The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #31: Clusters Squirrels (General Mills/Nestle)

Turns out, Quaker weren't the only brand to base a campaign on the conceit that squirrels are wily and rapacious little devils who are out to make life difficult for consumers of nut-based products. Over in the US, General Mills had much the same idea with a campaign that first took flight in 1987. Once again, our sciurine antagonists are driven by a serious case of nut envy, but this time it's the contents of your breakfast bowl that have them so enraptured - these squirrels crave the taste of Honey Nut Clusters, and they're not above clawing into your larder in order to get to it. The squirrels kept up their pursuit of Clusters for well into the 1990s, and by the middle of the decade had expanded their targets to European breakfast tables (internationally, it was sold under the Nestle brand name), with the squirrels putting in appearances on UK and German television. I'm not sure exactly when the campaign petered out, but the product itself is now defunct, so we can only hope that those thieving squirrels found an alternative source of monounsaturated fat.

I'd call the Clusters campaign a more benign cousin of that for Quaker Harvest Bars, in that the squirrels here aren't quite so overtly menacing. The Quaker campaign, at least in its early stages, was blatantly taking its cues from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, the implication being that the rodents would unleash all manner of physical devastation upon any human reckless enough to come between them and a Harvest Crunch bar. Here, it's my impression that the squirrels would sooner avoid a direct confrontation wherever possible. Physically, they're not up for a scrap, and are reliant on their wits to deprive unwary humans of the coveted cereal. Making a big tonal and aesthetic difference is that the squirrels are predominantly portrayed by real specimens, as opposed to the googly-eyed glove puppets from the Quaker campaign, so there's more of an adorability factor. There's also a lot more chintz - cue cheesy visual effects, as the squirrels intermittently switch back and forth from their flesh and blood selves to stiff animatronic puppets for some of the more challenging pieces. Compared to the largely silent squirrels from the Quaker campaign, these squirrels don't appear to swear by stealth, and are instead prone to involuntarily advertising their whereabouts with non-stop cartoon chattering. To the nutaholic, they're a less intimidating adversary than what the Quaker crew came up with, but they are every bit as fiendishly relentless.

What the Clusters campaign does emphasise, more than the Harvest campaign, is the squirrels' inclination to invade their victims' personal territory to get their paws on whatever clustered goods they may be hoarding within. The majority of ads in the campaign revolve around the theme of house-breaking and what a fine art the squirrels have it down to. Most of them take place in a sunlit suburbia that's ostensibly very pleasant, pristine and golden, but naturally that's all a facade. It becomes apparent that the residents are under constant surveillance, from legions upon legions of envious eyes lingering in every hidden orifice, endlessly conspiring and combining their underhanded talents to make up one great unstoppable force of voraciousness, of which the unwary suburbanite is utterly at the mercy (particularly first thing in the morning, when the average suburbanite is not at their quickest, and those squirrels clearly know it),. No blind spot goes unexploited, no weakness escapes their notice. So insatiable is their appetite for Clusters that they never stop coming, and they're guaranteed to make short work of whatever obstacles stand in their way. They certainly aren't going to let a silly thing like a lack of opposable thumbs keep them from turning door handles or sawing their way through walls. They may be small and fluffy, but their tenacity is the stuff of nightmares.

The squirrels might represent the forces of nature striking back at man where he least suspects it, but they're also knowledgable enough about technology to know how to use it against him. Many ads involve them obtaining the desired cereal thanks to the manipulation of some kind of technological appliance, be it as benign as distracting a human with a television set, or as hostile as laying waste to the breakfast table with a vacuum cleaner. One of the most bizarre ads in the series involved the inexplicable appearance of a robotic-squirrel hyrbid who stormed his way into an unfortunate breakfast-eater's domain and, unusually, claimed his cereal through the kind of out-and-out physical intimidation more commonly favoured by the Quaker bunch. This was a particularly anomalous ad all-round, in fact, as it opened with a rare attempt at a truce between squirrel and suburbanite - the squirrel actually presented the man with a box of Clusters, and only when he refused to share the squirrel's peace offering did he incur the wrath of Robo-Squirrel. Moral of the story: squirrel rapacity is not to be underestimated, but human insatiability will always be its own worst enemy.

In the UK version of the campaign it was much the same deal, with squirrels targetting half-asleep consumers in the supposed comfort of their own kitchens. There was one particularly ambitious squirrel, however, who took on a woman eating Clusters in what looked like a big and swanky estate. Heartening to know that it's not just middle-class suburbia where tomorrow belongs to the squirrel.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #30: Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Citreon Xantia)

Next up in my continuing case that the tiny window from the mid-90s to the dawn of the new millennium that represented something of a golden age for mindscrew advertising is this thirty-second spot from 1995, which sought to illustrate the air-conditioning capacities of the Citreon Xantia through the imagery of a motorist being pursued across the desert by a rabid bloodhound. It was surreal, spooky and, as with all the best ads from this particular era, played like a chintzy exercise in persuasion second, a beautifully encapsulated micro-nightmare first.

It all makes sense (kind of) if you're familiar with the idiom "mad dogs and Englishmen", used to indicate when it's really hot outside, the implication being that you would have to be a member of one of the two cited classes to even contemplate setting foot in such scorching terrain. The idiom derives from a popular cabaret number of the same name - penned by Noel Coward and first performed by Beatrice Lillie in 1931, the song takes a humorous look at the reluctance of the Englishman abroad to adjust to the custom of the siesta in tropical climates, and how this behaviour nets derision from everyone else. The lyrics capture something of the tension created by the British Empire, which in 1931 had yet to hit its period of significant decline:

 

It seems such a shame
When the English claim
The Earth
That they give rise to such hilarity and mirth.

Mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.
The toughest Burmese bandit
Can never understand it.
In Rangoon the heat of noon
Is just what the natives shun.

 

Coward is often thought to have been inspired by an observation of Rudyard Kipling in his 1901 novel Kim: "Only the devils and the English walk to and fro without reason...and we walk as though we were mad or English."

In the Citreon Xantia television ad, all three main players in the equation - the mad dog, the Englishman and the midday sun - put in an appearance, and are helpfully identified using captions. The major twist is that the Englishman, far from sharing in the dog's dementia, gets to brave the heat in style, in the comfort of a Citreon Xantia equipped with air conditioning. The implicit narrative of the ad concerns the vehicle's imperviousness to the unforgiving aura of the desert outside, of which the dog serves as an apt manifestation. The effectiveness of the advert is rooted in the minimalist approach it takes to sound and visuals. The desert has an inertia, but not a calmness. The glare of the sun is oppressive, there is a great sense of discomforting, agitated restlessness, as conveyed in the relentless movements of the dog, and the initial succession of images is blurred and unfocussed, giving the ad a distinctly hallucinatory feel, as if we, like the dog, are suffering from the effects of the midday heat. It is only once we join the Englishman inside the featured vehicle that we get reacquainted with some form of clarity. Inside the Citreon it is completely silent - the sounds of the desert, along with the heat, are kept firmly at bay. The formal attire and collected demeanour of our English motorist stand in obvious contrast to the furious quadruped with whom she shares his noonday territory. Both are covering the sweltering terrain in good speed, but while the dog seems to be lumbering along on a senseless journey ever deeper into disconcertion (represented by a psychedelic orange tint presumably intended to constitute the dog's rabies-addled perspective) the driver is cool and unflustered and presumably knows exactly where he's headed. And of course he also has everything at the touch of a button, as illustrated in the shot where he adjusts his AC to max, shortly before breezing across the desert, comfortably ahead of the demented bloodhound on his tail. The final promise, thus, is one of complete control in a deeply chaotic universe.

