All Singing, All Dancing (aka Last Night At La La Land)

When "All Singing, All Dancing" (aka episode 5F24) first aired on January 4th 1998, it was the fourth installment in what, at the time, looked to be an established tradition of Simpsons clip shows. By now it seemed an accepted wisdom that these things were going to show up every other season or so (whether the fans appreciated them or not). In actuality, "All Singing, All Dancing" would prove to be the penultimate specimen in a doomed lineage - after this, clip shows as a practice just faded out, resurfacing briefly for a final hurrah (if you could call it that) with Season 13's "Gump Roast". It's well-documented (since they bring it up in every pertinent DVD commentary) that the production staff were not fond of the format and only made them out of executive obligation; in the case of "All Singing, All Dancing", it is perhaps a testament to how little they thought of the end-product that they trotted it out at a time when viewers might have been too preoccupied with getting the new year in order after the barrage of seasonal hangovers to worry terribly about that week's lack of original Simpsons content.

"All Singing, All Dancing" dropped midway through Season 9, a very patchy transitional period for the series consisting of holdovers from the Oakley-Weinstein era, the early days of Mike Scully's reign of terror and guest appearances from former showrunners Al Jean, Mike Reiss and David Mirkin (the last of whom oversaw "All Singing, All Dancing"). It's no secret that I don't much care for Season 9 as a whole; there's a lot I could say about the various missteps that were made that pushed the series off of course, but for now I'll just sum up my number one grievance -  this was the first season in five years not to feature an appearance from Sideshow Bob. Season 9 was an upsettingly Bob-free experience - Seasons 2 and 4, which had no actual Bob episodes, at least had the decency to give him non-speaking cameos. The sole acknowledgement he received in all of Season 9 was a very fleeting shout-out in "This Little Wiggy". Didn't that just jinx things good and proper?

The DVD cover art, though, is precious.

Being a clip show, you can bet that "All Singing, All Dancing" is seldom rated as one of the higher points of a wobbly season. There is, however, a valid sentiment underpinning this oft-maligned, music-driven mash-up - which is to say, hasn't The Simpsons yielded some legitimately brilliant sonic compositions over the years? "Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?" and "The Monorail Song" are both diabolical in their infectiousness. And face it, the only reason you rate "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" as highly as you do is because of Burns' "See My Vest" number (cards on table, is there really anything else about that episode that sticks out to you at all? Aside from maybe the Shar Pei?). It seems a waste, really, that The Simpsons Movie contained no comparable song and dance sequences - one can only imagine what they might have accomplished working within a theatrical scope - something I can only attribute to the animated musical being considered the trough of fashion in 2007.

The episode opens with Homer returning from the video store with the family's evening entertainment; Marge had requested Forest Whittaker's Waiting To Exhale (1995), starring Whitney Houston, while Lisa's heart was set on the back-up option, Douglas McGrath's adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma (1996), starring Gwyneth Paltrow. Both are disappointed by his actual choice, Joshua Logan's Paint Your Wagon (1969), starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, which Homer assumes will be a regular carnage-filled shoot-em-up western. But then, as we'd already seen in "Fear of Flying", Homer is a poor judge when it comes to deciphering the nature of a movie from its cover and title. He's appalled to discover that Paint Your Wagon is actually - get this - a musical, and that the characters solve their problems through singing and dancing instead of gruesome bloodbaths. Homer expresses his disdain for the picture by ejecting the rented VHS tape into the trash and denouncing singing as "the lowest form of communication", whereupon Marge and Lisa (who'd rated Paint Your Wagon as toe-tappin' fun) try to convince him of the powerful musical streak that runs deep throughout the town, backing up their point by referring to various euphonious interludes from previous adventures. The grand and inevitable irony being that this entire argument takes the form of a song.

Although these Simpsons clip shows are something that I've covered in the past with disproportionate passion (bolstered by the knowledge that nobody else on Earth is likely to share that passion, so if I don't provide them with such fawning, drawn-out analyses, who will?), I will state upfront that I never had any intention of extending that devotion to "All Singing, All Dancing". By the time we get to this one - and even more so with the final clip show, "Gump Roast" - I find my that my patience is somewhat tested and my opinions start aligning with the majority, which is to say that I'd sooner be watching a regular episode. I did, however, have a slight change of heart which made me want to go back and examine this one a little deeper. Out of sheer curiosity, I'd gone to look up the AV Club's review of "All Singing, All Dancing" and, after quite a bit of double-checking, determined that no such item existed. To the contrary, the AV Club has reviews for every Simpsons episode from Season 1 to 9 except this one lonesome pariah, which they appear to have very deliberately and stealthily skipped over, leaping directly from "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" to "Bart Carny" with no acknowledgement of all the musical fruitiness sandwiched in between. Odd, because they deemed all three previous clip shows worthy of their own individual write-ups. Did they really consider it such an impossibly daunting task to have to spin out a few paragraphs on this one? What was it about "All Singing, All Dancing" that made it so especially exasperating that the AV Club were compelled to throw in the towel, completism be damned? I felt as though a gauntlet was being extended to me, to delve in and see if this episode could withstand any kind of protracted probing. I guess the AV Club's omission awakened some deep protective instinct in me - which might not be enough to actually bring me around to "All Singing, All Dancing", mind, but I'm willing to give it a fair shake.

