The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular (aka As The Weeks Went On, So Did The Cartoons)

It's been a while since I last talked about a Simpsons clip show on here. Long overdue is my coverage of the clip show that many fans (although not I) would rate as the strongest of a questionable bunch - "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" (3F31), which first aired December 3rd 1995 as part of the show's seventh season.

"138th Episode Spectacular" is a more challenging episode to analyse than "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show" or "Another Simpsons Clip Show", thanks to the total lack of anything resembling a traditional Simpsons plot. Whatever our feelings on the artistic merit or integrity of being served up a casserole of reheated clips in place of a completely fresh narrative, its predecessors do at least offer the family the opportunity for a little personal growth and reflection amid the forced reminiscing; the recycled material is structured, however vaguely, so as to be building toward something of meaning for the Simpsons in the present. "Spectacular" eschews a framing narrative in favour of linking segments with everyone's favourite C-list fish fetishist, Troy McClure, who in a bit of reality-blurring is presenting the celebration from the Springfield Civic Auditorium. Troy, who prior to this episode had never interacted with the Simpsons in person and should logically have no idea who these people even are (although that would all change soon enough), has temporarily detached himself from the show's internal universe in order to provide to provide an external commentary. As such, this boasts the distinction of being the series' first non-canonical episode outside of the Treehouse of Horrors. It's an obvious precursor to the criminally undervalued Season 8 offering "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", which uses Troy in a very similar fashion. Both episodes are characterised by a veneer of showbiz phoniness purposely designed to signal creative bankruptcy, and Troy, with his feigned enthusiasm and fixed plastic smile, provides the perfect human face for that veneer. I suspect that the unusually protracted emphasis on Troy is a huge factor in why this episode enjoys a somewhat sunnier reputation than others of its ilk. Both of Phil Hartman's recurring characters are obviously firm fan favourites and, compared to Lionel Hutz, Troy rarely got the opportunity to be involved directly in episode plots, "Spectacular" being one of only three appearances in which he was used as more than just a one-scene side character. That in itself makes it quite a rare and precious thing.

"The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" was written by Jon Vitti, who was no stranger to the clip show arena, having previously penned "Another Simpsons Clip Show". In both cases, Vitti was so uneasy about having his name attached to something so discreditable that he hid behind the moniker of a certain child-eating, shape-shifting clown (this time, director David Silverman followed suit and assumed the pseudonym Pound Foolish). Vitti admits on the DVD commentary that he felt more comfortable with how this one turned out, chiefly for the fact that it advertises its magpie nature upfront, whereas "Another" opens more deceptively, like any regular Simpsons episode. Vitti also feels that "Another" hampered itself by approaching the series with a degree of reverence that "Spectacular" utterly spurns. The killer clown doth sell "Another Simpsons Clip Show" too short, methinks, although there's no denying that "Spectacular" gave the show an opportunity to be inordinately uncharitable toward itself, one of its most infamous gags being a particularly brutal one at the expense of the late Bleeding Gums Murphy, whose passing was viewed as a more serious matter in the episode in which it occurred (although in that regard he still fared better than poor Dr Marvin Monroe, who wasn't even considered important enough to receive his own exit arc). Gruellingly honest "Spectacular" may be, but it's also one of the series' fluffier pieces, and probably the fluffiest of the entire classic era. For all of its self-deprecating charms, the lack of even a perfunctory narrative does mean that "Spectacular" inevitably comes off as a shallow affair, one that's fun but offers little substance beneath the novelties (say what you will about the two previous clip shows, there were stakes in both their cases). I would suggest, however, that there is, once again, an implicit narrative being conveyed amid the collaging - it's one that I think "Spin-Off Showcase" would tackle a whole lot better later on, but "Spectacular" still makes for a perfectly respectable test run.