But never mind the virtues of the Citreon Xantia - with its eldritch imagery and eerie undertones, the advert gives the sensation that we've strayed, momentarily, from the safety net of normalcy and into a way-out ferality too perplexing to be expressed in words. The mad dog and the Englishman, while presented as polar opposites, in practice end up feeling like two sides of the very same coin, in a manner that seems befitting to the Coward ditty that inspired the ad's unsettling visual metaphors. Both of them convey a distinctive kind of freakishness - the dog in its distorted, feverish frenzy, the motorist in an intense silence that serves less as a counterpoint to the heat-inflicted dementia outside than a deepening of the overall disorientation. The interior of the Citreon becomes a vacuum, offering not refuge but a vast unnatural emptiness where some kind of presence should be. The vehicle may be perfectly insulated from everything beyond it, but that silence comes to feel every bit as oppressive as the glare outside, and as unnerving as the dog's discombobulated howls. The Englishman might fancy himself as the master of his environs, but he's really just another curiosity in a mind-bending landscape, confounding in his determination to shut himself off and remain willfully oblivious to everything around him. This is something to which the ad appears to concede in its final image, which shows the dog in hot pursuit of the Citreon - for as assured as the driver feels in his self-contained domain, it's painfully clear that if he were to set foot outside, he'd be well-broiled dog chow. What we therefore have is an illustration of the gulf between the motorist's self-perception and how the rest of the world perceives him. In his fully air-conditioned bubble, he's the top dog, while in reality he's the quarry of a very different dog. 

That, or it's a cute visual punchline showing that even mad dogs in the sweltering middle of nowhere cannot resist the playful urge to chase after moving vehicles.

Annabelle's Wish (aka Our Lips Are Sealed)

Annabelle's Wish is a 52-minute animated film from Ralph Edwards Productions that debuted on VHS in October 1997, with a holiday TV airing occurring later that same year on Fox. It was animated by The Baer Animation Company, the production company of former Disney artists Dale and Jane Baer. When you learn that it was distributed by Hallmark Home Entertainment, you might be inclined to dismiss it as a trite syrup-drinking fest, and certainly, the banal opening narration, in which narrator Randy Travis assures us that "Christmas Eve is a night tailor-made for wishes", isn't likely to dispel that trepidation. And yet here I am about to make the case that Annabelle's Wish is an overlooked gem with more depth to it than meets the eye. It's nowhere near as sophisticated, in terms of its animation or execution, as Channel 4's 1982 adaptation of Raymond Briggs' The Snowman, but it does convey a (not dissimilar) message that feels every bit as poignant and sincere. And for as vapidly disposable as its musings on dreams and wishes might seem, they're basically window dressing. Wishes, and the possibility of their being granted by some kind of redemptive seasonal spirit, are not what's actually on this picture's mind. Life, death and everything in between is what's on its mind.  

Annabelle's Wish tells the story of a quixotic calf named Annabelle (voice of Kath Soucie), who arrives at a farm in Twobridge, Tennessee on Christmas Eve, shortly before Santa (Kay E. Kuter) makes his annual visit. The animals always look forward to Santa's appearances, for every year he bestows on them the power of speech; for just one day, they may articulate their innermost thoughts and feelings to one another, on the condition that they do not let a human in on the affair. Annabelle, though, isn't satisfied with a mere yearly day of conversation - her fascination lies with Santa's reindeer and their uncanny knack for flying. Annabelle decides that she wants to be a reindeer, and to fly with Santa's fleet, and is advised by her mother, Star (Jennifer Darling), to take this up with Santa when he returns next year. In the meantime, Annabelle is given as a pet to a boy named Billy, the grandson of farmer Charles Baker (Jerry Van Dyke). Billy's parents were killed some years ago in a fire; Billy survived, but was rendered mute, potentially for life. Since the incident, Billy has resided with Charles, but suddenly finds himself in the middle of a vicious custody battle between Charles and his wealthy, city-dwelling aunt Agnes (Cloris Leachman), who desires a child and insists that she could give Billy a better life. The Bakers are also constantly at loggerheads with a neighbouring farming family, the Holders - their patriarch, Gus (Jim Varney), was formerly on friendly terms with Charles, but was embittered by his own family tragedy (it's never outright stated, but his wife died), while his sons Bucky (Charlie Cronin) and Buster (James Lafferty) make a habit of ganging up on Billy in the knowledge that he cannot answer back. Billy has only two allies, a local girl named Emily (Aria Curzon) who empathises with his inability to express himself, and Annabelle, who quickly becomes his most cherished companion. And when Annabelle inadvertently reveals to Billy just what kind of occult magic goes on in the barn every Christmas, the other animals don't take it so hard, well aware that Billy is unable to articulate what he has witnessed to the rest of his species.

The plot of Annabelle's Wish derives from an actual piece of festive folklore, familiar mainly to European tradition, which asserts that, at the stroke of midnight on 25th December, animals acquire the gift of the gab, although Santa does not typically play a part in the legend. The lore is commonly linked to the animals said to have been present at the birth of Jesus (see an earlier animated Christmas special, ABC's The Night The Animals Talked from 1970), and is presumably a close cousin of the similar superstition suggesting that barnyard animals like to usher in every new Christmas by kneeling in reverence at midnight, a tradition supposedly inherited from their manger-gazing ancestors more than two millennia ago, although the stories of talking Yuletide animals may date back even further than the Christian religion. Whatever the origins, the superstition is a good deal less whimsical than it appears on the surface, or indeed its benign portrayal in Annabelle's Wish. For a human to overhear these garrulous critters was said to be terribly unfortunate, for the animals seldom speak words of comfort and joy. Often they foretell of some pending disaster, typically for the human eavesdropper, or some other unpalatable truth. Writes Mark Liberman: "In these stories, occult knowledge is bad, and research beyond normal bounds creates not only unwelcome knowledge of misfortune, but also misfortune itself."

