When "Treehouse of Horror VI" (aka episode 3F04) first aired on October 29th 1995, it represented the brand new model for the Treehouse of Horrors going forward. The show had finally shaken off a lot of the silly conventions that had served the earliest Halloween intsallments well, but become increasingly cumbersome as time went on. Gone were the framing narratives, the amusing tombstones and the cautionary introduction sequences. The only traditions that still clung on (besides the basic three story formula) were the pun-ridden production credits (although some mud - or should I say obtrusive green slime - is slung at these on the DVD commentary) and the arbitrary cameo from malevolent space squids Kodos & Kang (the writers hadn't been able to integrate them into an actual story since "Treehouse of Horror II", although that much would change come the next Halloween). In place of a humorous content warning we get a short skit based on Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with Krusty as The Headless Horseman. It's a nice enough tone-setter, but an absolute waste conceptually, since it leaves me hungry for a full-fledged Simpsons take on Sleepy Hollow that sadly doesn't materialise. Because think about it - if Krusty is our Headless Horseman, then the most logical Springfieldian to cast in the role of Ichabod Crane would be Sideshow Bob (bonus credentials for his connections to another of popular culture's most celebrated Cranes), and that's a retelling of Sleepy Hollow I would be totally down for. Alas, all Krusty does is hurl his severed head at the camera and immediately regret it, and we move on into our main event.
After the censor-baiting marathon that was "Treehouse of Horror V", an episode that went out of its way to be as violent and blood-soaked as the series could conceivably get away with, as a response to contemporary hand-wringing about the ubiquitousness of televised violence, "Treehouse of Horror VI" is a comparatively sedate affair...to a point. The most obvious heir to its predecessor's bloodlust is "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace", which continues the infanticidal preoccupations of V's "Nightmare Cafeteria", with the attendees of Springfield Elementary once again being ruthlessly victimised by a murderous member of staff. (The casting of Willie in the role of Freddy Krueger itself feels like a
bit of an in-joke, carried over from the running gag throughout V in
which Willie was repeatedly butchered whenever he attempted to come to the Simpsons' aid, a parody of Scatman Crothers' doomed
rescue effort in The Shining; it seems only fitting that Willie would himself have an axe to grind on the following Halloween.) By contrast, the last of the segments, "Homer3", is an unusually violence-free addition to the "Treehouse of Horror" canon, with the family pitted against a monster of a very different variety, ie: computer-generated imagery, which was about to lay waste to traditional animation techniques and change the industry beyond all recognition within less than a decade. Not even The Simpsons could have predicted just what kind of bear they were poking.
Before both of those, though, we get "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores", my personal pick of the bunch, although it's my impression that this is the most undervalued of the three. At the time, the segment that got everybody talking was "Homer3", on account of its 3D animation, which was super-novel (the episode aired behind Casper but ahead of Toy Story), but as those kinds of visual techniques became commonplace, "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" seems to have superseded it as the fan favourite (thanks largely to Homer's grumblings about the lousy Smarch weather). Compared to the technical ambitions of "Homer3", and to the visceral slasher scares of "Nightmare", "Attack" possibly seems like quite a modest offering - it's a smart segment, and yet it wraps itself up in a concept that's fundamentally so silly. It might seem churlish to accuse a "Treehouse of Horror" segment of being "fundamentally silly", but the plot of "Attack" - in which an ionic disturbance causes the various fibreglass advertising figures at Springfield's Miracle Mile retail district (in Homer's words, where value wears a neon sombrero and there's not a single church or library to offend the eye) to come to life and demolish the city - really does feel like the most far-out ToH premise the series had come up with up to this point. Likewise, it's probably fair to say that "Attack" is the least plot-driven of the "VI" segments, a good chunk of the story being made up of skits in which the advertising mascots wreak havoc on the townspeople in ways that are pertinent to each mascot's marketing niche (eg: a Mr Peanut knock-off who tears the roofs off of cars and eats the occupants like he was cracking peanut shells), and which also tease out the monstrous energies lurking within the townspeople themselves (among them, Wiggum murdering a local basketball captain, Bart becoming the devil on the shoulder of the Red Devil Realty devil, and Otto, on being seized by said devil whilst helming a bus-load of screaming schoolchildren, remarking: "Another acid flashback - man, I'd hate to be driving a bus right now!"). All great skits, but it leaves the segment feeling somewhat fragmented. It also feels, more so that most "Treehouse of Horror" segments, like a story specifically conceived with an eye toward building to its final, fourth wall-breaking punchline. It's an extremely clever punchline, but alas, a punchline that hinges 100% on you seeing it in the correct context. Which totally didn't happen when the episode aired on UK television (and I'm guessing a few other countries as well), making the ending yet another source of childhood bafflement for me. It's also not a punchline that favours being watched on DVD or Disney+.
