22 Short Films About Springfield (aka The McWhat?)

The first thing to be said about "22 Short Films About Springfield", aka episode 3F18, (aside from the fact that it contains what has, in the succeeding years, become a strong contender for the internet's favourite Simpsons joke) is that the title is a lie. It does not actually contain twenty-two short films, about Springfield or otherwise, and it is futile to try to compile them, as many a Wikipedia contributor has discovered to their detriment. So, why does the title appear to be under that impression? For one, it was a reference to François Girard's Canadian arthouse classic 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993), the title of which seemed to resonate with the zeitgeist of the time (enough for a contemporary episode of Animaniacs to supply its own variation), even if the film itself was only likely to appeal to an esoteric audience (personally I love it, but I am an admirer of Gould). It also alluded to the fact that your average Simpsons episode was (roughly) twenty-two minutes long, meaning there was room (in theory, anyway) for twenty-two one-minute stories. In actuality, the writers had already settled on the title before they began compiling stories, and so many were rejigged or excised from the final edit that in the end they failed to keep track of whether they had twenty-two of them or not (they admit this much on the DVD commentary), and this had remained a point of confusion for fans ever since (as a kid, I once tried to keep track and thought I had them all, but I had to include the interludes with the bee's eye-view and the sewer-traversing donut as their own separate films, which felt like a cheat). What we do get is one of the most unique and pleasingly experimental of the series' run, one that, in place of the standard A to B narrative centred on the titular family, offers up a barrage of skits and sketches depicting the assorted goings-on of a perfectly typical noon in Springfield (presumably on a weekend, given that none of the kids or teaching staff are in school). The skits segue deftly into one another, but only two develop into recurring narrative threads (three if you count the episode bookends with Bart and Milhouse) - first, an ongoing saga with Marge attempting to extract a wad of wayward bubblegum from Lisa's hair, and second, a perilous journey into Springfield's seedy underbelly, seen through the eyes of Chief Wiggum and assembled from pastiches of one of the defining flicks of the era. Wiggum and Lisa's stories are each told in three separate chunks, although to get anywhere close to the alleged total of twenty-two, these all need to be counted as their own individual shorts.

The nominal shout-out to 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould has greater significance still, in the sense that "22" can, on one level, be understood as The Simpsons' love letter to the wave of independent cinema that was taking the multiplexes by storm in the early/mid-1990s, peaking with the breakout success of Quentin Tarantino's sophomore feature, Pulp Fiction, in 1994. By the time the episode aired, on April 14th 1996, everybody in the world had seen Pulp Fiction and everybody wanted the world to know they had seen Pulp Fiction, which is why you had references to the film popping up in the most random of places, from Spice Girls videos to Space Jam. And The Simpsons was certainly no more immune to the lure of the big PF, the homages in "22" being as slickly implemented as you would expect from the series that was arguably an even more avid devourer of pop cultural detritus than Tarantino himself, but perhaps of a somewhat more self-consciously showy nature than was typical for the show's numerous cinematic pastiches. It really wants you to sit up and notice how faithfully it has recreated a number of key sequences from the movie, just as it wants you to feel cool and in on the joke because you recognise it as being lifted from Pulp Fiction, to the extent that it's not consistently accessible to those unhip to Tarantino - which is definitely not the case for the numerous Hitchcock references sprinkled throughout the series. "Bart of Darkness" makes no strict requisite for you to have seen Rear Window for it to be enjoyed on its own terms as the story of a particularly aggravating summer viewed from the Simpsons' backyard. You obviously need to have seen Psycho to get the full benefit of the sequence in "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" with Maggie bludgeoning Homer in the garage, but it can still be easily appreciated as its own self-contained slice of weirdly unsettling absurdity. But if you did happen to miss out on the whole Pulp phenomenon, then I can't see how the part of "22" where Herman has Snake and Wiggum gagged and bound inside his store is going to do anything other than confuse the heck out of you. And while you probably could take an educated guess at exactly what kind of party Herman has in mind for when his mysterious friend Zed arrives, there is something terribly, fundamentally off about stumbling across a scene of this nature in an episode of The Simpsons, and not just because of its decidedly adult implications. Part of the issue, I think, is that in order for the allusion to work, it requires Herman to behave in a way that's very...if not exactly out of character for the one-armed antique dealer (Herman being something of a dark horse), is definitely unprecedented based on what we do already know about him. One of the episode writers, Rachel Pulido, points out as much in the DVD commentary, when Josh Weinstein comments on how tremendously lucky it was that Herman was already an established character, and that he was "exactly like that guy [Duane Whitaker's character] in the movie". Pulido retorts, "I thought he was nicer than that. He seemed a lot nicer in "Bart The General"". It's fair to say that, even at his very nicest, Herman's always been something of a creep. But I would never in a million years have suspected he was THAT much of a creep. As sparkling and lovingly-observed as the episode's Pulp Fiction pastiches are, let's face it, the whole thing does end up doing poor Herman slightly dirty.

What "22 Short Films About Springfield" has in common with Pulp Fiction, besides a fascination with fast food and the kind of unsettling bondage that goes on behind closed doors, is an interest in the multi-stranded narrative, in grander stories constructed from smaller parallel threads intersecting at various points. Pulp Fiction follows three different narrative trajectories, not all of which are relayed in a strictly linear fashion, but which all come together to create a more-or-less coherent picture of interlocking lives in Los Angeles' seedy underground crime circuit. All three of the stories feature Vincent Vega, a somewhat dim-witted hitman played by John Travolta, to varying capacity, and all three circle back to Vega's boss, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), and the intimidation he inspires in those reckless enough to cross him - although Marsellus himself remains an abstract threat in all but one of the narratives. "22" is a comparatively more basic affair, attempting none of Tarantino's tricks around perspective and chronology (The Simpsons would try something along those lines in the Season 12 episode, "Trilogy of Error"), but like Pulp Fiction wishing to convey a sense of parallel lives and stories that are constantly brushing up one another; the intuition that whatever is going on right around the corner could be of equal interest, and potentially part of something bigger. It's this interest that marks it out as not simply The Simpsons' attempt to get on the Pulp bandwagon, but to replicate something of the spirit of contemporary indie cinema as a whole, which was continuously seeking new ways to subvert the enduring Hollywood modes of storytelling. Tarantino might have succeeded in making the multi-stranded narrative more accessible to mainstream audiences, but he by no means invented the technique, which was already a popular plaything among his peers in the indie landscape - Jim Jarmusch, for example, had attempted something quite similar in his 1989 film Mystery Train, and in 1993 long-time maverick Robert Altman released Short Cuts, an adaptation of multiple short stories by Raymond Carver dramatised as a collection of intersecting lives across a brief period in Los Angeles, itself recalling Altman's 1975 film Nashville. The 1990s indie that the structure of "22" most closely resembles, whether intentionally or not, is Richard Linklater's 1991 feature Slacker, which depicts a day in the life of various denizens of Austin, Texas, with particular focus on its downtown hipster community. As with "22", the camera never lingers on a subject for particularly long, before another individual, meters away, commandeers its attentions - although, unlike "22", Slacker boasts no recurring story threads, merely thematic echoes. The philosophy of the film is outlined in the opening sequence, by a character played by Linklater himself and credited, humorously, as "Should Have Stayed At The Bus Station". He muses on what kinds of possible alternative narrative trajectories might have opened up in The Wizard of Oz had Dorothy and friends taken different paths on their route to the Emerald City, and theorises that life follows a similar pattern, with parallel universes opening up for every idle thought a person has, with even the most mundane of decisions having the capacity to seriously alter how things eventually develop. In the case of Slacker, we never see how any of the roads taken by the characters, literal or metaphorical, work out for them in the longer-term, because we're constantly being tugged toward whatever is happening in the opposite direction.