In Annabelle's Wish, the lore serves quite a different end, for the film has great interest in the power of self-expression and communication. The ability to speak, and to clearly articulate one's needs and desires, equals empowerment. The animals revel in the fact that for one day out of 365, they enjoy the same privileges as man, even if their use of the gift does not typically extend beyond relatively frivolous discussion (the rooster talks like a morning disc jockey, the dog is a would-be gossip hound who can never remember the information he garners, the pig is constantly making insincere resolutions to start dieting, etc). Annabelle is seemingly alone in aspiring to use her ability to alter her destiny, an idea that most of the animals scoff at. Her fanciful ambitions of getting herself off the ground, meanwhile, contrast with the bleakness of Billy's circumstances, for he is denied a privilege that most people take for granted. It's never made explicit whether Billy's muteness is physical (brought on by damage suffered by inhaling smoke from the fire) or psychological (rooted in the trauma of what he witnessed) in nature, although I would presume the latter. Either way, we might ponder why Billy has not been provided with alternate means of expressing himself (eg: learning to sign, or writing) - a valid question in-universe, although one that essentially misses the point of the symbolism of the story. Billy's muteness is effectively a shorthand for his complete inability to determine his own situation. He is at the mercy of whichever way the balance of power tips between his grandfather and his aunt, and powerless in standing his ground against the local bullies. His literal lack of a voice is, in analogical terms, indicative of his general lack of confidence and, in the case of Agnes, his being denied a voice in her refusal to listen to what he wants. Upon witnessing Billy's struggle first-hand, Annabelle aspires to "do the talking for both of us", but is reminded by Star that, for 364 days of the year, she and Billy are even in their inability to speak for themselves. And yet, Annabelle finds a way to make good on her aspiration, although it involves having to put her own career ambitions aside. 

The theme of sacrifice first occurs when Charles pawns his most valued possession, a music box that previously belonged to his deceased daughter, in order to settle a debt with the Holders and prevent them from taking Annabelle as payment. This foreshadows the more pivotal sacrifice that Annabelle later makes on behalf of Billy. When, finally, a full year has elapsed, Santa returns to the barn and Annabelle regains the ability to speak, she has the opportunity to ask him about the possibility of flying. We discover the following morning, however, that Annabelle has actually used the opportunity to put in a very different kind of request. Billy awakens and, seemingly by miracle, regains the power of speech (and the voice of Hari Oziol). And not a moment too soon, as Agnes's lawyer had recently uncovered a loophole that would have granted her custody of Billy for as long as he remained mute. Annabelle's wish has come at a great price, however - when Billy joyously races to the barn to tell her the good news, he finds their situation reversed, with Annabelle now rendered permanently mute. Star explains to Billy that the voice he was granted was Annabelle's own; she wished to surrender her own power of speech to Billy, at the cost that she herself could never use it again. We understand that the magnitude of Annabelle's wish is far greater, however - by giving up her seasonal voice, Annabelle is also forfeiting her only means of ever articulating to Santa her personal desire to fly along with him. We do not sense that Annabelle regrets or resents her decision - over the course of the year, her priorities have changed, and she has learned to put Billy's needs above her own desires.

The ostensible tragedy of Annabelle and Billy's relationship is that, until the very end of the film, they never possess the ability to speak at the same time, and as such, no two-way conversation ever occurs between them. But then we are never encouraged to believe that this in any way hinders their friendship - Billy and Annabelle are at their most purely happy during a montage showcasing their various adventures in the year in between the two pivotal Christmases, when neither character possesses the ability to speak. For while Annabelle's Wish has a lot to say about the value of words and self-expression, it ultimately posits that the most powerful communication manifests in what is never verbalised, but what is intuitively understood between those closest to one another. As the narrator informs us, "Talking just wasn't required for the kind of friendship they had." No, the real tragedy of Annabelle and Billy's relationship is that inherent to any bond between a child and their cherished pet - unless the pet in question is a tortoise, one of them can expect a significantly shorter lifespan than the other. This is something we are reminded of in the film's most mordant joke, when Ears the would-be gossip hound (Jay Johnson) states that as a puppy he dreamed of stardom, "like Lassie or Old Yeller." He then reflects on this, and rectifies, "Maybe not like Old Yeller." Even if you've never seen Disney's classic 1957 boy and his dog picture, you probably know from its reputation that the dog dies at the end; furthermore, it is his young owner's willingness to shoot his beloved dog, who had contracted rabies during a confrontation with an infected wolf, that signifies his first major step toward adulthood. Annabelle's Wish isn't quite so brutal in its depiction of life's comings and goings, but it nevertheless remains consciousness of the prevalence of death in everyday life (both the Bakers and the Holders have had to deal with their own bereavements) and the inevitably of change. As Scarlett the horse (Rue McClanahan) advises Annabelle, when she realises just how brief a window of opportunity the animals get for talking each year, "Nothing lasts forever." Annabelle's Wish is a film about the power of communication, in all its forms, and the personal sacrifices that sometimes need to be made for the greater good. But it is, above all, a story about the beautiful moments that cannot last, and this is where I feel the film particularly excels. On the surface, it is a touching story of an idealistic cow who yearns to be a reindeer and the traumatised boy she befriends, and how each of them ends up compensating for what the other is lacking. But I think it also works as an allegory for the formation of a childhood bond with a beloved pet, a bond that exists entirely without words. Annabelle's Wish is sensitive to the power and importance of such a relationship, and to the non-judgemental comfort and companionship it provides, while staying alert to the eventuality that the child will have to face up to letting go. For all the feel-good sentiments of the film's epilogue, in which we discover what ultimately became of Billy and Annabelle, there is a great sting to the final outcome that that the sweetness of the imagery does not disguise, and Annabelle's Wish is all the better for it.

Before we go any further, the film does have one really obvious weakness, and we might as well get that out of the way right now. It's not the songs, although none of them are amazingly memorable, and while Travis's narration is largely mundane, it serves a purpose that becomes apparent only in the final stages. No, the weakness lies in the character of Agnes, the rather heavy-handed villain of the piece, as it's in her that we get a number of the prejudices endemic to feel-good holiday entertainment - not least, the idea that those who live alone and do not have families are, at best, incomplete and, at worst, present a threat to those who follow a more traditional lifestyle. There was certainly room for Agnes to be a more complex character, and for shades of grey regarding her perspective on the situation, but the film settles for making her into a callously self-indulgent type in the vein of Cruella de Vil, just so there's no risk that we might end up accidentally siding with her. Agnes is an outsider to the family unit who both envies it and aspires to destroy it. She's also from the city, meaning that she brings with her a heap of disdainful opposition toward the modest sincerity of the rural community. Agnes's shortcoming, of course, is that, unlike Annabelle, she is not prepared to put Billy's interests above her own desires, although some of the arguments she puts forward are nevertheless valid. For example, she raises the question as to why Billy is not receiving medical treatment for his condition, suggesting that the local doctor was too quick to give up on the possibility of Billy never speaking again and insisting that, should she obtain custody of Billy, she would get him the best therapy money could buy (of course, the loophole she later uncovers would indicate that it is not within her interests to do so). That being said, the film does end up treating Agnes with a surprising magnanimity, in the very same breath with which it yields redemption for the Holders. Gus, on learning that Charles was forced to pawn his daughter's music box to settle their debt, is ashamed enough to buy the music box back and return it to Charles; while at the Bakers' farm, Agnes and Gus encounter one another and apparently hit it off. She's in desperate want of a family, they're without a mother - turns out there was a common solution to both of their problems all along. A clement ending for all concerned, then, although Billy, our narrator (surprise!), closes this arc off with the snarky observation that, "as usual, Aunt Agnes got what she wanted. And the Holder boys got what they deserved."