All three classic era clip shows, regardless of how straight the face with which they play themselves, contain a particularly pivotal line of dialogue that accentuates the unmistakably sour intentions behind the reminiscing. In "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", it was about attempting (perhaps in vain) to relive long lost summers. In "Another Simpsons Clip Show" it was about opening up old wounds - discovering that certain summers are perhaps better off lost. In "Spectacular", I think the ethos of the episode is best summed up in Troy's comment, "As the weeks went on, so did the cartoons" - a seemingly banal statement on the development of the Ullman shorts that encapsulates, in the tidiest of nutshells, the entire history of The Simpsons and a few of the contemporary anxieties about where it might be headed. In its predecessors, the most grudging attacks on the entire clip show exercise were reserved for the episode titles, and "Spectacular" is really no exception, the 138th episode being a conspiciously arbitrary milestone. There's nothing particularly special about that number, aside from the fact that it was, at the time, considered a big one for a show of this nature. "Hasn't this cartoon been running for an extraordinarily long amount of time?" seems to be the underlying point at the heart of "Spectacular", a question that speaks to the impressive strength and endurance of the series, but also to the eternal drudgery in having to keep the damned thing going. It was a tension that dominated much of Oakley and Weinstein's tenure as showrunners, the implicit problem one that Troy McClure would raise explicitly at the end of "Spin-Off Showcase" - how do you keep The Simpsons fresh and funny after so many years? "Spectacular" is not so much a celebration of the show's longevity as a public unmasking that openly invites us to see the cracks within the series, something perfectly encapsulated in the visual metaphor of the auditorium set, which has been done up to resemble the family's living room, and which, from certain angles, betrays intermittent glimpses of the dark, empty stage space beyond.

When I covered "So It's Come To This", I noted that the prolificness of the clip show in US television (at least back in the day) can be attributed to their conforming to the basic principles in George Ritzer's theory of McDonaldization, mainly efficiency (clip shows mean a higher episode count at lower costs) and predictability. The assumption behind clip shows is that audiences don't mind being offered the same material all over again because humans are naturally drawn to what is familiar and and will enjoy getting to relive all of their favourite gags in quick succession. In that regard, "Spectacular" is something of a boat rocker; it offers a very different clip show experience to its predecessors, in pooling from a more adventurous range of material. Only around the middle portion of the episode, when Troy answers a sampling of faux fan mail, does it settle for simply regurgitating the familiar, yielding a couple of demo reels for Homer's devolving intelligence and Smithers' closet sexuality. Elsewhere, the episode concerns itself with quite unchartered territory, extending way back beyond the usual boundaries to the series' roots and to the dark corners that had previously been concealed from public eyes. For viewers familiar only with the show in its current, stand-alone form, it was a rare (and potentially startling) opportunity to get acquainted with its origins as a series of crudely animated supporting skits on The Tracey Ullman Show - a step further back than the show, in its contemporary form, was perhaps comfortable with its memories being cast. Elsewhere, discarded footage from favourite episodes saw the light of day for the very first time (Troy's term, "Cut-out Classics", being an obvious oxymoron) and, most shockingly of all, we learned of the existence of an alternate solution to the previous summer's "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter, in which Burns named a different suspect as his shooter. Unlike a more conventional clip show, its purpose is not to immerse you in the cozy glow of nostalgia, but instead to upset everything you thought you knew about The Simpsons. It is, in many respects, an anti-clip show, a clip show for people who don't like clip shows, not altogether dissimilar to the South Park episode "City on The Edge of Forever", in that it presents us with a version of The Simpsons were everything is fundamentally wrong at every turning - not least, the fictitious representation of series creator Matt Groening as a gun-toting crackpot who, unbeknownst to us, was feeding us subliminal right-wing messages in the opening sequence every week.

For me, the best of the clip shows will always be "Another Simpsons Clip Show" - I know that's not a popular opinion, but it's a hill I will nevertheless die on. It's the one that I think does the best job in illustrating the futility of retreating down memory lane and taking comfort in past adventures - adventures which, on closer inspection, have distinctly negative implications that might reverberate within the present. It is, however, of little surprise to me that "Spectacular" is the one most commonly favoured among fans. After all, it has a ton of footage that, at one time or another, you couldn't see anywhere else, almost to the point that I feel that the presence of so much novel material gives it an unfair advantage over the other clip shows. The question is, how does it hold up now, when the march of time and media have brutally chiselled away at a chunk of that novelty? 

Clip shows in general are today regarded as something of an outdated television convention - The Simpsons hasn't made one since "Gump Roast" of Season 13 - making more sense in an era when viewers would not have known if or when they would get to see their old favourites again. The increased availability of complete show inventories through DVD box sets and, more recently, streaming has somewhat robbed them of their function. In a post-DVD world, "Spectacular" is left with little advantage over its brethren - deleted scenes, alternate endings and all sorts of miscellaneous goodies that, in Troy's words, "You were never meant to see" can be easily accessed at the touch of two or three buttons. As Erik Adams notes in his review on the AV Club, the episode now has the air of a "glorified DVD extra...were it not for the extra work that went into the Troy McClure sequences, it’d be indistinguishable from a retrospective featurette whipped up for the Complete Seventh Season box set". A distinction "Spectacular" does retain is that it's still one of the very few venues in which you can legally see a selection of the Ullman shorts, although only two of these, "Good Night" and "Bathtime", are shown in their entirety. The Ullman shorts have remained a surprising obscurity across the years, although if you're really interested then uploads of those can be easily accessed online, albeit seldom in outstanding quality.