Slacker is a first class example of what I would term a "channel surf" picture. Not in the sense of Amazon Women on The Moon (1987), a collection of television spoofs presented via the format a faux channel surfing session, or its predecessor, Disco Beaver from Outer Space (1979), but rather a film that makes a point of continuously abandoning one narrative thread for another, the key driving forces being a curiosity as to what we are currently missing out on in the nearest parallel trajectory and, having satisfied that curiosity, an inability to stick with it for long. Simply put, a channel surf picture is a film that refuses to settle and is constantly roaming in search of new subjects, as if fascinated by the mere existence of parallel trajectories and what could potentially be if a different course were pursued (the act of channel surfing itself being commonly posited as one of the defining pastimes of the Gen-X experience, the mark of living in an age addled by media saturation - hence its inclusion in contemporary twentysomething-geared comedies Wayne's World and Reality Bites). Linklater would eventually create another film along the channel surf format in 2001 with Waking Life, a sort of spiritual sequel to Slacker (or should that be a spiritual prequel, given that it seems to have been modelled on the very dream that Should Have Stayed At The Bus Station describes in his opening monologue?), but in between, the worthiest successor to the format could well have been this very episode. "22", too, is a channel surf project, a showcase of alternative possibilities as to what type of cartoon we could be watching if any one of these given supporting characters just so happened to be the focus instead. It is less upfront on the matter than Season 8's "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", but in many regards it plays as a precursor to that episode. Several of the skits give off the air of being their own self-contained mini-sitcoms. The central joke of the vignette centred around Bumblebee Man's domestic life is that, even with the bee costume off, his existence is virtually indistinguishable from that of his TV counterpart. Other segments - the three that open each act - receive their own introductory title sequences (the Apu intro was severely truncated for the finished episode, but the full audio was included as a track on the CD release Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons), suggesting faux pilots for sitcoms that might have existed in alternate realities.

On that note, "22" can also been as the culmination of what seemed to be an increasing preoccupation of the series heading into Oakley and Weinstein's tenure as show-runners - that is, an awareness of The Simpsons' fully fleshed out and expansive supporting cast, and their capacity to hold our attentions with nary a Simpson in sight. The much-hyped "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter that had bridged the transition from Mirkin's reign to Oakley and Weinstein's was founded on a similar principle - that Springfield was swarming with characters with dynamics and agendas of their own that could all be harnessed to bring them all into conflict with the same maniacal businessman. And while "Who Shot Mr Burns?: Part Two" does ultimately end up upholding the law of Simpson-centrism, in having one of the family be the shooter, the first two acts are actually more focussed on Smithers and Wiggum, with Sideshow Mel doing much of the important detective work. Likewise, Season 7 has at least two episodes that convey an interest in giving members of the supporting cast their own stories in ways that didn't have to be dominated by the shadow of the titular family - "A Fish Called Selma", which focuses on Selma's ill-fated marriage to washed-up actor Troy McClure, and makes the highly unusual move of allowing said characters to resolve the matter on their own terms, with surprisingly minimal input from the Simpsons themselves, and "Homer the Smithers", an episode that's ostensibly about Homer's attempts to fill in as Burns' personal assistant while Smithers is on vacation, but is actually about the perfectly symbiotic relationship between Burns and Smithers. That being said, the genesis of "22" can be traced all the way back to the Season 4 episode, "The Front", which ended, somewhat bizarrely, with a self-contained skit starring Ned Flanders and his sons. The skit was created purely out of necessity, to keep the episode from running too short, and was modelled on those one-page quickies you would occasionally find at the back of Archie comics looking to fill up a spare page. And it blew my mind when first I saw it, since it seemed to open up the possibility of more of the same, given that they went to the trouble of creating theme music and all (incidentally, "22" contains a pointed reminder that Homer isn't the only person who doesn't love Ned Flanders; Reverend Lovejoy can't stand him either, something he demonstrates by actively encouraging his Old English sheepdog (another one-off pet I don't think we ever saw again) to foul the Flanders' lawn, only to get caught in the act by Ned). Reaction to the skit was so positive that the show staff had indeed considered making them a regular feature, but never found themselves in a position where they were in danger of running so short again (or so they claim - didn't they have a really hard time getting "Cape Feare" to over 20 minutes? Now that I think about it, an epilogue where Bob and Snake are reunited in jail really wouldn't have gone amiss). Eventually, they got tired of waiting around and decided to create a whole episode that was nothing but skits of the variety seen at the end of "The Front". Hence, "22 Short Films About Springfield" was born, with an unusually extensive line-up of writers leaping at the opportunity to write sketches for their favourite supporting characters. The episode immediately became a firm fan favourite (even before the whole "Steamed Hams" phenomenon), although we're told on the commentary that two of the show's higher-ups really disliked it, by which I'm going to assume they mean James L. Brooks and Sam Simon. I'm guessing not Groening, since he seems genuinely happy and proud to have received a writing credit for the episode (one of eleven).

Something they don't bring up until the very end of the DVD commentary, but which had been the subject of fan speculation for some years, is that "22" was at one point considered as the basis of a possible spin-off series, Tales From Springfield, which would have focussed on different supporting characters each week (an idea later realised, incidentally, by the Pokémon spin-off Pokémon Chronicles). Obviously, it didn't happen, one of the cited reasons being that the staff didn't have the time or resources to work on two series concurrently. As intrigued as I am by the idea, I have to admit that the set-up for Tales From Springfield would strike me as a tad redundant if The Simpsons itself was still in production. The scenarios seem so closely interwoven that I'm not sure you could justify breaking them up into two separate shows (I think it might also be something of a logistical headache ensuring that the two series didn't contradict each other's canons). Far easier to do the occasional peripheral character-heavy episode as part of the main series, although I can understand why you maybe wouldn't want to do episodes focussed on the supporting cast at the expense of the title family too often. It is, after all, their show, and too many diversions from the headlining subject would have netted the accusation that the Simpsons themselves were running out of steam as characters (the possibility of the show running out of steam being another preoccupation of the Oakley/Weinstein era). I also find it somewhat telling that one of the suggestions for the kinds of stories we might have seen from the spin-off series, as per the DVD commentary, are stories centred on a young Homer. Homer's already a focal character; why would you need a spin-off to do what could be readily accomplished in a flashback episode within the series proper? Or are they betraying a slight trepidation as to how far you could reasonably hope to take the important happenings of Springfield away from the Simpsons' door? 

Ostensibly, "22" was made with the intention of demonstrating that life in Springfield doesn't revolve around the Simpsons themselves. I say "ostensibly", because of course it does, and one of the fundamental ironies of the episode is that it ends up proving it, whether knowingly or not. The Simpsons clearly do have a privileged position within this universe. It's Bart who sets the sequence of events into motion, by pondering aloud what kinds of adventures are currently unfolding all around the town, and Marge and Lisa get the story that provides the episode with its strongest narrative backbone. The most you can really say is that it's unusually light on Homer, who appears alongside Maggie and Santa's Little Helper in a skit that involves his accidentally trapping the former in a newspaper vending machine, but makes no appearances before or after (although we hear second-hand that he discarded the beer can that gets Lisa indirectly into her sticky predicament). The biggest indication of the Simpsons' centrality, though, occurs in the second Marge and Lisa skit, when the issue of removing gum from Lisa's hair suddenly becomes a matter of immense interest to the entire town. On the one hand, this functions as a means of getting a whole bunch of characters who couldn't be worked in via their own individual arcs (Willie, Otto, Uter and even the Capital City Goofball) a place in the episode. On another, it seems to to be the characters' acknowledgement of just how fundamentally their lives revolve around this one nondescript suburban family that they're compulsively driven to involve themselves in something as non-eventful as getting gum out of a child's hair. If the staff were looking to prove that the supporting cast members were capable of maintaining their own stories, then I honestly think that "A Fish Called Selma" provides a far better model for such a spin-off, since it doesn't depend so extensively upon the input of the family.