While I consider it somewhat brazen that they skipped it altogether (if you're going to be undertaking that kind of rigid, episode-by-episode analysis, then I'm not sure you're really in a position to be differentiating between worthy and unworthy episodes), I can sympathise with the AV Club's trepidation. "All Singing, All Dancing" is a gut-wrenching episode to anybody looking to say anything at all substantial, and at length, because it hinges on quite possibly the thinnest premise the series had boasted up until this point. There's very little plot linking the clips together - once we get past the Paint Your Wagon opening (which is really good), the family just discuss (in song form) how much they love/hate singing, between "music videos" culled from previous episodes. The selection of clips itself is honestly pretty solid - if you just want to review a collection of musical highs from the series back-to-back, then "All Singing" mightn't be too offensive - but judged as a Frankenstein entity on its own terms, there is a certain frothiness about it, as liable to irritate as to disarm. Overall, I think that most of the entertainment value I've derived from "All Singing, All Dancing" comes not from the content of the episode itself, but from how two members of my own family each related to it:

1. For a while (possibly still) this was my brother's pick for the prestigious title of Worst. Episode. Ever. He had no profound objection to any of the previous three clip shows, but took tremendous issue with this one. Which largely seemed to be on account of Bart's line, "Springfield swings like a pendulum do!" That line REALLY pissed him off. Not that I can blame him - those are some pretty atrocious lyrics.
   
2. Generally speaking, my dad hates musicals, and would no doubt sympathise with Homer's stance therein. There are, however, two musicals for which he's willing to make an exception - the stage version of Les Misérables (the less said to him about the 2012 film adaptation the better) and...I shit you not, Joshua Logan's Paint Your Wagon. I don't think he's ever seen this particular episode, but I recall him being somewhat disappointed to learn that it was sent up on The Simpsons. Of course, it goes without saying that the footage we see here is pure pastiche (like the version of Alive Marge watches in "Fear of Flying"), and that the real Paint Your Wagon isn't exactly like this (for one thing, the plot of the film does not actually revolve around the painting of a wagon) - although if you came to it expecting something more along the lines of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, you were in for a rude awakening. Also, as per some backstage accounts, Lee Marvin was perpetually drunk and violent during the making of the film.
   

The gimmick of having the family sing their connective dialogue, making the episode a mini-musical in its own right, while distinctive and ambitious, is not particularly successful. The reason why it doesn't work honestly has very little to do with the quality of the music itself. Arguably, the episode is hamstrung in the sense that none of the original musical sequences (with the possible exception of the Paint Your Wagon number) are half as enjoyable or as memorable as the material from which it's pooling, but one particularly abominable "pendulum do" line notwithstanding, I'd say they're perfectly serviceable from a strictly sonic standpoint. No, the real limitation that this show nosedives right into and never overcomes has to do with the staging. The Simpsons spend the entirety of the episode inside their living room, meaning that "All Singing" doesn't exactly have a great deal to work with in terms of bringing these new interludes to life. Bart performs the occasional stilted jig (expect nothing as grand as his fancy foot work in "Homer vs Patty and Selma") and at one point Lisa does a big dramatic slide across the floor, but overall there is a conspicuous lack of visual energy and imagination behind the musical sequences. Got to keep those production costs down, I suppose. It's true that "Another Simpsons Clip Show" also restricted most of the "original" action (a lot of which was redubbed from recycled footage anyway) to the family's breakfast table. But then "Another Simpsons Clip Show" was never attempting to be anything so showy or elaborate as a 22-minute musical. By its very nature, we would expect a musical to engage in a little kinetic amplification, to present the family's world from a different, more stylised perspective and to elevate itself above the humdrum - something obviously well beyond this cost-cutting project's resources. It's a problem that I fear had always doomed "All Singing" to failure.

The best the episode can do to enliven the situation is to have Snake (the only supporting cast member to appear outside of the recycled footage) intermittently jump in through the window and threaten the family with a shotgun. And, to give credit where it's due, the first time this happens it is genuinely startling and unexpected. Unfortunately, Snake's involvement amounts something of a gigantic fake-out - when he first appears, he suggests a darker impending plot development that never materialises. Instead, it becomes a running gag that Snake shows up before every ad break, only to abruptly disappear as soon as the episode resumes. Still, this is the most playful that "All Singing" is willing to get with the concept, and one can only imagine how much livelier it could have been had it managed to get the Simpsons out of their living room and interacting with more of their neighbours.

As a musical, "All Singing" feels deficient. As a clip show...what it's lacking is the same degree of self-criticism, or at least malaise that made its predecessors so compelling (in my books, anyway). The most we get on that front is a rare instance at the end in which the family straight-up break the fourth wall (something seldom done outside of Halloween episodes) to rally beneath a banner explicitly advertising the episode as "The Simpsons Clip Show #4", having proclaimed that "It really does blow...when a long-running series does a cheesy clip show!" All of the Simpsons clip shows contained some obligatory reference to what an inherently cheap and tacky concept the clip show be ("138th Episode Spectacular" was less explicit on this point than the others, but its hokey set-up and the presence of Troy is more than substitute enough), but the pointed acknowledgement of the show's established longevity is the only inkling we get of the series expressing any kind of winking unease about its own status.

The most intriguing thing that "All Singing" has going for it as a clip show is the aura of suspicion that it might have been forced into production for even more dubious reasons than its predecessors. This is all purely speculation, but a lot of fans theorize that the musically-themed collage was conceived as a marketing tool for the series soundtrack album, Songs In The Key of Springfield, which had been released only the year prior. Now, Songs In The Key of Springfield had hit the shelves in March 1997, whereas "All Singing" first aired in January 1998, so we did have the better part of a year's gap between the two (also noteworthy: Songs In The Key of Springfield only covers the first seven seasons of the show, and "All Singing" does include one track that came after - "We Put The Spring In Springfield" from Season 8's "Bart After Dark"). Most die hard fans who wanted the album would presumably have noticed and acquired their copies by then, so at best "All Singing" was going to speak to more casual viewers who might have forgotten how infectious some of the show's original music could be, if they hadn't heard it in a while. A sequel, Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons, later followed, but that was still the better part of two years away. Heck, The Yellow Album wasn't even seeing the light of day until the opposite end of the year. So if the raison d'etre of "All Singing" was indeed to maximise the sales of tie-in shiny discs, then it wasn't strategically issued to line up with a period of peak hype for Simpsons music. The timing is still close enough to raise eyebrows, however, and I personally do find it hard to believe that there wasn't some connection, even if it's as basic as the (moderate) success of Songs In The Key of Springfield convincing the writers that there was an exploitable theme here.