Ultimately, "Spectacular" is at its strongest when it does appear to be making some statement on the current status of the series, even if very little from the show's regular inventory is actually shown. Of all the Simpsons clip shows, this one feels the most consciously structured to comment pointedly on not only the development of the show and how far it had come, but also its imminent, possibly concurrent decline. Professor Lawrence Prince's hilariously concise observation that "Homer gets stupider every year", represented a common charge from fans on Homer's continued debasement over the years (the people expressing this concern back in 1995 did so not unreasonably, although I think that Bachman Turner Overdrive might have had apt words for them nevertheless). The selection of clips used to assess this point is somewhat lackadaisical - for Season 6, they used a clip from the "Treehouse of Horror V" segment "The Shinning", in which Homer's over the top behaviour is NOT a sign of excessive stupidity, but a well-observed parody of Jack Nicholson's scenery chewing in the role of Jack Torrance - but we nevertheless get a decent taste of how increasingly outlandish the series had gotten as it went along, starting in the relatively grounded world of "Blood Feud" and "Flaming Moe" and (discounting the Halloween clip) ending up with the plausibility stretchings of "Deep Space Homer" (put a pin in that, because it comes up elsewhere in the episode).

The episode as a whole takes us from the visual grotesqueness of "Good Night", and the show's messy birthings, to more-or-less the present day and the conceptual grotesqueness of "Who Shot Mr Burns?", an intriguing mystery that ended with the deliberately far-fetched revelation that a baby had pulled the trigger. It's important to note that the alternate scenario shown in "Spectacular"  - where Burns was wounded by his best friend Smithers - was a dummy ending created purely to keep the animators from leaking the answer, and never considered seriously as a possible solution to the mystery (I emphasise that, in part, because I find the mere suggestion of Smithers as the gunman to be profoundly upsetting). Nevertheless, we might ponder if its existence undermines the validity of the ending we were given, in illustrating just how arbitrarily things could be tweaked in another direction, or if it ends up vindicating the actual solution as the only one that makes any kind of narrative or intuitive sense. The thinly-veiled cultural reference in Troy's remark about ignoring Simpson DNA evidence aside, that actually isn't the issue with the Smithers solution - Burns still has his lollipop tussle with Maggie, so he could presumably have acquired her eyelash in much the same manner. The real issue has to do with how the gun used to shoot Burns ended up inside the Simpsons' car, which isn't accounted for in this version of events (and Smithers obviously kept the gun on him, if he still went on to shoot Jasper). But the DNA thread does, at best, get turned into rather a weak red herring, while Smithers' established alibi is casually fudged. Ultimately, though, the major selling point behind Maggie being the shooter is underlined in the flagrant ridiculousness of Burns and Smithers' relationship resuming normalcy outside of a 5% pay cut for the latter - she was one of the few characters who could do the deed and reasonably face no repercussions. There is the status quo to maintain (Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital notwithstanding).

Of all the truly salacious tidbits on offer, I'd say that the "Cut-out Classics" hold up the least well. It's a fairly arbitrary selection of deleted scenes (if you've trawled through the extras for each season's DVD release, you'll know that they had a lot of options to choose from), with only two clips that really benefit from being recontextualised here. It is, in all cases, easy enough to deduce why they might have been cut - presumably, the writers had enough confidence in their comedic merit for them to have made it into full animation, but the majority of them are weird tangents that don't contribute anything to the overarching narrative. The deleted scene from "Krusty Gets Kancelled" is the only one that would have furthered the plot in any way, in that it contains the pivotal development promised by the title, but even then the final edit had more impact for omitting it. The excised scene from "Treehouse of Horror IV" gives Lionel Hutz more closure than he received in the version that aired, but I think the implication there - that he scarpered and had no intention of coming back - is far funnier than him returning to present Marge with an empty pizza box. Sometimes less is more.

