The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly (aka A Clown Has Feelings Too)

One of my favourite pieces of writing of 2021 was this Vice article by Amelia Tait, which posed the all-important question that might not have been at the forefront of our concerns in the current global climate, but had nevertheless lurked uneasily at the back of our skulls for quite some time - whatever happened to Ronald McDonald? Actually, I suspect that most of us kind of already knew the answer, but there is a fascinating yarn to be unpicked in delving into the specifics of his discreet decline - keeping in mind that, in the latter stages of the 20th century, the burger-hawking clown was on a par with Mickey Mouse in terms of American icons who'd effectively achieved world domination. It didn't take long for the 21st century to start getting rough on the once unassailable brand mascot, with his various McDonaldland cohorts - Grimace, Hamburglar, Officer Big Mac and co - facing eviction from McDonald's eateries and promotions in 2003. For the time being, Ronald himself was left standing, but has been officially retired from McDonald's advertising in the UK as of 2014, while his appearances have been largely scaled back in his native US. It's a significant comedown for a character who, according to a poll cited by George Ritzer in The McDonaldization of Society, was once identifiable among 96% of school children, an honor bested only by Santa Claus (p.8). So where did it all go wrong for Ronald?

As it turns out, Ronald McDonald was a casualty of not one, but two cultural shifts that made a smiling clown an undesirable thing to have at the forefront of your branding. Firstly, over the past two decades we've become a lot more leery about fast food marketing geared specifically and unambiguously toward enticing the very youngest of consumers. Traditionally, McDonald's has always been a family brand, a place you took the kids after swimming lessons when you were too exhausted to cook for them, when you were in another town and your offspring were way too fussy to be up for anything local and unfamiliar, or just when they really eager to get their hands on whatever giveaway was being offered in Happy Meals that week. By all counts it still fulfils all of those functions. But in the mid-2000s, McDonald's underwent a massive image overhaul designed to counteract the tidal wave of negative publicity they had accumulated with Morgan Spurlock's hit documentary Super Size Me and growing concerns about childhood obesity, a somewhat inevitable consequence of years of general indifference toward the messages children were actually receiving in between their favourite programming (I grew up in an era when junk food promotions were not only slapped over every inch of commercial children's media, but could get away with pushing themselves as healthy snacking options, if they were sneaky enough about it). Happy Meals and the promise of free plastic haven't gone away, but McDonald's was toning back on its kid-zeroed marketing, as the emphasis moved more toward courting the next most receptive demographic, ie: students. Secondly, in recent years we've undergone a drastic revamp in terms of how we look at clowns. The general consensus is that clowns are no longer benign purveyors of innocent birthday party capering, but sinister, grotesque deviants who signify something very corrupted in the childhood vista. The 2016 clown invasion and the popularity of the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King's It appear to have cemented this notion in the public consciousness. Coulrophobia itself is hardly a novel phenomenon, but it's only relatively recently that clowns have effectively been ranked alongside spiders and vertical drops as something that people are almost expected to fear by default; nowadays, if you don't have any profound dislike of clowns, you can consider yourself the anomaly. All in all, the 21st century just hasn't been the kindest of climates for a grease-peddling joker.

One of the last notable artefacts of Ronald McDonald's uncontested reign of terror was The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald, a series of forty-minute direct-to-video animated adventures specially created to be sold as add-ons to consumers purchasing drinks and ice creams, beginning with a Halloween-themed video, Scared Silly, in October 1998 (a clip from the series was featured in Super Size Me, where Spurlock incorrectly identified it as a television cartoon). The cartoon was unmistakably the work of Klasky Csupo, the animation studio founded by husband and wife team Arlene Klasky and Gene Csupo in 1982 that went on to become a children's entertainment powerhouse in the 1990s/early 2000s, engineering such hit Nickelodeon shows as Rugrats, The Wild Thornberrys and As Told By Ginger. The studio was also responsible for animating The Simpsons during its first few years of life, before disputes between Klasky Csupo and Gracie Films prompted the latter to switch to Film Roman. Despite the company's ubiquitousness through many a millennial's childhood, in my experience Klasky Csupo are an extremely decisive studio; their output is fondly remembered by many, but just as many others are alienated by their visual style, rating it as ugly and unappealing. Additionally, a high number of millennials report having had their first logophobic experience by unwisely sticking around to the end of any Klasky Csupo production's closing credits and seeing just what horrors were lying in wait - particularly during the studio's peak years when they were using what has been affectionately dubbed the "Splaat" logo. If you think clowns are grotesque, then you should get a load of the nightmarish mouth they had blurt out the studio name, in eerily emotionless, computerised tones, at the end of each adventure with Eliza or Ginger (although it was at least handy for those who, myself included, were unsure of the pronunciation). Put a pin in that, because Klasky Csupo really are overdue their own Logo Case Study on these pages.

Like any Klasky Csupo production, The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald has built up its share of detractors and devotees, with some regarding them as junky promotional tools and others nostalgic essentials - such nostalgia tends to be less prolific than that for KC's Nickelodeon cartoons, however, due to the limited availability of the videos. A total of five VHS tapes were available in McDonald's restaurants between 1998 and 2001, with a belated sixth adventure finally seeing the light of day in January 2003, albeit exclusively through Klasky Csupo's official online store. The series was never upgraded into the DVD age, presumably owing to the decision to retire the McDonaldland characters soon after. I've also not seen a wild amount of evidence to suggest that the videos were sold in many, if any, locations outside of the US (they certainly never made it to UK restaurants), capping their impact even further. Their modern status as animated curios naturally makes them irresistible to me, although I did have another, slightly more esoteric motive for wanting to dust off the series at this point in time. We're currently in the early stages of 2022, a year that has long stood out to me as being of immense significance owing to the fact that it is the year in which Soylent Green takes place. It's been on my mind that I ought to do something to commemorate the Year of The Suspicious Foodstuff, and nothing struck me as more savoury than a year-round retrospective dedicated to particularly strange or unique fast food promotions.