I say that, of course, as if clip shows in general aren't elongated commercials, albeit not always with the intention of selling you something so tangible. The key reason such episodes exist in the first place is because they're cheap and easy from a production standpoint, and in the pre-DVD/streaming age, they might even have been welcomed by viewers impatient to wait until the next re-run to revisit a favourite scene (although weren't you setting your VCR for these things? - see below). But they do serve an additional function as show reels for the general series, enabling you not only to relive favourite moments but to also glimpse what else you might have missed the first time around, with the hope of enticing you into watching those re-runs. And yet there is something about "All Singing, All Dancing" that feels particularly disposable, which might have to do with the lack of any kind of compelling or meaningful conflict at the story's centre (is it really such a big deal if Homer doesn't like musicals?). Erik Adams, in his review of "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" on the AV Club, described that installment as a "glorified DVD extra", and I feel that goes double for "All Singing, All Dancing". All you need are onscreen lyrics and some Simpson-ised equivalent of a bouncing Mickey Mouse head (bouncing doughnut, perhaps?) and you'd have yourself a pretty neat analogue to those Sing-along featurettes that Disney used to churn out regularly during the VHS era. 

Although, speaking of VHS, there is another small yet critical element of "All Singing, All Dancing" that sets it apart from all previous clip shows, and that's that this is the first occasion in which the family have actually dredged up archival footage on tape, under the pretense that it comes from their home movie collection, rather than reminisce purely from memory. Apparently, Marge has VHS recordings of the musical sequences from "Homer's Barbershop Quartet", "Bart After Dark" and "Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood" that she could just conveniently pull out and show to Homer and Bart as proof of their respective melodic inclinations (she doesn't even have to scroll through the tape to find the footage she needs). This aspect honestly strikes me as way more hokey and far-fetched than the central premise of the family singing, as it hinges on the dubious notion that somebody at the time just happened to have a camera and was recording the whole thing - and isn't it uncanny how the perspective of this invisible, in-universe cameraman also happens to match everything we saw in the episodes proper, frame for frame? Which of course plays entirely knowingly into the artificial nature of clip show and musical alike. The episode hangs on an underlying thread of fourth wall breaking (subtler than the explicit instance that occurs at the end), with Marge's "family videos" being a sly nod to the series itself, and the family relating to it as their viewers do - not as collection of personal anecdotes springing from organic reminiscence, but as a series of archival recordings to be rewound and revisited at any time (very few of the featured episodes were commercially available on VHS at the time - certainly, none were in the US - but I'm sure most of us long-term viewers had built up our own extensive home recorded libraries by now). This compliments not only the contrivances of the clip show, but also the make-up of the clips themselves. For there is another reason why Marge couldn't plausibly possess home recordings of the overwhelming majority of the featured clips - most of them were non-diegetic. Meaning that it makes zero sense for the family to be reminiscing about them, period. That is the tremendous irony at the heart of "All Singing, All Dancing" - there is no singing, and no dancing. Okay, that is something of an exaggeration, as we do find the occasional diegetic track in here. But most of what we see is, in Homer's words, "fake and phony and totally wrong."

Before pursuing this point any further, it is necessary to make the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic audio, for The Simpsons has spawned ample musical content over the years that could be divided into both camps. In a nutshell, diegetic audio refers to any sound that occurs with the reality of the characters' world, whereas non-diegetic refers to audio that exists purely for the viewer's benefit and one would assume is not actually part of the characters' experiences in-universe. So, for example, whenever Lisa blows on her saxophone, it's diegetic - she has the physical instrument, and the characters in the vicinity are hearing and responding to the sounds coming out of it. Danny Elfman's scores, on the other hand, are non-diegetic - there's no reason to believe that the characters can hear them. Likewise, I would presume that Sideshow Bob isn't actually broadcasting a certain Bernard Herrmann leitmotif wherever he goes. When it comes to musical numbers where characters randomly burst into song and everyone conveniently just happens to know all the words and choreography, it gets a little less clear-cut - we might assume that if the characters are doing the singing, then they can hear themselves in-universe. Yet the very contradictions that make the musical sequence so appealing (or repellent, if you take Homer's view) - the sleight of hand through which freshness and spontaneity can be suggested from what would, in actuality, require hours of painstaking orchestration and rehearsing - inevitably calls into question the reality of what we're seeing. It seems fair to conclude that such sequences represent an idealised or exaggerated version of the participants' lives, rather than the lives they're actually living. Asking how the characters happen to know all the words and where the music is coming from is about as futile as asking to whom the artless monologuers in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads are actually talking - in both cases, I think we can accept that this is all a theatrical device for representing the characters' inner voices. So the singing is non-diegetic in the sense that the characters presumably aren't really doing it in context, but rather temporarily shifting into a kind of fantasy space where they get to flaunt their emotional states to the fullest (remember what James L. Brooks, when discussing his ex-musical I'll Do Anything, said about how musicals, despite their inherent artifice, bring you closer to  the truth).