"22" boasts such a delectable package of skilfully interwoven sketches featuring so many beloved Springfieldians that it's just as intriguing to note which characters are left out. As Bart says, there's not enough time to hear every story in town, but there is an obvious bias in terms of which characters are given the time allotted - if "22" has one real shortcoming, it's that it is an absolute sausage party of an episode. Outside of the skits involving Marge and Lisa, the female character who gets the most dialogue and screen-time is Bumblebee Man's one-time wife. Brandine gets in a line, as does an off-screen Agnes Skinner, but most of the Springfieldian women - Helen Lovejoy, Edna K, Patty & Selma and their ilk - get completely passed over in the spotlight allocation, demonstrating that, though the Simpsons themselves may be a female majority unit, the writers seldom seemed to have as much interest in getting to know the supporting gals. A male character who is noticeably excluded is Krusty (although Sideshow Mel, Mr Teeny and Handsome Pete all show up among the crowd in the Simpsons' kitchen), an absence felt all the more strongly due to his featuring indirectly by way of his Krusty Burger restaurant, which works its way into not one, but two of the vignettes. Script extracts that have since shown up online reveal that Krusty did originally have his own vignette which was among the excised material (Patty and Selma would also have appeared in it, which explains their absence), but in a way it suits the episode that he never appears in the flesh, remaining instead a kind of omnipresent corporate entity hanging queasily over the characters throughout. It's through the reappearing Krusty restaurant that the episode is able to touch on one of the themes nearest and dearest to Tarantino's heart, regarding the kinds of mass consumerism in which we all participate.

One of Tarantino's most striking features as a film-maker has always been his forthrightness in embracing popular culture as a kind of universal language understood and spoken by all. The sequence at the beginning of Pulp Fiction, where Vincent Vega and his partner in crime, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) discuss variations in menu items in McDonald's restaurants across different European locations while on their way to carry out their latest professional killing, speaks of the manner in which the humdrum is interspersed with the brutality that goes hand-in-hand with their line of work. But it is also, in its own right, a fascinating review of an all-dominating consumerist force that has penetrated the world over, in spite of the low-key ways in which different cultures continue to express their individuality (one of the gags being that Burger King, though it has its own established international presence, is very much second in the pecking order - when Jules asks Vincent what the French call a Whopper, he responds, somewhat irritatedly, "I don't know, I didn't go into Burger King"). The Simpsons' take on this very sequence, in which Wiggum is having lunch at Krusty Burger with Lou and Eddie, and Lou shares a recent experience of his own with an unfamiliar fast food locale, offers a clever twist that again seems to touch on the idea of parallel realities, in this case the show's own tentative relationship with the real world. The Simpsons is ostensibly set in the same universe as our own, hence the barrage of shared pop cultural markers, but as Vincent and Lou both say, "It's the little differences." Itchy & Scratchy (also surprisingly absent from "22") take the place of Mickey Mouse, the Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry and every other golden age cartoon creation you can name, McBain fills in for Arnold Schwarzenegger (until the movie), while Krusty Burger substitutes for McDonald's, to the point of having its own grotesque-looking clown for a mascot. So when Lou says, "I went to the McDonald's in Shelbyville last Friday," he is, in effect, violating an unspoken rule of the Simpsons universe, in acknowledging the existence of the very thing for which Krusty Burger was conceived as an obvious shorthand. Humor rises from the trepidation with which the characters regard the world beyond their fictionalised bubble, as the ridiculous names from the Krusty Burger menu are contrasted with the familiar McDonald's items ("Shakes", grunts an incredulous Eddie, upon learning what they call Krusty Partially-Gelatinated Non-Dairy Gum-Based Beverages in McDonald's, "You don't know what you're getting"). Whatever you care to call it - a Krusty Burger with cheese, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Steamed fucking Hams (despite the fact that they are obviously grilled), it's all the same pile of salted grease. (Curiously, there is another reference to the real-world McDonald's elsewhere in the episode - in one skit, Comic Book Guy sells Milhouse a comic starring a distinctly off-model Hamburglar. Gotta watch out for the Big Mc's lawyers, I suppose).

As the Wiggum story progresses, it borrows more heavily from "The Gold Watch", the narrative strand centred on Butch (Bruce Willis), a professional boxer paid by Marsellus to throw a fight, but who instead takes the money, wins the fight anyway and attempts to make a sneaky getaway with his girlfriend Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros). Throwing a wrench into Butch's scheme is the realisation that Fabienne has neglected to pack an important family heirloom (the titular watch), so he goes back to his apartment to retrieve it, and on his return journey has the tremendous misfortune of running directly into Marsellus. A violent confrontation breaks out between the two men, whereupon the film takes arguably the most bizarre and unexpected turn in a film littered with bizarre and unexpected twists - Butch and Marsellus take their fight into a downtown pawnshop where they are captured by the shop's owners, a trio of deviants who gag and bind them in the basement and proceed to rape the incapacitated Marsellus. Butch escapes their clutches, but chooses to re-enter the basement and rescue Marsellus, who returns the favour by agreeing to turn a blind eye to Butch's getaway, on the condition that he does not return to LA or tell anybody else about the incident below the pawnshop. The incident in question - Tarantino's tribute to the most infamous sequence of John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance, relocating the menace to the sprawling urban wilderness in which the cast of Pulp Fiction are more at home - is startling because it is so unpredictable, a threat that materialises from effectively nowhere. The three deviants - Maynard (Duane Whitaker), Zed (Peter Greene) and the anonymous gimp (Stephen Hibbert) - have nothing to do with any of the other characters introduced up until now, or any stakes in the established arcs - like Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer), the criminal romantics who open the film (but whose significance does not become apparent until the final scene), they are mere opportunists who become involved in the bigger picture because they spy an opening that suits their own independent agenda, the implication being that if you peel back the surface far enough in any given patch of Tarantino's Los Angeles, you'll uncover all manner of unexpected sleaze and vice. The sequence in the pawnshop also adds homophobia to the long list of possible charges that can be levelled at Tarantino, whether rightly or wrongly, by his detractors (as far as "22" goes, I'd like to think it a coincidence that the two featured queer characters - Smithers and, on the basis of this episode, Herman - end their stories sprawled out helplessly upon the ground).

In Wiggum's case, he ends up in a confrontation with Snake (who had appeared earlier in a skit starring Moe and Barney, although the only connection carried over into this story is Snake's Middlebury t-shirt, a nod to his comment about paying off his student debts), before the two of them find a common adversary in Herman, who gags and binds them in a manner so analogous to the equivalent sequence in Pulp Fiction that it is difficult to suppose his intentions are any different. As I've acknowledged, this seems a surprisingly dark turn for the character, even coming off of his previous prominent appearance, in "The Springfield Connection" of Season 6, which had him running a counterfeit jeans ring out of the Simpsons' garage, and thus already no stranger to villainy. Sadly, "22" would prove his last really significant role for some years; other than a bit-part in a segment of "Treehouse of Horror VIII", the upcoming seasons weren't going to see an awful lot of action from Herman. Regarding Herman, as I do, as one of the more interesting supporting characters introduced in the show's earliest days, I consider that a tremendous shame (among other things, he is one of the series' few disabled characters; he also had a unique dynamic going with Abe that I wish the writers weren't so quick to abandon), so I do take solace in the fact that he at least went out, for the time being, making an impression (an utterly nightmare-inducing one, but an impression nonetheless).