Even without its slick writing and smart subtext, "Attack" would still stand out for boasting what is, for my money, one of the most eerily disturbing death scenes in the ToH canon. It's not a gory demise by any stretch, but it never fails to get me wincing. I speak of the scene where the neon cowboy on the Duff billboard comes to life and is greeted enthusiastically by a crowd of college-aged Springfieldians, whom he proceeds to pulverise like bugs beneath his neon beer bottle. No blood or guts are seen trickling out from beneath the bottle, the squishing noises heard are fairly moderate and the victims barely even have time to scream, but I think what really bothers me about this sequence is the cowboy's sheer, unrelenting meanness. His destruction of the onlookers in question is so wholly unmotivated that it's chilling - he crushes them for seemingly no other reason than that he could, and they were just too easy targets to pass up. It's one way to get across the inhumanity of the advertising mascots - their foremost compulsion is to destroy, and they seem totally indifferent to the fact that a lot of mankind would sooner party with them than oppose them. But more importantly still, this is all a gigantic metaphor, correct? The onlookers welcome the Duff cowboy because they believe, erroneously, that he's their friend, when all he's actually out to do is to have them writhing helplessly beneath the weight of his oversized beer bottle, a sure-fire signifier for alcoholism if ever there was one.
The segment's title derives from that of the classic 1958 B-picture Attack of The 50 Foot Woman, and the story has nods to the Japanese kaiju genre (after coming to life, Lard Lad gives the iconic Godzilla roar), but its most obvious antecedent, in the pop cultural sphere, would be the climactic showdown with the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters (1984), another corporate logo given the opportunity to reduce a city to rubble. "Attack" takes the idea implicit to the Ghostbusters climax, and spins a deliciously satirical six-minute nightmare from the notion that the corporate logos that pervade every square inch of our existence, and which we casually accept as the cute and familiar faces of the surplus of products vying for our consumption, are actually monsters ceaselessly assaulting us and browbeating us into submission. We might be designated the status of consumers, but the corporate giants are really the ones consuming us. "Attack" also ultimately teaches us that advertising is a monster that will eat you only if you look at it. So, stop feeding it, you slack-jawed gawkers.
Hmm...
The conclusions of "Attack" - that advertising has no sway wherever it fails to grab attention - is one that ought to be empowering to the consumer (see Negativland's "Bite Back"). At one point, the script even gets on the nose enough with its themes to flat-out tell us that, "If you stop paying attention to the monsters, they'll lose their powers." But then "Attack" is blatantly skeptical of the consumer's capacity for resistance. In the end, Lisa is able to convince the people of Springfield to turn their backs on the mascots, causing them to become rigid and die, yet she does so not by appealing to the people's sense of defiance, but by competing with the mascots using two of advertising's other go-tos - a catchy jingle and celebrity endorsement (Paul Anka, who seems a random choice, although that's undoubtedly the point, and besides, the story of how he got the gig is a cute one; having previously received a shout-out in the Season 6 episode "Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy", Anka wrote the producers a fan letter to let them know how touched he was, and they in turn were so touched that they gave him the opportunity to guest star). Even then, the gambit nearly fails, as Lard Lad is able to cling onto relevancy for just a mite longer than his brethren, by promising Homer that, never mind all that, his donuts now come with sprinkles.