Of the nine musical clips featured in "All Singing, All Dancing", only three could be considered truly diegetic - "Baby on Board" (from "Homer's Barbershop Quartet"), "Send In The Clowns" (from "Krusty Gets Kancelled") and "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (from "Bart Sells His Soul"). In those three instances, there were clearly established circumstances under which the characters were performing their respective tunes in-universe. "We Do" from "Homer The Great" is more of a grey area - it's possible that the Stonecutters really do have this obnoxious club chant that they belt out as part of their evening ritual, but with no obvious source for all that highly-orchestrated music that goes along with it I am compelled to put this on the at least partially non-diegetic pile. The remaining five all occupy that weird limbo between reality and non-reality, which we might as well call La La Land. In the case of the "Springfield, Springfield" sequence from "Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood", this particular visit to La La Land was intended as a signifier for Bart and Milhouse's sugar-addled state (itself a family-friendly shorthand for an acid high), so definitely not the kind of objective reality that any Springfieldian was going to have captured on tape. So think about what actually is going on in this episode - the Simpsons aren't embarking on a nostalgic journey through authentic family memories, but are instead witnessing embarrassing projections of their own inner psyches, visualised and laid bare for all to see. For a seemingly frivolous clip show, it delves into some seriously twisted Black Mirror-esque nightmare zone. The idea would be every bit as at home in a Halloween show.

The Simpsons itself has a proud history of deliberately blurring the barriers between the diegetic and the non-diegetic for comic effect; several of the featured sequences had punchlines in their original forms, in which the characters made some kind of immediate callback to the song and to its improbable placement within the narrative progression, although only the punchline from "Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?" of "Homer and Apu" appears intact in "All Singing, All Dancing". This particular track, possibly the most insanely catchy in the Simpsons repertoire, was really all an elaborate set-up to a gag mocking the glibness behind the theatrical convention of implying emotional and narrative closure through an upbeat song and dance number. We learn that, contra everything expressed in the sequence, Apu is pining for his old job at the Kwik-E-Mart - to the chagrin of Homer, who despises being lied to through song. A similar gag occurs in "Bart After Dark", where the artifice of the musical number is once again used to convey a kind of narrative insincerity; the very idea communicated in "We Put The Spring In Springfield" is obviously bogus - double entendres asides, this random burlesque house that we've never seen before nor have any any real emotional investment in is blatantly not the nexus of the community we've been tracking for the past seven years - but the real punchline of the sequence follows right after, when Marge, who was absent during the performance, has a hard time comprehending why her fellow moral guardians would do a complete 180 on the basis of a song. She asks the townspeople if they can sing it again, only to be told by Ned that, "it really was one of those spur the moment things."

Compared to the full tracklisting on Songs In The Key of Springfield, the selection of songs in "All Singing, All Dancing" can't help but feel a little lopsided. You can only cram so many tracks into into 22 minutes and have time for a vague framing story, but it does strike me as a glaring omission that we get no examples of Lisa and Marge's individual singing talents among the featured clips - in fact, Lisa's only contribution, outside of the framing narrative, is her single line in "Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?" (Marge does marginally better, in that she also gets a line in "The Monorail Song"). You know what I happen to think is one of the greatest musical sequences in Simpsons history? Lisa's rendition of Carole King's "Jazzman" in "Round Springfield", which was definitely the track that got the most attention on my personal copy of Songs In The Key of Springfield. Yeardley Smith's performance is delightful; she brings a strength and a vulnerability to the song that's purely Lisa. So what's the reason for its exclusion here? Is it because it's not an original song? Possibly not, since neither are "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" or "Send In The Clowns" (although Krusty's version of the latter does use mostly modified lyrics - I do love me some Stephen Sondheim, and A Little Night Music is one of my all-time favourite musicals...but I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I first learned that the actual version of that song does not contain the words "schmaltz by the bowlful"). Was it a bias towards the more comedy-orientated tracks? More than likely. On Marge's side, I feel aggrieved on behalf of the entire "Oh, Streetcar!" songbook.

You might also notice that the oldest clip featured in "All Singing, All Dancing" is "The Monorail Song" from "Marge vs The Monorail" of Season 4, meaning that the earliest seasons get completely snubbed. That much I'll put down to the fact that the kind of heavily stylised, Broadway-esque numbers on which "All Singing" predominantly hangs its hat didn't really seep into the series' DNA until around the fourth season, when the show adopted a much more flexible sense of reality. The early seasons had no shortage of musical interludes, as such Lisa's duet with Bleeding Gums Murphy in "Moaning Lisa" and Lurleen Lumpkin's repertoire in "Colonel Homer", but these tended to be mostly diegetic in nature. For a while, the track that had the most fun on the diegesis-blurring front was probably Tony Bennett's ode to an unidentified capital city in "Dancin' Homer". At the beginning of Season 4, the aforementioned "Oh, Streetcar!" musical from "A Streetcar Named Marge" enabled the series to do a fully diegetic parody of the conventions of musical theatre (complete with a horrendously, albeit infectiously glib wrap-up song). The point at which it became acceptable for Springfieldians to spontaneously burst into song and prance around as though their lives obeyed the same rules as musical theatre...I'm not 100% certain, but I think that "Marge vs The Monorail" might actually have been the first of its kind in that regard. There, it wasn't entirely left of field, in that the entire set-up of the episode was derived from a Broadway musical, The Music Man, with "The Monorail Song" being a nod to a specific number therein, "Ya Got Trouble". And that's just as true for many of the non-diegetic musical numbers that followed in its footsteps - they're there because homage permits it. The central conflict of "Bart After Dark" was taken from another musical, The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, so I guess it made sense for the climax to take the form of a song and dance number. "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" was The Simpsons' affectionate take on Disney - mostly One Hundred and One Dalmatians, but Burns' unsubtle pilfering of the melody to "Be Our Guest" from Beauty & The Beast still goes along with the general theme. In all cases, it's evident that the production team had a tremendous amount of admiration for the subjects they're spoofing, and it's on these terms that "All Singing, All Dancing" is probably best understood - as a testament to what a fabulous collective love letter The Simpsons has been to the musical form throughout its run. That inconsequential frothiness I've picketed against - well, maybe it does ultimately play into the basic territory of the musical. The family spends most of the episode in La La Land, where they go to re-examine memories that would otherwise be inaccessible to them, and the outing has an appropriately ephemeral quality about it. It's something that happens within its own fanciful space before immediately evaporating into thin air, and that's arguably a pretty accurate replication of the evanescent nature of the non-diegetic song and dance number. I still feel that the episode's boxed-in scope does it no favours, but perhaps it's as lightweight as it is by cunning design, and I've been underestimating it all this time.