In The Simpsons' take on this most horrifying scenario, Zed's arrival is promised by Herman, but he never gets there. Instead, Herman inadvertently lets in Milhouse and his father Kirk Van Houten, who are desperately seeking a nearby bathroom where the former can relieve his overloaded bladder. It's here that the nicer, more helpful Herman that Pulido champions momentarily raises his head - he is sympathetic enough to the Van Houtens' plight to allow Milhouse to use his bathroom, something previously denied him by Comic Book Guy (it could be that, for all his implied depravity, Herman is simply a softer touch when it comes to children), thereby creating an intensely awkward moment where Kirk is forced to stand around and make small talk with Herman while his gagged and bound hostages make stifled pleas for help, until finally Herman tires of Kirk and attempts to take him captive too. Ironically, it's the one character to whom Herman has shown kindness that ends up thwarting him -  Milhouse accidentally knocks him unconscious with a mace (see what they did there, all ye Tarantino devotees? They had Milhouse get medieval on Herman's ass!). While Kirk, Milhouse and Snake linger around Herman's unresponsive body, uncertain what to do, Wiggum seizes the opportunity to leg it, albeit in a far less dignified fashion than Bruce Willis' character in the movie. But then the deprivation of dignity is as keeping with the spirit of Pulp Fiction as anything else. The characters there have a veneer of cool that made numerous admirers instantly want to emulate them, yet it's interesting just how often Tarantino is willing to degrade those same characters, and not always to the extreme extent suffered by Marsellus - sometimes, that degradation can stem from something as basic and human as acknowledging that the characters make regular bathroom visits, which in Vincent Vega's case seems to be the root cause of all of his problems. Jules, meanwhile, makes a habit of reciting a particular Biblical passage to his victims before dispatching them, giving him an air of righteous deadliness - yet even he has his moment where he is forced to pander pathetically to his friend Jimmie by praising the gourmet coffee he serves them while hiding out at his abode (a scene that perhaps takes on additional resonance when we consider that Jimmie is played by Tarantino himself, and therefore is the higher power that might choose to save or destroy him by throwing a random plot contrivance his way).

And the Steamed Hams skit? Be patient, I'm getting to it.

So much of Pulp Fiction deals with the creation of really big messes, usually by total accident, and having to clean up all the evidence before an authority figure gets wise. This is such a common hazard in the world of organised crime that one character, Winston Wolfe (Harvey Keitel), even specialises in restoring order after all unforeseen chaos has broken loose. In one of the stories ("Vincent Vega and Marseullus Wallace's Wife"), Vincent is tasked with taking Mia (Uma Thurman), the flirtatious, coke-snorting wife of his fearsome boss, to dinner at a 50s-themed restaurant; Vincent resists the temptation to sleep with Mia, speculating that Marsellus is deliberately testing his loyalties, but gets into hot water anyway when Mia snorts a packet of heroin uncovered from Vincent's clothing, believing it to be cocaine, and sends herself into a coma. Another story, "The Bonnie Situation", concerns the avoidance of the wrath of a very different authority figure - Vincent ends up accidentally killing an underling, Marvin (Phil LaMarr, the future voice of Hermes from Futurama), and he and Jules attempt to hide the evidence at the house of the aforementioned Jimmie, who fears that his wife Bonnie will divorce him if she returns home and learns of his involvement with gangsters. Meanwhile, the circumstances in "The Gold Watch" under which Butch runs into Marsellus (recycled from Marion Crane's attempted getaway in Psycho and recreated wholesale in "22") are nothing if not hilarious, and while the narrative ultimately dips into full-blown horror territory with the developments in the pawnshop, even those images have an eye-popping, cartoonish ridiculousness to them. So often, the world of Pulp Fiction resembles less that of a gritty crime thriller than episodes of a sitcom from an altogether more twisted universe (an interpretation I must credit to Dana Polan's 2000 book on the picture), with its inhabitants repeatedly getting themselves into all manner of far-out jams and doing everything in their power to avoid getting caught. The film's repeated evocation of sitcom convention displays a recognition of the sitcom's dual role as both comfort food and a spectacle of human folly at its most grotesque, a paradox Pulp Fiction seems intent on underlining through the sheer gruesomeness of the scenarios on offer. It is a paradox that The Simpsons likewise understands to a tee, and displays a particular awareness of throughout "22". Outside of the Wiggum narrative, none of the segments feature the kind of lurid brutality in which Tarantino specialises, but they are just as fixated on the underlying chaos and cruelty that drives the characters' universe, and the characters doing their darnedest to pretend otherwise. I've no doubt that one of the reasons for the Steamed Hams skit's remarkable memetic afterlife is that it is such a perfectly condensed pastiche of the sitcom form, complete with the standard sitcom cliche of the boss coming to dinner and the host having to flub his way through various upsets to keep whatever horrors are bubbling below the surface from coming to light. It's a great skit because it also understands what is specifically so effective about the dynamic between these two characters - as Bill Oakley puts it, Chalmers was the one character, before Frank Grimes, who was willing to question the insanity of the Simpsons universe; unlike Grimes, though, he never goes the full mile with his incredulity, appearing always to just about swallow whatever absurd explanation is offered him. Indeed, Skinner somehow manages to get through this calamity - Chalmers walks away concluding that, while Skinner is an odd fellow, he steams a good ham - but all at the expense of suffering an even greater one. Throughout his unforgettable luncheon, the situation backstage has swollen from one of mild embarrassment (a ruined roast) to something potentially life-threatening (a house fire), and the vignette ends with Skinner giving Chalmers the thumb-ups, while behind him we have the troubling sight of his house going up in flames, and the sounds of Agnes, presumably trapped upstairs, screaming for help.

It's not just the Steamed Hams skit that exhibits this fascination with the point at which an inconvenience crosses over into something altogether nastier. Many of the miniature-sitcoms in "22" rely on evoking an increasing sense of discomfort in the viewer, as if daring us to question at what point we should perhaps stop laughing at these appalling scenarios. Lisa getting gum in her hair is a mundane, albeit uncomfortable problem that takes an unsettling turn when Ned Flanders, of all characters, is seen whacking her hair with a hammer, in an arrangement that resembles not so much assistance as torture (although Marge instructing her daughter to take her mayonnaise-soaked head out into the sun was already kind of questionable). The conclusion to Smithers' skit is even more disturbing - sure, there is a lot of fun to be had in the antiquated slang Burns flings at him while getting him to pedal to the hospital, but we leave Smithers in a truly dire situation, barely conscious, murmuring for help and being mistaken for a vagrant by Dr Nick, who throws him spare change for the booze he erroneously believes he needs. And for all the comic quirkiness of Bumblebee Man's mishaps within the home, it goes in a harsh direction, with his wife divorcing him and his house collapsing, resulting in a punchline where Bumblebee Man acknowledges his own very real need for booze ("Donde esta mi tequila?"). Like Pulp Fiction, "22 Short Films About Springfield" is enamoured of the violent outpouring of chaos the town over, and with watching its denizens lose all control (the final example being a fourth wall-breaking Frink's loss of control against the looming fade-out threatening to plunge his prospective story into oblivion). Just as seeing these allegedly professional gangsters struggle to deal with the absurdities of their day-to-day existence (catching them with their pants down...in Vincent's case, quite literally) made them more accessible and fun, so too watching Springfield go to pieces, fragment by fragment, reminds us of why, over the past seven seasons, we'd built up so much investment in this array of cartoon freaks. They are, like all of us, so wretchedly vulnerable, and in the end what else are you gonna do but laugh?

Bob and Mick's Dirty Little Secret (Let's Get Interactive!)

Let's talk about one of the stranger early 2000s computer-generated advertising mascots - Sky UK's Lil' Red, who was launched in 2002 to promote Sky Active, the interactive feature service that once enabled you to play Space Invaders and shop for Pokémon toys on your television. That little red button on your Sky Digital remote (not to be confused with the little red button from The Fifth Element which, if activated, meant death for us all) was your portal to a world of fun and connectivity, and what better way to get the point across than to personify the button as a hip and happening party dude, beckoning you to touch him and see what happened? Hence, Lil' Red was born. And yes, to get the obvious point out of the way early on, he did indeed look like the freaky bastard love child of Sideshow Bob and Mick Jagger. That was what we all used to say about him back in the day, and it accounted for a significant cut of his charm, did it not?