Most of the classic McDonaldland characters appear, albeit adapted to fit the Klasky Csupo visual style. Grimace (Kevin Michael Richardson) looks more-or-less the same (I guess there aren't a whole lot of options when you're working with a giant purple blob). Hamburglar (Charlie Adler), on the other hand, looks nigh-unrecognisable, still favouring the striped convict motif but having swapped out the bulk of his burglar attire for dark glasses and a trendy sports coat, and looking for all the world like an all grown up Rocket Power reject (compared to previous Hamburglar incarnations, who spoke mostly in gibberish, he's also unusually articulate).  Other familiar faces include Birdie the Early Bird (Christine Cavanaugh), a character originally introduced to plug breakfast menu items, and, more nightmarishly, the Fry Kids and the McNuggets. I say "nightmarish", because while I can handle more generic characters like Birdie and Hamburglar just fine, the McDonaldland residents who are meant to be physically comprised of McDonald's foodstuff have always struck me as aesthetically and conceptually disturbing (among other things, wouldn't it make cannibals of them to actually eat at McDonald's?). The Fry Kids are a mild example - in their case, it's not altogether clear to me if that shaggy matter hanging off of them is intended to be off-colour French fries, or if they're just walking puffballs nominally affiliated with processed potato sticks. But those McNuggets...here, they've been given little beaks, wings and combs so as to resemble the farmyard critter they're made of, and I seriously can't be the only person who finds that design choice a bit sick (puts me strongly in mind of Banksy's "Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill" exhibit). On that note, it's something of a relief that the two burger-headed characters are largely ignored - Mayor McCheese (Bob Joles) makes an appearance in just one of the adventures, Have Time, Will Travel, while Officer Big Mac is conspicuously absent. Oh well, nobody likes authority figures, right? There are also a handful of new characters, the most prominent being Ronald's sardonic talking mutt, Sundae (Dee Bradley Baker - for years, I harbored under the misconception that Sundae was voiced by the same actor who does Squidward from Spongebob Squarepants, but a quick check of the cast list reveals not), and a couple of human kids who are chummy with Ronald, Tika (Jazmine A. Corona) and Franklin (Alex D. Linz).

Each video opens and closes with live action segments showing the familiar flesh-and-blood Ronald (Jack Doepke or David Hussey, depending on what video you're watching) hanging out in his surreal McDonaldland residence. In the first three adventures, he is accompanied by Sundae (actually Verne Troyer, best known for playing Mini-Me in the Austin Powers films, in a Sundae suit), and there's a transitional sequence where Ronald and Sundae take a chute down into the world beyond, assuming their animated forms along the way. I've come across more than one person ascribing a bout of grisly childhood nightmares to the live action Sundae, and that's understandable enough. Because Sundae was a completely original character, his default design was in the Klasky Csupo style, and the efforts to translate that directly into live action aren't the easiest on the eyes (it doesn't help matters that the zipper on the Sundae suit is also very visible across his underside, making it look as though he's recovering from heart surgery). That said, I think the least appealing thing about Sundae visually applies to both his animated and live action forms, which is to say his unpleasant-looking mouth. Freaky pronounced animal lips are a bizarre design choice favoured by Klasky Csupo in general, as evidenced all throughout The Wild Thornberrys - here, they're also seen on a beaver, a sinister talking grizzly who stalks the gang at random intervals during the adventure, a stuffed and mounted swordfish, and those creepy deep fried miniature chickens - but Sundae's a particularly egregious example, what with his bright red lips, the coulrophobic-taunting layer of white clown make-up around his muzzle (albeit only really visible in his animated form) and his distinctly human-looking teeth. Between this and the Splaat logo, I'm detecting that Arlene and Gene have a possible fetish for ugly mouth visuals. Well, good for them.

Scared Silly opens with the revelation that both Ronald and Sundae are connoisseurs of vintage B-movie horror, which is honestly not a bad place to start. The film they're watching, identified by Ronald as Attack of The Dinosaurs, is actually the silent 1925 classic The Lost World, plucked safely from the public domain, and dubbed over with some comically hammy dialogue. Ronald then receives a video call from Tika, who invites him to go camping with her and the rest of the McDonaldland gang in Far-Flung Forest. She later reveals that she's always been too scared to venture into the forest, owing to local lore about it being haunted by a Phantom. The gang make it to nightfall without anything in the way of major incidents, but are caught off-guard in a rainstorm and decide to seek shelter in a suspicious-looking, seemingly abandoned manor that transpires to be riddled with various booby traps, causing the party to become increasingly splintered. What kind of nefarious forces will they discover pulling the strings?

The inevitable deal-breaker with Wacky Adventures for many viewers is going to be the odiously commercial, not-so-ulterior motive behind their productions - there is little getting around the fact that they were 40-minute long advertisements designed to make children hungry for empty calories, and I can wholly understand anybody disliking them on mere principle. The thing is, in an alternate universe where the McDonald's brand never existed and these were entirely original characters having wacky adventures in their own stand-alone world, I could see these titles becoming hot cult classics for their sheer weirdness. If you didn't know anything about McDonaldland and you saw this series, wouldn't this just strike you as the most random assortment of characters imaginable? Approached from that angle, the series offers a pretty enjoyable mix of visual strangeness (particularly in the live action segments) and quirky humor - nothing especially ground-breaking, but they are objectively stronger and more competently made than I had expected, given their dubious origins. And, for as mean as I've been about Sundae's character design, he's actually a pretty funny addition to the McDonaldland roster; his deadpan personality makes him a perfect foil to the perpetually upbeat Ronald. On a narrative level, my only real gripe with Scared Silly is that it could have stood to be at least ten minutes shorter. There is quite a lot of padding, particularly in the first half of the story which has the gang rambling somewhat aimlessly around the forest - it takes them a long time to get into the real heart of the adventure involving the haunted manor. Prior to that, the characters sing a couple of songs (pretty standard, inoffensive children's fare, but 100% filler) and Hamburglar pranks the others into thinking the Phantom has arisen, but all that goes on in the woods that's of any genuine import is its becoming increasingly apparent that a) the gang's every movements are being tracked by surveillance cameras and b) Tika clearly knows more about the situation than she's letting on (for one, she lets slip with Ronald that, contra her claims to have always been too terrified to set foot in the forest before, she actually knows her way around it pretty well). Still, Far-Flung Forest is kind of a screwy place, even before we get to the supposedly cursed section - in addition to that creepy talking bear Hamburglar inadvertently summons, there's an odd sight gag where Sundae chases after a squirrel, only to discover that that squirrel has one heck of an intimidating ally, namely a human-sized, body builder squirrel in army boots and khaki shorts, whom I just know, without googling, must be the subject of a ton of furry fan art.

The second half of Scared Silly is stronger than the first, as it's here that the story becomes focussed on a clearer objective, with the gang entering the manor and, on discovering that they're now trapped there and at the mercy of the so-called Phantom, having to navigate their way through its labyrinth of rooms, solving various puzzles in order to find the correct way out. You could say that it turns into a kid-friendly version of Christopher Manson's Maze, except that here the clues have the benefit of being halfway comprehensible. Characters who get it wrong get separated from the others, as the Fry Kids and McNuggets find out. Through it all, Ronald manages to keep his head, reassured that the manor is all an illusion, that the reality is a lot less nefarious than it seems, and that the gang can get through it with the use of teamwork and co-operation.