Finally, something the series had started experimenting with all of a sudden come Season 9 was the concept of having the characters interact with the closing credits - they'd already trialled this a few episodes previously with "Bart Star", which had Homer dismissing the various names in the credits and finally rebuking the "Sshh" lady in the Gracie Films logo. "All Singing" contains a variation on that gag, where Snake gets irate whenever the music gets too loud for his liking and fires off his gun. Which takes us into this episode's other really notorious element. Personally, I am weary of this whole "Simpsons predicted it" bandwagon - I think a lot of these so-called "predictions" amount to either vague coincidences or instances of history tiresomely repeating itself. Nevertheless, I (like everybody else) can't help but shudder upon hearing Snake fire his gun just as Phil Hartman's name appears on screen. There are two shots, which to my morbid brain registers horribly as signifiers of the individual bullets that killed Hartman and Omdahl respectively. It's almost poetic, in the most distressing possible way.

Sport Goofy in Soccermania (aka Release The Van Citters Cut)

The 1980s are not, generally speaking, regarded as the finest hour in the annals of Disney history (and not at all unjustly either), and yet it the era is a fascinating one in terms of watching the company go through utter turmoil in an effort to find its place in the modern age, having spent the bulk of the 1970s adhering to the same old formula while the rest of Hollywood was moving in fresh and exciting directions. There were plenty of false starts and misfires along the way (the most infamous being the box office disaster of The Black Cauldron in 1985) with the result that the decade has no shortage of weird outliers that just don't fit with the trajectory on which the Mouse House ultimately settled. Besides The Black Cauldron (which, incidentally, is nowhere near as naff as its reputation suggests and I don't recommend that you sleep on it), you have your pick of any of the company's early experiments in PG-rated fare, before the creation of the Touchstone label in 1984 (Ron W. Miller, whom history has judged as a most ineffectual CEO, was responsible for that particular innovation), The Wuzzles, Disney's fledging attempt at establishing an Saturday morning cartoon series AND a toy line to rival the Care Bears (I revisited that in late 2020, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that at least 70% of the jokes are cracks at the rabbit-hippopotamus hybrid's weight), Fluppy Dogs, another merchandise-based cartoon that never got further than its pilot, and the 1983 computer-generated demo for their abandoned take on Where The Wild Things Are. One of the greatest misfits of the lot, however, might be Sport Goofy in Soccermania, a thoroughly inoffensive twenty-minute short focussing on Goofy (voice of Tony Pope) and his heroic turn as a champion football player (disclaimer: for the purposes of this review, I will be referring to the sport as "soccer", simply because that is the term used in the short itself). Sport Goofy in Soccermania debuted on NBC on May 27th 1987, where it was partnered with a clip show pooling from various classic sports-themed Goofy shorts. Now largely forgotten, the short feels like the remnants of a botched attempt to take the company's catalogue of classic characters in a new direction (and that is, more-or-less, exactly what it is) and yet it did, by some tremendous fluke, manage to point to where the company would shortly be headed.

Sport Goofy can be seen as the missing link between the old school theatrical Disney shorts (which were all but extinct by the 1960s, but in which there had been a recent - if ultimately rather fruitless - revival in interest following the success of Mickey's Christmas Carol in 1983) and Disney's embracing of television animation (a domain formerly dominated by the fiendishly frugal Hanna Barbera) in the latter half of the 1980s, while paradoxically bearing no genuine resemblance to either. Superficially, it can be viewed as a loose pilot to the hit series DuckTales, which debuted a few months later, and with which it shares quite a few areas of overlap - most notably, it was the debut performance of the late Russi Taylor as the voices of Donald Duck's nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie (who, incidentally, are not colour-coded and therefore totally indistinguishable in this special). As with DuckTales, Donald himself is curiously sidelined (he's represented only indirectly, as a portrait in Huey, Dewey and Louie's house), but many other characters from the Carl Barks canon make cameos, including Gyro Gearloose and Gladstone Gander, the special takes place in the city of Duckburg, where Scrooge gets to dip in his iconic money bin, and Scrooge's canine nemeses, the Beagle Boys, are featured as our antagonists. There's also a proto Duckworth, whom Scrooge addresses as "Jeeves". Tonally, though, Sport Goofy is a very different beast to DuckTales - the humor is a lot more zany and physical, although not in a manner that recalls the classic Disney shorts either. It certainly feels worlds apart from the reverence and sincerity of the heavily nostalgic Mickey's Christmas Carol.

It's my understanding (and I do have to credit this Roger Rabbit fansite as my primary source on the matter) that Sport Goofy was conceived in 1983, off the back of the enthusiastic reaction to Mickey's Christmas Carol, with the intention of having the short ready to screen by mid-1984 to coincide with the Summer Olympics (and of plugging a fashionable line of Goofy-themed sportswear on the side). However, delays on the project meant that that particular deadline was missed, with the short ultimately becoming a causality of the company takeover by Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Frank Wells later that same year; they objected to the existing version of the project, which under the guidance of director Darrell Van Citters had been taking things in a far quirkier direction than they wanted associated with the Disney brand. Van Citters was ultimately replaced by Matthew O'Callaghan (Van Citters, who goes uncredited in the final Sport Goofy, left Disney shortly after to work for Warner Bros. Animation) and the project underwent an extensive retooling, before finally seeing the light of day as a television special in 1987. It made little splash in its native US, although VHS releases of the short would prove a hit in various European markets (perhaps owing to the greater popularity of the sport therein).