The second really prominent curiosity surrounding Lil' Red is how the heck did this guy not become a bisexual icon? He must be the most flamboyantly bi advertising mascot out there, what with his unambiguously sexualised yet entirely gender-neutral approach to selling the merits of keeping your finger on that little red button. Lil' Red unveiled himself to the world with the declaration that, "Pleasuring you is my creed!", and with his tight leather pants, gyrating pelvis and non-stop emphasis on physical intimacy, it was clear that Sky were looking to equate the special feeling you get from pushing that button with sexual gratification. Your gender was of no odds to Red; so long as you were a Sky subscriber, then you were his type. And if his suggestive dance moves did nothing to grab your attention, the song to which he was spiralling was certainly headed straight for your inner ear. The thing was as catchy as smallpox.

Lil' Red was the brainchild of network creatives Martin Delamere and Rafaela Perera. Animation for the promos was supplied by Uli Meyer Studios, who received a shout-out in one of the ads, "FrankenRed", a parody of Frankenstein, where Red, playing the titular scientist, addresses his Igor-esque assistant as "Uli". Actually, the evocation of horror iconography was quite appropriate - I asked earlier why Red didn't become a bisexual icon, but I suppose I already know the answer to that. Debate rages on as to whether the personified button was a unique and dynamic mascot or a horrifying concoction of nightmare-inducing graphics. The inevitable roughness of that early 00s CGI, combined with Red's aggressively flamboyant and in your face personality, was a bit much for some, and a sizeable number of Sky viewers, in my experience, will freely admit to feeling more than a little creeped out by his promos. Red perhaps wasn't the kind of anthropomorphic toggle with whom you necessarily wanted to get interactive - he had a very prominent mouth, with an awful lot of sinister-looking teeth - and besides, not everyone was sold on the idea of the red button on their Sky remote coming onto them (much less that it was getting off on you touching it). Red might have had the heart of a rock star, but perhaps he gave off a slightly Spinal Tap vibe which had you suspiciously scanning for the sores at the corners of those pronounced lips of his. Still, to counter all of that, he looked like Sideshow Bob spliced with Mick Jagger, and you're never in a million years going to convince me that that's not awesome as fuck. Red tickled the living snot out of me every time he appeared on my screen, albeit without actually convincing me to press that infernal button, mind. It's a world that remained forever unknown to me. The omnipresent red dot in the corner of my screen was but an annoying blemish on my TV landscape.

Despite giving a serious portion of Sky devotees the heebie-jeebies, Red had a fairly decent run of it, appearing in spots where he invited us to play Space Invaders ("this one's from the old-school!") and Tetris ("get them shapes horizontal - it's a good way to be!") and to download polyphonic ringtones through Sky Active for your Nokia 3310. Still, when Red was phased out around the mid-00s, Sky's strategy was take things in a decidedly more sedate and non-threatening direction, with a campaign involving a live action dog who politely sought the permission of a live action duck to press the red button. The freaky sexualised factor was out and heart-melting cuddliness was in, it seemed. Don't expect Red's successors to show up as Horrifying Advertising Animals any time soon; but for the slightly odd pseudo-preschool ambience that accompanied their promos, I don't have a whole lot to say about them. Except that they were the anti-Red in every way; whereas Red was all about emphasising just how wild and alive those interactive features were, Dog and Duck depicted them as something amiable and familiar. There was a soothing, almost soporific quality to their promos, like collapsing into a fluffy duvet and letting Sky Active whisk you off into a world of gentle loving care, as opposed to the all-out adrenalin rush promised by Red.

I've no clue why the duck has a fire engine, mind.

As for Red, the world hadn't yet seen the last of him, at least not viewers Down Under, for in 2004 he was imported to become the mascot for the equivalent red button service of Australian pay TV company Foxtel. Some of animation in Red's Australian campaign was recycled from UK promos, but his voice was re-dubbed to incorporate a local accent. The Foxtel promos appeared to emphasise Red's dynamic personality over his sensuality; the gyrating pelvis and intense close-up shots are still there, but the Australian voice-over seems to be milking the flamboyance factor far less than his UK equivalent.

Information on Red's genesis is scarce, and alas, I've been unable to find any reliable source on who voiced him in either his UK or Australian campaigns. A number of people in the YouTube comments seem convinced that the UK voice actor was Russell Brand, although I'm not detecting the same level of overall confidence as I did with the consensus that Rocky Robin was voiced by Tim Dealy.

Whether he brings back fond memories or long-repressed nightmares, Red was a truly one of a kind mascot. It's nice to know that entering the bold new millennium didn't completely dampen our capacity for a little all-out weirdness in our marketing.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #44: Rocky Robin (The Early Bird Catches The Earworm)

I wonder how many popular songs have been irrecoverably ruined for young ears because they first heard them not in their default forms, as delightful slices of chart-topping bubblegum, but as corrupted versions carefully modified to tout the virtues of branded cooking oils and sunflower spreads? To children of a certain era, "Rockin' Robin", a 1958 hit for Bobby Day that was later memorably covered by a young Michael Jackson, sounds inherently wrong coming out of the mouths of either artist, and as a ballad detailing the rhythm-loving avians of Jaybird Street. To their ears, the song is at its most authentic when performed in a thick Geordie accent, by Tim Dealy (I've yet to see any official sources confirming it, but everyone seems pretty convinced that it's him) and from the perspective of an audacious robin praising a brand of sweet treat from Kirklees-based manufacturers Fox's Biscuits. If you feel compelled to insert the songbird's catchphrase, "A chock-a-block, man!", onto the ending of your each and every exposure to the Day and Jackson versions, then I see you, fellow member of the Rocky Robin generation. The cartoon robin's reign during mid-1990s children's television was brief but relatively prolific, the result being that our consumption of said tune has forever been hijacked.

Rocky's shtick is that he was "hard", like the brand of chocolate-coated biscuit he favoured, something he demonstrated with both his old-school Jimmy Dean get-up and his knack for antagonising various garden-dwelling predators and getting away with it scot-free. I'm aware of at least three ads from the original campaign, and Rocky was given a different nemesis for each - cat, dog and corvid, respectively - all of whom wound up on the receiving end of cartoon slapstick for attempting either to eliminate the pesky robin or to come between him and his Rocky bars. Meanwhile, Rocky would perform some variation on his corrupted take on "Rockin' Robin". The robin's catchphrase, "A chock-a-block, man!", made enough of an impression within its time, at least judging by the high number of children in my own playground compelled to replicate it, and before the campaign closed one company, our defunct chums at Blockbuster Video, were canny enough to take advantage of it with a tie-in promotion, for which Rocky (predictably, but slickly) modified his slogan to "A chock-a-Blockbuster!"

 

What stands out to me about the campaign now is that Rocky is kind of a jerk, particularly to Spot the dog, whom Rocky both explicitly insults in his lyrics and renders the victim of a really mean prank. In fact, I think Rocky's treatment of Spot is positively sociopathic. For a start, I think we could devote an entire subgenre of Horrifying Advertising Animals to ads where dogs are purposely enticed with chocolate-based products - I'm not sure how widely educated people were on the issue of canine chocolate toxicity in 1995 (seven years prior, Disney had apparently had no qualms with giving Georgette the poodle a box of chocolates in Oliver & Company), but it's difficult to watch any such scenes now without feeling really uneasy. Here, Rocky stops short of putting that all-destructive theobromine into Spot's digestive system, but what he does instead isn't much nicer, which is to say feeding him his own tail and turning him into a canine Ouroboros. Thereby upholding his point that Spot is one seriously thick rover, but, erm, Rocky - what did Spot ever do to you that warranted such thoroughly uncompassionate behaviour? Rocky wasn't exactly blameless during the cat installment either - the cat was actually sleeping peacefully until Rocky began strutting uproariously around its territory - but at least there there was ultimately an element of self-defence involved. Here, Rocky goes after Spot for seemingly no greater reason than to demonstrate that he's at the top of this particular garden ecosystem, and that the larger denizens underestimated him at their own peril. A more charitable interpretation would be that Rocky is using aversion therapy in an effort to train Spot to shun chocolate products, but I still can't say I think much of his tactics.