Some of them may have been excised for slightly more complex reasons than needing to speed up the narrative flow. As per the DVD commentary, the clip from "Homer and Apu" was cut because Bollywood was deemed too esoteric a target for The Simpsons to be ribbing. The clip from "Burns' Heir" was cut because Richard Simmons was deemed too obvious a target for The Simpsons to be ribbing. And, let's face it, as delightfully unnerving as that robotic Simmons is, it would be an inanely out of character item for someone as zeitgeist-challenged as Burns to own. Whereas most of these cut-out classics I can readily swallow as once having conceivably been part of their respective episodes, there's something about that robotic Richard Simmons encounter that strikes me as intrinsically inauthentic - it's so over the top, left of field and at odds with the friction of the scene in question that it's difficult to contemplate it fitting in without the benefit of Troy's quotation marks. I am not questioning the legitimacy of the clip, but it does feel like it was always conceived to go along with a show of this nature than with its supposed mother episode. It comes across more as a parody of a deleted scene than an actual one, an alternate resolution to the stand-off between Homer and Burns that's deliberately jarring in how much sillier it is than anything leading up to it (I think there's a good reason why they saved this clip for last - it may be one of the most out-there Simpsons cut scenes, period). That the clip receives a callback at the end of the episode, when we're treated to a montage of naked Simpsons arranged to the same KC & The Sunshine Band track emitted by robot Simmons, merely reinforces the idea that the clip's natural environment was always right here amid the show at its loosest and most pointedly self-aware. And yet, it seems that one of the greatest legacies of "Spectacular" has been to permanently rewire many a viewer's perception of "Burns' Heir" - I've encountered a number of fans who report that, upon hearing Homer's challenge of "Do your worst!", they reflexively connect the dots to Burns' response in "Spectacular", and it feels jarring when Simmons doesn't appear (I won't lie, I do it myself). Something in their heads tells them that this is how the scene should play out. Which raises an interesting question - if a scene is excised, but we see it anyway, is it still a legitimate part of the episode? Does it potentially undermine the authenticity of the cut we were given? At the very least, it gives us a glimpse into what could have been (and, in the case of robotic Richard Simmons, was anyway, thanks to "Spectacular"), making the final product seem less like the definitive version, but just one of several possibilities.

The other deleted scene that I feel works a lot better here than it would have done in its original form, or even as a stand-alone DVD extra (albeit for very different reasons), is that of "Mother Simpson", an episode that would at the time still have been pretty fresh in viewers' minds, having aired only a couple of weeks prior to "Spectacular". It's also the most restrained cut-out of the bunch - no dancing robots or pornography-peddling clowns, just Homer and Mona sitting at the breakfast table, continuing their game of catch up after decades apart. Ostensibly, the punchline of the scene is in Homer assuring Mona that, despite working at a nuclear power plant, he does not, in practice, support the nuclear power industry on the grounds that he's such a lousy worker. But a far subtler gag occurs just before, when Homer references the events of "Deep Space Homer" of Season 5 and asks Mona if she was aware that, two years prior, he was blasted into space as part of a publicity-baiting mission by NASA. The pivotal beat is in Mona's casual response - "I read all about it...after all, it was national news" - which is, when all is said and done, a more passive-aggressive variation on Frank Grimes' overtly disgusted reaction on being related the exact same story a season later. In both cases, it's an acknowledgement on the show's part of how debased its own adherence to basic plausibility had become in recent seasons, with Homer the astronaut being their mutual watermark for the series at the very peak of its absurdity (although a baby gunning down an old man has got to come close). In its early years, the kinds of adventures the family were involved in were of the low-key variety that typically wouldn't extend far beyond the local papers, if they even made that. Since then, Homer has enjoyed exposure of such magnitude that even someone as supposedly out of the loop as Mona has a decent idea of what he's been doing. Such humor was a defining characteristic of the Oakley/Weinstein era, when the series was evidently building toward an existential crisis regarding its own longevity, a malaise that came to dominate a significant chunk of the atmosphere in Season 8 (see below). You can catch traces of it in Season 7, but it tended to be a bit more stealthily disguised - take Marge's pep talk to Bart and Lisa toward the end of "The Day The Violence Died", for example, the actual purpose of which was touched on a little in this entry - with Mona's line being one of the earliest, if not the earliest examples. It's probably for the best that it didn't make the final cut of "Mother Simpson" - such snarky self-deprecation would have felt out of place in one of the most sincere and heartfelt episodes of the entire series - but it's great that "Spectacular" managed to preserve that status nonetheless.