So yes, there is a twist at the end in which the narrator is revealed to be the adult Billy, giving us a shot of irony in the revelation that the voice of narrative authority had, all along, belonged to the character who couldn't talk (and an additional irony in that the animals had trusted Billy never to spill the beans on their annual talk-athons, and there he just went and passed it onto the world. Oops). As an adult, Billy now owns the farm and, in one of the more predictably twee aspects of the special, is married to Emily. Annabelle is still alive in the present, but has grown old and frail (it's never flat-out stated, but presumably Star, Ears and the other animals would have all passed on by now) and, as per the conditions of her agreement with Santa, hasn't uttered a word since that fateful Christmas years ago. Nevertheless, Billy has maintained his bond with his childhood friend and continues to talk to her, despite Emily's derision. In the early hours one Christmas morning, Billy awakens to discover that Annabelle has left the barn and disappeared into the snowy landscape; he goes searching for her, and finds that she has fallen. Before he can reach her, however, she is helped up by her old friend Santa, who tells her that he never forgot the sacrifice she made on Billy's behalf. Without her voice, Annabelle remains unable to express her desire to fly to Santa, but he is able to make it happen regardless, on the grounds that, "I know someone who has a wish for you", referring to Billy. Thus, Billy is finally able to repay Annabelle's favour by making a wish on her behalf. Appropriately, though, the wish in question is never actually verbalised - Santa simply responds to what is evident in the bond between Billy and Annabelle and their inclination to always want the best for one another. Annabelle glances into the adjacent lake to discover that she has been rejuvenated, transformed into a reindeer and, on top of everything else, she has regained the ability to speak. Annabelle and Billy make their only two-way verbal exchange of the entire story, in wishing each other a merry Christmas, and the film ends with Annabelle joining Santa's sleigh and flying off into the night sky, as Billy watches from the ground below.

In other words, the perfect death metaphor, no?

Maybe it's because I grew up with The Snowman and other seasonal Raymond Briggs cartoons where sorrowful endings were par for the course. Maybe it's because I find the ending of Annabelle's Wish to be vaguely reminiscent of that of Watership Down, where an elderly Hazel is approached by the ghost of El-ahrairah and invited to come away with him. Or maybe it's simply because my initial viewing of this film happened to coincide with the point in my life where I was growing painfully aware of my cat's mortality, so the image of the geriatric Annabelle stumbling through the snow hit me doubly hard. But I've always taken it as a given that Annabelle's final transformation and her flying away with Santa was indicative of her having passed on...which is not to say that she is hallucinating her closing Santa encounter, just that it functions on an allegorical level. Ostensibly, it's a happy ending, and yet there is something about it that I find profoundly heart-breaking. Whichever way you slice it, Annabelle's initiation into Santa's fleet marks the end of her time as Billy's companion; as was always inevitable, the two of them end up going their separate ways, with Billy still young and having much of his life yet ahead of him, and Annabelle fading away into the distance. It does not seem to me that Santa averts Annabelle's death, but rather that he facilitates it - which, admittedly, is an unconventional outcome because it does, in practice, make Santa the grim reaper of this universe. That Annabelle dies a highly symbolic death is perhaps entirely appropriate, given that she was born by a highly symbolic birth. At the start of the film, Annabelle's birth is depicted not as the ordinarily messy means through which a calf enters the world, but by a stream of sparkles snaking its way into a barn and leaving a calf in its wake - which, not coincidentally, is the same stream of sparkles also emitted by Santa's sleigh. Santa giveth, and he take awayeth. Significantly, when Santa encounters Annabelle for the first time, he adorns her with a large red ribbon, a visual indicator of her status as a gift intended for Billy, and then at the end of the film, when he revisits her in her old age, he makes a point of fastening an identical ribbon around her neck. The ribbon acts as a bookend to Annabelle's life and her relationship with Billy, its reappearance signalling that both have reached their natural conclusion. But at the same time, it also heralds the start of a whole beginning, for Annabelle continues to wear the ribbon in her new reindeer form; it, coupled with her rejuvenation, points to the ongoing cycle of life. The symbolism of the ribbon might clue us in on why Santa has chosen to wait this long before finally fulfilling Billy's wish for Annabelle, even though Billy must have been wanting it for years, for she had a whole other purpose that she first needed to see through to completion. In the literal world of the story, Annabelle's rebirth as a reindeer could be interpreted as constituting an afterlife in of itself - either Annabelle has undergone a form of reincarnation, or her joining Santa's fleet means that she has risen to a higher plane of existence. In allegorical terms, Annabelle's newfound ability to fly is an indicator of the extent to which her legacy will continue to endure in Billy's memory. It is, after all, through Billy's ongoing devotions that she is implied to gain her final powers, so it seems reasonable to suppose that this is representative of the new life she will take on as a less concrete companion to Billy going forward. It marks the end of one stage of their relationship, but the beginning of quite another.

In the end, you can take Annabelle's Wish at face value, if you prefer, and it is a perfectly charming enough experience on those terms. But amid all the Hallmark banalities about Christmas being a night for wishes coming true, I see a far simpler, more authentic story about a boy who regained hope and confidence through his bond with his childhood pet, and continued to value her memory and the tremendous difference she made to his life. Anyone who's ever loved and lost a pet should get the picture.

Randy Beaman's Kansas Encounter (aka Betsy's Been Dead For 10 Years!)

After years of speculation, the new Animaniacs is finally upon us! How does it hold up?

Right now, I'm not in the best position to comment, since I don't have Hulu and I haven't yet been able to experience any episodes in their entirety. I've watched a number of clips here and there, and what I have seen has made me laugh, so it's passed the first test. From the outset, though, I do have a cluster of lingering reservations. Firstly, the Jurassic Park parody, which was used as one of the early trailers, is by and far the best new skit I've seen so far, so I do have this ominous feeling they may have already used up their best material in the promos. Secondly, is it just me or are there a lot of incredibly grotesque-looking human characters in this revival? Thirdly, there's been good news and bad news on the matter of the peripheral cast.  The good news is that I was (somewhat) wrong in my prediction that Charlton Woodchucks would never return, because he was indeed featured (and mentioned by name) in a segment that incorporated most of the supporting characters from the show's previous incarnations. As one of Charlton's few allies, I was positively ecstatic to have been thrown a bone, even if did come at the expense of one of my other favourite Animaniacs characters (Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you?). But then, I was simultaneously dampened by the understanding that this was indeed the only bone that any of those peripheral characters would be getting from this entire revival. All that speculation about which segments would get a new lease of life in the modern age turned out to be totally moot, because none of them have returned besides the two we'd known about from the very start. Talk about your anti-climax.