The most entertaining scene occurs at the climax, when the remaining characters are confronted by the Phantom, who challenges them to a final game of riddles. As a particularly fiendish touch, the Phantom uses the correct answer to each riddle to suck the losing contestant into oblivion. So, for example, Tika is challenged with the question: "What is it that the more you take away from it, the bigger it gets?" It's a fairly well-known riddle, and I suspect a good chunk of the video's target audience would be qualified to respond correctly, but Tika comes up with a completely different,more smart-alecky answer that, to her credit, actually does fit the criteria of the question: "A restaurant! The more you take out..." (I can't help but feel that this constitutes a slight Freudian slip on behalf of McDonald's, in admitting that their global empire depends on your insatiable custom). The Phantom still isn't having it. "Way too complicated - and wrong!" he bellows, before ejecting her down an actual hole. Next up are Birdie and Hamburglar, who are asked: "What is you can feel outside, hear inside, but never see it unless it's full of dust?" Again, a fairly easy riddle, but the participants once again manage to screw it up by overthinking - Birdie suggests a dust mop, and Hamburglar mothballs. Too bad, the answer was the wind, and they both get sucked away by a tornado. Finally, it's up to Ronald, Grimace and Sundae to turn things around, as the Phantom poses: "What is is that costs nothing, but is worth everything, weighs nothing, but lasts a lifetime, that one person can't own, but two people can share?" My guess would have been "love", but Ronald comes up with "friendship", which wins him the game, much to the Phantom's chagrin. I suppose love can be unrequited, whereas friendship is typically thought of as being a two-way thing (neither is guaranteed to last a lifetime, however), but still, I would argue friendship is a variation of love, so I could have gotten through on a technicality, right?

The twist in the tale is that the "Phantom" is actually a holographic simulation, and that the man (or boy) behind the curtain is none other than Franklin (he will become a recurring character throughout the series, but here the McDonaldland crew are clearly meeting him for the first time). He and Tika have been secretly manipulating Ronald and the gang into becoming unwitting participants in their elaborate room escape game (it also transpires that the McNuggets, of all characters, were in on the deception - as we'll see from the subsequent video, The Legend of Grimace Island, the zombie chickens are easily led). It's revealed that Franklin's father is a scientist who specialises in virtual reality technology, which accounts (kind of) for how he'd even have access to all of this funky equipment. Franklin concedes victory to Ronald, and Tika apologises for deceiving Ronald and the others, stating that she didn't think they could be persuaded to participate knowingly. Fortunately there are no hard feelings; everyone is reunited, and they resume their outdoor camping trip. Scared Silly ends with a live action epilogue, with Ronald and Sundae back in their living room, and Attack of The Dinosaurs II about to start up on the box. Ronald questions the wisdom of watching a scary movie this late at night, but Sundae assures him that he can handle the experience knowing that Ronald is with him. The adventure bows out with a somewhat less wholesome message, where Ronald directly addresses his audiences and makes explicit what blatantly been on the production's mind this entire time - that, next time, he wants to see them "live and in person at McDonald's". All the same, I give Scared Silly kudos for its refreshingly positive outlook on the horror genre, here celebrated as an opportunity for bonding between two friends. The final item on the tape (besides the credits and our good friend Splaat) is a preview for the next adventure, The Legend of Grimace Island, arriving in 1999. I'm assuming that they didn't have an awful lot of finished animation ready at the time, because the preview consists entirely of still images.

Note: efforts to develop the McDonaldland crew into animated characters actually weren't limited to their Klasky Csupo swansong. Everyone's favourite purveyors of 1980s animation, DiC, had already tried their hand in 1990, with a precursor to the Klasky Csupo series, a one-off direct-to-video special entitled The Adventures of Ronald McDonald: McTreasure Island (meaning that you can watch a Ronald McDonald adventure with an even dodgier closing logo than Splaat). Before that, there was an animated short, Ronald McDonald and The Adventure Machine, but that never received a commercial release, having been produced to be shown exclusively within McDonald's restaurants. The best animated depiction of Ronald McDonald, though, would have to be his turn in the 2009 short Logorama, which certainly caters better to contemporary perceptions of the character. Clowns in general too.

Bewitched '05: Worth Another Look? (aka Deal With It, Derwood)

A defence of Nora Ephron's much-derided feature adaptation of the classic fantasy sitcom Bewitched, starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, is frankly something I had never anticipated writing, not least while I was actually watching the thing on its release in 2005. But how time makes fools of us all.

I remember the summer of '05 being rather an underwhelming one for blockbusters. I know Batman Begins had a lot of devotees, but it was not my cup of tea. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy was a crushing disappointment (with hindsight, I've no idea why my expectations were ever so high - if there was ever a thing Hollywood was guaranteed to screw up, it was Douglas Adams), The War of The Worlds had a few technically sound moments, but was overall one of Spielberg's lesser efforts, ditto Burton and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, and I utterly loathed Madagascar. Bewitched had never struck me as all that promising from the outset, and I only wound up seeing it, on release, because I went as part of a group; I'd had my eye on a different picture altogether, but got outvoted, so on my first ever viewing I was a tad resentful that I was having to sit through this total fluff piece because the rest of my party couldn't cope with something more cerebral. It didn't help that, at the time, I was also quite weary of Will Ferrell in general; as a student, I belonged to a cinema club that was overseen by a group of rabid Ferrell cultists (feral Ferrellists, as a friend of mine once dubbed them) who liked to quote Ron Burgundy ad nauseam. Anything with Ferrell was guaranteed to get a screening, no matter how well-received, so of course they snapped Bewitched up the following autumn. And, despite my cool reaction the first time around, I watched it again, because what else was I going to do on a Friday night? Years onward, and I've reached the worrying stage where Bewitched now registers as something cozy and nostalgic to me, seeing as I associate it with those Friday nights from a bygone age when I was a callow undergrad with nothing better to do than to watch movies in a chilly auditorium. (Oh, and incidentally, that "cerebral" film I had wanted to see - it was a little film called Crash, which you might have heard of. Needless to say, it turned out to be an absolute piece of shit, and Bewitched the superior picture in every way. With hindsight, my friends had the right idea all along. As I say, time = fools of us all.)

Bewitched '05 wasn't your mother's Bewitched, a fact that earned it few admirers at the time. Critics were unsparing and audiences indifferent. Those hoping for something in the vein of When Samantha Met Derwood were vexed as to why Ephron had chosen such a bafflingly postmodern approach to the material. Was there not a perfectly fun and charming picture to be mined from a more straightforward treatment of the beloved sitcom? To an extent, I think that Ephron was merely catering to her strengths - the juxtaposition of two parallel narratives, one modern and "real", the other familiar and fictional, puts me in mind of her earlier hit Sleepless In Seattle (1993) and its affectionately parasitic relationship with An Affair To Remember (1957). No doubt she was hoping to create a similar dynamic here, but with an overtly outlandish, reality-blurring vibe in the vein of Spike Jonze's then-recent Adaptation. (2002). It didn't pay off, but I can give Ephron props for at least trying to think outside the box and do something a little unexpected in lieu of a routine remake. It's easy to question why after the fact, when you're stuck with an unsuccessful product, but there are a high number of popular and acclaimed risk-taking pictures (Adaptation. included) that feel as though they could so easily have gone the other way. Enough of the right ingredients were certainly in place for Bewitched to have been a smashing success; in its case, the stars just didn't align, but I can buy that it looked like a great idea on paper.