Mona's words have additional resonance in this episode, for their logical conclusion is something that Troy makes all-too explicit in his closing reflection: "Who knows what adventures they'll have between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable?" Judging by a few of the adventures the family had in Season 8, this was a question that was evidently causing the production crew a few sleepless nights (not that they were sleeping much anyway, on their work schedule). A quarter-century later, and Troy's grim prophesy has still not come to pass, but throughout Oakley and Weinstein's reign the series seemed increasing resigned to likelihood that it was nearing the end of its natural lifespan, with multiple episodes underlining the basic practicality as to what more there possibly was to do with these characters after so many years on the air. Troy's words are ostensibly optimistic, pointing to the many exciting possibilities that lie ahead, but are undercut by a stark and deliberately unsentimental reminder that everything, even a cartoon institution as formidable as The Simpsons, is ultimately mortal, and that profit has the final word on everything. But there is another implicit threat in that statement, and one that did prove far more prescient - the suggestion that the show would keep on going specifically until it became unprofitable, as opposed to bowing out because the best of its years were now behind it. With hindsight, Troy's statement wasn't a warning that the end was in sight, but that the insanity was only just beginning. You thought Homer going into space was stretching the limits? Do Bachman Turner Overdrive have words for you!

Milky Way: Red vs Blue (aka The Cars That Ate Paris, Texas)

If there was an advertising character who simultaneously terrified me and had my deepest sympathies, it's the Red Car from Milky Way's "Red vs Blue" campaign. The animated TV ad, which first appeared in 1989, depicted a race between two auto-mobiles, a red 1951 Buick Roadmaster and a blue 1959 Cadillac on an hours-long journey between the fictional towns of Lunchville and Dinnertown, located in some kind of alternate reality mid-century America. A mid-century America where the cars are not only living beings, but some are apparently predisposed to devouring anything unfortunate enough to come into close proximity with them. The ad was of course a cunningly-conceived metaphor, with Red and Blue symbolising two contrasting strategies for making it through the long, monotonous hours between lunch and dinner. Red is a compulsive snacker who consumes anything indiscriminately (from trucks to prickly trees, as we are both told and shown), while Blue eats only one item along route - the chocolate/nougat concoction manufactured by Mars and named for a galaxy - which gives him the energy to complete the journey without putting a dent in his appetite. Ultimately, the binge-eating Red is forced to drop out of the competition (literally), as he gets too overloaded to reach Dinner, while the leaner of our two sugar junkies speeds on to victory. You may already be detecting something slightly questionable about this whole scenario - it's not the broader issue as to why a car would be compelled to eat the local scenery in the first place, although we will get to that.

The ad ends with Blue passing a neon billboard proclaiming the Milky Way to be "The sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite." It's not clear to me on what science Mars were basing this audacious claim; I kept my eyes peeled for a footnote or disclaimer and couldn't see one. I suspect it basically all came down to the fact that Milky Way bars were lighter in density than their close cousins, the Mars Bar and the Marathon. Or Snickers.

Not surprisingly, there was some backlash against the campaign from anti-sugar lobbyists, who questioned why Mars was positing a candy bar as a healthy between-meal snack. The Independent Television Commission sided with Mars, on the grounds that the ads clearly depicted indiscriminate snacking as a negative thing via the cautionary example of Red. I'm not sure if that ruling holds up to scrutiny, however, as Mars weren't exactly promoting healthy eating habits, but rather championing the lesser of two very blatant evils. The ad's perspective on nutrition is obviously quite superficial; a Milky Way is hailed as a sensible snacking choice because it "won't ruin your appetite", as opposed to how much good it actually does the body. We all know that there's a plethora of healthier options the Blue Car could have chosen over a Milky Way. And, let's face it, the explicit encouragement to eat candy in between meals always was something of a dubious marketing angle for a campaign targeted primarily at children. Keep in mind, though, that this was an era when junk food advertisers basically had free rein over children's media - they were, after all, what was keeping commercial kids' television afloat. The campaign lived on long enough to garner a sequel, this one science fiction themed, focussing on a race between a red meteor and a blue satellite. Same narrative, different dress, only in this case I cry foul, as it looks to me like the twin planets Boss n' Nova deliberately sabotaged the meteor's run. Where was the referee?!

