well for the pig. Already we have a sense of an innocent heading off to their doom.

"He had a monkey on his shoulder and a skip in his step."

A seemingly contradictory mishmash of idioms. To have a skip in one's step suggests that someone is happy and carefree, but to have a monkey on one's back (or shoulder) implies the opposite, indicating that someone is beset by a persistent problem or bad habit of which they need to be rid. This becomes less confusing when we consider that "monkey" is also a Cockney slang term for 500 pounds sterling, suggesting that this little piggy is financially quite well off. The fact that his "monkey" is positioned on his shoulder (of all places) is foreboding, suggesting that there is trouble for the pig on the horizon. Perhaps his problem is his simple naivety, which is about to land him in a dangerous predicament indeed.

"On the way he met a matador. "You going to market?" the matador said. "Indeed I am," said the pig. "Where you going?" "Home," said the matador. "Today's a bear market and I'm a bull man."

There's nothing in this enigmatic exchange that can't be explained with a little investor jargon. A "bull market" refers to a market on the rise, marked by economic growth and stability, whereas a "bear market" refers to a receding market. Naturally, the bear market is the riskier of the two to invest in. They are so-called for the attacking motions each animal makes when it goes on the offensive; a bull attacks by thrusting its horns upwards into the air, whereas a bear swipes its claws in a downward motion. Obviously, an optimist like the pig is liable to get eaten alive in a bear market; our malaise is reinforced by the indication that there are predatory animals (whether literal or not) up ahead.

"The little piggy skipped on. Soon he found himself being turned over and under by hungry bears. They ate the shirt from his back, turned his monkey into a hill of beans."

To take the shirt from someone's back means to plunder their economic resources to the point of causing them serious hardship. A hill of beans is something of negligible value. So clearly, the pig did not do well by investing his £500 in the bear market.

"The moral of this is this: don't go to market unless you know who you're dealing with."

Self-explanatory. All that's left is for the pig to exit, pursued by a bear.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #16: Barclays' Cock and Bull Story (featuring Samuel L Jackson)

If we gleaned nothing else of value from Quentin Tarantino's rise to prominence in the 1990s (aside from trivia regarding menu items at McDonald's restaurants across various European locales), it's that there is an infinite amount of entertainment mileage to be had from watching Samuel L Jackson talk at a protracted length, even when what he's saying doesn't actually make a whole lick of sense. The verve, the presence and the potency were undeniable. It was inevitable that, eventually, some corporation would attempt to harness that monologuing magic for their own commercial ends. Hence, the "Fluent In Finance" campaign from Barclays bank in 2002, which hinged on just how enthralling it is to hear Jackson rave his loquacious heart out. And threw in a smattering of unnerving animal imagery while it was at it.

Celebrity endorsements can be an odious business, of course - plunderphonics group Negativland dedicated three whole tracks of their 1997 album DisPepsi to skewering the practice - and conventional wisdom dictated that if there was one thing guaranteed to chip away at Jules Winnfield's badass sheen, it was having him turn to the camera to hawk a product. But Bartle Bogle Hegarty made good one on this one. Celebrity endorsements were the tactic favoured by Barclays at the dawn of the new millennium, and they weren't exactly modest when it came to the magnitude of the celebrities they ensnared. The "Fluent In Finance" campaign was preceded by the "Big World Needs A Big Bank" campaign, directed by Tony Scott and featuring Anthony Hopkins, and was succeeded by a trilogy of ads featuring Donald Sutherland and Gary Oldman (note: that was a seriously epic combination). Getting an actor of Jackson's magnitude was certainly no mean feat - he'd already racked up considerable cultural credentials thanks to his major roles in two Tarantino pictures, Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997), and by 2002 he'd graduated to the Star Wars leagues as Jedi Knight Mace Mindu. And if you're going to fork over a gargantuan sum to have some Hollywood hotshot extol the virtues of your product, you might as well aspire to do something slightly mind-bending and flat-out unsettling with them.