I should admit upfront that I am hopelessly unqualified to comment on how successful the film is in capturing the essence of the original sitcom, which debuted in 1964 and ran for eight seasons, none of which I have had the pleasure of viewing first-hand. Growing up, it was just not something on my radar, and I think Ephron's film may have even been my formal introduction to the very existence of the series (there is a Simpsons opening that has Bart writing "Bewitched does not promote Satanism" on the chalkboard, but when I was a kid the only "Bewitched" I knew was the Irish girl band B*Witched, and I probably assumed he was referencing that). I do, however, get the gist of what it was about - a suburban housewife, played by Elizabeth Montgomery, who was secretly a witch, and whose marriage to a mortal milksop (played by Dick York for the first five seasons, and Dick Sargent for the remainder) was a subject of serious contention among her magical family, who were constantly interfering in their day to day lives. Plans for a feature Bewitched adaptation had been drawn up as early as the 1990s, when actor/director Ted Bessell bought the rights and began developing ideas with the help of one-time Babysitter Bandit Penny Marshall. The project was shelved following Bessell's death in 1996, but it's easy to see how the more conventional adaptation then being shepherded would have fit right in with the cinematic climate of the 90s, when Hollywood was going through a full-blown love affair with the 1960s television the current crop of producers had presumably grown up watching (among others, there were feature film remakes of Dennis the Menace, The Brady Bunch, The Flintstones, My Favorite Martian and Flipper). By the time Bewitched came to fruition in the mid-00s, the cycle had largely passed, and the film had adjusted its nostalgic specs accordingly, applying greater distance from the source by going all meta and retooling itself as a modern romantic comedy set against the making of a 21st century take on Bewitched. What was in right now was Will Ferrell and his personal brand of manic improv humor, and that's something the 2005 picture was going to amp up for all it was worth. I actually don't feel that my lack of familiarity with the source puts me at too big a disadvantage, as overall the finished product seems less interested in being a heartfelt love letter to a beloved sitcom than in trading on something familiar from popular culture while regarding it with a tongue-in-cheek remoteness suggesting new milliennium hip; the various shout-outs and references to the original sitcom all appear to have quotation marks around them. Take, for example, the left of field appearance in the climax of a character named Uncle Arthur; the film operates on the assumption that I'll know who the character is, which I don't (beyond what's already self-explanatory)...but I do get that I'm watching Steve Carell doing a Paul Lynde impersonation, and that feels like it might very well be the joke in itself.

Kidman plays Isabel Bigelow, an idealistic witch whose pursuit of a fresh start has led her to Los Angeles, where she intends to pass herself off as a mortal and live the nondescript life of which she's so enamoured - much to the disapproval of her warlock father Nigel (Michael Caine), who insists that she'll never be able to survive out there without falling back on her magical abilities (to be fair, it does make life so much more convenient when you can adjust reality with a simple snap of your fingers). Meanwhile, Ferrell plays Jack Wyatt, a self-obsessed actor dangerously close to hitting rock bottom, although it wouldn't do for a man of his ego to admit it. His previous film, Last Year In Kathmandu, was such a career-derailing disaster that it managed to shift a grand total of zero DVD copies, and his personal life isn't much rosier, with his wife Sheila (Katie Finneran) having separated from him under humiliating circumstances. His only recourse is to turn to television, and to accept the role of Darrin in an upcoming reboot of the 1960s sitcom Bewitched. Jack, however, has this one big reservation about the project: Samantha, and not Darrin, was the star of the original series, and that's something he's determined to change in this particular go-around. He asserts enough creative control over the series to stipulate that an unknown actress be cast in the role of Samantha, with the intention of minimising her input and keeping himself firmly at the centre (not having seen the original series, I can't say for certain, but I'm going to assume there's something inherently absurd in the very idea of trying to make it all about the non-magical Derwood). Naturally, he crosses paths with Isabel and, noting the uncanny resemblance between her nose and that of the original Samantha, coaxes her into joining the project, unaware that he's tangling with an actual witch. Isabel's idealism can only blind her to Jack's egotistical machinations for so long, however, at which point she puts aside her aspirations for a magic-free lifestyle and sets her sights on getting even with Jack. And you know how this game goes. First the resentment and misunderstandings, then the inevitable magnetism.

The first really obvious problem Bewitched has riding against it is its flimsy yet incongruously fussy plotting, which never comes together to create a coherent and satisfying narrative. Instead, we get lots of episodic, miniature conflicts that better resemble the experiencing of watching multiple installments of a half-hour TV series stitched together to create a single unconvincing feature. When Isabel gets wise to Jack's nefarious ploy to shut her out of the spotlight, she first has some fun using her powers to manipulate his on set behaviour and sabotage several scenes to show off her own comedic chops. Then she's persuaded to cast a hex on Jack that, as an unintended consequence, causes him to fall head over heels in love with her; to her surprise, Isabel discovers that she could make it work with this brainwashed version of Jack, but her reservations on the ethics of a magic-induced romance eventually get the better of her and cause her to (quite literally) reverse the entire hex narrative arc. In its place, Isabel chews Jack out for his self-absorption and threatens to quit the series, but Jack, impressed by this display of moxie, agrees that she be given a fuller role and falls in love with her for real. Jack and Isabel have thus resolved all of their major differences with the movie barely past the hour mark, leaving the third act a bit strapped for momentum. It has Jack's wife show up out of the blue, apparently intent on rekindling their marriage now that his career might be picking up, but she doesn't stay long enough for anything to come of this (besides one of the script's better physical gags). Finally, it hangs its climactic action on the crisis of confidence Isabel is suddenly feeling regarding keeping her real identity as a witch hidden from Jack, and Jack's reluctance to accept this when the bombshell is eventually dropped on him. There's also a subplot involving Nigel's pursuit of one of Isabel's co-stars, Iris, played by Shirley MacLaine, and his beginning to suspect that she too might be a witch, a narrative thread that's only half-resolved. Many of the individual jokes are decent enough (I enjoy an animal wrangler's desperate attempts to get a non-compliant dog to run in a specified direction) but there's no cohesive effect.