Sport Goofy might not have re-started the titular character's career in any significant way (although if it's any consolation, Goof Troop was only five years away), and in the end it probably played more successfully as a light appetite-whetter for the upcoming DuckTales - chiefly for the fact that Scrooge McDuck, and not Goofy himself, is the character who really dominates the narrative, along with Huey, Dewey and Louie. At the same time, this Scrooge feels very different to the one set to head Disney's breakthrough animated adventure series, not least because the voices don't align. This is a rare appearance, post-Mickey's Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge's vocals are not supplied by Alan Young, who served as the character's go-to voice until his death in 2016. Instead, he's voiced by Will Ryan, a voice actor with a fairly ubiquitous presence in 1980s animation (both television and theatrical). One would assume that Young wasn't available for this particular project, but I suppose at this point his status as the "definitive" Scrooge McDuck had yet to be truly cemented, so there was still sufficient wriggle room for someone else to have a crack at him. (Note: more recently, Scrooge has been voiced by the authentically Scottish David Tennant, in the 2017 DuckTales reboot, although whether he'll pursue the gig in the long-term, as Young did, remains to be seen.) If, like me, you were raised on a diet of annual viewings of Mickey's Christmas Carol and endless re-runs of the original DuckTales, then Ryan's lighter, less gruff take on the character will take some getting used to - but then, I am also conscious of the fact, to that those raised on the original DuckTales, Taylor's voice will inevitably sound like the definitive Huey, Dewey and Louie, but I can only imagine how radical a departure her voice must have felt to fans at the time (prior to Sport Goofy, Huey, Dewey and Louie were voiced by Clarence Nash, the original voice of Donald Duck, with the result that they had always traditionally sounded like younger versions of Donald). And besides, it works in further distinguishing this version as an alternative interpretation of the character - a wackier, more manic Scrooge than the intrepid adventurer from DuckTales, one who spends the overwhelming majority of the special on the verge of a mental breakdown, for which Ryan's portrayal is a pretty decent fit. I don't regret that the company persisted with Young for future projects (for one, Ryan's accent has a tendency to wander more than Young's), but it is intriguing nevertheless getting to glimpse the competition.

The plot of the special involves the young triplets wanting their miserly uncle to support the city's efforts to hold a soccer tournament by providing a trophy, and feeling understandably cheated when he declines to fork out $1.49 for a brand new trophy and instead fobs them off with a dented old cup he has lying around his money bin. Scrooge's stinginess quickly backfires, however - a museum curator spots the trophy and identifies it as an ancient athletic urn worth millions. Naturally, Scrooge is mortified that he ever parted with it. Huey, Dewey and Louie refuse to give the trophy back to Scrooge, even in exchange for a much grander-looking cup, but agree to let him have it if their team, the Greenbacks, is able to win it fairly in the tournament. Now Scrooge has the incentive to throw his full weight into supporting their team, and is horrified to discover that it consists largely of (strangely familiar) rejects who couldn't make the more prestigious squads. Salvation arises from an unlikely source - Scrooge discovers that Goofy, his old friend (and deceased business partner in another, more Dickensian reality), is a remarkably proficient soccer player, and recruits him as captain of the team. With Goofy's guidance, this ragtag group of underdogs is able to pull together into a formidable force and advance to the tournament finals - where they find unwelcome competition in the form of the Beagle Boys, who also fancy their chances at winning the coveted trophy, and don't share Goofy's philosophies on the importance of sportsmanship. Realising that even their aggressively foul play might be no match for Goofy's talents, the Beagles decide to up their nefarious game by kidnapping Goofy on the night before the final, leaving the Greenbacks without their star player. Can they soldier on to victory regardless, or do the Beagles have them truly licked? As Sport Goofy would say, may the better team win.

The first thing that most seasoned Disney fans tend to pounce on regarding this special is how out of character the entire enterprise seems for Goofy, who is here portrayed as a totally competent sportsman. If you're familiar with the old "How To..." shorts that had Goofy trying out a variety of athletic challenges, he rarely succeeded without unleashing a heck of a lot more calamity along the way. In fairness, though, this Goofy is consistently identified throughout as "Sport Goofy" (Scrooge is the only character who seems to insist on plain old "Goofy"), so one might assume that he's also intended to be an alternate interpretation of the character. And titular hero though he may be, he's essentially just our would-be marketing hook, his raison d'être being to look upstanding and saleable to the athletically-inclined, and to spell out the moral of the short to any viewer obtuse enough to not figure it out on their own ("If you play fair and work together as a team, anyone can be number one!"). The real emotive conflict of the story lies in the relationship between Scrooge and his nephews, and in Huey, Dewey and Louie's disillusionment in Scrooge's transparently self-serving priorities. As a narrative thread, this goes a little under baked - it does lead into the sole moment of sincere character reflection, when Scrooge realises that he cares more about securing the trophy than he does his kidnapped friend, but all that comes of it is a narrative afterthought, with Scrooge eventually mustering humility in donating the trophy to the Duckburg Museum. It strikes me that Scrooge's redemption would have carried more weight had he been somehow instrumental in Goofy's escape (instead of just leaving him to elude the Beagles single-handedly while he argues with the referee) or been willing to put himself on the line by attempting to personally fill in for Goofy (which the special even teases us into thinking might happen - Scrooge does walk out onto the pitch with the others, but alas, takes no active role in the game).