The final interplay between Lard Lad and Homer gives the story a neatly cyclic feeling, keeping in mind that this whole mess all started with Homer being lured into the Lard Lad bakery by the marketing gimmickry of its disarming mascot, and finding that the reality does not match his expectations. He wants a "colossal donut", as touted by the venue's signage; cheekily, this refers to the colossal donut brandished by the Lard Lad statue, and in the absence of a "not actual size" disclaimer, Homer is disappointed to
discover that the product itself is no bigger than any other donut on
the market. He cries false advertising, and his response - to steal the colossal donut and (somehow) squirrel it away inside his living room - is beyond overkill, given that it's not an item he has any use for, other than to lounge around inside as a giant trophy. Crucially, his actions implicate the consumer as being no innocent in this equation. The Simpsons' take on the matter is characteristically double-edged - on the one hand, the corporate giants lack compassion for the little people and, once they're accustomed to having the whole of Springfield under their thumb, show no inclination to stop. (At first, it appears as though the mascots are attacking Springfield out of solidarity
with Lard Lad, because Homer separated him from his colossal donut, creating some kind of upheaval in the order of the universe; it'll do for a rationale, except when the donut is returned to Lard Lad, it results not in a restoration of said order, but merely empowers the hulking baker boy to inflict even greater damage upon the town.) At the same time, "Attack" suggests that the monsters came because the consumers invited them with their own hollow insatiability. Such insatiability is further echoed in Kent Brockman's televised coverage of the occurrence, when he speculates that the monster rampage
might actually be part of an ambitious marketing campaign, but questions
what kind of product could possibly justify such carnage. He yields the answer - a fat-free fudge cake that doesn't let you down in the
flavour department - before being attacked by a monster created in his own image, an absurdly unsettling scenario insinuating that the commercial-saturated landscape we live in is as much a reflection of our own voracious cravings as it is their source. As "Attack" would have it, a Faustian complicity exists between the corporate giant and the consumer, with the latter allowing the former total dominance in exchange for satisfying their every frivolous whim. (Marge's failing in all of this, meanwhile, is to put too much faith in the intrinsic goodness of the universe. Which is why she has to contend with being wrong all the time.)
The means through which the advertising
mascots are ultimately overcome is itself reminiscent of how Nancy
Thompson manages to defeat Freddy Krueger (temporarily, anyway) in the original Nightmare on Elm Street. Interesting, then, that in the Simpsons' own take on Nightmare on Elm Street, coming up right afterward, this particular round of carnage gets started precisely because the characters don't look - at Willie, when he's going up in flames and in desperate need of aid. Once again, it's Homer who gets the calamity rolling, but when the burning Willie bursts into a PTA meeting crying for help, the gathering collectively chooses to ignore him (even Marge, I'm afraid), because the issue of whether or not Milhouse gets two spaghetti dinners in one day is more important. But then adult apathy being the root of all evil, as manifested through Willie's child-murdering energies, is entirely consistent with Freddy's own conceptual underpinnings (with the added bonus that the Krueger equivalent here gets to be on the receiving end of said apathy, making him a victim who lashes out at his fellow sufferers). Reviewing "Treehouse of Horror VI" on The AV Club, Erik Adams proposes that all three segments are linked by "a thread about the powers of perception". I would not disagree with that assessment, and would further argue that the first two segments in particular are specifically concerned with the atrocities committed by the eye, both through what it fuels in choosing where to direct its gaze, and what it willfully ignores.
The closing moments of "Attack" continue the growing trend among "Treehouse of Horror" installments for pessimistic endings that didn't necessarily reset the status quo. Even with the mascots vanquished, the city of Springfield lies in ruins, and we end with the troubling image of the Simpsons outside their trampled abode, with no clear indication as to how they're going to rebuild their lives. But the segment cunningly allows for broadcasting convention to get the final say, and to unwittingly uphold its final warnings about the pervasive, inescapable nature of those unrelenting prompts to consume, obey and conform. Kent Brockman (having inexplicably survived his encounter with his monstrous counterpart) advises his viewers to beware "the scourge of advertising", with an ominous message: "Lock your doors. Bar your windows. Because the next advertisement you see could destroy your house and eat your family!" Homer then takes it upon himself to address the viewer with a more ominous message still: "We'll be right back!" I absolutely dig this joke and yet, to my deepest chagrin, I have never seen it play out as the Simpsons gods intended. When "Treehouse of Horror VI" aired on Sky 1 in the UK, I recall that they used to put the ad break between "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" and "Homer3" - meaning that we went straight from "Attack" into "Nightmare", and this naturally took all the air out of the punchline of "Attack". Inevitably, the ending fared no better on BBC2, for while the Beeb's airing of "VI" was a fuller experience, restoring much of the material excised from the Sky 1 edit (among them, the couch gag with the family in hangman's nooses and the especially brutal moment where Lard Lad kills Santa's Little Helper by booting him like a football across Evergreen Terrace), they were a little hamstrung on this particular point, owing to the fact that the BBC has no ad breaks (this led to a number of "orphaned" jokes in various other episodes alluding to the knowledge that an advertising break was imminent - among them, Marge's motion in "And Maggie Makes Three" to spend the next few minutes thinking about products that she might like to purchase). Eventually, The Simpsons relocated to Channel 4, but as I've never seen "VI" as broadcast on 4, I can't comment on their handling of it. Regardless, it's a joke better suited to the US broadcasting format, in which the transition from scheduled programming to commercial break happens much more abruptly. Without ads, it's a gag that still kind of works, if we assume that the "we'll be right back" refers to an impending commercial break in-universe, for the viewers of Brockman's newscast. But then it lacks the interactive element, the turning of that complicity back on the Simpsons viewer, while also not really making a whole heap of sense for Homer to be the one to say it. I live in hope that I might one day find a recording of the episode's original US broadcast from October 29th 1995 - not least because I am curious to get a taste of exactly which ads had the privilege of directly following Homer's dire warning. Whoever paid for that particular nugget of advertising space certainly bought more than they bargained for.