Bewitched is a glorious mess from start to finish, but more harmful than the chaotic story structure would be the total lack of chemistry between Kidman and Ferrell, which keeps it from succeeding on its own terms as a sweet romantic comedy, and was egregious enough to earn the film a Golden Raspberry Award for the year's worst screen couple. I can't really argue with the Razzies on this one - the two are like ketchup on apple pie. Largely, it's a reflection of the project's skewed priorities. The grand irony that appears to be lost on the film is that the central problem keeping the lead characters occupied (at least for the first hour or so) is mirrored in the interplay between the two leads - which is to say that there's too much emphasis on making this another Will Ferrell comedy vehicle when Kidman should frankly be the star. Ferrell may have been the film's greatest asset from a marketing standpoint in 2005, but he's also its biggest problem. I wouldn't go so as to claim that Ferrell single-handedly derails Bewitched, but I think he is, in no small way, responsible for the tonal dissonance that pervades the picture and prevents it from ever settling down and figuring out what it's about and to whom it's supposed to appeal. Ferrell can be a joy to watch when he's given the right material (case in point, we all know how much of a hoot he is in Elf). Here, I feel he was misdirected, and possibly even miscast altogether. In depicting Jack as the kind of cartoonishly buffoonish man-child we can delight in rooting against, he's perfectly within his element, but he has more trouble when it comes to depicting Jack as the kind of inwardly sensitive romantic lead we can comfortably see our heroine ending up with. Ferrell approaches the role from an entirely irreverent angle that always seems to be wanting to take the picture in a more arch, Frat Pack-friendly direction - something closer in spirit to his recent hit Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy - which can both suit and disturb the story depending on what stage of its trajectory we're at. During the portion of the film where Jack is hexed into falling in love with Isabel, he does an enjoyable parody of a man twitterpated out of his wits. When he later becomes romantically involved with Isabel for real, their non-existent chemistry still feels as though it's in the exact same quotation marks. Which might have been less of an issue in a version of the story that enabled all of the players to be on the same page, but that's not the case here. Kidman approaches the role of Isabel with a sweet sincerity that feels indicative of the project's origins as a more reverent and faithful translation of the series. She is, in a word, charming - but the film underestimates Kidman's charm, instead favouring Ferrell's aggressively domineering comedy style and allowing the warmth and likeability she brings to be completely suffocated. The two of them barely belong in the same feature, let alone the same romantic pairing.

At the heart of Bewitched is the disarming fantasy of a naive witch trying to give up on magic and figure out how to survive in the real world. Bewitched itself seems to forget about this for despairingly long stretches, so hung up is the film on the delusion that this is Jack's story and that his neurotic outbursts are the main event. But that story thread is nevertheless there, and it's why I've come around to kind of sort of liking Bewitched, in spite of Bewitched. Kidman is just too darn likeable for me to write the whole picture off as a failure. But I find that a lot of the film's eccentricities and downright baffling decisions have also grown on me over the years - not least, the curious wrap-up where Isabel decides that the key to thriving in the real world is to duck out of it altogether. At the end, she and Jack find mutual refuge from their self-doubts by assuming the identities of the fictional characters they've been playing. Despite Ephron's insistence that she had no interest in creating a film that functioned as a prequel to the series (as was apparently the approach of everybody else who had worked on the project before her), the final scene makes it clear that she has done exactly that - the film ends precisely where the sitcom scenario would be expected to pick up, with Isabel and Jack marrying and moving into a house resembling the one inhabited by their on-screen counterparts, before spooking Mrs Kravitz across the road by magicking up a tree in their front yard. I surely can't be the only one unable to shake the feeling that they've ditched their own reality by retreating into a fictional world in the manner of Howard Duff's character from the classic Twilight Zone episode "A World of Difference"? The most comparable film I can think of would be Karel Reisz's 1981 adaptation of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, in which Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons play Anna and Mike, the lead actors in an in-universe adaptation of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, sequences from which are interspersed with episodes from the actors' backstage affair (the film was scripted by Harold Pinter, who did love his stories about role-playing lovers). Fowles' book was itself very meta and regularly broke the fourth wall, so for Reisz's film the whole "making of" angle was a logical means of incorporating an equivalent kind of interplay more appropriate to the world of cinema. Fowles' book also concludes with an invitation to the reader to choose between two possible endings, one hopeful, the other bitterly unhappy, with the warning that each is ultimately as plausible as the other; Pinter's strategy of adapting the story into two parallel narratives enables the film to likewise show both endings, more-or-less - Hollywood naturally favours the more optimistic ending, while the "real" world offers no such clemency. In the closing sequence, Mike makes his last ditch plea to Anna by addressing her by her character's name, "Sarah", raising questions as to whom he has really fallen for - the real woman, or an abstract ideal embodied by a fictional character. Something very similar occurs at the end of Bewitched, when Jack professes love to Isabel, but mistakenly (or not?) calls her "Samantha". Unlike Streep in the aforementioned film, Isabel reciprocates by calling him "Darrin", granting us the happy ending that was beyond Anna and Mike, but prompting similar questions regarding their final relationship with reality.

Isabel's climactic dilemma comes from being caught between two worlds and feeling that she belongs in neither; it should come as no surprise that both worlds, "real" and magic, are entrenched in fantasy. At the start of the film, when discussing her magical prowess and her desire to step away from it, Isabel uses language analogous to overcoming a drinking habit; there's a lot of talk of "falling off the wagon" whenever the temptation to cast a spell gets the better of her. An equally apt comparison, given Nigel's repeated interjections, would be family endowment, with Isabel wishing to be self-sufficient and to forge her own independent path in life without having to fall back on the resources she's lucked into by birth - her magical powers are figurative credit cards (in one sight gag, they take the form of a literal credit card, or rather tarot card) granting her access to seemingly limitless funds, and giving her a head start on living out the consumerist fantasies that characterise aspirations in the real world. Isabel's first action, on arriving in Los Angeles, is to secure a swanky abode with the use of magic (albeit one that's located just down the street from a Denny's, so there's always a catch), where she is swiftly initiated into the joys of lawn sprinklers, microwaved popcorn and cable television. One needn't squint too hard to see a parallel between the instant gratification she criticises among the inhabitants of the magical realm and the real world banalities for which she feels such deep fascination; in her new terrain, she is surrounded by technological luxuries in which everything is similarly accomplished at the touch of a button. More crucially, she acquires, with ease so ludicrous it could only be magic, the kind of bourgeois paradise the average denizen would struggle to attain. Her life in the real world is a materialist sham, birthed from a culture that thrives on insatiable consumption (this omnipresent consumerism is further underscored in a sequence where Isabel is out shopping and Nigel ambushes her by transmuting his form into a variety of brand logos), one that Isabel ultimately deems to be no more nourishing than the falsehoods she was accustomed to swallowing among her fellow enchanters. Toward the end of the film, she asks Nigel where home is, actual is advised "Wherever you've been the happiest." Isabel responds by abandoning her brick and mortar house and flying out to the studio set where she has played the role of Samantha; it is in her staged and scripted life as Samantha that she has found her greatest fulfilment, and it is here that she wishes to remain, an epiphany fortified by Jack's proposition that Samantha's (fictional) existence constitutes an ideal middle path between the mortal and magical realms, and that Isabel might live by following her example. He reasons that Samantha lived happily ever after, before admitting that, "Of course, there's no way to tell because she went off the air..." The suggestion that Samantha's narrative ultimately ended in irresolution introduces an element of disturbance into his proposed nostalgic anchor. After all, the appeal of nostalgia lies in knowing exactly what you are getting, and in replicating the spirit (or an approximation of) of a bygone era that seems, with hindsight, like a simpler time, primarily because it appears so safely removed from the uncertainties of the present. Jack's words imply that Samantha vanished from the airwaves due to a disturbance in the timeline, and are an invitation to Isabel to remedy that by herself becoming Samantha - that fantastical ideal that exists only in televisual (or, in this case, cinematic) fiction - and validating the survival of her breezy sitcom world, not simply for her own benefit, but for a here and now that yearns for the oldfangled reassurances she brings. The discussion around Isabel's wanting to occupy the mortal world whilst embracing her magical heritage might suggest that a balance is desirable between reality and fantasy, yet the closing sequence appears to wholly privilege the latter - it shows a convergence between the two narratives, with Samantha restored to her rightful place, opposite the Kravitzes, and the present attaining its final redemption by disappearing into its past.