Rocky had all but disappeared by the latter half of the decade, but he made an unexpected comeback in 2003 when Fox revived him as the face of a new product, Rocky Rounds. This wasn't the Rocky that you and I had known, however. This was Rocky R, an audacious, biscuit-loving robin for the new millennium. The world had changed significantly over the last few years, and 1950s throwbacks, Geordie accents and Tom and Jerry-esque calamity were no longer what the cool kids responded to - hip hop was in, and Rocky was accordingly reimagined as a rapper leading a swanky playboy lifestyle. The ads parodied conventions of rap music videos, with corrupted renditions of "Rockin' Robin" naturally being off the cards. Likewise, 2D animation was sliding rapidly out of fashion, so this new incarnation of Rocky was a computer generated creation who intermingled with the real world. He bore so little resemblance to his 90s counterpart that it would be easy enough to interpret him as a different character altogether, if not for lyrics in which he specifies that "Rocky R is back". It was a strange set-up, openly anticipating prior familiarity with the character while blatantly out to exploit nobody's nostalgia for the original campaign - it's hard to tell, but I don't think any of those placards wielded by Rocky's adoring fans reads, "Chock-A-Block, man", which is about the peak of my personal disappointment. Otherwise, I'm pretty clement toward rappin' Rocky. I know some old school Rocky fans aren't so hot on Rocky '03, feeling they went the Poochie route in attempting to amplify the character's hip factor, but as far as I can see the spirit of the original campaign is still more-or-less intact. Rocky is as cocksure as ever, and while he's traded his avian chorus girls for flesh-and-blood human groupies and is no longer in the business of evading cartoon predators, the paparazzi show up to be the target of slapstick violence in their place (albeit not caused by Rocky directly). It was an amiable enough attempt to take the character into a brand new era, although possibly hampered in lacking the earworm factor of its predecessor; nothing the rapping robin comes out with is going to bore its way into your brain quite as ferociously as that earlier jingle. On the flip side, he doesn't pull anything half as sociopathic as that japery with feeding Spot his tail. Rocky R is clearly more of the humane sort.

Who Shot Mr Burns? Part Two (aka Suspicion Could Tear Us Apart)

So, to answer a question to which I alluded in my previous commentary, why did the culprit in the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" mystery have to be Maggie, as opposed to the other obvious candidate who would have enabled the Springfield denizens to carry on as if nothing happened, guest celebrity Tito Puente? Simple. Because it had to be a Simpson. That much was always inevitable. I presume that this is the reason why Puente ended up with such miniscule odds at The Mirage (600/1) while Homer topped the list with odds of 2/1. Puente was as peripheral a candidate as can be, whereas the entire Simpson universe revolves around Homer and his clan. All of the important events in this world tend to intersect with the family in some way or another; why would the shooting of Mr Burns be any different? (Although to those of you who were swayed by Homer's high odds, I sincerely hope you were also banking on this all coming down to a really ridiculous accident, as opposed to wanting him to be exposed as an attempted murderer.) As a bonus, it also enabled to the writers to make implicit commentary on contemporary events involving a notorious namesake. I've no doubt that buried beneath all that emphasis on Simpson DNA is an underlying preoccupation with the O.J. Simpson trial, although ironically the most explicit this episode is prepared to get on the matter is with regards to Puente. "I can't see him doing something illegal," pleads Lisa, having inadvertently directed suspicion toward Tito. "He's in show business. He's a celebrity!"

Although "Who Shot Mr Burns? Part Two" (2F20) ends up dramatically upholding the law of Simpson-centrism, it starts out with deceptively little interest in the Simpsons themselves. The first act is all Smithers' story, more-or-less, and the family have surprisingly meagre input. There's a scene where Lisa obligingly reels off a few lines of exposition as to their own individual motives for inflicting harm on Burns, for the benefit of anyone who didn't see Part One or just has a really short memory, and a Vitamin D deficient Homer later joins in with a vigilante effort to dismantle Burns' sun-blocker. At first, the family are quite happy with the (as it turns out, erroneous) assumption that Smithers was the shooter, because it alleviates whatever suspicion could potentially fall on them; hence, it's up to Sideshow Mel (getting more exposure than he'd ever received at this point in the series) to right the serious injustice. With Smithers cleared and the case re-opened, Lisa takes an interest in conducting her own amateur investigation, becoming the audience surrogate in the process, yet the second act is more heavily centred on Wiggum's formal investigation. It's only when Simpson DNA is uncovered from Burns' clothing that everything clicks into place and the family find themselves at the centre of attention - narrative and forensic - when, just this once, it would have been in their best interests to have maintained a low profile.

I feel this a minority opinion, but I prefer Part Two to its predecessor. Part One tends to be the more fondly-remembered of the two, and I've no doubt that the reasons for that are at least partially rooted in the fact that Part One opened up such an exciting barrage of possibilities that Part Two seemed always destined to disappoint, by providing an answer that was unlikely to satisfy everyone. Anticlimax is the inevitable bugbear of any whodunnit that captures the imagination of zeitgeist  - I've no idea how it worked out for Dallas and the "Who Shot J.R.?" mystery, but most Twin Peaks fans are agreed that the series was so much more fun before the question of  "Who killed Laura Palmer?" was prematurely answered. Irrespective of where all of this is eventually headed, I'd rate Part Two as the more purely enjoyable installment. Part One had to juggle so much plot, exposition and dramatic tension that it overall becomes something of a cumbersome experience for anybody less interested in exploring the particulars of the mystery than in hanging out for 20-odd minutes with their favourite characters. Despite having a heap of fall-out to unpick from Part One, Part Two is content to let the pieces fall where they may; it unfolds at a more leisurely pace than Part One, and has more fun building scenes around the various Springfieldians and exploring their reactions to finding themselves caught up in the middle of such a heinous whodunnit. It clearly isn't bound by the same obligation as its predecessor to keep everything as tightly plot-focussed as possible - the big musical centrepiece of the episode, Tito Puente's slanderous mambo, "Senor Burns", takes up a whole minute and has fairly little to add in terms of narrative substance. But it would be an awful shame if we went to all the trouble of bringing Puente into a two-part episode and didn't get to hear his Latin Jazz Ensemble in action (as a bonus, we also get an overdue reappearance from Gulliver Dark, the lounge singer from "Homer's Night Out"). The sporadic screen-time afforded the family in the episode's front-end means that several members of the supporting cast get to do a generous amount of narrative heavy-lifting - including one who'd had few real opportunities in which to shine up until now. Sideshow Mel, here giving his full name as Melvin Van Horn, finally gets to demonstrate that he can be good for something other than suffering abuse in the name of slapstick and inviting negative comparisons to Bob, becoming the surprise hero of the first act by speaking up for Smithers' innocence. Jasper also makes a couple of small but indispensable appearances, exercising a bizarre one-man vigilantism with an eye toward upholding sidewalk and drive-through etiquette. And of course it's great seeing the emotional drama of Smithers' arc continue on from Part One, as he grapples with the uneasy feeling that he might have done something terribly out of character while intoxicated (and gets a particularly surreal false awakening into the bargain).