Its interest in the Duck clan aside, Sport Goofy ultimately registers less as a pseudo-pilot to DuckTales than it does a pseudo-crossover between a slightly warped, parallel version of Duckburg, and Disney's 1971 live action-animation hybrid, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, of all things. There does appear to be a fairly salient homage to the aforementioned feature running all throughout Sport Goofy, in recognition of the fact that soccer plays a prominent role in both narratives. In lieu of doing the obvious thing, and giving Goofy a full team assembled from classic Disney characters, the Greenbacks are made up largely of nondescript animals - a motley bunch comprised of elephant, hippopotamus, goat, kangaroo, ostrich, cheetah and sea lion, all but two of which align with the line-up of the True Blues, the "good" team in the Naboombu soccer match (well, the lesser of two evils, anyway). The character designs diverge just enough for me to question if they are actually meant to be the same characters (although if so, then there is a pretty hilarious in-joke, when Goofy asks the Greenbacks if they've ever played soccer before, and is met with a wall of blank stares), but I doubt that the selection of species here was a coincidence. Furthermore, the referee, an avian by the name of Four-Eyes Fowler, has a character design that borrows liberally from that of the Secretary Bird of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. The Bedknobs allusions, while they can't help but feel somewhat out of place in the world of Duckburg, are at the very least cute, although they will have the added drawback of making the Beagle Boys' underhanded tactics look comparatively tame to viewers familiar with their origins (because those Naboombuian animals really know how to play soccer dirty). And, just to add to the grab bag nature of this particular universe, do you know who else makes a cameo? Okay, so I did leave a tiny clue in linking to a fansite for said character in an earlier paragraph - sharp-eyed viewers might spot a proto Roger Rabbit among the spectators at the final game. Sport Goofy might even be most aptly described as an all-star intersection of various Disney projects, past and future, while feeling curiously divorced and adrift from the lot of them.

The obvious question that looms over Sport Goofy is, if this is supposedly the reined in version of the short Van Citters was preparing, how much more off-the-wall was his original vision? Sport Goofy is far from the most anarchic thing I've ever seen (the wildest gag, honestly, involves Goofy escaping from the Beagle Boys with the help of a giant toothbrush pilfered from an advertising billboard), but it does have an off-kilter flavour that certainly seems to be reaching for a more ironic, self-aware level of humor than had been typically associated with the self-reverent Disney up until now (in that regard, I would even be bold enough to call this the primitive ancestor to The Emperor's New Groove - very primitive, mind you). It doesn't truly embrace that aspiration (the resulting special feels vaguely peculiar, but overall fairly fluffy), but you can intermittently see the glint in its eye. The Beagle Boys get the best gags, which might have to do with the fact that a lot of their dialogue in particular plays like it's in constant quotation marks, with the Beagles touting each line as if they're entirely aware that they're going through the motions of diabolical yet flagrantly ridiculous scheme (there's also a strange, understated sight gag revealing that they have a collection of manicules hung decoratively in their living room, which I suppose is intended to tie in with their general criminality but instead raises uncomfortable questions about what they like to get up to in their free time, besides watching anodyne cooking shows). I'm going to hazard a guess that Van Citters' version would have pushed this factor even harder, which makes me regret that his efforts are most certainly fated to stay locked up in the dreaded Disney vault for all eternity (along with the nastier cut of The Black Cauldron).

Something else that has to be said about Sport Goofy is that is quite handsomely animated, at least by the standards of the time, when children's television animation was an absolute wasteland where budgets were concerned (a trend that DuckTales likewise was about to buck). Theatrical quality this ain't, but the characters move with a fluidity and an expressiveness that must have seemed refreshing coming off the backs of so much Hanna Barbera and DiC produce.

Overall, I'm inclined to rate Sport Goofy as a likeable dead end. It failed to captialise on the momentum that inspired it and aired when its intended moment had long passed, its snarky (albeit compromised) tone feels jarringly out of step with the spate of Disney Television Animation shows on the horizon, while at the same time it doesn't pursue that snark to the dizzying degrees that might have made it truly joyful in its outlier-ness. The future of Disney Animation this was not, although the success of DuckTales soon after it does sort of inadvertently make Sport Goofy look as if it knew what it was doing all along. The short both depicts and feels like the product of some parallel Disney universe in which the stars were a little differently aligned, and as a hazy window into that deserted route for Goofy and chums, it offers its own modest but charmingly curious pleasures.

Joe's Apartment '92 (aka I'll Be Under The Fridge If You Need Me)

Joe's Apartment (aka Joe's Apt.) is a 3:20 minute short directed by John Payson that debuted on MTV in 1992 and was later included on the 1996 VHS release, I Want My MTV. It offers a small glimpse into the offbeat world of Joe (Mark Rosenthal), a twentysomething New Yorker who shares his apartment with legions of talking, singing cockroaches. Joe is remarkably tolerant of his six-legged roomers, who in return do their best to support Joe through his daily challenges - all the same, living with a roach infestation (especially roaches who can answer you back) does tend put a cramp in one's lifestyle. Here, we see what happens when Joe brings home his first date in months (a nameless girl played by Arija Bareikis) and the roaches get a little too carried away in trying to make their evening enchanted. Joe's date eventually gets wise to the apartment's bug problem and scarpers, leaving the crestfallen Joe to be consoled by the roaches, who assure him that, while love might come and go, the one thing he can always be sure of in life is being surrounded by roach-infested walls.