When the campaign debuted, I would have been four years old, and I suspect the central metaphor was lost on me. Pretty much every food product advertised on television suggested that you would acquire super powers if you signed their figurative dotted line - whether that power entailed turning into a fuzzy yellow monster (Sugar Puffs), making your enemies flee in terror (Weetabix), or just making you inhumanly cacophonic (Trio) - and I doubt that I saw Blue Car's example as any different. I was much more preoccupied with the nature of the scenario and how freakishly disturbing it was. The idea of a living, breathing car that lunges at everything it passes and violently packs it into its non-existent digestive system is like something out of your darkest nightmares, or at least one of the more warped Monty Python sketches. And having Red eat a truck, of all things, certainly raises a barrage of uncomfortable questions. If the Red Car and the Blue Car are alive, then what reason is there to believe that the truck isn't either? And if it isn't alive, then isn't the implication that Red ate it with the driver inside? In either case, would that be considered murder? Or maybe just the law of the jungle in this auto-mobile society? To be fair, Blue did look pretty intimidated when the truck came into view, so an argument can possibly be made that Red swallowed in self-defence. It is admittedly difficult to assign moral value when you're dealing with anthropomorphic cars. But already I find this living auto-mobile universe to be infinitely more enthralling than Pixar's attempt.

The Red Car, of course, was supposed to come off as somewhat monstrous. We're clued in right from the start as to which of the two we're intended to sympathise with by the nature of their respect smiles (more of a grimace in Red's case) - they gave Red pointy predator teeth and Blue a cheesy, non-threatening grin. Here's the thing, though - as much as that Red Car and his insatiable voraciousness terrified me, he was always the one I sincerely rooted for. I'd like to say that I always knew, on a subconscious level, what that Blue Car was really up to, but I think that Red appealed to me because, in the end, his freaky eating habits were as endearing as they were alarming - that hair-raising moment where he swallows a truck and its hypothetical occupant whole was, on top of everything else, delightfully animated. Blue, by contrast, was frankly rather dull. He might have had all the glory, at least as far as the ad was concerned, but there's no question that Red had all the character. As such, I was always really bummed by that ending where he not only loses the race (inevitable though it was), he drops down a ravine and we never even learn if he came out again in one piece (and the frenzied way the narrator screams "Oh no, the bridge has gone!" was ultimately more chilling to me than anything Red himself got up to). There was a print version of the ad that showed up in various children's comics in the early 90s (nowhere were impressionable young eyes free from Mars's nefarious agenda) which had a less gruesome outcome for Red - there, he simply couldn't fit through a gate to the final location - but it's the principle, dammit. Red was a colourful anti-hero, while Blue was a flashy corporate shill.

Like this ad or lump it, it is a fondly-regarded classic, enough so that Red and Blue were later returned to television screens in 2009 in time for its twentieth anniversary. The world they lived in had visibly changed, however. For one, they were no longer competing in hours-long races between Lunchville and Dinnertown, but Playville and Light Town. And the explicit message being conveyed by Mars had undergone some notable revisions. 2009 was an entirely different ball game - after decades of bombarding children with non-stop encouragement to eat unhealthy food products, people were suddenly starting to get very jumpy about the consequences. Childhood obesity had become one of the hot issues of the day, and there were now much tighter restrictions on how junk foods were allowed to promote themselves. Any suggestion that candy bars could constitute a wholesome between-meals snack was now a huge no-no. In its place, we're told that Blue chose the Milky Way, not because it wouldn't spoil his appetite, but because it's "something that tastes just right", while the neon sign he passes at the end instructs us to "Lighten up and play." A common concession that junk food marketing now made was to include some kind of disclaimer about the importance of counterbalancing their consumption with regular physical activity, and I presume that the switch from Lunch/Dinner to Play/Light was an attempt to change the implied metaphor from between-meal snacking to rewards between exercise sessions. The implication now, I suppose, is that Red indulges so much that he leaves himself too bloated to participate in further activity. Which works well enough for the purposes of the metaphor I guess, although it does make me contemplate the irony that, by the very nature of that metaphor, Red was always a proponent of burning calories as you consumed them. He was, after all, up for running the hours-long route between Lunch/Play and Dinner/Light - the Buick was no couch potato.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #35: Hooch Lemon Mosquito