All that being said, Part One was so over-burdened with build-up that it's somewhat inevitable that a number of story threads end up being fudged or completely forgotten. The whole matter of Burns' sun-blocking device is gotten out of the way early on - and, for as much terror as the thing inspired in Part One, the townspeople seem to have little difficulty in bringing it down. Meanwhile, Marge's closing suggestion that "we can all get back to normal" seems particularly glib when you consider just how many loose threads from Part One there are still left hanging by the end of Part Two. Are Burns and Smithers reconciled? Was Moe's bar re-opened? Have the school's financial troubles been resolved, enabling Willie and Largo to be rehired? The answer to all of those questions is obviously, "Yes", but only because Marge's reassertion of normalcy paves the way for all of that to be conveniently reset by the beginning of the next episode. Whereas Part One bowed out on a rare note of Simpsons solemnity, with the suggestion that what had just gone down might have serious ramifications for the show going forward, Part Two flies in the face of that, in gleefully shirking just about anything resembling consequence. The episode's biggest trick is in how it reveals itself as the punchline, rather than the extension of, the momentousness built up around Part One, brushing it all aside with a wink and a "Naaah, we're not going to be doing that!"

But for one tiny exception. As it turns out, something of lingering consequence does happen in Part Two, but it's squirrelled away so delicately within the fabric of the story that odds are that you didn't even notice it the first time you saw it. "Who Shot Mr Burns? Part Two" opens with a series of fake-outs that are purposely designed to exploit our uncertainty regarding the other lingering question that went hand in hand with the titular one, but was less amenable for building an official contest around - did Burns survive the shooting? The episode opens with a hungover Smithers finding Burns alive and well in his shower, a la Bobby Ewing in Dallas - discarding the whole "Who Shot Mr Burns?" arc then and there, as Dallas did for the entirety of its Season 9, would have been one heck of an audacious move for the series...but most viewers would be savvy enough to know right away that something is up. That Smithers is confronted by such a buoyantly naked Burns in his shower already seems to mark this out as wish fulfilment on his part, and as soon as we get into that whole Speedway Squad business, we know that we're in false awakening territory here (as much as I would pay good money to watch a spin-off series where Burns and Smithers are undercover detectives on the hot rod circuit). I wonder, though, how many viewers were genuinely caught off-guard by the subsequent bit of trolling from Kent Brockman's lips, as he brings us up to speed on the aftermath of the shooting: "Burns was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was then transferred to a better hospital, where doctors upgraded his condition to alive." With that went the first prospect of this having any kind of significant impact on the series, and a good thing too - there can't have been many viewers who actually wanted The Simpsons to do away with Burns. Still, we remain so fixated on Burns' fate, and the identity of his would-be killer, that we might miss the subtler reference to an established character's demise that goes on in the backdrop. Along with everything else, "Who Short Mr Burns? Part Two" is the episode that officially laid Dr Marvin Monroe to rest. The character wasn't deemed worthy of a big tearful send-off, a la Bleeding Gums Murphy - instead, news of his passing occurs only implicitly, when Lou gets a call on his police radio telling him to report immediately to the Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital where the fugitive Homer has been sighted. The death of Monroe was not explicitly announced until the clip show, "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular", at which point I, like so many viewers, felt tremendously confused, wondering if I had somehow missed an episode. Going back and catching the reference to the Memorial Hospital in this episode was a big "a-ha!" moment for me. And what can I say, I kind of feel bad for Monroe. Not only did they kill him, they unceremoniously buried him, as a footnote in someone else's story, a bitter irony only underscored by the fact that Burns and Monroe are both voiced by Harry Shearer. Monroe hadn't been used in the series for some time, owing to the fact that Shearer hated doing his voice, but he had a fairly major presence in the first two or three seasons, and was regarded a great enough menace to be cast as a boss in the 1991 video game Bart vs. The Space Mutants (although he seemed a bit out of place alongside actual antagonists like Bob, Nelson and Ms Botz), while Burns was apparently not seen as important enough to even be included in the family's first video game outing. How massively had their fortunes reversed in the interim.

(And yes, I'm aware that Monroe's own condition was later inexplicably upgraded to alive for a Season 15 episode, "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", retroactively making his status here somewhat confusing. I am focusing on what was clearly intended by the writers at the time, however.)

The million dollar question at heart of Part Two, and the overarching mystery as a whole, concerns whether or not the revelation that Maggie was the shooter is actually a good one. The answer to that, in my books, would be a resounding YES! But also NO! A common defence, when dissecting effectiveness of "Who Shot Mr Burns?" on the mystery front, is to insist that, no matter how seemingly out of nowhere the outcome, "the clues are all there".  Wood and Martyn do it in their reference book, I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide. David Sims does it in his review of the episode on The AV Club. And yes, it certainly is the case that the clues are all there BUT you've also got to keep in mind that, since everybody nowadays knows it was Maggie, we all have the luxury of getting to play the game backwards, ie: to use our knowledge of the culprit to identify whatever clues appear to specifically implicate them. Put yourself in the position of the fans in 1995 who were required to work things in the opposite direction - to identify which details were the all-important clues and whom they appeared to implicate - and I'm not convinced that the process translates half as well as a properly forward-played game. For as beautifully and intricately constructed as the mystery is, it does require the viewer to make a leap of narrative logic that I'm not convinced it was entirely reasonable to expect of them. The whole business with the sundial was well-observed, and cleverly implemented. The freeze frame shot revealing Burns' missing gun was also slickly done. I've still not tested this myself, but apparently if you follow the route Burns takes after leaving the town meeting and compare it to the miniature model of Springfield he'd showed to Smithers earlier, you'll see that he ends up in the parking lot where Marge had left Maggie and Santa's Little Helper. If so, then that's also great. Where the solution gets creaky, in my view, is in necessitating the assumption that, because Burns had previously made the casual suggestion that he and Smithers steal a peppermint stick from a baby in the plant daycare, he automatically has reason for taking an interest in Maggie, and that she in turn was capable of firing back at him. The circumstances surrounding the shooting are so flimsy and incidental compared to everything else going on in Part One - and that, I suspect, is why so few participants in 1995 were able to crack the mystery. It hinges on the viewer making the audacious supposition that Burns' prior remark about stealing candy from a baby translated into personal avidity on his part; that, in spite of how easily he allowed himself to be dissuaded, Burns was secretly annoyed that Smithers had prevented him carrying out this dastardly deed and would try it again given the next opportunity. And I'm sorry, but how is the viewer supposed to know that Burns' "I feel like celebrating" equates to "I want to indulge my sweet tooth"? What a load of crapulence.

The best way to interpret the whole taking candy from a baby thing - and Maggie's significance as the shooter, period - is on a symbolic level, it being indicative of Burns' contempt for Springfield as a whole, and his assumption that he could cheat, rob and finally deprive them of their basic right to sunlight, while they just lay there on their backs, clawing helplessly at thin air. Burns doesn't anticipate anybody having the power or the resolve to fight back against him, so perhaps there is some tremendous poetic justice in it taking a literal baby to bring him down, on behalf of everyone else in town. It's the classic David and Goliath story. But more importantly still, the revelation that the shooter was Maggie transforms the entire scenario into a middle finger directed squarely at the audience, and I do mean that in the most affectionate way possible. Leave it to The Simpsons to turn a cartoon shooting into a full-blown soap opera and get the whole world talking about it, only to have the solution come down to as mind-blowingly stupid a freak occurrence as Burns getting blasted by a baby while trying to steal their lollipop. And would you really want it any other way? It's exactly the kind of brilliantly subversive move I would expect from The Simpsons - to build an elaborate whodunnit with an endless array of possible leads and with so much seemingly at stake, only for the solution, when it comes, to show the entire thing up as a hilarious waste of time. It's an absurdity that's so much more in keeping with the spirit of the show than a more conventional denouement where we find out that Colonel Mustard did it with the breadstick and for the insurance money.

I just think it was a terribly flawed idea to use it as the basis of an official contest, that's all. In the end, that aspect of the mystery didn't boil down to very much more than a cynical publicity stunt, but so long as everyone had fun with it, I guess that's all that matters, right?