Like everything else, Bewitched has a mostly ambivalent attitude toward nostalgia and implications thereof, tending to vacillate between backhanded mockery and genuine reverence in its representation of its sitcom mother. This ambivalence is best epitomised in a sequence where Isabel discusses her new acting gig with her friend Maria, played by Kristin Chenowith (Chenowith's casting is itself something of an in-joke, as she played another of popular culture's iconic witches, Glinda The Good Witch, in the Broadway musical Wicked), who gushes about how much she loved the original show, only to let it slip that she's actually confused it with I Dream of Jeannie, a rival fantasy sitcom from the same era - which, strangely, doesn't hinder her ability to give Isabel a passionate run-through all the beats of the Bewitched title sequence. In another scene, Jack monologues about how much he liked the character of Uncle Arthur and a running gag involving a cracked mirror; it's the kind of thing I'm sure is very fun to watch first-hand, but there's an inevitable tedium in hearing somebody else describe it back to you, and it's hard to say just how knowing this is on the film's part (we later see Jack laughing hysterically at a Bewitched re-run, but his reaction is so exaggerated that it's similarly unclear if we're supposed to be nodding along with his rampant enthusiasm or sniffing at his absurdity as a human being). Meanwhile, the in-universe charge that the Bewitched revival is "a crass attempt by the network to market nostalgia, rather than take a risk on new ideas" comes off as the obligatory sprinkling of pseudo self-deprecation any truly hip reconstruction needs to demonstrate that it's a good sport, with Jack's response ("This isn't the old Bewitched, it's been refocussed") enabling the film to go explicitly on the defensive. By the final sequence, the film seems to have settled on an predominantly celebratory perspective on nostalgia, with Isabel and Jack finding security in taking up permanent residence inside a world reassembled wholesale from pop cultural memory. The reverence with which the characters regard the original Bewitched, however overblown, is likewise vindicated, with the film appearing to make the case for the value of escapist fantasy. At the beginning of the film, Isabel complains to Nigel that her inability to live as she pleases is akin to being "pressed against a glass window...it's right there on the other side. I can see it but I can't feel it, I can't touch it." While ostensibly alluding to the reality in which she so yearns to participate, what she more deftly describes is the plight of the television viewer looking to be absorbed into an on-screen fantasy world for half an hour or so - something Isabel successfully achieves at the end of the film when she makes the fictional world of the original sitcom her literal reality. It does mean that we close with the implication that Isabel failed in her mission to live in the real world. But then, Bewitched supposes, who does want to live in the real world? Isabel finds fulfilment in making gentle fantasy re-accessible to mortals who'd otherwise have only the consumerist constants of Denny's restaurants, Coffee Beans and the Jolly Green Giant to distract them from the terrors of uncertainty (a fantasy that's as market-tested a product as any other, but sometimes magic happens in between the cracks).

Naturally, Isabel feels at home in assuming the role of Samantha because she is Samantha, more-or-less. The uncanny symmetry between Isabel's life and that of her fictional counterpart are evoked repeatedly - she has the same abilities, and a meddling magical family, including an Aunt Clara and (possibly) an Uncle Arthur - reinforcing our intuitive understanding that she has always been the displaced protagonist of a fantasy sitcom and never known it. She is a fantasy figure who, much like Pinnochio, wishes to become real, but finds that reality is neither desirable nor desired of her. She exudes an airy, ethereal romanticism, one that is blatantly not of the Los Angeles she arrives in, and which, the instant she touches down, is just waiting to be snapped up and utilised by a world that has survived more than three decades with Bewitched regulated to the re-run heap, but is all the rosier for its restoration. The problem Jack poses, regarding what became of the "original" Samantha, might well be echoed in an otherwise unresolved loose end, subtler than that involving Nigel and Iris, that was, in all likelihood, leftover from an earlier draft of the story, and that has to do with the whereabouts of Isabel's mother. It is established during her opening conversation with Nigel that Isabel's parents are separated, and when Nigel asks her what her mother makes of her newfound aspirations, Isabel responds, "She's disappeared again." It looks as though they're setting up for Isabel's mother to come up again later as a plot point, or at the very least a brick joke, but this doesn't happen. She is alluded to when Isabel informs Jack that when anyone in her family gets angry, "we usually just disappear". Otherwise, the only other really explicit reference to Isabel's absent parent is her mentioning that her mother fixed the world series. So what gives? I remember anticipating that Iris might turn out to be Isabel's mother, which would tie in both with her playing Endora in the in-universe show and the gradual revelation that she too is a witch, although presumably having heavily modified her appearance, given that neither Isabel or Nigel seem to recognise her. But no. Iris herself, or at least her magical abilities, turn out to be something of a non-sequitur - nothing much comes of it other than a couple of moments where she cockblocks Nigel at a party and Uncle Arthur randomly disclosing that she's a witch to Jack. (I find it odd, actually, that there is this other witch wandering around in the backdrop, one who's blatantly already figured out how to live among mortals, and she plays no part whatsoever in the story's resolution - again, earlier draft?) Once we've ruled out Iris, my next best guess would be that Isabel's mother is the original Samantha...although perhaps not literally, and more in the sense that there's a thematic parallel to be drawn between the unexplained absence of Isabel's mother and Samantha's having gone off the air. In both cases, they upped and left, and it falls upon the next generation of benevolent witch looking to hide out in the real world to take up the mantle and demonstrate that Samantha's world is still just as sunny and spotless three decades on. The absence of Isabel's mother leaves the space vacant for Samantha to become her metaphorical mother, a connection aacentuated in the guidance Isabel seeks from Samantha throughout the film.

Alternatively, I am just as happy to entertain the possibility that Uncle Arthur may be Isabel's mother incognito.

What A Blessing They're Detached (A Very Strange Ad For Volvo V40)

Let's take a look at a rather risqué Volvo ad from 1998 - one that weirded me out as a teenager, and frankly still weirds me out today, and which I feel particularly compelled to dive into and finally glean some degree of sense out of.