The campaign consisted of a series of television ads in which a solitary Jackson walked the Earth, roaming across various landscapes, each one more deserted and eerily desolate than the last, delivering monologues directly to the camera in the style of a kind of artsy, folk horror take on Wayne's World. The ads were directed by (who else?) Jonathan Glazer, the offbeat genius behind that perplexing Guinness advertisement about the visionary squirrel, and much like that ad, were clearly engineered to make you feel a little out of water - or "to be thought provoking" as per this Campaign article. Jackson's monologues were strange, bewildering and and had a delirious, foreboding tone about them, as if Jackson were delivering some cataclysmic prophecy in deeply cryptic terms. The brand name "Barclays" never once came up, although all of the monologues were connected by the common theme of money. In "Tale", Jackson tells the cautionary fable of a foolhardy swine who fails to heed the warnings of a matador about the drastic differences between bull and bear markets. In "Sold" he describes a vexing encounter with a belligerently lyrical shoe salesman. In "Evil", Jackson challenges assumptions about money being the root of all evil, and in "Drama" he recites a passage from Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. The campaign yielded at least one other ad, although I have only my personal memory to go on for this one. There, Jackson narrates the story of an audacious golfer who opted to play out in a turbulent thunder storm, closing the ad on an unresolved cliffhanger: "Does he get the score card of a lifetime, or does that lifetime get scratched right there?" This particular ad appears to have been a later addition to the series - it is not mentioned in the linked Campaign article from the time of the series' launch, nor does it appear to have been preserved for the YouTube generation, but trust me, I'm not quite morbid enough to have manufactured a tagline so fitfully macabre on my own.

All of the ads concluded with a visual stinger, usually involving an animal alluded to in Jackson's monologue (the golfer ad, if memory serves me correctly, was an exception, closing with the imagery of a golf course being lacerated by a lightning bolt). The seemingly innocuous chicken that appears at the end of "Evil", only to scream bloody murder at the viewer, is self-explanatory. It is the punchline to a question Jackson poses in his refutation of the popular assertion that money is evil - namely, that if humans used chickens as currency instead of dollars, would that make chickens evil? The stinger to "Tale" serves as an epilogue to Jackson's fable, in which we see our porcine hero fleeing from the roars of ferocious bears, while "Drama" takes a more surreal turn in showing a centaur (mentioned in Shakespeare's text) bolting surreptitiously through a woodland. More baffling is the closing imagery of the "Sold" installment - an ad which, according to the aforementioned Campaign article, is intended to illustrate "the secrecy that often surrounds money issues". The animal explicitly referenced by Jackson in this particular monologue - the cat who surely did not have possession of the garrulous salesman's tongue - is nowhere to be seen. Instead, we get the imposing form of a black bull bucking repeatedly in a dusty field. In the preceding monologue, Jackson recounts his efforts to break through the merchant's impenetrable sales technique - a technique so abstruse that it seems almost purposely designed to prevent him from claiming ownership of that desirable pair of shoes - and it is not immediately obvious how the bull fits into that. It could potentially be a nod to the "Tale" installment, and to the matador who insisted on giving bear markets a wide berth on account of being a "bull man", or perhaps the bull is an allusion to the materials used to make those unobtainable shoes (hence why it is so riled up). Although I think it has more to do with the bull's display of raw, untamed fury, which seems startling in its capriciousness; it momentarily regains its posture, only to begin jerking its body again, almost as if willed by a force outside of its own control. Thus, I am inclined to see the bull as emblematic of the kind of misspent energy underpinning the sales ritual described by Jackson, in that it's a frenetic (and infuriating) dance that ultimately goes nowhere.

Back in 2002, my dad was dismissive of the "Fluent In Finance" campaign for much the same reason that I was transfixed by it - he pointed out that the ads were exercises in confoundment for confoundment's sake, and that Jackson's oblique dialogue made it something of a nightmare to ascertain just what the hell he was really on about. In other words, they were pure burbling. But burbling brought to life by the combined talents of Jackson and Glazer is burbling that's bound to possess a contorted personality all of its own. This isn't your Lucasfilm Jackson, and it isn't quite your Tarantino Jackson either - his sleek, deadly dynamism is there, but is an altogether uncannier, more feverish Jackson, one who rants about demonic chickens, and who, when he speaks about a cat not having your tongue, could well be referring to the literal possibility of a cat making off with your severed body parts. If there has ever been a movie role where Jackson's monologuing abilities have been used to such gloriously arcane ends, then I implore you to bring it to my attention.