Glancing at the list of episodes, it looks as though the revival follows a format more akin to Garfield and Friends than to its predecessor. You can enter into each episode pretty much always knowing what you'll be getting - a couple of segments involving the main characters, with the supporting act sandwiched in between. There are a handful of segments involving brand new characters, but these definitely seem to be getting the cold shoulder compared to the two headlining shorts. Now, there were rumors circulating earlier this year that this would be the case, so I have had a few months to steel myself for this reality. It didn't really hit home for me, however, until I watched the new intro. I think anybody familiar with the original will wince at the sheer volume of dead space they have to fill where most of the supporting cast would have been name-checked - to extent that it makes little sense retaining the Pinky and The Brain stanza, since all it does is awkwardly punctuate a musical sequence that would otherwise be hogged entirely by the Warners. Watching the introduction to 2020 Animaniacs is a weirdly depressing experience, like revisiting the site of a once bustling, lively shopping district to find most of the venues boarded up and out of business. Having Yakko, Wakko and Dot loudly assert that they did meta first barely disguises the unhappy fact that they don't have a whole lot of friends left. (And seriously, why not take the opportunity to introduce some of the new characters instead of just vaguely alluding to them? Or are they just reluctant to commit to those segments in case they don't take?)

I suppose what bothers me about this all-out cast purge is the probable rationale behind it. I suspect the reason why the original supporting cast did not come back, in the majority of cases, is not because it was unviable to revive them, but because the characters weren't considered important or iconic enough to be worth the effort. And that's a real shame. I appreciate that it might have been harder to bring back characters tied to a specific voice actor, like Sherri Stoner or Bernadette Peters (although I'm unclear if they were even asked), but what about the non-vocal characters like Chicken Boo, Mr Skullhead and the Mime? Those guys could run forever! It is on behalf of the characters from the shorter, more random pieces, such as "Chicken Boo", "Good Idea, Bad Idea" and "Mime Time", that I take particular umbrage, as the assumption that they were insignificant to the Animaniacs formula strikes me as completely wrong. They weren't expendable extras - no, they were the very heart and soul of Animaniacs! I love the Warners and Pinky and The Brain as much as the next person, but it was in these perfectly compressed, wonderfully inexplicable bursts of insanity that the Animaniacs star shone at its brightest. The little bits and pieces in between the longer segments were what really gave the series its unique character - I can't think of any other cartoon from the same era where you might have encountered anything as ingeniously simple, yet gloriously strange as "Good Idea, Bad Idea".

Or indeed Randy Beaman, who is one of the great unsung champions of the original series. The twist in his case being that we never met Randy first-hand; instead, we heard stories about his bizarre and sometimes disturbing life from a small child whose own connection to Randy was never explained. The child's official name was Colin (after his voice actor, Colin Wells, who was the son of series producer Deanne Oliver), though I'm not sure if he was ever explicitly identified as such in the series itself (in the "Big Wrap Party" musical sequence Yakko refers to him as "The Randy Beaman Kid"). The Randy Beaman skits all followed the same basic formula - Colin would emerge from his house, talk directly to the camera about Randy's latest misadventure, sign off with his signature line, "'kay, bye", and run back into the house. Often, they would spice the routine up by giving Colin alternate attire or a prop to fiddle with, but onscreen action was typically fairly minimal. The offbeat appeal of the series lay in the juxtaposition of the mundaneness of the immediate surroundings with the way-out nature of the stories being told, which ranged from the quirky to the macabre. On rare occasions, they had the ring of plausibility - one of the most notorious skits involved Randy's traumatic bathtub experience, which I suspect actually has happened to a number of kids who were forced to bathe with their siblings (in this instance, the humor derives from what's merely implicit in the final line, "And now Randy Beaman gets to take showers by himself"). Wells' delivery was fun and natural - I'm not sure if there was any improvisation on his part, but he always sounded entirely convincing as a kid who related tall tales with a mix of morbid fascination and artless bewilderment, as though he only half-understood the implications of what he was saying. A number of Colin's stories are straight-up re-tellings of classic urban legends - amid the assorted misfortunes suffered by Randy Beaman and his family are familiar (and highly suspect) warnings about the dangers of mixing pop rocks and soda and of lingering too long in tanning salons (those are dangerous, although not for the reason legend insists). And then we have the time that Randy Beaman and his father got to live out the most classic urban legend of them all - that of the disappearing hitch-hiker. In one skit set in the dead of winter, Colin emerges from his house clad in a thick parka to tell us about Randy's encounter with a mysterious woman while on a road trip in Kansas:

"Okay, so what happened is, one time Randy Beaman went on a trip with his dad and they picked up this lady who wanted a ride home - and this was in Kansas - and she sat in the backseat and when they got where she wanted to go, they turned around and she was gone. Randy Beaman's dad talked to the man who lived there and told him what the lady looked like, and the man said, "Oh, that's my wife, but she died four years ago." Spooky, huh? Okay, bye."

Just to make things doubly unsettling, the skit offers a break from routine by having Colin actually not make it back into the house on this occasion. Instead, he topples over into the snow and doesn't get back up again (presumably because his movements are restricted by the parka). Spooky, huh? Isn't that the perfect visual representation of the anxieties expressed in his story?

Well, hear me out. The legend of the phantom hitch-hiker is easily one of the most familiar and enduring in modern folklore, so odds are you'd already heard some variation on this story by the time you were Colin's age. You know how it always goes - unsuspecting motorist picks up an innocuous-looking character by the side of the road and takes her for a bit of a ride, only to discover that Betsy's been dead for ten years! Jan Harold Brunvand, the granddaddy of urban legend analysis, covered the legend extensively in a chapter of his 1981 book The Vanishing Hitch-Hiker: Urban Legends and Their Meanings, and at least one book has been dedicated exclusively to the subject, The Evidence For Phantom Hitch-Hikers by Michael Gross, published in 1984. The story dates back to at least the late 19th century, and has been told so many times that the details of the journey inevitably vary. In some versions, the hitch-hiker is completely, eerily mute, while in others they reward the driver by sharing a prophesy (depending on when the incident has said to have occurred, the hitch-hiker has predicted everything from World War II to the second coming of Jesus). Sometimes, the hitch-hiker mysteriously vanishes midway through the journey; on other occasions, they make it all the way to the specified destination and depart in a conventional fashion, but had borrowed some item of clothing from the driver they'd neglected to return, prompting the driver to follow them and ultimately locate their clothing beside a tombstone bearing the name of their erstwhile companion. What does tend to remain quite consistent across re-tellings is the genders of the parties involved - in the majority of cases, the hitch-hiker is female, while the motorist is typically male (although of course you will find variations there too). Some perceive possible sexual undertones within the legend, including Cecil de Vada of Fate Magazine, who is quoted in Gross's book as speculating: "I suppose there is no man, celibate or married, who hasn't imagined himself driving on a lonely road at night and being hailed by a glorious femme, even if she is only a wraith." (p. 136) Maybe, although I suspect that this is at least partially down to conventional wisdom that a lone female out in the middle of nowhere is more likely to be regarded with sympathy, as odds are she'll be perceived as vulnerable instead of potentially dangerous - the reverse scenario, in which a female motorist picks up a male stranger, occurs far less often, presumably because it has too much of a yikes factor from the outset to be especially appetising.