Watch this ad with your volume down low and the content probably seems innocuous enough. We're shown an exterior shot of a perfectly charming-looking abode on a crisp winter's day, followed by a shot of the same house on a crisp winter's night, a warmly lit glow emanating from the bedroom, and finally on a crisp winter's morn. All the while, the vehicle the ad is supposedly promoting is situated prominently at the front. Not a lot appears to happen, but it is a picturesque enough scene, the kind that might make a pleasant image for a holiday brochure advertising winter getaways. Only in the final section do we see something resembling a visual punchline - a cyclist pauses while passing the house, clearly intrigued by something or other within the vicinity. Is it the flash Volvo that's parked out front? Possibly not - the non-stop creaking of mattress springs and the intermittent sounds of a female moaning make it very clear what the occupants are up to, and judging by the succession of temporal skips we've glimpsed throughout the ad, they've been at this around the clock. The owners of this Volvo V40 are certainly horny devils, making it a jolly good thing there's such a distance between their love shack and the nearest visible adjacent building - and yet there's still a sense, by the end, that their insatiable sex drives are infringing on the local community. The biggest mystery, of course, is what this ribald scenario has to do with the car parked out front, which is what we would, in theory, expect it all to come back to. The only real clue on offer is in the verbal punchline: "Now all you need are some kids"...meaning what, exactly? That the couple's relentless fucking is borne less of unbridled passion than of a frenzied desperation to procreate (so that they'd have a few young accessories with which to deck out their swanky car)? Or is the idea more that if the couple did have children, they might have something to distract them from all that unbridled passion, which is engendered by how deliriously euphoric their car makes them feel? Either way, and in spite of the text's suggestion that the two are to be regarded as complementary, the ad establishes an implicit rivalry between the prospective children of the over-stimulated couple, and the car which may be their real pride and joy. The kids themselves are mere afterthoughts, their very existence dictated by the Volvo, conceived in service of it and not the other way around, or as a direct result of the Volvo's profound effect on their parents' lives. The message is that the Volvo is a family car, but the ad goes a step further in positing it as the very nexus of family life; despite the irony that it is never, at any point, shown to be the centre of its owners' attentions (and, since they're so preoccupied with staying indoors and procreating, it does not appear to be getting a lot of use at the moment), the car is privileged as the cornerstone of their relationship. Those kids, when they come, had better know their place.

It does not escape my notice that the car, while entirely stationary, has something of an arc going on throughout the three vignettes, in that it becomes increasingly snow-covered the further we progress along our day/night cycle. What's curious is that it's the only aspect of the mise-en-scene where this appears to be happening. By the final portion, neither the steps nor the surrounding greenery appear to have accumulated any additional layers of snow, and the footprints from the previous day are still as visible the following morning. The only really radical difference we have in the morning segment, besides the appearance of the voyeuristic cyclist (and an unidentified black speck besides the steps that might possibly be a bird?) is the addition of a new white topping across the roof of the Volvo, which I am inclined to entertain as an effort to subconsciously connect the car to the sexual activity unfolding in the room above. In other words, an ejaculation metaphor, to reinforce the Volvo's crucial role in the reproductive process. Might this account for the otherwise incidental decision to set the ad in winter scenery?

So yes, the nature of this ad is all very cheeky. For myself, however, its appeal has never rested in the risqué humor, but in the simple pleasure of its images. As a lover of diurnal cycles, I can't help but be charmed by the simple transitioning from one temporal point to the next, and by the general ambience of the scene as it exists at the different times of day - the howling winds that rage on as relentlessly as the mattress-creaking, the array of tracks and prints that snake across the local terrain, the intriguing architecture of the featured abode, with its lack of lower front windows (I would be curious to know of the filming location). Basically, anything that doesn't pertain to the pivotal joke about our salacious Volvo owners. It is a calming aura that is only mildly offset by what's implied to be going on below the surface. We all know that sex sells, but they could honestly have jettisoned that all-important audio and the entire set-up would have struck me as every bit as titillating.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #41: Blockbuster Nights (aka Rabbits and Guinea Pigs Shouldn't Live Together, They Are Totally Different Animals)

Dogs and cats might be notoriously volatile company, but we've already established that there's no reason why they can't get along, so long as there's sufficient quantities of J2O to go around. If you're looking to promote your product as the kind of universally agreeable artefact around which consumers from all backgrounds and walks and life can find common ground, then having a couple of infamously antagonistic species seeing eye to eye on the matter can make for a persuasive metaphor (see also: that Coca Cola ad where a polar bear and a seal are able to put aside their differences with said effervescent beverage). But when your advertising campaign derives from the assumed harmony two traditional best buds who may, in actuality, be anything but, there's likely to always be a layer of unintentional discomfort nestled at the centre. In other words, don't copy the example of the following campaign.

When I was a child, there was a popular misconception that guinea pigs made better companions for rabbits than other rabbits, and it was common to see the two housed together. This was slightly before the era when neutering rabbits became standard procedure; groupings between males and females were obviously a huge no, while social aggression in same-sex groupings could be a more challenging issue for rabbit owners to have to rein in, so circumventing the problem altogether by having your rabbit shack up with a cavy was seen as an ideal life hack. I mean, they're both herbivores; what's the worst that could happen? Needless to say, nowadays it's not encouraged - rabbits and guinea pigs are both highly social animals, but they are very different social animals, and they thrive on the companionship of their own kind, not some alien species whose various signals and/or vocalisations are going to mean nothing to them. Also, since the rabbit tended to be the bigger and brawnier participant in such groupings, the guinea pig was unlikely to have very much leverage in the situation, and there was a very real risk that, if things did turn nasty, the rabbit could do some serious damage to the guinea pig with those enormous hind legs of theirs. Finally, rabbits are vectors of certain respiratory diseases that, while harmless to other rabbits, can be fatal to guinea pigs. All in all, keeping them together is not a smart idea. So it would be an unfortunate thing if any prospective pet owners were negatively influenced by this light-hearted Blockbuster Video campaign from the early 00s, which centred on the residents of 173 Jefferson Avenue - Ray, an overly-excitable guinea pig, and his long-suffering straight man roomie, a Dutch rabbit named Carl. Ray gets on Carl's nerves in just about every installment, so in reality this arrangement would probably have ended in bloodshed, but here the ill-matched critters (CGI creations animated by Tippett Studio) were able to maintain some level of decorum through their one notable area of common interest - DVDs and their prolificness in the venue opposite. At this point VHS hadn't completely gone away, but DVD was very much the shiny new kid in town, and the campaign provides a window into a time when $14.99 for a used disc was considered an absolute steal.