Finally, a number of the evil advertising mascots featured in "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores" were parodies of actual existing mascots. Naturally, these are all American mascots, and for a while Mr Peanut was the only one I knew the origin of, but I think I'm more-or-less up to speed now. Others are based on familiar characters, like Aladdin, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, although I couldn't say if this is a nod to such characters being appropriated for any specific ad campaign (or, in the case of Bunyan and Babe, to the various giant statues of the characters found in different locations across America). Here's what I've got so far:
- The colossal donut held up by Lard Lad was inspired by the one atop the Randy's Donuts bakery in Inglewood, California, as is helpfully illuminated by the production team on the DVD commentary. Lard Lad himself, however, was blatantly modelled on Big Boy of the Big Boy restaurant chain (who is notable, among other things, for playing a prominent role in the 2009 film Logorama).
- The neon cowboy, here seen shilling for Duff beer, was in reality from a contemporary campaign for Miller Genuine Draft. As in "Treehouse of Horror VI", he comes to life, but resists the temptation to squish the denizens of Vegas in favour of picking up a neon girl on the other side of the street. In the absence of such companionship, I have to wonder if his murder of the Springfieldian college students was at least partially motivated by sexual frustration.
- The Zip Boys are a parody of the Pep Boys (or Manny, Moe and Jack, after the company founders), a chain specialising in auto repair and maintenance.
- As noted above, the giant walking peanut with a taste for human motorists is based on Mr. Peanut, the mascot of snack food company Planters.
- The man with a top hat and mallet (whom I originally thought was supposed to be Mr Monopoly) turns out to be the mascot of the Los Angeles-based Western Exterminator company - according to the episode's Simpsons Archive page, the logo consists of "a man in a top hat and black suit leaning over a rat with one hand shaking its index finger in a "no, no, no!" position and the other hand behind its back with a mallet". Gah. Well no way in hell am I doing a Google Image search on that.
- She doesn't appear in person, but Lisa makes reference to "that old woman who couldn't find the beef". She speaks of Clara Peller, star of a popular Wendy's campaign from 1984, which gave rise to the zeitgeist-penetrating slogan, "Where's the beef?" Perhaps not the most apt example of a campaign waning through public disinterest, since Peller was dropped by Wendy's due to a dispute over her appearing in a commercial for Prego spaghetti sauce, in which she committed the ultimate transgression - from Wendy's standpoint, anyway - of declaring that she'd found that elusive beef elsewhere. But then The Simpsons had previously mocked the incomprehensibility of the phenomenon, to anybody who wasn't there, in the Season 4 episode "Lisa's First Word" - clearly, they were fascinated by the fickleness of cultural devotion, and by something that was once so massive becoming so remote in little time.
The mascots I continue to draw a blank on: the Red Devil Realty devil and the Tam O' Shanter hat. Oh, and it's glimpsed only briefly, but there is that purple octopus with the ice cream cones that appears in the distance when Lisa points out that the monsters may be difficult to ignore. I've no idea what that thing's deal is, either.
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