Watching this bizarre TV ad from 1999, it's hard for me not to be put in mind of one of my favourite movies, Barton Fink, the first hour or so of which regularly checks in on the ongoing enmity between the title character and the strangely sinister mosquito with whom he's forced to share a hotel room. The mosquito in Barton Fink is never shown to be anything other than an ordinary mosquito - the most remarkable thing about it is that it's made it all the way to Los Angeles, which one character assures us is not its natural habitat - nor does it, in itself, amount to anything more than a mundane, if persistent, irritation for Barton. Yet the mosquito maintains an awfully unsettling presence for that first hour, in part because it's a minor menace that feels magnified within the empty inertia that defines Barton's initial Hollywood nightmare. It is this eerie, omnipresent force that Barton senses constantly but is never quite able to pinpoint. This Hooch ad focusses on another battle between man and mosquito, in which the balance is tipped thanks to the latter's taste for alcoholic lemonade. And, like Barton Fink, it really attempts to bring out the inherent horror in the notion that your helpless hide is but a waiting buffet to an opportunistic hematophage, this time with an overt savagery that has the 32-second ad playing more like a miniature slasher flick.

The alcopop, a sort of successor to the wine cooler that took off in the mid-1990s, immediately became one of the hot controversies of the day due to concerns that the beverages were being stealthily marketed with a view to enticing underage drinkers. They were the subject of a particularly vicious media outcry in the UK, and so immense was the backlash that many supermarket chains refused to stock the product altogether. Hooch, one of the most prominent alcopop brands, attempted to redress its negative image in 1999 with a campaign of unnerving ads aimed unambiguously at the adult set, albeit adults with a very visceral sense of humor; a sister ad that appeared at the same time had a patron at a trendy bar discovering that his Hooch-infused piss had the power to split urinals in half. The intended message, in both cases, is that Hooch indulgence is not for the squeamish.

As with Barton, we get a sense from the start that the unlucky blood bag in this scenario is being purposely targeted; the constant cutting back and forth between the man and mosquito gives the distinct impression that the latter has selected its prey from the outset, that the confrontation is inevitable and that this unsettled gentleman is up against a force much more powerful than himself. For all of the steely determination of our beastly invader, its mission is very nearly thwarted by the presence of a simple glass pane that stands between itself and its target, but a few gulps of Hooch Lemon are all that's needed to give that perfectly-honed killer instinct the cutting edge. Compared to Barton, who fought his own six-legged nemesis in a dingy hotel room, this man apparently enjoys quite the swanky lifestyle, getting to rest his head inside a chic-looking pad, although the pad evidentially takes on a very different character in the dead of night (it is admittedly hard, though, to imagine the surrounding landscape looking any less forbidding in the light of day). The assorted items that adorn the balcony are tell-tale signs of a leisurely diurnal existence, but the inside of the building seems uncomfortably barren, the drab grey slabs that dominate the interior giving off the sensation more of entrapment than recreation; a sweaty, gnawing claustrophobia that seems contrary to the spaciousness of the abode (in some respects it's not altogether different from how those soap-squirrelling minimalists lived). Unlike Barton Fink, which was all about immersing the viewer in the cut-price seediness of Barton's world, this ad centres upon the horrors of a hematophage encounter in the lap of ostensible luxury, a subversion emphasised in having the mosquito ultimately thwart the man by indulging in the symbols of his own decadence.

The ad ends with the mosquito landing its inevitable "kill", although it possibly oversells its absurdity in the visual punchline, which features a close-up shot of the victim screaming with an almost cartoon intensity (it's not altogether clear to me whether he's screaming in reaction to the mosquito bite, or because he slapped himself while attempting to take out the mosquito). Uncomfortable close-ups were featured prominently in the aforementioned ad set inside a trendy bar, although with nothing quite so jarring over-animated; I guess the visual of that urinal splitting in two was considered absurdity enough. Here, it ultimately works against the creeping atmosphere the ad spent the past 27 seconds sustaining; the sight of that Hooch-drinking mosquito is obviously ludicrous in itself, but there's a certain genuine, understated menace to it - a mounting sense of dread as to how the scenario will ultimately play out, and that overtly comical screaming shot, grotesque as is, always struck me as a tad anti-climactic. Edited from some TV broadcasts was the shot of the victim's female companion waking up screaming, having intuitively sensed that mosquito perform its malign business; compared to Audrey, who was sharing Barton's bed when his own mosquito conflict reached its climax, she might consider herself lucky.

Both the mosquito and urinal ads were directed by Eric Coigneoux. Among his other credits is a French ad for Eco Emballages involving a close encounter between a man and a bear. That one looks as though it might turn ugly, but the outcome is surprisingly wholesome.