In many accounts, the hitch-hiker is revealed to have been killed in a road accident that occurred on the exact spot that the motorist picked them up (just to make things additionally spooky, the night in question is often specified to be the anniversary of said accident) - the implication being that the hitch-hiker is attempting, in death, to complete the journey that was tragically truncated in life. And although the hitch-hiker in such accounts is rarely dangerous or malevolent per se, they are nevertheless a deeply sinister figure, for a couple of reasons that I suspect ultimately converge into one. As with many ghost stories, the appeal, in part, tends to boil down to a fascination with our own mortality, and the phantom hitch-hiker's uncanny ability to pass themselves off as a living human offers an eerie illustration of the thin line between life and death. Secondly, I think Gross is on the right track when he attributes the prevalence of the legend to "a sense of adventure: a timeless adventure, a Romance of the Open Road" (p.137), although adventure of course goes hand-in-hand with trepidation. It is in the phantom hitch-hiker that we find a personification of the uneasy gulf that lies between one patch of civilisation and another, the uncertainty as to what lies ahead whenever we venture out from a place of (presumed) safety and take our chances in less chartered territory. The phantom hitch-hiker poses no direct threat, but they represent a possible outcome that is terrifying to the wary traveller having to journey through the middle of nowhere to get to somewhere - the possibility that they, too, might not make it back to civilisation. The hitch-hiker is a prevalent figure in horror lore because they embody the unknown, unpredictable nature of the world beyond our comfort zone - we cannot be sure quite who we're picking up and allowing to ride along with us - although in the specific case of the phantom hitch-hiker, I would argue that a kind of implicit kinship exists between the hiker and the motorist. The motorist has entered into the dark in-between and discovered that they now occupy a middle ground with the phantom, a transitional state in which both figures have left one world behind them and await reaffirmation on the other side. The lines between the living and the dead are blurred until the motorist returns to the safety of civilisation, at which point their travelling companion can no longer follow them. For the motorist, this state of dark uncertainty has been only temporary, but their brush with the phantom is a chilling reminder that this outcome was never guaranteed - and that, in making the return journey (or heading out again), they'll be forced to cross through much the same void.

Hence, the significance of Colin not making it back inside the house in the end. As we fade out, he's still down for the count, stranded in the icy in-between of his snow-covered yard. A troubling upset to the established routine that reinforces the story's underlying anxieties that on any given day, things can go unexpectedly wrong.

Of course, in Colin's version of the story it's never actually specified that the hitch-hiker died en route to her intended destination. The humor in Colin's re-telling comes from two key elements - firstly, the abrupt manner in which he punctuates his story in order to specify that the alleged incident occurred in Kansas, as though this somehow accounts for everything (lots of wide open spaces, I suppose), and secondly, the nonchalant reaction of the husband (at least as Colin represents it) to news that his deceased wife has rubbed shoulders with a couple of passers-through, suggesting that he's quite familiar with, or at least unfazed by her spectral eccentricities. The Randy Beaman skits are as much about the foibles of oral tradition as the stories themselves.

The really spooky thing about Randy Beaman, though? I don't think he really exists. He too, is another phantom, albeit one that serves a very different kind of function - that of the all-purpose protagonist to whom all this crazy shit has to happen. The prevailing mark of the urban legend is that they seldom, if ever, are reported to have happened to the individual narrating them, or even to someone whom the narrator personally knows. It always happened to your neighbour's aunt's hairdresser's dog groomer's cousin - or, in short, "a friend of a friend". Someone to whom there does seem to be some semblance of connection to the person telling the tale, but from whom a comfortable enough distance is imposed as to make it impractical for the narrator to have to verify. Protagonists who apparently touch life at enough points for multiple narrators to easily trace a connection, yet with whom nobody ever seems to have any direct relationship. It's not too hard to draw parallels between such protagonists and those aforementioned phantom hitch-hikers - no real fixed and solid identity, and trapped in a loop, constantly reliving the same traumatic experience over and over, in public consciousness, so long as their story suits the morbid fascinations of the age. For his part, Colin never claims any personal connection to Randy Beaman, raising the question as to whether one exists at all. Has Colin so much as met the guy, or is he simply regurgitating stories that have been fed to him by other kids? It seems entirely reasonable to suppose that Randy is a sort of mythical figure who exists only in school yard folklore. More bizarrely, it seems that Wakko Warner also possesses a knowledge of Randy and the kind of macabre scrapes that he and his family are reputed to get into - in one of the longer segments, "Ups and Downs", Wakko cites a Randy Beaman story in order to illustrate the potentially gruesome outcomes of taking the elevator instead of the stairs. That does seem to be Randy's lot in life (whether the life is actually real or not) - to provide cautionary examples, as is typically the case of those elusive protagonists of urban legends. The Randy Beaman stories strike such an uncomfortable nerve because they are, at heart, warnings that speak to our deepest, darkest fears - fear of the road less travelled, fear of the abuses we may inadvertently inflict on our body via modern luxuries like pop rocks and tanning salons, fear of having to share the spaces in which we supposedly practice personal hygiene with those who don't. He is merely an empty vessel onto which we are free to project whatever macabre thought takes our fancy.

Getting back to the newer Animaniacs, once again I have to acknowledge that my own first-hand experience there is extremely limited, and that perhaps my view will soften when I get to view the episodes in their entirety. Maybe I'll get over my disappointment about the supporting characters being axed and manage to enjoy the new episodes for what they are - after all, I did just that with Freakazoid! when it made a similar move at the beginning of its second season (although that was a slightly different scenario - for one, my favourite character was a beneficiary of that particular change). I sincerely hope, though, that we haven't seen (or heard) the last of Randy Beaman. So long as morbid curiosity remains integral to the human condition, it doesn't feel like that kid's work is truly done.

(And fun fact: before Jan Harold Brunvand popularised the term "urban legend" in the early 1980s, one writer, Rodney Dale, made the compelling case that we should call them "whale tumour stories", or WTSs for short, but regrettably it did not catch on.)

Treehouse of Horror '94: Time and Punishment (aka It's Raining Again...)

Let's talk about the time The Simpsons paid homage to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" as part of their annual Treehouse of Horror rituals. The segment, "Time and Punishment", was included in "Treehouse of Horror V" of Season 6 (episode 2F03), which first aired October 30th 1994.

"Time and Punishment" follows the basic plot of "A Sound of Thunder" for its first two or three minutes, deftly adapted to suit the beats of the Simpsons universe - here, we have Homer in the role of Eckels, Abe in the role of Travis (kind of) and Ned Flanders in the role of Deutscher. Homer acquires a time-travelling toaster and goes back to prehistoric times (unlike Eckels, he did not mean to do this), crushes an insect (unlike Eckels, he meant to do this), and returns to 1994 to discover that it's now a horrifying dystopia ruled by a tyrannical (if characteristically affable) Ned. With that, we've reached the equivalent point at which Bradbury's original story stopped. "Time and Punishment", though, goes a step further, in exploring the truly deranged possibilities in having its time-travelling bug killer go back in an effort to fix their mistake, only to keep on distorting the space time continuum in ever more ludicrous ways. Conveniently for Homer, it seems that the space time continuum merely resets to its "default" state whenever he uses the toaster to travel back in time, so he never runs into the obvious problem as to what would happen if he were to encounter a past or future version of himself (just as well, as the way things were going, he'd probably have ended up killing them too, and then we really would have a paradox on our hands). 