What does stand out when watching the Jefferson Avenue campaign is how great a debt it blatantly owes to Budweiser's "Swamp Gang" campaign from just a few years prior. I don't think it's unfair to say that it constitutes an urbanised, more family-friendly take on much the same idea, in revolving around a bunch of sardonic talking animals with no actual logical connection to the product being hawked, just that they happen to be situated in close proximity to its signage, and clearly have nothing better to do with their time and their gift of the gab than to comment on it. (Bonus: Ray the guinea pig is frequently mistaken for a hamster by some viewers, much as the chameleons from the Budweiser ads were often mistaken for iguanas, because an awful lot of people are species-illiterate.) In Ray and Carl's case, they lived in the window display of a pet shop located directly across the street from a Blockbuster Video, so they were always alert to the latest deals and promotions. It seems a pretty safe assumption that neither Ray or Carl had accessed a VCR/DVD player in their lives, so the notion that they would be so excited over the release of Bad Boys II, or that they would attach so much hysterical importance to the knowledge that Blockbuster was giving away free vacations to lucky customers might be a testament more to the monotony of life in that pet shop than to the awesomeness of Blockbuster. (Very conveniently for continuity, Ray and Carl also never seemed to attract any prospective buyers of their own - the fact that they were themselves purchasable stock came up in only one ad toward the end of the campaign's cycle.) The ads were absurd, sure, but then most memorable advertising is in some way or another, and I'd wager that this intrinsic silliness was in no small way accountable for their appeal, which was considerable - the public, clearly not put off by the campaign's derivativeness, took Ray and Carl to their hearts, and the ads proved to be quite popular, despite their relatively short run. The original campaign ran between 2002 and 2003, but in 2007 saw a brief revival to promote Blockbuster's ill-fated Netflix rival, Total Access, albeit one made up of recycled footage from an existing promo entitled "Mouse Click", in which Ray and Carl attempt to get online by pounding repeatedly on a mouse (the kind more endemic to the pet shop ambience).

Blockbuster managed to secure some fairly prominent voice talent for the campaign, with Ray being voiced by Jim Belushi. Carl, meanwhile, was voiced by James Woods, whom you'll probably recognise as the voice of Hades from Disney's Hercules, and in a clever bit of casting, the mouse he abuses in the aforementioned "Mouse Click" spot was voiced by Bobcat Goldthwait, aka Pain, one of the two shape-shifting demons Hades was similarly fond of pummelling.

Although they were, in a way, just as far-out as anything involving the Budweiser lizards, the Ray and Carl ads largely forwent the self-consciously weird humor of their swamp-dwelling models in favour of gags centred around the Odd Couple dynamic between the two central characters, playing like miniature sitcoms about mismatched roomies who, in this instance, just so happened to be a rabbit and a cavy living in a pet shop window. Occasionally there might be a movie connection - in one ad, Ray annoys Carl by dancing to the song "Maniac" from Flashdance, while in another Ray attempts to act out a tribute to his purported favourite genre, kung fu, and incurs the wrath of both Carl and a team of ninja mice. Most of these gags seem entirely peripheral to Blockbuster itself, however - Ray and Carl could have lived across the street from a Starbucks and I'm sure the overwhelming majority of them (mainly hinged around the implication that the rabbit, like everyone else, barely tolerates the guinea pig) would require only minimal tweaking to have made every bit as much sense. On the other hand, there is an appealing irony in the fact that, for Ray and Carl, the Blockbuster storefront itself functions as their nightly entertainment, their shop window effectively being a giant television screen into which they can gaze and receive endless diversion (something evoked in the spot where Carl's ears function as antenna, and Ray has to adjust them to get a decent reception of the street beyond). With no first-hand access to the media in question, Ray and Carl could experience the thrill of the Blockbuster rental only vicariously, through the deals and offers afforded its patrons. I am not convinced that they necessarily understand what Bad Boys II is, but they bear nightly witness to the desire of the human urbanite to seek out a copy, riddled with scuffs and finger marks from the like-minded individuals who were there before them, for escapism from the drudgery of the brick and mortar that otherwise surrounds them. And that, ultimately, is what gives the campaign its unique flavour, despite the conceptual similarity to the Swamp Gang - the sense it captures of a vibrantly interconnected, yet indifferent and emotionally estranged urban world outside. If the Swamp Gang campaign depicts a humorous collision between the forces of nature and human consumerism, with Ray and Carl we see a world where, much like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, man's connection to nature seems almost non-existent, with concrete dominating where wilderness once stood. Unlike the Swamp Gang ads, where the featured critters were usually spectators but would intermittently encroach on the human world by raiding the tavern or wrecking the neon signage, the animal kingdom has here been completely neutralised, the only specimens within range being entirely docile and safely contained in glass enclosures (they also go curiously unnoticed; I find it odd that no passers-by are stopping to enjoy the cute animals showcased right beneath their noses, seemingly more interested in the shiny discs being offered across the street). For some reason it is always night in Ray and Carl's world - likely to tie in with the tagline, "Make it a Blockbuster Night", but the lack of sunlight merely adds to that overwhelming sense of artificiality. Crucially, Ray and Carl are unable to interact with the world beyond their window, only look at it, which mirrors the patrons' own relationship with the kind of escapism Blockbuster is selling, suggesting that both worlds are implicitly characterised by a shared claustrophobia. I can't help but feel that Carl's excitement, on seeing the promise of a prospective free vacation, is fuelled by the mere possibility of escape being dangled before him, even if (as with most of the contest's real-life entrants) it remains utterly out of his reach. (Note: the same scenario was recycled for a number of different promotions, and Carl went just as wild over the promise of a free Stuart Little 2 poster. The inconsiderate rabbit never did learn the value of knocking.)

The terribly depressing thing about reviewing this campaign from the vantage point of 2022 is that we all know it ultimately didn't have a happy ending. Blockbuster peaked in the mid-00s, with most of their stores not making it into the mid-10s, as the company found itself up to its neck in debts and increasingly overshadowed by the media behemoth it had once infamously pooh-poohed (in 2000 Blockbuster passed up an opportunity to buy Netflix outright, a decision that seems flagrantly poor with hindsight, but then Netflix weren't exactly making a killing at the time). The Blockbuster at Jefferson Avenue would have packed up years ago, meaning that the current residents of the pet shop opposite (assuming they too didn't go out of business in the interim) would being spend their days gazing at a laundrette or trendy coffee bar. Lots of exciting signage there, I'm sure. Ray and Carl themselves would sadly also be long gone (we can only hope they eventually wound up with owners more attuned to the risks of letting rabbits and guinea pigs mingle). Meanwhile, the ghost of Blockbuster lingers on as a quintessential touchstone of 90s nostalgia, a ubiquitous presence throughout many a Gen X-er and Millennial's halcyon days the world is suddenly mournful it allowed to die off. Nowadays, if you want to go back, you'll find you're in much the same boat as Ray and Carl, able to gaze longingly at that garish blue storefront through old pictures and YouTube uploads, but the cold barriers of time are keeping you firmly inside that sawdust-filled box. Maybe we're at the point where, like Ray and Carl, the mere (erstwhile) existence of such a brand is its own form of delirious fascination.