For eighteen minutes or so, the attempt on Burns' life is serious business, one of the more unexpected side-effects being that it brings out an unusually professional side to Wiggum, who isn't taking his duty to identify the culprit lightly. Oh sure, his investigation begins with his struggling to pronounce the word "motive" and ends with him getting tangled up in a gruesome-looking drive-through accident because he couldn't be bothered to leave his police wagon to collect his food order, but even he gets to display a few flashes of semi-competence along the way. When Smithers recalls that it wasn't Burns that he shot, but sidewalk vigilante Jasper, it's Wiggum who asks the logical question - if a second person was shot on the night in question, why did it go unreported? - facilitating the discovery that Smithers had conveniently shot Jasper in his wooden leg, and that the senile Jasper has no memory of the incident. It's also Wiggum who at the end shuts down Burns' ludicrous demand for retribution, with the reminder that no jurisdiction would hold a baby criminally accountable (maybe Texas). For all of that, though, it's ultimately Lisa, the plucky amateur attempting to solve the mystery from her armchair, with whom the viewer is most likely to identify. She's sincere about wanting to get to the truth, but compared to Wiggum has an obvious emotional investment in where the evidence seems increasingly to be pointed. While we have every reason to believe that Lisa is a lot shrewder and more together than the adults fronting the official investigation, her own judgement is inevitably clouded by her personal attachment to some of the potential candidates, and not just Puente - right out of the gate, she wrong-foots her investigation with the understandable but erroneous assumption that nobody in her family could be capable of murder, instead encouraging the police to investigate the suspects who might have been avenging financial wrong-doings. When a DNA test on a vital piece of forensic evidence - an eyelash uncovered from Burns' suit - points to involvement from someone inside the Simpson clan, and the cries of an awakened Burns appear to implicate Homer, Lisa continues to advocate her father's innocence, although this does put her in the awkward position of hypothesising that there could be a traitor in the Simpson ranks.

The tactic of making Lisa the audience surrogate is an effective one - her first-hand understanding of what went on around the shooting is fairly narrow, so we get to uncover the truth precisely as she does - but occasionally presents some limitations. At one point the episode flat-out cheats, in having Lisa appear to recall from memory the all-important detail that Burns' own gun was missing as he staggered toward the sundial, in spite of the fact that she wasn't at the scene in question. The scene where Lisa attempts to rationalise how Homer's fingerprints could have ended up on the gun used to shoot Burns is likewise confusing - we see a flashback revealing that Homer unwittingly touched the gun whilst rummaging around the car floor for his dropped ice cream; Lisa was present, but the flashback isn't shown from her perspective, making it unclear if this is intended to be her conjecture or some objective third-person perspective sandwiched in for the viewer's convenience. But then Part Two in general is riddled with awkwardly-implemented memories and flashbacks; unusually for a non-clip show, it's a partial Frankenstein creation, with several extracts from its predecessor that, to the binge viewer, probably seem repetitive and unnecessary but are presumably there to make Part Two more comprehensible as a stand alone episode (again, for the benefit of anyone who didn't see Part One or just has a really short memory). For example, when Smithers is interrogated by police, he cites Burns' prior readiness to take candy from a baby as an example of how consumed by greed the man had become. I've already questioned the effectiveness of said scene in establishing a clear motive for Burns to later tangle with Maggie, although its repetition in Part Two is a big enough hint that we're to regard it as significant. More questionable is the inclusion of the sequence where Homer angrily confronts Burns in the latter's office - we'd already re-established at the beginning of the episode that Homer's "damn good reason" for wanting retribution was due to Burns' selective memory, so what's the purpose of this flashback? I'd hazard the guess that it's to provide some kind of context for why Burns, on emerging from his coma, can initially only say the name "Homer Simpson" over and over, since he'd been bombarded with this name shortly before the shooting, even if he didn't consciously take it in. This leads to the unfortunate misunderstanding that Burns is identifying his assailant, when a subsequent scene with Dr Nick makes it clear that he isn't doing this voluntarily. For the long-term fan, I'm not sure if this particular plot contrivance needs any context - I would have thought the joke was that being in a coma has temporarily rewired something in Burns' neural pathways, forcing him to communicate solely through the information he's been inexplicably suppressing all these years.

Another, likely unintentional consequence of Homer's flashback is that it potentially casts a smidgeon of doubt on the validity of the Simpsons DNA evidence, since it's never established to which family member that rogue eyelash even belonged. Clearly, we're meant to assume that it came from Maggie when she and Burns tussled over the lollipop, but isn't it just as plausible that Burns got it from Homer when he grabbed and shook him in the office? In the end, maybe that's not so important - the most damning evidence turns out to be not the DNA per se, but the gun uncovered from the Simpsons' car, with bullets matching the one removed from Burns (something the dummy ending from "138th Episode Spectacular" does not take into account). Perhaps the whole Simpson DNA thread was itself more indicative of a leap of faith that the viewer was already expected to make, in figuring that the titular family had to be involved somewhere (if so, it seems less of a stretch than whatever motive we were expected to ascribe to Burns' going after Maggie's lollipop). Just before Burns' denouement, Lisa manages to solve the mystery by herself (with a little assistance from a disease-ridden pigeon), and while she does so by picking up on the two most important clues from the end of Part One, by this stage both she and the viewer also have to accommodate the subsequent information suggesting that the shooter is someone very close to home. Lisa had already ruled out Marge on the basis that she's biologically a Bouvier, leaving only one other individual to whom MS could possibly refer. Let's look at how it might work from the viewer's perspective - if we were always operating on the assumption that it had to be one of the titular clan, on the grounds that it's their show, then suddenly it turns the mystery into a good old-fashioned game of Cluedo (or Clue, if you will), giving us six candidates to work with, three male, three female, and the opportunity to fish out the red herrings based on the clues available. It couldn't be Homer or Lisa because there's no way to connect them to what's on the sundial. The detail of Burns' missing gun is an obvious hint that he was felled by his own weapon, implying that he wasn't shot by either Abe or Bart using the former's Smith & Wesson. We already know that Marge didn't do it because we saw where she was when the shooting took place. That leaves us with only Maggie, which is consistent with what Burns appears to indicate on the sundial. Perhaps that's all the detective work that was ever needed.

That's assuming you could have brought yourself to swallow the unlikelihood that Maggie could have gotten hold of Burns' gun and fired it. But stranger things had already happened. They'd sent Homer into space, for crying out loud.

As the shooter, there is one final invaluable quality that Maggie brings to the table that Tito Puente could not, nor any other suspect for that matter (except maybe Simpson Mutt), and that is ambiguity. Since we'll never know exactly what was rattling away in that infant head of hers when she pulled the trigger, she enables a little piece of the mystery to linger on. It was this very ambiguity on which Mirkin was able to sell his suggestion that the culprit be Maggie, feeling strongly that it should be a Simpson. James L. Brooks loved the idea, but Oakley and Weinstein apparently took some persuading; they feared that an accidental shooting by Maggie would be seen as a cop-out, but were willing to compromise when Mirkin pointed out that it didn't necessarily have to be an accident. Hence the unsettling ending where Maggie's eyes dart surreptitiously about and the sounds of her pacifier sucking are replaced by those of a gun firing, so that we depart not with the sweet kiss of clarity, but the eerie smirk of uncertainty. To suppose that Maggie knew what she was doing when she fired the gun seems a bit of a stretch, but then as they point out on the episode commentary, we've known from as far back as "Bart The Genius", when she uses her alphabet blocks to spell out E = mc², that Maggie's a pretty exceptionable baby. If so, then nice going, Maggie - you might have gotten back at Burns on behalf of the town, but you very nearly got the misdeed pinned on your own father. Unless of course she was banking on things going that way all along. Was Lisa right to suppose that one of her family might be a traitor? We can debate this all day.

Anyway, enough Burns. Do you remember the glorious summer when the UK was tasked with figuring out who murdered game show legend Bob Holness? Now if this campaign is ever uploaded to YouTube in its entirety, I'll cover it.