"Time and Punishment" is notable for being the least gory segment in a Halloween episode that went out of its way to be as violent, visceral and gratuitously tasteless as its slot and budget would allow - which is not to say that it's not an extremely macabre experience. In fact, it has the highest body count of the three, once we factor in non-human causalities - given that Homer is at one point implied to have caused a mass extinction by unleashing late-20th century microbes upon the prehistoric world. And, despite being relatively light on mutilation humour, it boasts one of the episode's most thoroughly disturbing moments, when the freshly-lobotomised Marge, Bart and Lisa appear clutching jars filled with brine and their own severed frontal lobes, imploring Homer join them in their newfound bliss. Morbid humor worms its way in in small and sometimes surprising ways. Take Homer's murder of the mosquito, for example - when he swats the little bloodsucker, it doesn't go down without also emitting a piteous whine, followed by a close-up of its lifeless, mangled body. At another point he also flattens a particularly adorable pink fish (a walking one, which obviously bodes badly in terms of the evolutionary course of terrestrial life on Earth).

"Time and Punishment" is not just any Treehouse of Horror installment. It happens to be a strong contender for my personal pick for THE absolute definitive Treehouse of Horror segment. Although "Treehouse of Horror II" would have little trouble securing my vote in terms of which Halloween episode functions most successfully as a cohesive whole, judged as as individual, self-contained piece, "Time and Punishment" feels like the Halloween shorts at the peak of their game. It packs so much outrageous mayhem into roughly seven minutes, yet there's something pleasingly effortless about how it all comes together, so that it never feels overly forced in its dark absurdities. It plays, beguilingly, like an actual, bona fide Simpsons story that just so happens to follow a more fantastical trajectory than usual. To clarify what I mean by that, I need only point to the preceding segment, "The Shinning", which is an affectionate and very cleverly-executed parody of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining. It does not, however, play like an actual Simpsons story - rather, it is a self-consciously very different kind of story, into which the family has been merely transplanted. "The Shinning", more so than any other Treehouse of Horror segment before it, was a straightforward re-enactment of a pre-determined narrative, with all of the characters playing their designated parts. Homer behaves in a flagrantly out-of-character fashion all throughout "The Shinning" because he's cast in the role of Jack Torrance (I've no doubt that no TV and no beer would have some kind of adverse on Homer's emotional health, but he's no axe murderer). In "Time and Punishment", he serves as Eckels' analogue but is still recognisably Homer - he reacts to the various far-out situations he finds himself in as Homer plausibly would. "The Shinning" is so intrinsically linked to the movie it's parodying that if you're unfamiliar with Kubrick's picture (and it should be noted that the segment is specifically parodying Kubrick's movie, not King's novel), then I don't know how you make sense of it; "Time and Punishment", on the other hand, uses Bradbury's scenario as its starting point but makes the story its own, to the point that familiarity with "A Sound of Thunder" is not really necessary to getting the benefit of it (although you should read "Thunder" anyway, because it's great). I think that "The Shinning" is exceptionally well-done, as such re-enactments go, but that Treehouse of Horror segments are generally at their strongest when they have the semblance of regular, slice of life Simpsons stories that got eerily corrupted. "Time and Punishment" is a particularly delightful example, for it allows its premise to develop at a relatively gentle pace and avoids advertising its nastiness upfront. It opens benignly, in a typical Simpsons fashion, with the family gathered at their breakfast table, and the opening gag, where Homer's hand becomes lodged, not once, but twice inside the toaster, could have served as the opener to any regular Simpsons episode (certainly by the Mirkin era). Only once Homer has reassembled the toaster and we get a glimpse of its space-age new abilities does the freakiness get underway, and even then, it takes its sweet time in getting to the full-on horror.

"Time and Punishment" also has the distinction of being the only segment of "Treehouse of Horror V" to end happily. "The Shinning" ends with the entire family freezing to death to the sounds of "One" from the musical A Chorus Line. "Nightmare Cafeteria" offers not one, but two possible endings, neither of which are favourable to Bart - either he gets liquefied in a blender or eviscerated by a greyhound while the rest of the family dances to an adjusted version of "One" from the musical A Chorus Line. "Time and Punishment" ends by returning us to where it all started, with the family seated nonchalantly at their breakfast table - this time round, there is a slightly disturbing twist to the arrangement, but not so disturbing that Homer is unwilling to overlook it. I noted previously when I covered "Bad Dream House" that, despite the non-canonical nature of the Halloween shorts, the writers initially seemed reluctant to end with anything other than a return to the status quo (the shock twist ending to "Treehouse of Horror II" notwithstanding). By "Treehouse of Horror IV" they seemed to grow a lot more accustomed to the idea of ending segments in truly bleak or harrowing places, and "V" had largely followed suit. With "Time and Punishment" we get the best of both worlds - an ostensible reaffirmation of normality that's actually anything but.

On the episode's DVD commentary, the production team acknowledge the debt to "A Sound of Thunder", although none of them are invested or reverent enough to remember the title of the story, just that it was derived from a work by Ray Bradbury. They also bring up that, unlike Stanley Kubrick, Bradbury was NOT a fan of The Simpsons, and might not have appreciated the show leeching off of his intellectual property. Unfortunate but true - it's my understanding that Bradbury was vocally critical of the series near the beginning of its run, which is why they in turn took such an open swipe at him in the Season 2 episode "Lisa's Substitute". Finally, they acknowledge that Bradbury, unlike Kubrick, was still alive at the time of the commentary's recording, but were confident that, "He's too weak to sue."

The audio commentary for "Time and Punishment" is a revealing one for multiple reasons. Among other gems, Groening tasks the rest of the crew with explaining Homer's line, "I'm the first non-Brazilian person ever to travel backwards through time," which left many viewers nonplussed - in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood muse that, "The reference to Brazilian time-travellers is bizarre - we draw a blank," and I suspect they speak for a lot of fans. If you were hoping that the commentary would finally shed light on this mystery, you would be sorely disappointed, because they never do explain it, which suggests two possible conclusions - either it was such an obscure, far-reaching reference that the crew themselves couldn't even commit it to memory, or it was a lot of random nonsense they made up on the spot (the latter would not surprise me, although Mirkin still thinks that it was a legitimate reference). What we do learn is that the line in question was originally scripted as, "I'm the first non-fictional character ever to travel through time" (take that, Eckels), which Groening insists was funnier. I'm going to disagree with Groening - "I'm the first non-fictional character" is the kind of profoundly obvious wisecrack that any common or garden sitcom could have made, and I'm not surprised that the writers felt obligated to come up with something a little more challenging. Given a choice between a head-scratcher and an overly obvious gag, I'll take the head-scratcher, although it is always preferable when there's a solution to the riddle.