The cockroach is yet another creature that blurs the presumed boundaries between domesticity and wilderness through its insistence on moving in a little too close for human comfort, and its public image has been molded accordingly. Insects in general tend to net very little in the way of human affection, and the roach ranks squarely toward the bottom of that largely unloved class - it is, nevertheless, a creature that warrants respect for the reason outlined in the short's introductory number: "We've been around for a hundred million years, and we'll be here long after you." And Joe's Apt. wasn't even the first animated film to attempt to show a more identifiable side to the ineradicable crawlers. The basic concept of Joe's Apt. bares some resemblance to the 1987 Japanese film Twilight of The Cockroaches, directed by Hiroaki Yoshida, which also centres around a man who allows a community of roaches to run amok around his apartment, although in his case more out of apathy than affinity. Yoshida's film carries bleaker, more apocalyptic overtones than Payson's - the roaches revere their human compatriot as a benevolent overlord, and are unable to comprehend their situation when his new girlfriend moves in and forces him to tidy up his act, which includes unleashing a whole truckload of insecticide onto their erstwhile utopia. The opposing classes are represented through a blend of live action and animation - the cockroaches are depicted as cartoon figures, anthropomorphised in a style reminiscent of the Fleischer brothers' 1941 film Mr Bug Goes To Town, and juxtaposed with three-dimensional backgrounds a la the characters in When The Wind Blows (1986). The humans, meanwhile, are flesh and blood actors, but are typically framed at such dark, monstrous angles as to ensure that our sympathies stay firmly aligned with the roaches. Payson too has his audience see the world primarily from the perspective of the roaches, starting from the opening sequence where we crawl up several flights of stairs with a pair of antennae spread out in front of us, although he forgoes the degree of visual anthropomorphism favoured by Yoshida. Gift of the gab aside, these creatures very much clock as roaches, the film's extensive insect action being conveyed through stop motion animation (either with model roaches or, where the bugs are invisible, various rustling household items) and, in some instances, actual live roaches. The film benefits from the array of fast cuts from numerous slanted angles, which keeps things moving at a lively pace and establishes the roaches as an omnipresent chaos against whom Joe, if he weren't such an obliging host, would be effectively powerless. The overall look is cheap, but charming.

Joe's Apt. plays like a humorous reimagining of the conflict in Twilight of The Cockroaches, in which the barriers of communication between man and roach have been completely obliterated and the two species co-exist with an obverse casualness. Once again, human sexuality proves to be the snake in the cockroaches' Eden, with Joe's eagerness to impress his date conflicting with his willingness to tolerate the roaches, although this is something to which the roaches seem gleefully oblivious. Watching the short as a companion piece to Yoshida's film, you can pick up on the implicit (if unconscious) rivalry between Joe's date and the roaches for Joe's affections, although it seems a stretch to conclude that the roaches' interference amounts to deliberate sabotage. The roaches are, fundamentally, innocents (even when their well-meaning imposition crosses over into full-on voyeurism, and we get to the short's most risqué joke - one of the roaches attempting to slip Joe a condom - there's a guilelessness about them), and this innocence keeps them disarming, even when it's hard to not also empathise with Joe's obvious dissatisfaction with the closing arrangement - a final contrast that, for the short's ostensibly upbeat ending, points back to the conflicting perspectives in Twilight of The Cockroaches, and how it ultimately resulted in tragedy.

Joe's Apt. received a full-blown Hollywood makeover in 1996, with Payson once again in the director's seat. The resulting feature isn't particularly well-remembered today, but it has significance for being not only MTV's first foray into theatrical film-making, but that of the now-defunct Blue Sky Studios, who became a popular CG effects house after their (legitimately excellent) work in animating the roaches. Sadly, Blue Sky seem to be the only party who actually benefited from their involvement in Joe's - Payson never directed another theatrical feature (although he did find further directorial work in television), and MTV were stuck with a deficit that was not offset until the success of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America later that same year. Joe's failure to find an audience does not surprise me - the set-up is not one that lends itself to elaboration. The events of the original short are recreated more-or-less faithfully, but the story has to be expanded to accommodate an additional 77 minutes' worth of material. So Joe (now played by Jerry O'Connell) and his date (Megan Ward) each get drawn-out backstories, we get to see how Joe acquires the apartment and comes to grips with the improbable assortment of squatters therein, and because the numerous misunderstandings between the human and cockroach factions aren't conflict enough, there's also a villain in the form of a corrupt senator who wants to tear down the apartment block and build a maximum security prison. Even with all that added detail, it's still a thin, thin premise, so the film throws in further padding involving performance artists with questionable monikers and urinal cakes (the feature film also has a greater penchant for gross-out humor than its predecessor, which was only ever going to nauseate viewers who really couldn't stand roaches to begin with).

I think it's fair to say that Joe's Apt. is the kind of scenario in which less is definitely more - the absurdity of the piece works to its favour if we're dropped directly in the middle of it, with minimal explanation. In the original short, it's not altogether clear whether these are meant to be extraordinarily talented cockroaches, or if Joe is some kind of cockroach whisperer (the feature film implies that it's the former...to my chagrin, as I would have preferred to think the latter). But in either case, it's enough for us to presume that Joe has been exposed to his roach-infested quarters for long enough that he's managed to make his peace with it. The smartest gags in the original short are the most implicit - Joe regards living with roaches as such an inescapable fact of life that his relationship with them has become totally familiar. He nonchalantly addresses them as he would any human roomie, making the standard roomie request that they clear out in preparation for the date he's planning to bring home tonight (with the more unusual detail that he bribes them by tossing raw steak onto the floor). At the same time, it's suggested that the apparent harmony between Joe and the roaches is a somewhat uneasy one - the short ends on a slightly troubling note that, while understated, casts doubt on the long-term sustainability of this interspecies "friendship". Like their counterparts in Yoshida's film, the roaches adore Joe and are confident that he will continue to provide for them, while Joe's final reaction indicates that, despite his initial stoicism, he privately yearns for something better. We thus round out with an ironic contrast between the purity of the roaches' intentions and their unwitting status as symbols of Joe's entrapment in a world of squalor and isolation (at least as far as his own species is concerned).

All of this goes entirely unspoken in the short, but the feature adaptation is required to develop this latent conflict into a more dramatic climax, one that echoes the outright warfare of Yoshida's picture and involves the use of insecticides on BOTH sides. But I can't help but feel that Joe's gesture of resignation at the end of the short carries way more potency. Unlike his movie counterpart, this Joe knows that any declaration of war on his part would be totally futile - the battle has already been won.