Where the commentary gets really juicy, however, is when segment writer Greg Daniels starts talking about this character called Roy, a teenage boy he was convinced was living with the Simpsons in one of Homer's alternate realities. He's confident this sequence was fully animated, and must have been included in a broadcast version at some point because enough fans seem familiar with the character. Of course, any Simpsons obsessive worth their salt knows where he's getting his wires crossed. Roy, an archetypal Gen X-er who once inexplicably joined the Simpsons household, did indeed exist, but he appeared in the Season 8 episode, "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", not here. Daniels, though, isn't completely barking up the wrong tree - as it turns out, Roy's origins can be traced to this very episode. Allegedly the series was, at the time, under pressure from executive forces to introduce a character along the lines of Roy (possibly to compensate for the series' overall lack of prominent teenage or young adult characters). It seems that the character of Roy was initially devised for this episode, in direct response to this outsider's unwanted suggestion, but not actually used, leaving him free for Oakley and Weinstein to later dust off come "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show". (Questionable Wikipedia Information of The Day: the Wikipedia page for Treehouse of Horror V currently states that: "Roy was a lodger in [The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show], rather than a son", although Roy's connection to the family is never actually explained in that episode. It's not clear if he's a lodger, a distant relative, or even a fourth Simpsons child who's been glaringly retconned into the show's established continuity - the characters all just accept that he's there without question, and that's the joke in itself.) The absolute culmination of juice occurs when Mirkin asks, "Was it somebody from outside the show? I heard it was somebody from inside the show." Oh, now that would be a tasty twist. It's hard to tell just how serious they're being, but my money's on James L. Brooks. Call it a hunch.

Roy's exclusion from "Time and Punishment" and later resurrection in "Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie" is not a development I especially regret. A character as intrinsically meta as Roy, and so wrapped up in the anxieties surrounding the series' longevity, definitely feels more at home in the sly, knowing world of Season 8 than in the comparatively complacent Season 6. The joke has more pertinence in an episode built on the implicit admission that the series was running out of options of where to go from here. Nevertheless, his genesis in earlier drafts of "Time and Punishment" is suggestive of a fascinating, unexplored angle from which the segment could have delved into various alternate versions of The Simpsons; how certain details could be mixed and matched and the knock-on effects on the show's overall dynamic. As it is, the segment reinforces the same lessons as "The Last Temptation of Homer" of Season 5, which also involved alternate realities, and in which Homer likewise learned to embrace the present, imperfect universe. His opening reflections - "Marge, I've had my share of troubles, but sitting here with you and the kids in our cozy home, in this beautiful, free country...it just makes me realise that I'm really a lucky guy" - may seem, in the short-term, like nothing more than the set-up to that particularly inspired bit of slapstick involving the toaster, but it also sets out the basic underlying conflict of the segment and precisely what's at stake. It's an intrinsically unstable universe, founded on the kind of inane chaos where your hand will intermittently become lodged in the toaster, but as the balance is presently stacked, Homer understands that he has a pretty good deal of it, and spends the entire segment desperately trying to defend that. As with "Last Temptation", the various alternate realities the universe throws at him play like a series of great cosmic jokes at his expense; he samples one where he is forced to cow to his much-resented neighbour Ned Flanders, and another where humans are gargantuan in size, and he finds himself on the receiving end of the kind of retribution he unleashed on that mosquito. In another, Homer is tempted with what, ostensibly, looks to be his best possible reality - one where the family is rich, the kids are well-behaved and Patty and Selma are out of the picture - and momentarily decides to settle there, only to discover that there may in fact be a hidden cost. No one in this universe seems to know what a donut is. The great cosmic punchline to this particular gag comes when Homer abandons the reality only for it to start raining donuts outside - a concept so impossibly ridiculous it as though the universe is wilfully wearing its cruelty on its sleeve. One gets the impression that the universe deliberately dragged Homer back in time just to have a little sport with him...which would imply that the Simpsons universe is also behaving in a perfectly in-character manner throughout this segment.

"Time and Punishment" doesn't have quite the same satiric undercurrent as "The Shinning", which, in addition to lovingly homaging Kubrick's film, acts as a subtle rebuttal to contemporary hand-wringing about the supposed effects of media saturation. Although not quite as upfront on the matter as "Itchy & Scratchy Land", it makes the case that deprivation of media violence is more likely to result in murderous outbursts than exposure to it (of course, if it was making the same point about the other item denied to Homer, beer, then I'm not sure it works quite as well). The one point at which "Time and Punishment" seems to feed into the episode's wider social theme is in the narrative thread involving the alternate 1994 controlled by Ned Flanders. David Sims on The AV Club has some qualms about this aspect of the episode, reasoning that it's "almost too stereotypically dystopian and evil, with the only special Ned touch involving the forced smiling—surely the whole thing would be a theocracy?" Eh, I'm not so sure. Devout religiosity has been Ned's thing since as far back as Season 2, but at this point in the series I think the idea behind his character, and the Flanders unit as a whole, was more that they represented the kind of "perfect", socially desirable family that inevitably put the Simpsons in the shade. They were well-behaved, well-presented and always seemed to be in perfect harmony with one another, and Ned's dystopia in "Time and Punishment" represents the dark extension to all this sanitization - a neutered society in which dissension and individuality has been carefully vetted out and conformity is encouraged toward a single ideal. I suspect that Ned was chosen to be Deutscher's counterpart for three reasons. Firstly, he's a character to whom Homer would truly hate having to submit. Secondly, there is a whole ton of humor (and horror) to be gleaned from the discrepancies in Ned's friendly demeanour and the downright brutal spirit-breaking techniques he employs. Thirdly, Ned, being that spotless model of social desirability, readily embodies the kind of prudish, moralistic sensibilities that stand as a direct counterpoint to a culture enraptured with life's chaotic imperfections; sensibilities that have here been magnified to a truly nightmarish degree. There is an understated visual kink to Ned's dystopia, in that the Negative Nellies who are forced to undergo Re-Neducation are made to dress like either himself or Maude, according to their gender, making it clear that Ned aspires to mold the entire world in his family's anodyne image. The sequence is a stark (and darkly hilarious) warning against any culture where individual thought or expression is obliterated in favour of a forced harmony that is horrifying in its falseness, perfectly exemplified in the gruesome discomforts of those metal hook-induced smiles.

The ending of the segment is double-edged, for while it appears to reaffirm the status quo, it does so only superficially. There is the disturbing matter that Homer does not actually make it back to his own timeline. He arrives at a reality that seems like a pretty good match, but for one unsettling detail - human evolution has, somewhere along the line, incorporated long reptilian tongues, which are used to scoop up food (begging the question as to why humans also developed cutlery in this timeline, because they don't seem to have any use for it). Homer is momentarily shocked, but decides that he can live with it, and with that the segment fades out. It is an optimistic ending (in a sense, it reminds me of the ending to the 1985 Twilight Zone episode "Wordplay", in that Homer ends up exhibiting the same resilience and willingness to adapt as Robert Klein's character), for Homer upholds the same perspective he expressed at the beginning of the segment - where things are not ideal, but more-or-less okay, one should find the value in that. Homer realises that things are as good as they're ever likely to get, and that to throw it away over something as insignificant, in the grand scheme of things, as reptile tongues would simply be picky. Throughout the segment, we have the irony that the "perfection" Homer is trying to regain is really imperfection that has the virtue of being familiar to him, and it is perhaps an awareness of this that ultimately causes him to be less particular. He accepts the compromise, and learns once again to be at peace with the universe.

Besides, reptile tongues aren't such a bad thing. Presumably, that whole debate as to whether or not it's physically possible for humans to lick their own elbows is totally moot in this reality.